Gigwise's 51 Best Albums of 2020

“It was about halfway through this process that I realized,” Rina Sawayama tells Apple Music, “that this album is definitely about family.” While it’s a deeply personal, genre-fluid exploration, the Japanese British artist is frank about drawing on collaborative hands to flesh out her full kaleidoscopic vision. “If I was stuck, I’d always reach out to songwriter friends and say, ‘Hey, can you help me with this melody or this part of the song?’” she says. “Adam Hann from The 1975, for example, helped rerecord a lot of guitar for us, which was insane.” Born in Niigata in northwestern Japan before her family moved to London when she was five, Sawayama graduated from Cambridge with a degree in politics, psychology, and sociology and balanced a fledgling music career’s uncertainty with the insurance of professional modeling. The leftfield pop on her 2017 mini-album *RINA* offered significant promise, but this debut album is a Catherine wheel of influences (including, oddly thrillingly, nu metal), dispatched by a pop rebel looking to take us into her future. “My benchmark is if you took away all the production and you’re left with just the melody, does it still sound pop?” she says. “The gag we have is that it’ll be a while until I start playing stadiums. But I want to put that out into the universe. It’s going to happen one day.” Listen to her debut album to see why we feel that confidence is not misplaced—and read’s Rina’s track-by-track guide. **Dynasty** “I think thematically and lyrically it makes sense to start off with this. I guess I come from a bit of an academic background, so I always approach things like a dissertation. The title of the essay would be ‘Won\'t you break the chain with me?’ It\'s about intergenerational pain, and I\'m asking the listener to figure out this whole world with me. It\'s an invitation. I\'d say ‘Dynasty’ is one of the craziest in terms of production. I think we had 250 tracks in Logic at one point.” **XS** “I wrote this with Nate Campany, Kyle Shearer, and Chris Lyon, who are super pop writers. It was the first session we ever did together in LA. They were noodling around with guitar riffs and I was like, ‘I want to write something that\'s really abrasive, but also pop that freaks you out.’ It\'s the good amount of jarring, the good side of jarring that it wakes you up a little bit every four bars or whatever. I told them, \'I really love N.E.R.D and I just want to hear those guitars.’” **STFU!** “I wanted to shock people because I\'d been away for a while. The song before this was \[2018 single\] \'Flicker,\' and that\'s just so happy and empowering in a different way. I wanted to wake people up a little bit. It\'s really fun to play with people\'s emotions, but if fundamentally the core of the song again is pop, then people get it, and a lot of people did here. I was relieved.” **Comme Des Garçons (Like the Boys)** \"It\'s one of my favorite basslines. It was with \[LA producers and singer-songwriters\] Bram Inscore and Nicole Morier, who\'s done a lot of stuff with Britney. I think this was our second session together. I came into it and said, \'Yeah, I think I want to write about toxic masculinity.\' Then Nicole was like, ‘Oh my god, that\'s so funny, because I was just thinking about Beto O\'Rourke and how he\'d lost the primary in Texas, but still said, essentially, \'I was born to win it, so it’s fine.’” **Akasaka Sad** “This was one of the songs that I wrote alone. It is personal, but I always try and remove my ego and try to think of the end result, which is the song. There\'s no point fighting over whether it\'s 100% authentically personal. I think there\'s ways to tell stories in songs that is personal, but also general. *RINA* was just me writing lyrics and melody and then \[UK producer\] Clarence Clarity producing. This record was the first time that I\'d gone in with songwriters. Honestly, up until then I was like, \'So what do they actually do? I don\'t understand what they would do in a session.\' I didn\'t understand how they could help, but it\'s only made my lyrics better and my melodies better.” **Paradisin’** “I wanted to write a theme song for a TV show. Like if my life, my teenage years, was like a TV show, then what would be the soundtrack, the opening credits? It really reminded me of *Ferris Bueller\'s Day Off* and that kind of fast BPM you’d get in the ’80s. I think it\'s at 130 or 140 BPM. I was really wild when I was a teenager, and that sense of adventure comes from a production like that. There\'s a bit in the song where my mum\'s telling me off, but that\'s actually my voice. I realized that if I pitched my voice down, I sound exactly like my mum.” **Love Me 4 Me** “For me, this was a message to myself. I was feeling so under-confident with my work and everything. I think on the first listen it just sounds like trying to get a lover to love you, but it\'s not at all. Everything is said to the mirror. That\'s why the spoken bit at the beginning and after the middle eight is like: \'If you can\'t love yourself, how are you going to love somebody else?\' That\'s a RuPaul quote, so it makes me really happy, but it\'s so true. I think that\'s very fundamental when being in a relationship—you\'ve got to love yourself first. I think self-love is really hard, and that\'s the overall thing about this record: It\'s about trying to find self-love within all the complications, whether it\'s identity or sexuality. I think it\'s the purest, happiest on the record. It’s like that New Jack Swing-style production, but originally it had like an \'80s sound. That didn\'t work with the rest of the record, so we went back and reproduced it.” **Bad Friend** “I think everyone\'s been a bad friend at some point, and I wanted to write a very pure song about it. Before I went in to write that, I\'d just seen an old friend. She\'s had a baby. I\'d seen that on Facebook, and I hadn\'t been there for it at all, so I was like, ‘What!’ We fell out, basically. In the song, in the first verse, we talk about Japan and the mad, fun group trip we went on. The vocoder in the chorus sort of reflects just the emptiness you feel, almost like you\'ve been let go off a rollercoaster. I do have a tendency to fall head-first into new relationships, romantic relationships, and leave my friends a little bit. She\'s been through three of my relationships like a rock. Now I realize that she just felt completely left behind. I\'m going to send it to her before it comes out. We\'re now in touch, so it\'s good.” **F\*\*k This World (Interlude)** “Initially, this song was longer, but I feel like it just tells the story already. Sometimes a song doesn\'t need that full structure. I wanted it to feel like I\'m dissociating from what\'s happening on Earth and floating in space and looking at the world from above. Then the song ends with a radio transmission and then I get pulled right back down to Earth, and obviously a stadium rock stage, which is…” **Who’s Gonna Save U Now?** “When \[UK producer and songwriter\] Rich Cooper, \[UK songwriter\] Johnny Latimer, and I first wrote this, it was like a \'90s Britney song. It wasn\'t originally stadium rock. Then I watched \[2018’s\] *A Star Is Born* and *Bohemian Rhapsody* in the same week. In *A Star Is Born*, there\'s that first scene where he\'s in front of tens of thousands of people, but it\'s very loaded. He comes off stage and he doesn\'t know who he is. The stage means a lot in movies. For Freddie Mercury too: Despite any troubles, he was truly himself when he was onstage. I felt the stage was an interesting metaphor for not just redemption, but that arc of storytelling. Even when I was getting bullied at school, I never thought, \'Oh, I\'ll do the same back to them.\' I just felt: \'I\'m going to become successful so that you guys rethink your ways.\' For me, this song is the whole redemption stadium rock moment. I\'ve never wanted revenge on people.” **Tokyo Love Hotel** “I\'d just come back from a trip to Japan and witnessed these tourists yelling in the street. They were so loud and obnoxious, and Japan\'s just not that kind of country. I was thinking about the \[2021\] Olympics. Like, \'Oh god, the people who are going to come and think it\'s like Disneyland and just trash the place.\' Japanese people are so polite and respectful, and I feel that culture in me. There are places in Japan called love hotels, where people just go to have sex. You can book the room to simply have sex. I felt like these tourists were treating Japan as a country or Tokyo as a city in that way. They just come and have casual sex in it, and then they leave. They’ll say, ‘That was so amazing, I love Tokyo,\' but they don’t give a shit about the people or don\'t know anything about the people and how difficult it is to grow up there. Then at the end of each verse, I say, \'Oh, but this is just another song about Tokyo,\' referring back to my trip that I had in \'Bad Friend\' where I was that tourist and I was going crazy. It\'s my struggle with feeling like an outsider in Japan, but also feeling like I\'m really part of it. I look the same as everyone else, but feel like an outsider, still.” **Chosen Family** “I wrote this thinking about my chosen family, which is my LGBTQ sisters and brothers. I mean, at university, and at certain points in my life where I\'ve been having a hard time, the LGBTQ community has always been there for me. The concept of chosen family has been long-standing in the queer community because a lot of people get kicked out of their homes and get ostracized from their family for coming out or just living true to themselves. I wanted to write a song literally for them, and it\'s just a message and this idea of a safe space—an actual physical space.” **Snakeskin** “This has a Beethoven sample \[Piano Sonata No. 8 in C Minor, Op. 13 ‘Pathétique’\]. It’s a song that my mum used to play on the piano. It’s the only song I remember her playing, and it only made sense to end with that. I wanted it to end with her voice, and that\'s her voice, that little more crackle of the end. The metaphor of ‘Snakeskin’ is a handbag, really. A snakeskin handbag that people commercialize, consume, and use as they want. At the end my mum says in Japanese, ‘I\'ve realized that now I want to see who I want to see, do what I want to do, be who I want to be.’ I interviewed her about how it felt to turn 60 on her birthday, after having been through everything she’s gone through. For her to say that…I just needed to finish the record on that note.”

Mike Hadreas’ fifth LP under the Perfume Genius guise is “about connection,” he tells Apple Music. “And weird connections that I’ve had—ones that didn\'t make sense but were really satisfying or ones that I wanted to have but missed or ones that I don\'t feel like I\'m capable of. I wanted to sing about that, and in a way that felt contained or familiar or fun.” Having just reimagined Bobby Darin’s “Not for Me” in 2018, Hadreas wanted to bring the same warmth and simplicity of classic 1950s and \'60s balladry to his own work. “I was thinking about songs I’ve listened to my whole life, not ones that I\'ve become obsessed over for a little while or that are just kind of like soundtrack moments for a summer or something,” he says. “I was making a way to include myself, because sometimes those songs that I love, those stories, don\'t really include me at all. Back then, you couldn\'t really talk about anything deep. Everything was in between the lines.” At once heavy and light, earthbound and ethereal, *Set My Heart on Fire Immediately* features some of Hadreas’ most immediate music to date. “There\'s a confidence about a lot of those old dudes, those old singers, that I\'ve loved trying to inhabit in a way,” he says. “Well, I did inhabit it. I don\'t know why I keep saying ‘try.’ I was just going to do it, like, ‘Listen to me, I\'m singing like this.’ It\'s not trying.” Here, he walks us through the album track by track. **Whole Life** “When I was writing that song, I just had that line \[‘Half of my whole life is done’\]—and then I had a decision afterwards of where I could go. Like, I could either be really resigned or I could be open and hopeful. And I love the idea. That song to me is about fully forgiving everything or fully letting everything go. I’ve realized recently that I can be different, suddenly. That’s been a kind of wild thing to acknowledge, and not always good, but I can be and feel completely different than I\'ve ever felt and my life can change and move closer to goodness, or further away. It doesn\'t have to be always so informed by everything I\'ve already done.” **Describe** “Originally, it was very plain—sad and slow and minimal. And then it kind of morphed, kind of went to the other side when it got more ambient. When I took it into the studio, it turned into this way dark and light at the same time. I love that that song just starts so hard and goes so full-out and doesn\'t let up, but that the sentiment and the lyric and my singing is still soft. I was thinking about someone that was sort of near the end of their life and only had like 50% of their memories, or just could almost remember. And asking someone close to them to fill the rest in and just sort of remind them what happened to them and where they\'ve been and who they\'d been with. At the end, all of that is swimming together.” **Without You** “The song is about a good moment—or even just like a few seconds—where you feel really present and everything feels like it\'s in the right place. How that can sustain you for a long time. Especially if you\'re not used to that. Just that reminder that that can happen. Even if it\'s brief, that that’s available to you is enough to kind of carry you through sometimes. But it\'s still brief, it\'s still a few seconds, and when you tally everything up, it\'s not a lot. It\'s not an ultra uplifting thing, but you\'re not fully dragged down. And I wanted the song to kind of sound that same way or at least push it more towards the uplift, even if that\'s not fully the sentiment.” **Jason** “That song is very much a document of something that happened. It\'s not an idea, it’s a story. Sometimes you connect with someone in a way that neither of you were expecting or even want to connect on that level. And then it doesn\'t really make sense, but you’re able to give each other something that the other person needs. And so there was this story at a time in my life where I was very selfish. I was very wild and reckless, but I found someone that needed me to be tender and almost motherly to them. Even if it\'s just for a night. And it was really kind of bizarre and strange and surreal, too. And also very fueled by fantasy and drinking. It\'s just, it\'s a weird therapeutic event. And then in the morning all of that is just completely gone and everybody\'s back to how they were and their whole bundle of shit that they\'re dealing with all the time and it\'s like it never happened.” **Leave** “That song\'s about a permanent fantasy. There\'s a place I get to when I\'m writing that feels very dramatic, very magical. I feel like it can even almost feel dark-sided or supernatural, but it\'s fleeting, and sometimes I wish I could just stay there even though it\'s nonsense. I can\'t stay in my dark, weird piano room forever, but I can write a song about that happening to me, or a reminder. I love that this song then just goes into probably the poppiest, most upbeat song that I\'ve ever made directly after it. But those things are both equally me. I guess I\'m just trying to allow myself to go all the places that I instinctually want to go. Even if they feel like they don\'t complement each other or that they don\'t make sense. Because ultimately I feel like they do, and it\'s just something I told myself doesn\'t make sense or other people told me it doesn\'t make sense for a long time.” **On the Floor** “It started as just a very real song about a crush—which I\'ve never really written a song about—and it morphed into something a little darker. A crush can be capable of just taking you over and can turn into just full projection and just fully one-sided in your brain—you think it\'s about someone else, but it\'s really just something for your brain to wild out on. But if that\'s in tandem with being closeted or the person that you like that\'s somehow being wrong or not allowed, how that can also feel very like poisonous and confusing. Because it\'s very joyous and full of love, but also dark and wrong, and how those just constantly slam against each other. I also wanted to write a song that sounded like Cyndi Lauper or these pop songs, like, really angsty teenager pop songs that I grew up listening to that were really helpful to me. Just a vibe that\'s so clear from the start and sustained and that every time you hear it you instantly go back there for your whole life, you know?” **Your Body Changes Everything** “I wrote ‘Your Body Changes Everything’ about the idea of not bringing prescribed rules into connection—physical, emotional, long-term, short-term—having each of those be guided by instinct and feel, and allowed to shift and change whenever it needed to. I think of it as a circle: how you can be dominant and passive within a couple of seconds or at the exact same time, and you’re given room to do that and you’re giving room to someone else to do that. I like that dynamic, and that can translate into a lot of different things—into dance or sex or just intimacy in general. A lot of times, I feel like I’m supposed to pick one thing—one emotion, one way of being. But sometimes, I’m two contradicting things at once. Sometimes, it seems easier to pick one, even if it’s the worse one, just because it’s easier to understand. But it’s not for me.” **Moonbend** “That\'s a very physical song to me. It\'s very much about bodies, but in a sort of witchy way. This will sound really pretentious, but I wasn\'t trying to write a chorus or like make it like a sing-along song, I was just following a wave. So that whole song feels like a spell to me—like a body spell. I\'m not super sacred about the way things sound, but I can be really sacred about the vibe of it. And I feel like somehow we all clicked in to that energy, even though it felt really personal and almost impossible to explain, but without having to, everybody sort of fell into it. The whole thing was really satisfying in a way that nobody really had to talk about. It just happened.” **Just a Touch** “That song is like something I could give to somebody to take with them, to remember being with me when we couldn\'t be with each other. Part of it\'s personal and part of it I wasn\'t even imagining myself in that scenario. It kind of starts with me and then turns into something, like a fiction in a way. I wanted it to be heavy and almost narcotic, but still like honey on the body or something. I don\'t want that situation to be hot—the story itself and the idea that you can only be with somebody for a brief amount of time and then they have to leave. You don\'t want anybody that you want to be with to go. But sometimes it\'s hot when they\'re gone. It’s hard to be fully with somebody when they\'re there. I take people for granted when they\'re there, and I’m much less likely to when they\'re gone. I think everybody is like that, but I might take it to another level sometimes.” **Nothing at All** “There\'s just some energetic thing where you just feel like the circle is there: You are giving and receiving or taking, and without having to say anything. But that song, ultimately, is about just being so ready for someone that whatever they give you is okay. They could tell you something really fucked up and you\'re just so ready for them that it just rolls off you. It\'s like we can make this huge dramatic, passionate thing, but if it\'s really all bullshit, that\'s totally fine with me too. I guess because I just needed a big feeling. I don\'t care in the end if it\'s empty.” **One More Try** “When I wrote my last record, I felt very wild and the music felt wild and the way that I was writing felt very unhinged. But I didn\'t feel that way. And with this record I actually do feel it a little, but the music that I\'m writing is a lot more mature and considered. And there\'s something just really, really helpful about that. And that song is about a feeling that could feel really overwhelming, but it\'s written in a way that feels very patient and kind.” **Some Dream** “I think I feel very detached a lot of the time—very internal and thinking about whatever bullshit feels really important to me, and there\'s not a lot of room for other people sometimes. And then I can go into just really embarrassing shame. So it\'s about that idea, that feeling like there\'s no room for anybody. Sometimes I always think that I\'m going to get around to loving everybody the way that they deserve. I\'m going to get around to being present and grateful. I\'m going to get around to all of that eventually, but sometimes I get worried that when I actually pick my head up, all those things will be gone. Or people won\'t be willing to wait around for me. But at the same time that I feel like that\'s how I make all my music is by being like that. So it can be really confusing. Some of that is sad, some of that\'s embarrassing, some of that\'s dramatic, some of it\'s stupid. There’s an arc.” **Borrowed Light** “Probably my favorite song on the record. I think just because I can\'t hear it without having a really big emotional reaction to it, and that\'s not the case with a lot of my own songs. I hate being so heavy all the time. I’m very serious about writing music and I think of it as this spiritual thing, almost like I\'m channeling something. I’m very proud of it and very sacred about it. But the flip side of that is that I feel like I could\'ve just made that all up. Like it\'s all bullshit and maybe things are just happening and I wasn\'t anywhere before, or I mean I\'m not going to go anywhere after this. This song\'s about what if all this magic I think that I\'m doing is bullshit. Even if I feel like that, I want to be around people or have someone there or just be real about it. The song is a safe way—or a beautiful way—for me to talk about that flip side.”

AN IMPRESSION OF PERFUME GENIUS’ SET MY HEART ON FIRE IMMEDIATELY By Ocean Vuong Can disruption be beautiful? Can it, through new ways of embodying joy and power, become a way of thinking and living in a world burning at the edges? Hearing Perfume Genius, one realizes that the answer is not only yes—but that it arrived years ago, when Mike Hadreas, at age 26, decided to take his life and art in to his own hands, his own mouth. In doing so, he recast what we understand as music into a weather of feeling and thinking, one where the body (queer, healing, troubled, wounded, possible and gorgeous) sings itself into its future. When listening to Perfume Genius, a powerful joy courses through me because I know the context of its arrival—the costs are right there in the lyrics, in the velvet and smoky bass and synth that verge on synesthesia, the scores at times a violet and tender heat in the ear. That the songs are made resonant through the body’s triumph is a truth this album makes palpable. As a queer artist, this truth nourishes me, inspires me anew. This is music to both fight and make love to. To be shattered and whole with. If sound is, after all, a negotiation/disruption of time, then in the soft storm of Set My Heart On Fire Immediately, the future is here. Because it was always here. Welcome home.

A mere 11 months passed between the release of *Lover* and its surprise follow-up, but it feels like a lifetime. Written and recorded remotely during the first few months of the global pandemic, *folklore* finds the 30-year-old singer-songwriter teaming up with The National’s Aaron Dessner and longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff for a set of ruminative and relatively lo-fi bedroom pop that’s worlds away from its predecessor. When Swift opens “the 1”—a sly hybrid of plaintive piano and her naturally bouncy delivery—with “I’m doing good, I’m on some new shit,” you’d be forgiven for thinking it was another update from quarantine, or a comment on her broadening sensibilities. But Swift’s channeled her considerable energies into writing songs here that double as short stories and character studies, from Proustian flashbacks (“cardigan,” which bears shades of Lana Del Rey) to outcast widows (“the last great american dynasty”) and doomed relationships (“exile,” a heavy-hearted duet with Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon). It’s a work of great texture and imagination. “Your braids like a pattern/Love you to the moon and to Saturn,” she sings on “seven,” the tale of two friends plotting an escape. “Passed down like folk songs, the love lasts so long.” For a songwriter who has mined such rich detail from a life lived largely in public, it only makes sense that she’d eventually find inspiration in isolation.

Released on Juneteenth 2020, the third album by the enigmatic-slash-anonymous band Sault is an unapologetic dive into Black identity. Tapping into ’90s-style R&B (“Sorry Ain’t Enough”), West African funk (“Bow”), early ’70s soul (“Miracles”), churchy chants (“Out the Lies”), and slam-poetic interludes (“Us”), the flow here is more mixtape or DJ set than album, a compendium of the culture rather than a distillation of it. What’s remarkable is how effortless they make revolution sound.

Proceeds will be going to charitable funds

Released in June 2020 as American cities were rupturing in response to police brutality, the fourth album by rap duo Run The Jewels uses the righteous indignation of hip-hop\'s past to confront a combustible present. Returning with a meaner boom and pound than ever before, rappers Killer Mike and EL-P speak venom to power, taking aim at killer cops, warmongers, the surveillance state, the prison-industrial complex, and the rungs of modern capitalism. The duo has always been loyal to hip-hop\'s core tenets while forging its noisy cutting edge, but *RTJ4* is especially lithe in a way that should appeal to vintage heads—full of hyperkinetic braggadocio and beats that sound like sci-fi remakes of Public Enemy\'s *Apocalypse 91*. Until the final two tracks there\'s no turn-down, no mercy, and nothing that sounds like any rap being made today. The only guest hook comes from Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Mavis Staples on \"pulling the pin,\" a reflective song that connects the depression prevalent in modern rap to the structural forces that cause it. Until then, it’s all a tires-squealing, middle-fingers-blazing rhymefest. Single \"ooh la la\" flips Nice & Smooth\'s Greg Nice from the 1992 Gang Starr classic \"DWYCK\" into a stomp closed out by a DJ Premier scratch solo. \"out of sight\" rewrites the groove of The D.O.C.\'s 1989 hit \"It\'s Funky Enough\" until it treadmills sideways, and guest 2 Chainz spits like he just went on a Big Daddy Kane bender. A churning sample from lefty post-punks Gang of Four (\"the ground below\") is perfectly on the nose for an album brimming with funk and fury, as is the unexpected team-up between Pharrell and Zack de la Rocha (\"JU$T\"). Most significant, however, is \"walking in the snow,\" where Mike lays out a visceral rumination on police violence: \"And you so numb you watch the cops choke out a man like me/Until my voice goes from a shriek to whisper, \'I can\'t breathe.\'\"

Looking for a respite from the gloomy cycle that has been 2020? Then Megan Thee Stallion\'s got you covered. “I feel like I had to name my album *Good News* because we\'ve been hearing so much bad news,” she tells Apple Music. “It\'s like, \'Okay, look, Megan Thee Stallion finally coming with the good news.\'” The Houston rapper\'s long-awaited (and, yes, aptly titled) debut album is a distillation of her best qualities punched up for maximum impact. It\'s skillful and clever, but not at the expense of style and levity. Hope you\'ve done your stretches. To start, she wastes no time addressing the controversy that had been trailing her, using the album\'s opening moments to put to rest any discussion about the shooting incident that left her wounded. It\'s brief, fiery, and filled with haymakers, as Megan takes aim at her perpetrator (who remains nameless on wax—“I know you want the clout so I ain\'t saying y\'all name,” she declares) and any naysayers. Never one to wallow, she spends the next 16 songs showcasing exactly why she\'s earned the respect and adoration of peers and fans alike. Songs like “Do It on the Tip” (featuring City Girls) and “Freaky Girls” (featuring SZA) are flirty, twerkable, and emblematic of the \'girls just wanna have fun\' mantra that seems to rule her world, while others like “Movie” and “What\'s New” are all attitude and take-no-prisoners displays of the lyrical dexterity that makes her freestyles so charming. Elsewhere, “Intercourse,” which features Jamaican artist Popcaan, and “Don\'t Rock Me to Sleep” find her outside of her comfort zone, the former a dancehall-inflected romp and the latter a singsongy pop record. And for Meg, that kind of ambition felt right for the current moment. “When I started recording the songs for this album, I knew it sounded like album songs,” she says. “And I\'m like, \'This is it. This is the time. Quarantine is happening, everybody\'s basically in the house. I have everybody\'s attention. Everybody wants new music and you can sit down and actually absorb it.\" By the time the album wraps up with a run of previously released singles (including, of course, her “Savage Remix” with Beyoncé), it feels like we’ve glimpsed past, present, and future. The fan-favorite styles of old are now well-developed and existing alongside the possibilities of what may come next. *Good News* lives up to its name with ease—a tenacious effort that makes room for pleasure, dance, and feeling good (and oneself) despite contrary circumstances. And, really, who among us couldn\'t use just a little more of that?

HAIM only had one rule when they started working on their third album: There would be no rules. “We were just experimenting,” lead singer and middle sibling Danielle Haim tells Apple Music. “We didn’t care about genre or sticking to any sort of script. We have the most fun when nothing is off limits.” As a result, *Women in Music Pt. III* sees the Los Angeles sisters embrace everything from thrillingly heavy guitar to country anthems and self-deprecating R&B. Amid it all, gorgeous saxophone solos waft across the album, transporting you straight to the streets of their hometown on a sunny day. In short, it’s a fittingly diverse effort for a band that\'s always refused, in the words of Este Haim, to be “put in a box.” “I just hope people can hear how much fun we had making it,” adds Danielle, who produced the album alongside Rostam Batmanglij and Ariel Rechtshaid—a trio Alana Haim describes as “the Holy Trinity.” “We wanted it to sound fun. Everything about the album was just spontaneous and about not taking ourselves too seriously.” Yet, as fun-filled as they might be, the tracks on *Women in Music Pt. III* are also laced with melancholy, documenting the collective rock bottom the Haim sisters hit in the years leading up to the album’s creation. These songs are about depression, seeking help, grief, failing relationships, and health issues (Este has type 1 diabetes). “A big theme in this album is recognizing your sadness and expelling it with a lot of aggression,” says Danielle, who wanted the album to sound as raw and up close as the subjects it dissects. “It feels good to scream it in song form—to me that’s the most therapeutic thing I can do.” Elsewhere, the band also comes to terms with another hurdle: being consistently underestimated as female musicians. (The album’s title, they say, is a playful “invite” to stop asking them about being women in music.) The album proved to be the release they needed from all of those experiences—and a chance to celebrate the unshakable sibling support system they share. “This is the most personal record we’ve ever put out,” adds Alana. “When we wrote this album, it really did feel like collective therapy. We held up a mirror and took a good look at ourselves. It’s allowed us to move on.” Let HAIM guide you through *Women in Music Pt. III*, one song at a time. **Los Angeles** Danielle Haim: “This was one of the first songs we wrote for the album. It came out of this feeling when we were growing up that Los Angeles had a bad rep. It was always like, ‘Ew, Los Angeles!’ or ‘Fuck LA!’ Especially in 2001 or so, when all the music was coming out of New York and all of our friends ended up going there for college. And if LA is an eyeroll, the Valley—where we come from—is a constant punchline. But I always had such pride for this city. And then when our first album came out, all of a sudden, the opinion of LA started to change and everyone wanted to move here. It felt a little strange, and it was like, ‘Maybe I don’t want to live here anymore?’ I’m waiting for the next mass exodus out of the city and people being like, ‘This place sucks.’ Anyone can move here, but you’ve got to have LA pride from the jump.” **The Steps** Danielle: “With this album, we were reckoning with a lot of the emotions we were feeling within the business. This album was kind of meant to expel all of that energy and almost be like ‘Fuck it.’ This song kind of encapsulates the whole mood of the record. The album and this song are really guitar-driven \[because\] we just really wanted to drive that home. Unfortunately, I can already hear some macho dude being like, ‘That lick is so easy or simple.’ Sadly, that’s shit we’ve had to deal with. But I think this is the most fun song we’ve ever written. It’s such a live, organic-sounding song. Just playing it feels empowering.” Este Haim: “People have always tried to put us in a box, and they just don’t understand what we do. People are like, ‘You dance and don’t play instruments in your videos, how are you a band?’ It’s very frustrating.” **I Know Alone** Danielle: “We wrote this one around the same time that we wrote ‘Los Angeles,’ just in a room on GarageBand. Este came up with just that simple bassline. And we kind of wrote the melody around that bassline, and then added those 808 drums in the chorus. It’s about coming out of a dark place and feeling like you don\'t really want to deal with the outside world. Sometimes for me, being at home alone is the most comforting. We shout out Joni Mitchell in this song; our mom was such a huge fan of hers and she kind of introduced us to her music when we were really little. I\'d always go into my room and just blast Joni Mitchell super loud. And I kept finding albums of hers as we\'ve gotten older and need it now. I find myself screaming to slow Joni Mitchell songs in my car. This song is very nostalgic for her.” **Up From a Dream** Danielle: “This song literally took five minutes to write, and it was written with Rostam. It’s about waking up to a reality that you just don’t want to face. In a way, I don’t really want to explain it: It can mean so many different things to different people. This is the heaviest song we’ve ever had. It’s really cool, and I think this one will be really fun to play live. The guitar solo alone is really fun.” **Gasoline** Danielle: “This was another really quick one that we wrote with Rostam. The song was a lot slower originally, and then we put that breakbeat-y drumbeat on it and all of a sudden it turned into a funky sort of thing, and it really brought the song to life. I love the way that the drums sound. I feel like we really got that right. I was like literally in a cave of blankets, a fort we created with a really old Camco drum set from the ’70s, to make sure we got that dry, tight drum sound. That slowed-down ending is due to Ariel. He had this crazy EDM filter he stuck on the guitar, and I was like, ‘Yes, that’s fucking perfect.’” Alana Haim: “I think there were parts of that song where we were feeling sexy. I remember I had gone to go get food, and when I came back Danielle had written the bridge. She was like, ‘Look what I wrote!’ And I was like, ‘Oh! Okay!’” **3 AM** Alana: “It’s pretty self-explanatory—it’s about a booty call. There have been around 10 versions of this song. Someone was having a booty call. It was probably me, to be honest. We started out with this beat, and then we wrote the chorus super quickly. But then we couldn’t figure out what to do in the verses. We’d almost given up on it and then we were like, ‘Let’s just try one last time and see if we can get there.’ I think it was close to 3 am when we figured out the verse and we had this idea of having it introduced by a phone call. Because it *is* about a booty call. And we had to audition a bunch of dudes. We basically got all of our friends that were guys to be like, ‘Hey, this is so crazy, but can you just pretend to be calling a girl at 3 am?’ We got five or six of our friends to do it, and they were so nervous and sheepish. They were the worst! I was like, ‘Do you guys even talk to girls?’ I think you can hear the amount of joy and laughs we had making this song.” **Don’t Wanna** Alana: “I think this is classic HAIM. It was one of the earlier songs which we wrote around the same time as ‘Now I’m in It.’ We always really, really loved this song, and it always kind of stuck its head out like, ‘Hey, remember me?’ It just sounded so good being simple. We can tinker around with a song for years, and with this one, every time we added something or changed it, it lost the feeling. And every time we played it, it just kind of felt good. It felt like a warm sweater.” **Another Try** Alana: “I\'ve always wanted to write a song like this, and this is my favorite on the record. The day that we started it, I was thinking that I was going to get back together with the love of my life. I mean, now that I say that, I want to barf, because we\'re not in a good place now, but at that point we were. We had been on and off for almost 10 years and I thought we were going to give it another try. And it turns out, the week after we finished the song, he had gotten engaged. So the song took on a whole new meaning very quickly. It’s really about the fact I’ve always been on and off with the same person, and have only really had one love of my life. It’s kind of dedicated to him. I think Ariel had a lot of fun producing this song. As for the person it’s about? He doesn’t know about it, but I think he can connect the dots. I don’t think it’s going to be very hard to figure out. The end of the song is supposed to feel like a celebration. We wanted it to feel like a dance party. Because even though it has such a weird meaning now, the song has a hopeful message. Who knows? Maybe one day we’ll figure it out. I am still hopeful.” **Leaning on You** Alana: “This is really a song about finding someone that accepts your flaws. That’s such a rare thing in this world—to find someone you love that accepts you as who you are and doesn\'t want to change you. As sisters, we are the CEOs of our company: We have super strong personalities and really strong opinions. And finding someone that\'s okay with that, you would think would be celebrated, but it\'s actually not. It\'s really hard to find someone that accepts you and accepts what you do as a job and accepts everything about you. And I think ‘Leaning on You’ is about when you find that person that really uplifts you and finds everything that you do to be incredible and interesting and supports you. It’s a beautiful thing.” Danielle: “We wrote this song just us sitting around a guitar. And we just wanted to keep it like that, so we played acoustic guitar straight into the computer for a very dry, unique sound that I love.” **I’ve Been Down** Danielle: “This is the last one we wrote on the album. This was super quick with stream-of-consciousness lyrics. I wanted it to sound like you were in the room, like you were right next to me. That chorus—‘I’ve been down, I’ve been down’—feels good to sing. It\'s very therapeutic to just kind of scream it in song form. To me, it’s the most therapeutic thing I can do. The backing vocals on this are like the other side of your brain.” **Man From the Magazine** Este: \"When we were first coming out, I guess it was perplexing for some people that I would make faces when I played, even though men have been doing it for years. When they see men do it, they are just, to quote HAIM, ‘in it.’ But of course, when a woman does it, it\'s unsettling and off-putting and could be misconstrued as something else. We got asked questions about it early on, and there was this one interviewer who asked if I made the faces I made onstage in bed. Obviously he wasn’t asking about when I’m in bed yawning. My defense mechanism when stuff like that happens is just to try to make a joke out of it. So I kind of just threw it back at him and said, ‘Well, there\'s only one way to find out.’ And of course, there was a chuckle and then we moved on. Now, had someone said that to me, I probably would\'ve punched them in the face. But as women, we\'re taught kind of just to always be pleasant and be polite. And I think that was my way of being polite and nice. Thank god things are changing a bit. We\'ve been talking about shit like this forever, but I think now, finally, people are able to listen more intently.” Danielle: “We recorded this song in one take. We got the feeling we wanted in the first take. The first verse is Este\'s super specific story, and then, on the second verse, it feels very universal to any woman who plays music about going into a guitar store or a music shop and immediately either being asked, ‘Oh, do you want to start to play guitar?’ or ‘Are you looking for a guitar for your boyfriend?’ And you\'re like, ‘What the fuck?’ It\'s the worst feeling. And I\'ve talked to so many other women about the same experience. Everyone\'s like, ‘Yeah, it\'s the worst. I hate going in the guitar stores.’ It sucks.” **All That Ever Mattered** Alana: “This is one of the more experimental songs on the record. Whatever felt good on this track, we just put it in. And there’s a million ways you could take this song—it takes on a life of its own and it’s kind of chaotic. The production is bananas and bonkers, but it did really feel good.” Danielle: “It’s definitely a different palette. But to us it was exciting to have that crazy guitar solo and those drums. It also has a really fun scream on it, which I always like—it’s a nice release.” **FUBT** Alana: “This song was one of the ones that was really hard to write. It’s about being in an emotionally abusive relationship, which all three of us have been in. It’s really hard to see when you\'re in something like that. And the song basically explains what it feels like and just not knowing how to get out of it. You\'re just kind of drowning in this relationship, because the highs are high and the lows are extremely low. You’re blind to all these insane red flags because you’re so immersed in this love. And knowing that you\'re so hard on yourself about the littlest things. But your partner can do no wrong. When we wrote this song, we didn’t really know where to put it. But it felt like the end to the chapter of the record—a good break before the next songs, which everyone knew.” **Now I’m in It** Danielle: “This song is about feeling like you\'re in something and almost feeling okay to sit in it, but also just recognizing that you\'re in a dark place. I was definitely in a dark place, and it was just like I had to look at myself in the mirror and be like, ‘Yeah, this is fucked up. And you need to get your shit together and you need to look it in the face and know that you\'re here and work on yourself.’ After writing this song I got a therapist, which really helped me.” **Hallelujah** Alana: “This song really did just come from wanting to express how important it is to have the love of your family. We\'re very lucky that we each have two sisters as backup always. We wrote this with our friend Tobias Jesso Jr., and we all just decided to write verses separately, which is rare for us. I think we each wanted to have our own take on the lyric ‘Why me, how\'d I get this hallelujah’ and what it meant to each of us. I wrote about losing a really close friend of mine at such a young age and going through a tragedy that was unexplainable. I still grapple with the meaning of that whole thing. It was one of the hardest times in my life, and it still is, but I was really lucky that I had two siblings that were really supportive during that time and really helped me get through it. If you talk to anybody that loses someone unexpectedly, you really do become a different person. I feel like I\'ve had two chapters of my life at this point: before it happened and after it happened. And I’ve always wanted to thank my sisters at the same time because they were so integral in my healing process going through something so tragic.” **Summer Girl** Alana: This song is collectively like our baby. Putting it out was really fun, but it was also really scary, because we were coming back and we didn’t know how people were going to receive it. We’d played it to people and a lot of them didn’t really like it. But we loved everything about it. You can lose your confidence really quickly, but thankfully, people really liked it. Putting out this song really did give us back our confidence.” Danielle: “I\'ve talked about it a lot, but this song is about my boyfriend getting cancer a couple of years ago, and it was truly the scariest thing that I have ever been through. I just couldn\'t stop thinking about how he was feeling. I get spooked really easily, but I felt like I had to buck the fuck up and be this kind of strong figure for him. I had to be this kind of sunshine, which was hard for me, but I feel like it really helped him. And that’s kind of where this song came from. Being the summer when he was just in this dark, dark place.”

*“It’s beauty meets aggression.” Read an interview with Abe Cunningham about Deftones’ massive ninth album.* “My bags are still packed,” Deftones drummer Abe Cunningham tells Apple Music. The California band was set to embark on a two-year touring cycle when the pandemic hit. “We were eight hours away from flying to New Zealand and Australia,” he says, when they received the news that the festival that was to signal the start of their tour had been canceled. The band had spent nearly two years before that chipping away at their ninth album, *Ohms*, while also planning to celebrate the 20th anniversary of 2000’s *White Pony* with a remix album, *Black Stallion*—which is to say, they had more than a few reasons to take their show on the road. “There was talk of delaying the album,” he says, “but we were like, ‘Shit, if we can help somebody out, if we can get somebody through their doldrums and their day-to-day shit, let’s stick to the plan.” *Ohms* is a triumph that serves the stuck-at-home headphone listener every bit as much as it would, and eventually will, the festival-going headbanger. It reaches into every corner of Deftones’ influential sonic repertoire: chugging grooves, filthy rhythms, extreme vocals, soaring emotions, experimental soundscapes, and intentionally cryptic lyrics, open for each individual listener’s interpretation. “We try to make albums,” Cunningham says. “Sequencing is definitely something that we put a lot of thought and energy into.” Opening track “Genesis” begins with an eerie synth, a slow, wavering riff. And then, with a hint of reverb and Cunningham’s sticks counting it in, there’s an explosion. Guitars and bass pound out an enormous, droning chord as Chino Moreno screeches: “I reject both sides of what I’m being told/I’ve seen right through, now I watch how wild it gets/I finally achieve balance/Approaching a delayed rebirth.” “Ceremony” opens with staccatoed guitar and muffled vocals, followed by a feverish riff. “The Spell of Mathematics” is an epic album highlight that combines doomy basslines, breathy vocals, and screams, before a midsection breakdown of finger snaps that you can easily imagine resonating across a festival field or concert hall. “It’s one of those things that just happened out of nowhere,” Cunningham says. “Our buddy Zach Hill \[Death Grips, Hella, and more\] happened to be in LA when we were tracking everything, so we all walked up to meet him and had one beer, which led to three and four. He came back to the studio with us. The snaps are our little attempt at a barbershop quartet. It just worked out organically, and we have one of the baddest drummers ever just snapping.” The band took time off after touring their 2016 album, *Gore*, allowing them to take things slow. “In the past, it’s been, ‘All right, here’s your two months, you’re off tour, take a break. All right, you’ve got studio coming up, go, be productive!’ And we’re like, ‘Okay, but what if I don’t feel productive today?’ Tensions can come in. So we decided to take that year off.” Each band member lives in a different city, so they’d get together for a week or so once every month to jam and write songs, ultimately creating *Ohms*, in the order it was written. “Each time we would jam, we started making songs and we treated it as a set list,” Cunningham says. “We’d go home, stew on that for the month and see what we had, live with it, then come back and play those songs in order.” Summing up their approach, Cunningham says, “It’s beauty meets aggression. We’re trying to make a lovely mix of things that flow. I think we have more to offer than that, but it’s definitely one of our trademarks. I think our frustration is just trying to fit all these things that we love into one album.”

The first time that Mac Miller and Jon Brion formally met, Miller was already hard at work on what would become 2018’s *Swimming*, an album that Brion would sign on to produce. “He comes in and he plays five or six things,” Brion tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “There was more hip-hop-leaning stuff, and it was great and funny and personal—the tracks were already pointing someplace interesting. After a couple of those, he goes, ‘I’ve got these other things I\'m not sure what to do with.’” Those “other things” were the beginning of *Circles*, a now posthumous LP that Miller had envisioned as a counterpart to *Swimming*—one that finds him exploring levels of musicality, melody, and vulnerability he’d only hinted at before. It feels more akin to Harry Nilsson than hip-hop, and the breadth of Brion’s CV (Kanye West, Fiona Apple, Janelle Monáe) made him the perfect collaborator. With the support of Miller’s family, Brion completed *Circles* based on conversations the two had shared before Miller’s death in September 2018, adding elements of live percussion, strings, and various overdubs. Here, Brion takes us inside the making of some of *Circles*’ key songs and offers insights on what it was like to work so closely with Miller on something so personal. **Circles** “That\'s what he played me. I added a brush on a cymbal, and a vibraphone. Throughout all of his lyrics, his self-reflection is much more interesting than some other people’s. ‘Circles’ and a few other songs on this record: You hear him acknowledging aspects of himself, either that he doesn\'t feel capable of changing or things he thinks are questionable. Things you\'ll hear in the lyrics directly—‘I’m this way, and I think other people might not understand how I think, but actually I\'m okay with that.’ It\'s so pointed. I was just a hundred percent in from the get-go.” **Complicated** “I think that vocal was done, if I recall correctly. He\'d play me things in various states, and the whole batch, meaning both albums’ worth of songs. He\'d play things, and I might just go, ‘That\'s great. All it needs is for the low end to be a little better.’ Almost every time I\'d make a suggestion like that, he\'d go, \'Oh, I\'m so glad you said that. I just didn\'t know how to do it with this type of thing.\' Other times, I might listen to something and go, ‘I love it. I love what you\'re saying. I like that vocal. I like the rhythm. In this case, about halfway through, my mind wanders, and I don\'t want the listener\'s mind to do that, because what you\'re saying is great.’” **Good News** “It was him singing over a very minimal track. The lyrics were incredible. It didn\'t have the chorus. He said, ‘I just think you should play a bunch of stuff on it.’ I gingerly asked, ‘Do you like the chords that are there?’ He\'s like, ‘No.’ I\'m like, ‘Okay. Well, I\'m going to play, and every time you hear something you like, let me know.’ I did with him what I\'ve done with a bunch of directors, which is watch the body language, when somebody\'s happy or not. He came into the control room, and he was really excited. He started singing over it in the control room, and he sang the chorus. I’m in the middle of the keyboard over top and I look up and go, ‘That\'s great. Go run onto the mic.’ After he first did it, he came in and he was still a little unsure, like, ‘Yeah, I don\'t know, maybe that\'s a different song.’ And thank god he lived with it and saw the sense in it. Again, that\'s not something I created—that\'s something he was doing. I think I did say to him when he was walking around in front of the speakers and he was singing that, like, \'Look, there\'s a reason that came to you right now.\'” **I Can See** “It’s not fair to give words to the heaviness of it, but I can tell you that the week I had to listen through stuff was a torture and a delight. Torture because of the loss. And then ‘I Can See’ would come up and I\'d be beyond delighted because I\'m like, ‘This is good by anybody\'s standards, in any genre, this human being expressing themselves well.’ It would turn back to a torture because you\'re like, ‘Oh my god, you were capable of that. I didn\'t even get to hear that one yet.’ I could sit there and wonder, would I have? Was it something he was nervous about, or because it was already so complete, did he not feel a need? No idea. You can ascribe all sorts of things to his sense of knowing. But people are going to have that experience because he was already self-aware and was unafraid of expressing it. But beyond that lyrical wonder of honesty, the melody just made me cry.” **That’s on Me** “He had come back from Hawaii. I was sideswiped by the song and the feeling of it. He usually said, ‘Oh, you should just play everything.’ I\'m like, ‘No, you\'re already great, I\'ll play along with that.’ Inevitably, he\'d finish a take and say, ‘Was that all right?’ And all I could do is honestly go, ‘Yeah, it was great. I\'m having a blast.’\" **Hands** “He wanted it big and expansive and cinematic, had no idea how he had one keyboard pad implying that. I said, ‘Oh, I\'ve got this notion of Dr. Dre-influenced eighth notes like he would have on a piano sample. Instead of it being piano or a piano sample, let\'s take the influence of that era, but I want to do it on orchestral percussion but a lot of different ones. So it\'s sort of subtly changing across the thing.’ And he was like, ‘Just put everything you want on it.’ So that\'s one where I went to town. He was really excited but had no idea how one would even go about that.” **Once a Day** “He came over, played two or three things—that was one of them, and it had a little mini piano or something. I couldn\'t believe the songwriting. I looked forward to his visits so much because every time, there was this new discovery of, ‘You\'re hiding this?’ Honestly. I don\'t know what else he\'s got undercover, but this thing is fully fleshed out. It\'s personal. It\'s heartbreaking. I went through the rigmarole to get him to play it and I did what I thought was the right production decision. I left the room, but I didn\'t close the door. I didn\'t leave, not even slightly. I stood in the door, basically a room and a half away from the control room with the door open. And he started playing and the vocal was coming out and I wasn\'t having to be in the room and he did a pass and I could hear there was something on the keyboard needing adjustment. It needed to be brighter or darker, and I just sort of came running in like, ‘Oh, sorry, just one thing.’ And I went back out and I stood in the hallway and I listened to a couple of takes. And this is how I can tell you I\'m not looking at it with the loss goggles: I bawled my eyes out. Heard it twice in a row. I kind of poked my head around the door and said, ‘Oh, I heard a little bit of that. That sounds good. Just do a double of that keyboard just right now while the sound’s up. Okay, cool.’ Boom. Ran out into the hallway and cried again and dried my eyes out and went back in and sat through the usual ‘Was that good? Are you sure you shouldn\'t just play it?’ Maybe it\'s something the rest of the world wouldn\'t see and I will be blinded by personal experience, but I don\'t fucking care. It\'s what happened. It\'s what I saw, and I just think it\'s great and doesn\'t need any qualifiers, personally. So there.”

From thrilling affairs that dissolve into sweaty desperation (Night Chancers) to the absurd bloggers, fruitlessly clinging to the fag ends of the fashion set (Sleep People), via soiled real life (Slum Lord) social media – enabled stalkers (I’m not Your Dog) and new day, sleep – deprived optimism (Daylight), the record’s finely drawn vignettes, are all based on the corners of world Dury has visited. Baxter says “Night Chancers is about being caught out in your attempt at being free”, it’s about someone leaving a hotel room at three in the morning. You’re in a posh room with big Roman taps and all that, but after they go suddenly all you can hear is the taps dripping, and all you can see the debris of the night is around you. Then suddenly a massive party erupts, in the room next door. This happened to me and all I Could hear was the night chancer, the hotel ravers”.

Welcome to Calvary Falls, where the world of one quiet, snowy American town is about to be turned upside down by the arrival of a mysterious man…to catastrophic results. Creeper has never been a band to accept limitations on their ambitious designs; 2017’s debut album, *Eternity, In Your Arms*, took broad brushstrokes of Peter Pan, weaved in the fantastical story of a paranormal investigator’s disappearance, and set it, as one would fully expect, in Southampton. On *Sex, Death & the Infinite Void*, their second full-length concept album, such scale and vision isn’t simply confined to their storytelling. “Creating this record was about ignoring the things that had trapped us in the past,” frontman Will Gould tells Apple Music. “I wanted to ignore what had come before, and prove wrong everyone that said no band could advance their sound so dramatically without alienating your fanbase.” And so this love-triangle tale of lust, envy, and wrath plays out to a soundtrack of British glam rock, Americana country, 1950s doo-wop, and their stock-in-trade: emo punk hooks. A first visit to any strange place requires a good tour guide to uncover its true depths, however, so who better to show you the sights of Calvary Falls than Gould himself? **Hallelujah!** “Our opening is spoken by Patricia Morrison, from The Sisters of Mercy and The Damned, who we met at the Kerrang! magazine awards show in London last year \[2019\]. A little while later I had this spoken-word idea to open the record, and asked Patricia. We sat inside this studio in London and did all of the dialogue between us. I described how I wanted a sort of Madame Leota character from Disney’s The Haunted Mansion \[ride\], and she knew exactly what I meant. This opens our whole story, and sets up the marriage of Annabelle, who Patricia voices throughout the album’s interludes, and the villain of our piece, Buddy.” **Be My End** “It took a long time to decide what the first song proper on the album should be. It isn’t a drastic departure in sound for us, which I felt important on an album that otherwise is a big change for us, while it also lays out the apocalyptic nature of the prophecy brought forward by our main character, Roe, who arrives in Calvary Falls with the message that the world as people know it will end in seven days. The whole piece is summarized by the opening lyric: ‘Will you be my Armageddon?’ It has a very Creeper chorus—over the top and vaudevillian—while the bridge contains a theremin, which we recreated the sound of on an emulator as none of us could play the actual thing.” **Born Cold** “This was the very first song we wrote for the record—it’s the nucleus of the whole piece. I already had the narrative for this album before even writing this song, which introduces the character of Roe, a man who can’t feel and has fallen to Earth. A lot of this record in fact was based on Marilyn Manson’s interpretation of Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, on Manson’s *Mechanical Animals* album. I was obsessed with that record when I was younger.” **Cyanide** “This song was the result of a very difficult time. My songwriting partner, Ian \[Miles, guitar\], was very sick for a time. He was receiving treatment in Brighton when we were supposed to be writing together in Los Angeles, so we found ourselves trying to write via FaceTime. Nothing was working. I went for breakfast one day off the Sunset Strip, and T. Rex came on over the speakers. ‘This is what we should be doing!’ I started saying. ‘People think Creeper are a pop-punk band with eyeliner, but we’re a glam rock band!’ My manager was eating his food in silence opposite me and—I’ll never forget it—he calmly put his cutlery down, looked at me, and said, ‘Well, just go and do it, then.’ We went back to the studio and the whole song came together in about 30 minutes. It’s my real life seeping into this album; I was writing this song about Annabelle and Roe’s attraction to each other, but also about myself and what I was going through personally. It’s half reality, half fantasy, and that’s when Creeper is at its best.” **Annabelle** “I was obsessed with Suede when I was younger, and the opening beat here pays homage to their song ‘Trash.’ It was something intentionally English on a very American record. It’s a Britpop song, yet when it comes into the first lyrics, it might as well be a Green Day song. This introduces Annabelle further, while Roe is learning that sinning is part of being human: ‘God can’t save us, so let’s live like sinners.’ That went back to when we played the Warped Tour one year and had a run-in with the Westboro Baptist Church, who were picketing the event.” **Paradise** “This is written from the point of view of our villain, Buddy Calvary. Roy Orbison was a really big influence on the country elements of this record, and when we were working on ‘Paradise’ we were watching the video to his song ‘I Drove All Night.’ The visual picture of the world we’re creating is something I always have in my mind when writing music, and this song was actually born from us muting that video and saying, ‘Let’s write a song to go with this.’ I always want lyrics to give you just enough for the listener to work with in imagining the place and characters, and then the music does the rest.” **Poisoned Heart** “Ian and myself wrote a number of songs in this alternative country vein, and this one stuck due to the chorus, which I love. It’s a song that will really divide people, I’m sure. There are similarities in our narrative to the first time you meet Roe and the first time you meet Buddy, and both have a poison heart in their own sense—Roe because he can’t feel anything, and Buddy because he’s had everything given to him; he may have loved Annabelle at one point, but his controlling nature has ruined their relationship. If this was a musical—and I really wish it was!—I would have both characters sing it, one verse each.” **Thorns of Love** “A long time ago, I was writing a musical called *Cosmic Love*, about a woman who fell to Earth and fell in love with a man from the 1980s. Some of the lyrics in the second verse are actually from the musical I wrote all those years ago—‘Lennon was shot in December time/Curtis was hung by washing line/1980s lovers died in twos.’ This is a doo-wop song in the vein of ‘Drive-In Saturday’ from the David Bowie record *Aladdin Sane*. Even though I wrote this song myself, it’s the contributions of other people that really make it: Ian with that Avenged Sevenfold-style solo, Patricia’s middle section that sounds like *The Rocky Horror Picture Show*, and Hannah’s \[Greenwood, keyboards and vocals\] ridiculous intro.” **Four Years Ago** “This is a Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra-style duet; a very delicate, feminine vocal meets the baritone male. I spent a long time trying to write a song for me and Hannah to sing, and it presents the disintegration of Annabelle and Buddy’s relationship. It’s opening up to the listener about how messed up this relationship is, after only giving little hints previously.” **Napalm Girls** “‘Napalm Girls’ is the coolest name for a song that anyone has ever come up with—and I didn’t even mean to call it that originally. This is where the road to the end of our story begins, and describes Roe and Annabelle getting together for the first time before running away to the top of a mountain for Roe to go back to whence he came. The lyric ‘She is a war in me/Her kiss is violence’ could sum up the last two years of my life, when you’re obsessed with someone and you’re first falling in love. I also hid a reference to my girlfriend’s favorite My Chemical Romance song in this.” **Black Moon** “Welcome to our album’s ‘death’ song, where Roe meets his demise at Buddy’s hands. At this point, Roe has become completely obsessed with Annabelle, and he’s a sinner now. He’s not the man from the start of the album who was ‘Born Cold’—he’s now transformed and has now become just as sinful as anyone. He is martyring himself and dying for the sins of this town—and closing our messed-up story. The title honors a long-standing tradition in our band of having the word ‘Black’ in the title of a song on each of our releases.” **All My Friends** “‘All My Friends’ is a departure from our narrative, and wasn’t meant to be on the album at all. I had originally written another ballad for this point, called ‘Shattered,’ which was really dramatic and about our character’s death. But I had also written this song late one night, while drunk, after Ian had fallen very sick, and it just so happened that some other people also heard it and encouraged me to develop it. It captures the darkest moment in my life. There’s a lot of realism in this record—the main romance; reflecting my own feelings of being an alien and an outsider in the music scene—but this song is the most real Creeper has ever been.”

When it came to crafting her fourth album, Jessie Ware had one word in mind. “Escapism,” the Londoner tells Apple Music of *What’s Your Pleasure?*, a collection of suitably intoxicating soul- and disco-inspired pop songs to transport you out of your everyday and straight onto a crowded dance floor. “I wanted it to be fun. The premise was: Will this make people want to have sex? And will this make people want to dance? I’ve got a family now, so going out and being naughty and debauched doesn’t happen that much.” And yet the singer (and, in her spare time, wildly popular podcaster) could have never foreseen just how much we would *all* be in need of that release by the time *What’s Your Pleasure?* came to be heard—amid a global pandemic and enforced lockdowns in countless countries. “A lot of shit is going on,” says Ware. “As much as I don’t think I’m going to save the world with this record, I do think it provides a bit of escapism. By my standards, this album is pretty joyful.” Indeed, made over two years with Simian Mobile Disco’s James Ford and producers including Clarence Coffee Jr. (Dua Lipa, Lizzo) and Joseph Mount of Metronomy, *What’s Your Pleasure?* is a world away from the heartfelt balladry once synonymous with Ware. Here, pulsating basslines reign supreme, as do whispered vocals, melodramatic melodies, and winking lyrics. At times, it’s a defiant throwback to the dance scene that first made Ware famous (“I wanted people to think, ‘When is she going to calm this album down?’”); at others, it’s a thrilling window into what might come next (note “Remember Where You Are,” the album’s gorgeous, Minnie Riperton-esque outro). But why the sudden step change? “A low point in music” and \"a shitty time,” says Ware, nodding to a 2018 tour that left her feeling so disillusioned with her day job that her mother suggested she quit singing altogether. “I needed a palate cleanser to shock the system. I needed to test myself. I needed to be reminded that music should be fun.” *What’s Your Pleasure?*, confirms Ware, has more than restored the spring in her step. “I feel like what I can do after this is limitless,” she says. “That’s quite a different situation to how I felt during the last album. Now, I have a newfound drive. I feel incredibly empowered, and it’s an amazing feeling.” Here\_,\_ Let Ware walk you through her joyous fourth record, one song at a time. **Spotlight** “I wrote this in the first writing session. James was playing the piano and we were absolutely crooning. That’s what the first bit of this song is—which really nods to musical theater and jazz. We thought about taking it out, but then I realized that the theatrical aspect is kind of essential. The album had to have that light and shade. It also felt like a perfect entry point because of that intro. It’s like, ‘Come into my world.’ I think it grabs you. It’s also got a bit of the old Jessie in there, with that melancholy. This song felt like a good indicator of where the rest of the album was going to go. That’s why it felt right to start the record with that.” **What’s Your Pleasure?** “We had been writing and writing all day, and nothing was working. We\'d gone for a lunch, and we were like, ‘You know, sometimes this happens.’ Later, we were just messing about, and I was like, ‘I really want to imagine that I\'m in the Berghain and I want to imagine that I\'m dancing with someone and they are so suggestive, and anything goes.’ It\'s sex, it\'s desire, it\'s temptation. We were like, ‘Let’s do this as outrageously as possible.’ So we imagined we were this incredibly confident person who could just say anything. When we wrote it, it just came out—20 minutes and then it was done. James came up with that amazing beat, which almost reminds me of a DJ Shadow song. We were giggling the whole time we were writing it. It\'s quite poppy accidentally, but I think with the darkness of all the synths, it’s just the perfect combination.” **Ooh La La** “This is another very cheeky one. It’s very much innuendo. In my head, there are these prim and proper lovers—it’s all very polite, but actually there’s no politeness about. So it’s quite a naughty number. The song has got an absolute funk to it, but it’s really catchy and it’s still quite quirky. It’s not me letting rip on the vocal. It’s actually quite clipped.” **Soul Control** “I had Janet Jackson in my head in this one. It’s a really energetic number. There is a sense of indulgence in these songs, because I wasn’t trying to play to a radio edit and I was really relishing that. But it’s not self-indulgent, because it’s very much fun. These are the highest tempos I’ve ever done, and I think I surprised myself by doing that. I wanted to keep the energy up—I wanted people to think, ‘When is she going to calm this album down?’” **Save a Kiss** “It’s funny because I was a bit scared of this song. I remember Ed Sheeran telling me, ‘When you get a bit scared by a song, it usually means that there’s something really good in it.’ My fans like emotion from me, so I wanted to do a really emotive dance song. We just wanted it to feel as bare as possible and really feel like the lyrics and the melody could really like sing out on this one. We had loads of other production in it, and it was very much like a case of James and I stripping everything back. It was the hardest one to get right. But I’m very excited about playing it. It has the yearning and the wanting that I feel my fans want, and I just wanted it to feel a bit over the top. I also wanted this song to have a bit of Kate Bush in there and some of the drama of her music.” **Adore You** “I wrote this when I got pregnant. It was my first session with Joseph Mount and I was a bit awkward and he was a bit awkward. When I\'m really nervous I sing really quietly because I don\'t want people to hear anything. But that actually kind of worked. I love this—it shows a vulnerability and a softness. Actually it was me thinking about my unborn child and thinking about, like, I\'m falling for you and this bump and feeling like it\'s going to be a reality soon. I think Joe did such an amazing job on just making it feel hypnotic and still romantic and tender, but with this kind of mad sound. I think it’s a really beautiful song. It was supposed to be an offering before I went away and had a baby, to tell my fans that I’ll be back. They really loved it and I thought, ‘I can\'t not put this on the record, because it\'s like it\'s an important song for the journey of this album.’ I’m really proud of the fact that this is a pure collaboration, and I have such fond memories of it.” **In Your Eyes** “This was the first song that me and James wrote for this whole album. I think you can feel the darkness in it. And that maybe I was feeling the resentment and torturing myself. I think that the whirring arpeggio and the beats in this song very much suggest that it’s a stream of consciousness. There’s a desperation about it. I think that was very much the time and place that I was in. I’m very proud of this song, and it’s actually one of my favorites. Jules Buckley did such an amazing job on the strings—it makes me feel like we\'re in a Bond film or something. But it was very much coming off the back of having quite a low point in music.” **Step Into My Life** “I made this song with \[London artist\] Kindness \[aka Adam Bainbridge\]. I’ve known them for a long time. In my head I wanted that almost R&B delivery with the verse and for it to feel really intimate and kind of predatory, but with this very disco moment in the chorus. I love that Adam’s voice is in there, in the breakdown. It feels like a conversation—the song is pure groove and attitude. You can’t help but nod your head. It feels like one that you can play at the beginning of a party and get people on the dance floor.” **Read My Lips** “James and I did this one on our own, and it’s supposed to be quite bubblegummy. We were giving a nod to \[Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam with Full Force song\] ‘I Wonder If I Take You Home.’ The bassline in this song is so good. We also recorded my vocal slower and lower, so that when you turn it back to normal speed, the vocals sound more cutesy because it sounds brighter and higher. I wanted it to sound slightly squeaky. My voice is naturally quite low and melancholic, so I don’t know how I’m going to sing this one live. I’ll have to pinch my nose or something!” **Mirage (Don’t Stop)** “The bassline here is ridiculous! That’s down to Matt Tavares \[of BADBADNOTGOOD\]. He’s a multi-instrumentalist and is just so talented and enthusiastic, and I also wrote this with \[British DJ and producer\] Benji B and \[US producer\] Clarence Coffee Jr. I think it really signified that I had got my confidence and my mojo back when I went into that session. Usually I\'d be like, ‘Oh, my god, I can\'t do this with new people.’ But it just clicked as sometimes it does. I was unsure about whether the lyric ‘Don\'t stop moving’ felt too obvious. But Benji B was very much like, ‘No, man. You want people to dance. It’s the perfect message.’ And I think of Benji B as like the cool-ometer. So I was like, \'Cool, if Benji B thinks it cool, then I\'m okay with that.’” **The Kill** “There’s an almost hypnotic element to this song. It’s very dark, almost like the end of the night when things are potentially getting too loose. It’s also a difficult one to talk about. It’s about someone feeling like they know you well—maybe too well. There are anxieties in there, and it\'s meant to be cinematic. I wanted that relentlessly driving feeling like you\'d be in a car and you just keep going on, like you’re almost running away from something. Again, Jules Buckley did an amazing job with the strings here—I wanted it to sound almost like it was verging on Primal Scream or Massive Attack. And live, it could just build and build and build. There is, though, a lightness at the end of it, and an optimism—like you’re clawing your way out of this darkness.” **Remember Where You Are** “I’m incredibly proud of this song. I wrote it when Boris Johnson had just got into Downing Street and things were miserable. Everything that could be going wrong was going wrong, which is behind the lyric ‘The heart of the city is on fire.’ And it sounds relatively upbeat, but actually, it\'s about me thinking, ‘Remember where you are. Remember that just a cuddle can be okay. Remember who’s around you.’ Also, it was very much a semi-sign-off and about saying, ‘This is where I’m going and this is the most confident I’ve ever been.’ It was a bold statement. I think it stands up as one of the best songs I\'ve ever written.”

"Portland’s mystery girl" (VICE) may no longer be a kept secret, but Alexandra Savior can never be fully figured out. She wears many colored hats, quite literally, as she explores a lighthouse, in her brand new video for the title track to her forthcoming album, The Archer, out now on Danger Mouse’s 30th Century Records. Today, Savior also announces her 2020 North American tour dates, which will bring her mesmerizing live show to Seattle, WA, Portland, OR, San Francisco, CA, Los Angeles, CA and New York, NY in February. Tickets will be on-sale on Wednesday, October 30th. Describing her album’s title track and latest release, Savior says: “I wrote “The Archer” on Christmas Eve as a gift for a lover. At the time, my perception was that I was writing a song about how it feels to love someone, but now when I listen back to “The Archer”, I realize that I was writing an observation of a psychologically unhealthy relationship, from the perspective of someone who is unconsciously aware that she is being emotionally mistreated. In 2017, I filmed the Super 8 video for “The Archer” in Port Townsend, WA with artist Alexandria Saleem. The lighthouse and the grim December sky, represented to me the isolation I felt during that time in my relationship.” Ladygunn says, “Savior has a unique voice that veers away from the cookie cutter pop that is dominating the mainstream right now.” New single, “The Archer,” showcases that standout vocality Savior is now known for, and also weaves a bittersweet story together with clever wordplay and broodingly beautiful layers of melody. “The Archer” is the third single from Savior’s forthcoming, sophomore album, The Archer, which was produced by Sam Cohen, often known as a fan of collaboration, most recently teaming up with Kevin Morby for his Oh My God album. On working with Savior, Cohen says, “It’s really a joy to work with someone who’s got such a strong sense of melody and also such a strong sense of what she wants stylistically.” Savior’s debut record, Belladonna of Sadness, was written in collaboration with Alex Turner of Arctic Monkeys and NME says, “Savior continues to build on that bold arrival and is becoming a star in her own right.” Her new album shows that not only does her voice stand alone, but that her musicality stands alone, too. Along with Savior’s newly announced tour dates, a previously announced, special live performance will take place on November 19 at The Bootleg in Los Angeles. Fans can hear the “striking and smoky vocals [that] belong solely to Savior (NME)” and these new picturesque melodies live.

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

“More often than not, my songs draw from things that remind me of home and things that remind me of peace,” Sophie Allison tells Apple Music. The Nashville guitarist and songwriter’s *color theory* is steeped in feelings of alienation, depression, loneliness, and anxiety, all presented with a confidence belying her 22 years. The album is organized into three sections, with the first, blue, symbolizing depression and sadness. The second, yellow, hones in on physical and mental sickness, centering around Allison’s mother’s battle with a terminal illness. Lastly, the gray section represents darkness, emptiness, and a fear of death. It’s a perfect middle ground between her earlier work and a studio-oriented sound, retaining a lo-fi ethos while sanding down the pointy edges. Here she breaks down the stories behind each song on *color theory*. **bloodstream** “‘bloodstream’ was one of the first ones I wrote. It took a while to finish it because I had to craft it a little bit more rather than just let all this stuff out. I felt I needed to piece together a lot of themes and ideas that I wanted in there, because it’s a song about being in a dark and empty place. I wanted to try to remember a time when it wasn’t that way. I also wanted it to have this contrast of beauty, and use images of flowers and summer. I wanted this natural beauty to be in there mixed with violence―these images of blood, wounds, and visceral stuff.” **circle the drain** “When I started ‘bloodstream,’ I also started ‘circle the drain.’ I was writing both of them on the same tour, and ‘circle the drain’ came together a lot faster, even though it is still a song that\'s pieced together. I just wanted to grab that wallowing feeling. In the song it feels like I\'m drowning a little bit. I wanted it to be a track that felt really bright and hopeful on the outside, even though the lyrics themselves are about someone literally falling apart, and wallowing in the sadness.” **royal screw up** “I wrote this one in about 15 minutes. The lyrics here are me just ragging and telling on myself for all these things that I do. It sucks, but if I\'m being honest, this is the level that it\'s at. It\'s about coming to terms with and being honest about your own flaws and your own reoccurring behavior that may be a little bit self-destructive.” **night swimming** “‘night swimming’ is one I wrote at home. I wrote it pretty early on and when I hadn\'t written a lot of songs. I wasn\'t sure how it was going to fit in, because it felt very different―softer and more gentle than a lot of the stuff I was writing. But as I started to write more songs, it emerged as the end of what is now the blue section. The themes that are in this song are very similar to things that are going on throughout the album. I think at the core of it, this song is about loneliness and about feeling like there\'s always a distance between you and other people.” **crawling in my skin** “This is a big shift out of the blue section. This one is really about hallucinating, having sleep paralysis, and paranoia, of just feeling like there\'s something watching me and there\'s something following me. It’s about the feeling that you\'re constantly running from something. Obviously, it\'s a huge shift in the record, and it comes in with a bang. It\'s immediately more upbeat and the pace of the album starts to pick up. I think about it like getting your heart racing. During the time I wrote it, I was having a lot of trouble with not sleeping very much and just having this constant paranoia of auditory hallucinations. I had the feeling of being completely on edge for a while and feeling like even when it\'s not there, the moment things get quiet, it\'s going to be back. The moment that you\'re at home and people are asleep, it\'s going to be back, it’s going to creep back in.” **yellow is the color of her eyes** “I really like this one. It\'s about sickness and the toll that that can take. It’s about being faced with something that is a little bit visceral even for a short, short time. Anything can happen at any second. You\'re not immortal, your people die, and people get ill. At any time, things can change. Anything can change.” **up the walls** “I wrote this on tour when I was opening for Liz Phair. I wrote it in my hotel room, because I was flying to every show and I was alone because I was playing solo. This one is all about anxiety and paranoia, but also just feeling tired of having to be a certain person, especially for someone you love when you’re in a relationship. It’s about wishing you could just take it easy. It’s about trying to be a calmer person and not falling into that anxiety when it comes to new relationships. I guess it\'s really just about feeling like you wish you could be perfect for someone.” **lucy** “‘lucy’ represents another shift in the album, both literally and sonically. It has an evil overtone, even just in the chords. I use this idea of the devil seducing you to talk about morality, struggling with that and things in the world that seduce you in ways you wish they wouldn\'t. It has this minor overtone all of a sudden, even though it\'s upbeat, catchy, and fun. This is when the album turns into the gray section. I begin to talk more about darkness and evil and things that tear you apart a little bit.” **stain** “I wrote this in my parents’ house. I got this new amp and I was just playing around with it and I ended up writing this song. It still makes me uncomfortable to talk about, just because it\'s about facing a power struggle with someone, and feeling like you lost, and wishing you could redo it over and over again. But it’s also about knowing that you can\'t, and just being unable to take that as the final answer even though it is. It’s a difficult thing to feel like you\'re stained with that interaction, and losing control over a part of your life.” **gray light** “This song reflects on everything I\'ve been talking about the entire album and brings in this new element of darkness, mortality, and fear. It also touches on longing for an end to some of your suffering and some of the things that will never be okay. It’s about being tired of struggling with things. It has this anxiety and it also has this kind of sadness that draws you to wanting to end some of your pain. But it also talks about how it’s important to recognize these feelings and acknowledge them.”

Confronting the ongoing mental health and familial trials that have plagued Allison since pre-pubescence, color theory explores three central themes: blue, representing sadness and depression; yellow, symbolizing physical and emotional illness; and, finally, gray, representing darkness, emptiness and loss. Written mostly while on tour and recorded in Allison’s hometown of Nashville at Alex The Great, color theory was produced by Gabe Wax (who also produced Clean), mixed by Lars Stalfors (Mars Volta, HEALTH, St. Vincent), and features the live Soccer Mommy band on studio recording for the first time, with a live take at the foundation of almost every track. The resulting album is a masterpiece that paints an uncompromisingly honest self-portrait of an artist who, according to 100+ publications, already released one of the Best Albums of 2018 and the 2010s, and is about to release an early favorite of 2020.

Over the last decade, Khruangbin (pronounced “krung-bin”) has mastered the art of setting a mood, of creating atmosphere. But on *Mordechai*, follow-up to their 2018 breakthrough *Con Todo El Mundo*, the Houston trio makes space in their globe-spinning psych-funk for something that’s been largely missing until now: vocals. The result is their most direct work to date. From the playground disco of “Time (You and I)” to the Latin rhythms of “Pelota”—inspired by a Japanese film, but sung in Spanish—to the balmy reassurances of “If There Is No Question,” much of *Mordechai* has the immediacy of an especially adventurous pop record. Even moments of hallucinogenic expanse (“One to Remember”) or haze (“First Class”) benefit from the added presence of a human voice. “Never enough paper, never enough letters,” they sing from inside a shower of West African guitar notes on “So We Won’t Forget,” the album’s high point. “You don’t have to be silent.”

The earliest releases of Yves Tumor—the producer born Sean Bowie in Florida, raised in Tennessee, and based in Turin—arrived from a land beyond genre. They intermingled ambient synths and disembodied Kylie samples with free jazz, soul, and the crunch of experimental club beats. By 2018’s *Safe in the Hands of Love*, Tumor had effectively become a genre of one, molding funk and indie into an uncanny strain of post-everything art music. *Heaven to a Tortured Mind*, Tumor’s fourth LP, is their most remarkable transformation yet. They have sharpened their focus, sanded down the rough edges, and stepped boldly forward with an avant-pop opus that puts equal weight on both halves of that equation. “Gospel for a New Century” opens the album like a shot across the bow, the kind of high-intensity funk geared more to filling stadiums than clubs. Its blazing horns and electric bass are a reminder of Tumor’s Southern roots, but just as we’ve gotten used to the idea of them as spiritual kin to Outkast, they follow up with “Medicine Burn,” a swirling fusion of shoegaze and grunge. The album just keeps shape-shifting like that, drawing from classic soul and diverse strains of alternative rock, and Tumor is an equally mercurial presence—sometimes bellowing, other times whispering in a falsetto croon. But despite the throwback inspirations, the record never sounds retro. Its powerful rhythm section anchors the music in a future we never saw coming. These are not the sullen rhythmic abstractions of Tumor\'s early years; they’re larger-than-life anthems that sound like the product of some strange alchemical process. Confirming the magnitude of Tumor’s creative vision, this is the new sound that a new decade deserves.

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Modern Dread is the third latest studio album which was released on July 3, 2020.

*K.G.* is the 16th—yes, 16th—studio album from Melburnian psych rockers King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard—albeit their first without founding member and drummer/manager Eric Moore, who quit the group in August 2020 to focus on running his label, Flightless Records. King Gizzard records are known for their off-piste themes, and *K.G.* is no exception. Following the precedent set on 2017’s *Flying Microtonal Banana*, *K.G.* also incorporates elements of microtonality (the two albums are subtitled *Explorations Into Microtonal Tuning, Volume 1* and *2*, respectively). In music theory terms, this means the band has customized their guitars to be able to play pitches that fall in between the traditional notes as defined by Western scales. In terms of how it sounds, this gives the riffs and melodies a more Middle Eastern feel—it’s a common feature of Persian and Turkish music. This approach is paired with the mind-bending lyrics and ferocious acid-prog guitar attack that have become King Gizzard trademarks, but there are also excursions into other genres. In particular, “Intrasport,” written solely by guitarist Joey Walker, veers into disco territory with its choppy licks and string stabs, before dissolving into a wall of static noise. Inventive to a fault, the sextet released fourth single “Automation” for free online, including the raw files for all separate audio channels whilst inviting fans to fashion their own versions of the track. It’s all par for the course for a band that never fails to innovate and surprise.

“I needed to change things in my personal life, but also in the way that I was working,” Jehnny Beth tells Apple Music of her debut solo LP. “It was exhilarating for me to begin from a clean slate, starting something new and feeling that fear of the unknown again.” Best known as the lead singer and co-writer for UK post-punk band Savages, Beth was repeatedly told that it was too much of a risk to branch out on her own and that she should build on what she had done before. She followed her instinct instead, relying on her own resources and several collaborators to bring her project to life, including British producers/audio engineers Flood and Atticus Ross and longtime creative partner Johnny Hostile. *TO LOVE IS TO LIVE* is a natural display of Beth’s experimental curiosity—unleashing unsettling synths and industrial percussive elements as she gets in touch with feelings of self-doubt and her sexuality. “It was an inner voice, something that was calling me to do this—otherwise, there’s the danger of losing myself completely,” Beth says. “I didn\'t want to be enslaved to one genre of music, and I didn\'t want to be one of those singers who are slaves to their dance.” Here, Beth walks us through the album, one song at a time. **I Am** “When I heard Atticus Ross’ production, I knew it was going to be the opener. With Savages, my voice was connected to the intensity of the guitars and the drums with that classic punk-rock band scenario. And he was creating the same intensity but with strings, and instruments that were different. I love that it creates a sense of suspense and wonder. When you finish the track, you\'re left with questions like \'What is coming next?\' The song was written by me and Johnny Hostile, and it was during the very early stages of exploration. During one of our lab experiments, we tried to pitch my voice in different styles and tonologies, and we found one that was really pitched down. There\'s a multiplicity of voices on the record. And I think the purpose is to unlock the forbidden thoughts and intimate thoughts that we believe are shameful. I think that we push them down. But as humans, we have contradictory thoughts—and we battle with the idea of identity and the idea of good and bad all the time. There is danger in trying to repress those hidden voices and not giving the space for them. So that\'s why it was important to open with that voice and not my voice.” **Innocence** “It was produced by Flood in his studio in London. He has this capacity of getting obsessed with details and muting all the important parts. You don\'t understand what he\'s listening to or why he\'s even listening to that. So I got frustrated, and he kicked me out of the studio and asked me to come back an hour later. And then I was very frustrated and angry. I came back and heard the mix, and then came this moment where I was hearing myself in a way that I had never heard myself before. It brought me to tears. I wrote the lyrics early on in the process of making the record; I placed it as the starting point of the journey—the same way a novelist would start with the shameful thoughts for his novel, and start from there to grow. Not trying to avoid it, but put it at the center—and I asked myself what is the thought that keeps you up at night that you never reveal to anyone. And it was the idea of lost innocence, in the sense of feeling isolated and not being able to connect with the rest of humanity. It\'s about the reality of living in busy cities as well. The more you close your eyes to people, the more walled up you become. You see the reality of a city which doesn\'t treat everybody equally or the same way, and the anger that it creates.” **Flower** “It\'s a classic scenario of distance being sexier than the touch, and celebrating female nudity in a hypnotic way. I was inspired by all the girls in Jumbo\'s, which is an LA pole-dancing club I go to when I\'m in LA. I really love the atmosphere of the club and how freeing it is, and how exciting and frightening it is at the same time. I love that tension. Hostile composed it for me, and when it was finished, I felt it wasn\'t for me. I wasn\'t sure, so I sent it to my friend Romy Madley Croft \[The xx vocalist/guitarist\], and she replied in capital letters that I have to have this song on the record and that it was great to hear me in a different context. I decided that I was going to check with myself if I was feeling uncomfortable. And if I was feeling uncomfortable, it was a good sign that I was going in the right direction.” **We Will Sin Together** “It’s an invitation to do bad things together and the realization that love is part of that. That there\'s no right or wrong; there\'s only in and out. If you decide to break a sweat and participate in life, you are going to make mistakes. So for me, it\'s what I call a post-romantic love song. It tries to reach beyond the ancestral codes of romanticism, because they too often generate frustration. Romy sang backing vocals on it. We were working on the song in LA and I asked her to sit behind the mic. I love her voice. I think it naturally carries a lot of emotion and never sounds fabricated, and it also suits the song perfectly. It\'s one of my favorite tracks of the record.” **A Place Above (feat. Cillian Murphy)** “I had written the texts and I wondered if \[Irish actor\] Cillian could read it. Because, again, I wanted this multiplicity of voices on the record. I knew he was a fan of Savages, and I was a fan of his; I think he has one of the best voices in modern cinema. He did it without hearing any music, which I think was great and perfect. I remember what Cillian wrote to me when he wrote the text. He said, ‘It\'s big stuff.’ And then he said, \'It should be done in a slow way, a quiet way.\' He made it personal, as if you were hearing someone\'s personal thoughts that you suddenly had access to. It’s a little bit like in *Wings of Desire* \[German film director Wim Wenders’ 1987 film\]. The angels have access to people\'s thoughts and minds, and they can hear their secret thoughts.” **I’m the Man** “What I wanted to say with this song is that the root of evil isn\'t just on the other side—it lives inside of each of us. It\'s implanted in our core by generations of parents or grandparents in society, and we must stay strong and aware to overcome the aggressive power to control us. It\'s about facing my own responsibility for the evil of this world. It\'s important for arts, in general, to show our own complexities to our faces. I wanted to portray the evil of this world and put it on me, wear the mask of people. Because it\'s impossible for me, as an artist, to draw a line between good and bad and just pretend that I\'m always standing on the right side of the fence. Sometimes it\'s about looking on the other side, trying to understand your own thoughts and your own darkness and your own violence.” **The Rooms** “It’s a resolution moment, kind of a resting in contrast to ‘I’m the Man.’ I wrote and recorded hours of piano and vocals on my own in the studio. It\'s a calm description of an orgy where women have all the power. It comes from a line by Francis Bacon, who said something like, ‘When I went into the rooms of pleasure, I didn\'t stay in the rooms where they celebrate acceptable modes of loving, I went into the rooms which are kept secret.’ It\'s a beautiful way to describe desire and exploration.” **Heroine** “I think ‘Heroine’ is a cry to be free. I have had quite a journey with this song, because it was originally called ‘Heroism.’ Because I wanted to talk about the idea of freedom and role models and the fact that freedom is, in fact, frightening. I was told I should play the heroine in ‘Heroine.’ I couldn\'t really step into the shoes of that big character that way, that was positive in a way. You need to be able to embody positive characters as much as you embody frightening and contradictory characters. So that was the realization for me. Sometimes you look for role models around, but you have to also be able to see what\'s within you. And for me to hold the people around me to get there, to take me there.” **How Could You (feat. Joe Talbot)** “One of my favorite songs about jealousy is ‘Why’d Ya Do It?’ by Marianne Faithfull from *Broken English*, and I always wanted to write something about jealousy. I\'ve had to work very hard to conquer jealousy in order to live, and it wasn\'t easy. I had to fight against all my conditioning and invent new rules for myself. I\'ve learned so much from the process, but it\'s something you constantly need to check yourself with. Because jealous people always think they\'re right. Which I think is my main problem with it; when I was jealous, I was tempted to think I was right, because jealousy makes you think that there isn\'t a greater pain than yours. I couldn\'t imagine a better person as Joe \[Talbot, IDLES vocalist\] to be a jealous man on this song. Because he knows, and he understands, what it means to take control of this human instinct. And he\'s been jealous. He\'s been a bad guy; he knows what it\'s like. When I discovered IDLES, I thought they were shining a light into what it means to be a man in a band. I knew Joe was going to write something brilliant about anger and jealousy, and he did.” **French Countryside** “I wrote it as if I was writing a soundtrack for *Call Me by Your Name*. That\'s what I had in mind: the summer, the countryside, and the promise of love. I wrote the lyrics much before that. I wrote them in a plane when I thought we were going to crash, and I was making a list of promises of what I would do better if I survived. And obviously when the plane landed safely, I forgot about my list of promises. When I revisited the idea I realized, oh god, we forget about the urgency of life. I was suddenly facing those ideas again, and I really wanted to make something before I go too. It contrasts so much with the rest of the record, but that\'s really on purpose.” **Human** “I knew I wanted to make a record that would give a sense of the journey, holding a narrative from start to finish. It was part of my early discussions with Atticus. I didn\'t want to make a collection of songs. I wanted the record to be a world you can live in. He had this idea of reintroducing the dark voice at that point with the same lyrics. And again, bringing in those orchestral strings, and that sort of drama and intensity and suspense. So we\'re going back to the beginning, but we\'ve evolved. The idea of the lyrics came to me when I was reading about people who go to digital rehab, because they\'ve lost the sense of self and connection to their life. It felt that it was interesting to finish the album by saying I used to be a human being and now I live in the web. Because I think we can relate to that more and more.”

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

“Place and setting have always been really huge in this project,” Katie Crutchfield tells Apple Music of Waxahatchee, which takes its name from a creek in her native Alabama. “It’s always been a big part of the way I write songs, to take people with me to those places.” While previous Waxahatchee releases often evoked a time—the roaring ’90s, and its indie rock—Crutchfield’s fifth LP under the Waxahatchee alias finds Crutchfield finally embracing her roots in sound as well. “Growing up in Birmingham, I always sort of toed the line between having shame about the South and then also having deep love and connection to it,” she says. “As I started to really get into alternative country music and Lucinda \[Williams\], I feel like I accepted that this is actually deeply in my being. This is the music I grew up on—Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, the powerhouse country singers. It’s in my DNA. It’s how I learned to sing. If I just accept and embrace this part of myself, I can make something really powerful and really honest. I feel like I shed a lot of stuff that wasn\'t serving me, both personally and creatively, and it feels like *Saint Cloud*\'s clean and honest. It\'s like this return to form.” Here, Crutchfield draws us a map of *Saint Cloud*, with stories behind the places that inspired its songs—from the Mississippi to the Mediterranean. WEST MEMPHIS, ARKANSAS “Memphis is right between Birmingham and Kansas City, where I live currently. So to drive between the two, you have to go through Memphis, over the Mississippi River, and it\'s epic. That trip brings up all kinds of emotions—it feels sort of romantic and poetic. I was driving over and had this idea for \'**Fire**,\' like a personal pep talk. I recently got sober and there\'s a lot of work I had to do on myself. I thought it would be sweet to have a song written to another person, like a traditional love song, but to have it written from my higher self to my inner child or lower self, the two selves negotiating. I was having that idea right as we were over the river, and the sun was just beating on it and it was just glowing and that lyric came into my head. I wanted to do a little shout-out to West Memphis too because of \[the West Memphis Three\]—that’s an Easter egg and another little layer on the record. I always felt super connected to \[Damien Echols\], watching that movie \[*Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills*\] as a teenager, just being a weird, sort of dark kid from the South. The moment he comes on the screen, I’m immediately just like, ‘Oh my god, that guy is someone I would have been friends with.’ Being a sort of black sheep in the South is especially weird. Maybe that\'s just some self-mythology I have, like it\'s even harder if you\'re from the South. But it binds you together.” BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA “Arkadelphia Road is a real place, a road in Birmingham. It\'s right on the road of this little arts college, and there used to be this gas station where I would buy alcohol when I was younger, so it’s tied to this seediness of my past. A very profound experience happened to me on that road, but out of respect, I shouldn’t give the whole backstory. There is a person in my life who\'s been in my life for a long time, who is still a big part of my life, who is an addict and is in recovery. It got really bad for this person—really, really bad. \[\'**Arkadelphia**\'\] is about when we weren’t in recovery, and an experience that we shared. One of the most intense, personal songs I\'ve ever written. It’s about growing up and being kids and being innocent and watching this whole crazy situation play out while I was also struggling with substances. We now kind of have this shared recovery language, this shared crazy experience, and it\'s one of those things where when we\'re in the same place, we can kind of fit in the corner together and look at the world with this tent, because we\'ve been through what we\'ve been through.” RUBY FALLS, TENNESSEE “It\'s in Chattanooga. A waterfall that\'s in a cave. My sister used to live in Chattanooga, and that drive between Birmingham and Chattanooga, that stretch of land between Alabama, Georgia, into Tennessee, is so meaningful—a lot of my formative time has been spent driving that stretch. You pass a few things. One is Noccalula Falls, which I have a song about on my first album called ‘Noccalula.’ The other is Ruby Falls. \[‘**Ruby Falls**’\] is really dense—there’s a lot going on. It’s about a friend of mine who passed away from a heroin overdose, and it’s for him—my song for all people who struggle with that kind of thing. I sang a song at his funeral when he died. This song is just all about him, about all these different places that we talked about, or that we’d spend so much time at Waxahatchee Creek together. The beginning of the song is sort of meant to be like the high. It starts out in the sky, and that\'s what I\'m describing, as I take flight, up above everybody else. Then the middle part is meant to be like this flashback but it\'s taking place on earth—it’s actually a reference to *Just Kids*, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. It’s written with them in mind, but it\'s just about this infectious, contagious, intimate friendship. And the end of the song is meant to represent death or just being below the surface and being gone, basically.” ST. CLOUD, FLORIDA “It\'s where my dad is from, where he was born and where he grew up. The first part of \[\'**St. Cloud**\'\] is about New York. So I needed a city that was sort of the opposite of New York, in my head. I wasn\'t going to do like middle-of-nowhere somewhere; I really did want it to be a place that felt like a city. But it just wasn’t cosmopolitan. Just anywhere America, and not in a bad way—in a salt-of-the-earth kind of way. As soon as the idea to just call the whole record *Saint Cloud* entered my brain, it didn\'t leave. It had been the name for six months or something, and I had been calling it *Saint Cloud*, but then David Berman died and I was like, ‘Wow, that feels really kismet or something,’ because he changed his middle name to Cloud. He went by David Cloud Berman. I\'m a fan; it feels like a nice way to \[pay tribute\].” BARCELONA, SPAIN “In the beginning of\* \*‘**Oxbow**’ I say ‘Barna in white,’ and ‘Barna’ is what people call Barcelona. And Barcelona is where I quit drinking, so it starts right at the beginning. I like talking about it because when I was really struggling and really trying to get better—and many times before I actually succeeded at that—it was always super helpful for me to read about other musicians and just people I looked up to that were sober. It was during Primavera \[Sound Festival\]. It’s sort of notoriously an insane party. I had been getting close to quitting for a while—like for about a year or two, I would really be not drinking that much and then I would just have a couple nights where it would just be really crazy and I would feel so bad, and it affected all my relationships and how I felt about music and work and everything. I had the most intense bout of that in Barcelona right at the beginning of this tour, and as I was leaving I was going from there to Portugal and I just decided, ‘I\'m just going to not.’ I think in my head I was like, ‘I\'m actually done,’ but I didn\'t say that to everybody. And then that tour went into another tour, and then to the summer, and then before you know it I had been sober six months, and then I was just like, ‘I do not miss that at all.’ I\'ve never felt more like myself and better. It was the site of my great realization.”

There aren’t many bands who undergo drastic sonic transformations *before* they’ve released their debut album. But Working Men’s Club’s music reflects the restless, push-it-forward energy of their leader Sydney Minsky-Sargeant. Originally a trio dealing in jerky New Wave, the band’s direction was diverted when Minsky-Sargeant took charge of the creative reins during the making of this self-titled debut. “I wanted to make a dance record, but I didn’t want to pigeonhole it as just being a dance record,” Minsky-Sargeant tells Apple Music. The frontman’s knack for snarling melodies remains, now beefed up with a sound that harks back to the dance floors of late-’80s Manchester, a heady mix of pulsing beats, acid house pianos, and bold synths. “I started off writing music on my own, then it became more collaborative, then back to being solo again,” says Minsky-Sargeant. “I’m grateful that I was given a chance to do it on my own, because that was always the route it was going.” Here, Minsky-Sargeant makes sense of the record, track by track. **Valleys** “The way that it starts very barren, selectively adding overt components and instrumentation, I thought it was a good buildup to the start of the record and a good opening track. It\'s about where I\'m from and how isolating it can feel to be in a small town in the North of England sometimes. It\'s quite a secluded, claustrophobic place sometimes. But I think everyone can relate to that in some way, wherever you live.” **A.A.A.A.** “It’s a funny tune. It blew me away how Ross Orton \[producer\] interpreted it and then how he made it. It was just a bass guitar and the same drumbeat, but with more brutal and normal-sounding drums. All the elements were there, but we chose to interpret it more electronically. Ross was using the synths to make drum sounds, and then we basically made that tune all on one synthesizer, which was really cool, and showed how minimal it could be.” **John Cooper Clarke** “I think John Cooper Clarke is a Northern icon. One of the last survivors of that era, going back into that period of time where he lived with Nico and lived in Hebden Bridge, which is down the road from me. He\'s just a proper punk, and one of the last remaining punks there is. Now Andrew Weatherall\'s dead, and people like that have fallen, he\'s still going. He just does it how he wants to do it, and I think that\'s quite admirable, as a creative.” **White Rooms and People** “It’s the poppiest, most indie-sounding tune on the record. It\'s hooky and captures that era of what we were doing when we started—but it\'s reinterpreted and much glossier. It feels like an older song to me. We did go back and reimagine it and put electronic drums on it, which I think really beefed it up and made it fit with the record.” **Outside** “This was an old demo of mine and we just made it sound better. It was the first tune that we did because we didn\'t know how to tackle it. We sped it up and just tried to really produce it, and it worked. It\'s quite a joyous tune, when the rest of the album is quite dark.” **Be My Guest** “I feel like there\'s two sides to this record and this is the first tune on the B-side. It’s the side of the record where it becomes more aggressive in stages. And this, I guess, is the most kind of nasty, brutal tune that there is on the record. It\'s all about the guitars for me, because I was really set on making sure that, especially that bit after the chorus where it goes into that big drop into those really high-pitched guitars, it just had to really carry.” **Tomorrow** “It\'s one of the last tunes I wrote before recording. It’s quite repetitive, maybe obnoxiously repetitive. I think when you\'re making that sort of repetitive music, it has to build throughout the backing. I guess it’s quite a polished, nice song in regard to the rest of the album. It’s more on the poppier side of things.” **Cook a Coffee** “We had to come back to this because the initial recording we did was really bare. I\'m pretty sure even the guitars might have been out of tune or something, so we went back and redid all the guitars, and put more synths on. We had to revisit it and beef it up. But we definitely got there in the end. Those synths at the end make it more anthemic and pulled it all together.” **Teeth** “When we put ‘Teeth’ out as a single, there was a lot of back-and-forth discussion over which mix would go out. Me and Ross had worked quite closely on this tune together, and for me and him, the wrong mix went out. So as soon as we got in the studio, it was like, ‘We\'ve got to change that mix for the record.’ And we did. It just drives it a lot more. It makes it a lot more cinematic than just guitars on top of synths. When we do stuff it\'s all so finely tuned, everything has its own place.” **Angel** “We play this second to last when we play it live, but in terms of the album, it had to be the last tune. I think it\'s just quite a pompous way to end it, isn\'t it? It\'s quite ridiculous. Whenever you read books about records and how they were done, it always seems that the last song\'s the last song that they recorded. And it felt like during the process of recording the album, we were putting it back–we knew it was maybe going to be a bit harder to capture. But it was actually fine. It was a nice way to end the recording process.”

“Life seems to provide no end of things to explore without too much investigation,” Laura Marling tells Apple Music. The London singer-songwriter is discussing how, after six albums (three of which were Mercury Prize-nominated), she found the inspiration needed for her seventh, *Song For Our Daughter*. One thing which proved fruitful was turning 30. In an evolution of 2017’s exquisite rumination on womanhood *Semper Femina*, growing, as she says, “a bit older” prompted Marling to consider how she might equip her her own figurative daughter to navigate life’s complexities. “In light of the cultural shift, you go back and think, ‘That wasn’t how it should have happened. I should have had the confidence and the know-how to deal with that situation in a way that I didn’t have to come out the victim,’” says Marling of the album’s central message. “You can’t do anything about it, obviously, so you can only prepare the next generation with the tools and the confidence \[to ensure\] they \[too\] won’t be victims.” This feeling reaches a crescendo on the title track, which sees Marling consider “our daughter growing old/All of the bullshit that she might be told” amid strings that permeate the entire record. While *Song for Our Daughter* is undoubtedly a love letter to women, it is also a deeply personal album where whimsical melodies (“Strange Girl”) collide with Marling at her melancholic best (the gorgeously sparse “Blow by Blow”—a surprisingly honest chronicle of heartbreak—or the exceptional, haunting “Hope We Meet Again”). And its roaming nature is exactly how Marling wanted to soundtrack the years since *Semper Femina*. “There is no cohesive narrative,” she admits. “I wrote this album over three years, and so much had changed. Of course, no one knows the details of my personal life—nor should they. But this album is like putting together a very fragmented story that makes sense to me.” Let Marling guide you through that story, track by track. **Alexandra** “Women are so at the forefront of my mind. With ‘Alexandra,’ I was thinking a lot about the women who survive the projected passion of so-called ‘great men.’ ‘Alexandra’ is a response to Leonard Cohen’s ‘Alexandra Leaving,’ but it’s also the idea that for so long women have had to suffer the very powerful projections that people have put on them. It’s actually quite a traumatizing experience, I think, to only be seen through the eyes of a man’s passion; just as a facade. And I think it happens to women quite often, so in a couple of instances on this album I wanted to give voice to the women underneath all of that. The song has something of Crosby, Stills & Nash about it—it’s a chugging, guitar-riffy job.” **Held Down** “Somebody said to me a couple of years ago that the reason why people find it hard to attach to me \[musically\] is that it\'s not always that fun to hear sad songs. And I was like, ‘Oh, well, I\'m in trouble, because that\'s all I\'ve got!’ So this song has a lightness to it and is very light on sentiment. It’s just about two people trying to figure out how to not let themselves get in the way of each other, and about that constant vulnerability at the beginning of a relationship. The song is almost quite shoegazey and is very simple to play on the guitar.” **Strange Girl** “The girl in this song is an amalgamation of all my friends and I, and of all the things we\'ve done. There’s something sweet about watching someone you know very well make the same mistakes over and over again. You can\'t tell them what they need to know; they have to know it themselves. That\'s true of everyone, including myself. As for the lyrics about the angry, brave girl? Well, aren’t we all like that? The fullness and roundness of my experience of women—the nuance and all the best and worst things about being a complicated little girl—is not always portrayed in the way that I would portray it, and I think women will recognize something in this song. My least favorite style of music is Americana, so I was conscious to avoid that sound here. But it’s a lovely song; again, it has chords which are very Crosby, Stills & Nash-esque.” **Only the Strong** “I wanted the central bit of the album to be a little vulnerable tremble, having started it out quite boldly. This song has a four-beat click in it, which was completely by accident—it was coming through my headphones in the studio, so it was just a happy accident. The strings on this were all done by my bass player Nick \[Pini\] and they are all bow double-bass strings. They\'re close to the human voice, so I think they have a specific, resonant effect on people. I also went all out on the backing vocals. I wanted it to be my own chorus, like my own subconscious backing me up. The lyric ‘Love is a sickness cured by time\' is actually from a play by \[London theater director\] Robert Icke, though I did ask his permission to use it. I just thought that was the most incredible ointment to the madness of infatuation.” **Blow by Blow** “I wrote this song on the piano, but it’s not me playing here—I can\'t play the piano anywhere near as well as my friend Anna here. This song is really straightforward, and I kind of surprised myself by that. I don\'t like to be explicit. I like to be a little bit opaque, I guess, in the songwriting business. So this is an experiment, and I still haven’t quite made my mind up on how I feel about it. Both can exist, but I think what I want from my music or art or film is an uncanny familiarity. This song is a different thing for me, for sure—it speaks for itself. I’d be rendering it completely naked if I said any more.” **Song for Our Daughter** “This song is kind of the main event, in my mind. I actually wrote it around the time of the Trayvon Martin \[shooting in 2012\]. All these young kids being unarmed and shot in America. And obviously that\'s nothing to do with my daughter, or the figurative daughter here, but I \[was thinking about the\] institutional injustice. And what their mothers must be feeling. How helpless, how devastated and completely unable to have changed the course of history, because nothing could have helped them. I was also thinking about a story in Roman mythology about the Rape of Lucretia. She was the daughter of a nobleman and was raped—no one believed her and, in that time, they believed that if you had been ‘spoilt’ by something like that, then your blood would turn black. And so she rode into court one day and stabbed herself in the heart, and bled and died. It’s not the cheeriest of analogies, but I found that this story that existed thousands of years ago was still so contemporary. The strings were arranged by \[US instrumentalist, arranger, and producer\] Rob Moose, and when he sent them to me he said, ‘I don\'t know if this is what you wanted, but I wanted to personify the character of the daughter in the strings, and help her kind of rise up above everything.’ And I was like, ‘That\'s amazing! What an incredible, incredible leap to make.’ And that\'s how they ended up on the record.” **Fortune** “Whenever I get stuck in a rut or feel uninspired on the guitar, I go and play with my dad, who taught me. He was playing with this little \[melody\]—it\'s just an E chord going up the neck—so I stole it and then turned it into this song. I’m very close with my sisters, and at the time we were talking and reminiscing about the fact that my mother had a ‘running-away fund.’ She kept two-pence pieces in a pot above the laundry machine when we were growing up. She had recently cashed it in to see how much money she had, and she had built up something like £75 over the course of a lifetime. That was her running-away fund, and I just thought that was so wonderfully tragic. She said she did it because her mother did it. It was hereditary. We are living in a completely different time, and are much closer to equality, so I found the idea of that fund quite funny.” **The End of the Affair** “This song is loosely based on *The End of the Affair* by Graham Greene. The female character, \[Sarah\], is elusive; she has a very secret role that no one can be part of, and the protagonist of the book, the detective \[Maurice Bendrix\], finds it so unbearably erotic. He finds her secretness—the fact that he can\'t have her completely—very alluring. And in a similar way to ‘Alexandra Leaving,’ it’s about how this facade in culture has appeared over women. I was also drawing on my own experience of great passions that have to die very quietly. What a tragedy that is, in some ways, to have to bear that alone. No one else is obviously ever part of your passions.” **Hope We Meet Again** “This was actually the first song we recorded on the album, so it was like a tester session. There’s a lot of fingerpicking on this, so I really had to concentrate, and it has pedal steel, which I’m not usually a fan of because it’s very evocative of Americana. I originally wrote this for a play, *Mary Stuart* by Robert Icke, who I’ve worked with a lot over the last couple of years, and adapted the song to turn it back into a song that\'s more mine, rather than for the play. But originally it was supposed to highlight the loneliness of responsibility of making your own decisions in life, and of choosing your own direction. And what the repercussions of that can sometimes be. It\'s all of those kind of crossroads where deciding to go one way might be a step away from someone else.” **For You** “In all honesty, I think I’m getting a bit soft as I get older. And I’ve listened to a lot of Paul McCartney and it’s starting to affect me in a lot of ways. I did this song at home in my little bunker—this is the demo, and we just kept it exactly as it was. It was never supposed to be a proper song, but it was so sweet, and everyone I played it to liked it so much that we just stuck it on the end. The male vocals are my boyfriend George, who is also a musician. There’s also my terrible guitar solo, but I left it in there because it was so funny—I thought it sounded like a five-year-old picking up a guitar for the first time.”

Laura Marling’s exquisite seventh album Song For Our Daughter arrives almost without pre-amble or warning in the midst of uncharted global chaos, and yet instantly and tenderly offers a sense of purpose, clarity and calm. As a balm for the soul, this full-blooded new collection could be posited as Laura’s richest to date, but in truth it’s another incredibly fine record by a British artist who rarely strays from delivering incredibly fine records. Taking much of the production reins herself, alongside long-time collaborators Ethan Johns and Dom Monks, Laura has layered up lush string arrangements and a broad sense of scale to these songs without losing any of the intimacy or reverence we’ve come to anticipate and almost take for granted from her throughout the past decade.

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

“I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig” reasoned George Bernard Shaw. “You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.” True to form, Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs have left the wiser of us aware that they are no band to be messed with. In the seven years since this band’s inception, the powerful primal charge at their heart has been amplified far beyond the realms of their original imagination. What’s more, no one has been more taken aback by this transformation than the band themselves. This culminated recently at a sold-out show at London’s renowned former fleapit Scala “That was the first gig where we were properly smacked with a feeling that something had shifted” reflects vocalist Matt Baty. “Something big and bold and positive. I felt quite overwhelmed with emotion at one point during that show. I’m not sure anyone paid to see me cry onstage, but I was close.” This upward trajectory has done nothing to make the Newcastle-based quintet complacent however, as they’ve used the cumulative force behind them as fuel for their most ambitious and hard-hitting record yet. ‘Viscerals’, their third proper is an enormous leap forward in confidence, adventure and sheer intensity even from their 2018 breakthrough ‘King Of Cowards’. Incisive in its riff-driven attack, infectiously catchy in its songcraft and more intrepid than ever in its experimental approach, ‘Viscerals’ is the sound of a leaner, more vicious Pigs, and one with their controls set way beyond the pulverising one-riff workouts of their early days. Whilst the fearsome opener ‘Reducer’s battle cry “ego kills everything” brings a philosophical bent to its Sabbathian abjection, elsewhere ‘Rubbernecker’ may be the most melodious ditty this band has yet attempted, redolent of the debauched swagger of Jane’s Addiction. Meanwhile the sinister sound-collage of ‘Blood And Butter’ delves into jarring abstraction anew, ‘New Body’ countenances a bracing Melvins-and-Sonic-Youth demolition derby and - perhaps most memorably of all - the perverse banger ‘Crazy In Blood’ marries MBV-ish guitar curlicues in its verses to a raise-your-fists chorus worthy of Twisted Sister or Turbonegro. Yet Pigsx7 have effortlessly broadened their horizons and dealt with all these new avenues without sacrificing one iota of their trademark eccentricity, and the personality of this band has never been stronger. “We’re a peculiar bunch of people - a precarious balance of passion, intensity and the absurd” notes Baty. Indeed, locked into a tight deadline in the studio, the band were forced to rally forces and to throw everything they had into created as concise and powerful a statement as could be summoned forth. “We booked dates in Sam’s studio before we’d written 80% of the album” reveals guitarist Adam Ian Sykes “We definitely thrive under pressure. It’s stressful but that stress seems to manifest itself in a positive way”. Yet for all that this record is the most far-reaching yet, its ability to get down to the nitty-gritty of the human condition is implicit from its title outwards. “Viscerals is reflection of many things I guess” says guitarist Sam Grant, whose Blank Studios was the venue in question for the band (whose rogues gallery is completed by bassist John-Michael Hedley and drummer Christopher Morley). “It’s the internal; it’s our health and physicality; it’s bodily and unseen; it’s essence that forgoes intellect; and it’s not a real word!” “At times it feels like we’re on a playground roundabout and there’s a fanatical group of people pushing it to turn faster” reckons Baty. “Then when it’s at peak speed they all jump on too and for just a few minutes we all feel liberated, together.” Such is the relentless momentum of this unique and ever-porcine outfit; hedonists of the grittiest and most life-affirming ride in the land, and still the hungriest animals at the rock trough. ---

Record in Autumn 2019 at Tile House Studios, London

Stephen Bruner’s fourth album as Thundercat is shrouded in loss—of love, of control, of his friend Mac Miller, who Bruner exchanged I-love-yous with over the phone hours before Miller’s overdose in late 2018. Not that he’s wallowing. Like 2017’s *Drunk*—an album that helped transform the bassist/singer-songwriter from jazz-fusion weirdo into one of the vanguard voices in 21st-century black music—*It Is What It Is* is governed by an almost cosmic sense of humor, juxtaposing sophisticated Afro-jazz (“Innerstellar Love”) with deadpan R&B (“I may be covered in cat hair/But I still smell good/Baby, let me know, how do I look in my durag?”), abstractions about mortality (“Existential Dread”) with chiptune-style punk about how much he loves his friend Louis Cole. “Yeah, it’s been an interesting last couple of years,” he tells Apple Music with a sigh. “But there’s always room to be stupid.” What emerges from the whiplash is a sense that—as the title suggests—no matter how much we tend to label things as good or bad, happy or sad, the only thing they are is what they are. (That Bruner keeps good company probably helps: Like on *Drunk*, the guest list here is formidable, ranging from LA polymaths like Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Louis Cole, and coproducer Flying Lotus to Childish Gambino, Ty Dolla $ign, and former Slave singer Steve Arrington.) As for lessons learned, Bruner is Zen as he runs through each of the album’s tracks. “It’s just part of it,” he says. “It’s part of the story. That’s why the name of the album is what it is—\[Mac’s death\] made me put my life in perspective. I’m happy I’m still here.” **Lost in Space / Great Scott / 22-26** \"Me and \[keyboardist\] Scott Kinsey were just playing around a bit. I like the idea of something subtle for the intro—you know, introducing somebody to something. Giving people the sense that there’s a ride about to happen.\" **Innerstellar Love** \"So you go from being lost in space and then suddenly thrust into purpose. The feel is a bit of an homage to where I’ve come from with Kamasi \[Washington, who plays the saxophone\] and my brother \[drummer Ronald Bruner, Jr.\]: very jazz, very black—very interstellar.\" **I Love Louis Cole (feat. Louis Cole)** \"It’s quite simply stated: Louis Cole is, hands down, one of my favorite musicians. Not just as a performer, but as a songwriter and arranger. \[*Cole is a polymathic solo artist and multi-instrumentalist, as well as a member of the group KNOWER.*\] The last time we got to work together was on \[*Drunk*’s\] \'Bus in These Streets.\' He inspires me. He reminds me to keep doing better. I’m very grateful I get to hang out with a guy like Louis Cole. You know, just me punching a friend of his and falling asleep in his laundry basket.\" **Black Qualls (feat. Steve Lacy, Steve Arrington & Childish Gambino)** \"Steve Lacy titled this song. \'Qualls\' was just a different way of saying ‘walls.\' And black walls in the sense of what it means to be a young black male in America right now. A long time ago, black people weren’t even allowed to read. If you were caught reading, you’d get killed in front of your family. So growing up being black—we’re talking about a couple hundred years later—you learn to hide your wealth and knowledge. You put up these barriers, you protect yourself. It’s a reason you don’t necessarily feel okay—this baggage. It’s something to unlearn, at least in my opinion. But it also goes beyond just being black. It’s a people thing. There’s a lot of fearmongering out there. And it’s worse because of the internet. You gotta know who you are. It’s about this idea that it’s okay to be okay.\" **Miguel’s Happy Dance** \"Miguel Atwood-Ferguson plays keys on this record, and also worked on the string arrangement. Again, y’know, without getting too heavily into stuff, I had a rough couple of years. So you get Miguel’s happy dance.\" **How Sway** \"I like making music that’s a bit fast and challenging to play. So really, this is just that part of it—it’s like a little exercise.\" **Funny Thing** \"The love songs here are pretty self-explanatory. But I figure you’ve gotta be able to find the humor in stuff. You’ve gotta be able to laugh.\" **Overseas (feat. Zack Fox)** \"Brazil is the one place in the world I would move. São Paulo. I would just drink orange juice all day and play bass until I had nubs for fingers. So that’s number one. But man, you’ve also got Japan in there. Japan. And Russia! I mean, everything we know about the politics—it is what it is. But Russian people are awesome. They’re pretty crazy. But they’re awesome.\" **Dragonball Durag** \"The durag is the ultimate power move. Not like a superpower, but just—you know, it translates into the world. You’ve got people with durags, and you’ve got people without them. Personally, I always carry one. Man, you ever see that picture of David Beckham wearing a durag and shaking Prince Charles’ hand? Victoria’s looking like she wants to rip his pants off.\" **How I Feel** \"A song like \'How I Feel’—there’s not a lot of hidden meaning there \[*laughs*\]. It’s not like something really bad happened to me when I was watching *Care Bears* when I was six and I’m trying to cover it up in a song. But I did watch *Care Bears*.\" **King of the Hill** \"This is something I made with BADBADNOTGOOD. It came out a little while ago, on the Brainfeeder 10-year compilation. We kind of wrestled with whether or not it should go on the album, but in the end it felt right. You’re always trying to find space and time to collaborate with people, but you’re in one city, they’re in another, you’re moving around. Here, we finally got the opportunity to be in the same room together and we jumped at it. I try and be open to all kinds of collaboration, though. Magic is magic.\" **Unrequited Love** \"You know how relationships go: Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose \[*laughs*\]. But really, it’s not funny \[*more laughs*\]. Sometimes you—\[*laughing*\]—you get your heart broken.\" **Fair Chance (feat. Ty Dolla $ign & Lil B)** \"Me and Ty spend a lot of time together. Lil B was more of a reach, but we wanted to find a way to make it work, because some people, you know, you just resonate with. This is definitely the beginning of more between him and I. A starting point. But you know, to be honest it’s an unfortunate set of circumstances under which it comes. We were all very close to Mac \[Miller\]. It was a moment for all of us. We all became very aware of that closeness in that moment.\" **Existential Dread** \"You know, getting older \[*laughs*\].\" **It Is What It Is** \"That’s me in the middle, saying, ‘Hey, Mac.’ That’s me, getting a chance to say goodbye to my friend.\"

GRAMMYs 2021 Winner - Best Progressive R&B Album Thundercat has released his new album “It Is What It Is” on Brainfeeder Records. The album, produced by Flying Lotus and Thundercat, features musical contributions from Ty Dolla $ign, Childish Gambino, Lil B, Kamasi Washington, Steve Lacy, Steve Arrington, BADBADNOTGOOD, Louis Cole and Zack Fox. “It Is What It Is” has been nominated for a GRAMMY in the Best Progressive R&B Category and with Flying Lotus also receiving a nomination in the Producer of the Year (Non-Classical). “It Is What It Is” follows his game-changing third album “Drunk” (2017). That record completed his transition from virtuoso bassist to bonafide star and cemented his reputation as a unique voice that transcends genre. “This album is about love, loss, life and the ups and downs that come with that,” Bruner says about “It Is What It Is”. “It’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, but at different points in life you come across places that you don’t necessarily understand… some things just aren’t meant to be understood.” The tragic passing of his friend Mac Miller in September 2018 had a profound effect on Thundercat and the making of “It Is What It Is”. “Losing Mac was extremely difficult,” he explains. “I had to take that pain in and learn from it and grow from it. It sobered me up… it shook the ground for all of us in the artist community.” The unruly bounce of new single ‘Black Qualls’ is classic Thundercat, teaming up with Steve Lacy (The Internet) and Funk icon Steve Arrington (Slave). It’s another example of Stephen Lee Bruner’s desire to highlight the lineage of his music and pay his respects to the musicians who inspired him. Discovering Arrington’s output in his late teens, Bruner says he fell in love with his music immediately: “The tone of the bass, the way his stuff feels and moves, it resonated through my whole body.” ‘Black Qualls’ emerged from writing sessions with Lacy, whom Thundercat describes as “the physical incarnate of the Ohio Players in one person - he genuinely is a funky ass dude”. It references what it means to be a black American with a young mindset: “What it feels like to be in this position right now… the weird ins and outs, we’re talking about those feelings…” Thundercat revisits established partnerships with Kamasi Washington, Louis Cole, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Ronald Bruner Jr and Dennis Hamm on “It Is What Is Is” but there are new faces too: Childish Gambino, Steve Lacy, Steve Arrington, plus Ty Dolla $ign and Lil B on ‘Fair Chance’ - a song explicitly about his friend Mac Miller’s passing. The aptly titled ‘I Love Louis Cole’ is another standout - “Louis Cole is a brush of genius. He creates so purely,” says Thundercat. “He makes challenging music: harmony-wise, melody-wise and tempo-wise but still finds a way for it to be beautiful and palatable.” Elsewhere on the album, ‘Dragonball Durag’ exemplifies both Thundercat’s love of humour in music and indeed his passion for the cult Japanese animé. “I have a Dragon Ball tattoo… it runs everything. There is a saying that Dragon Ball runs life,” he explains. “The durag is a superpower, to turn your swag on. It does something… it changes you,” he says smiling. Thundercat’s music starts on his couch at home: “It’s just me, the bass and the computer”. Nevertheless, referring to the spiritual connection that he shares with his longtime writing and production partner Flying Lotus, Bruner describes his friend as “the other half of my brain”. “I wouldn’t be the artist I am if Lotus wasn’t there,” he says. “He taught me… he saw me as an artist and he encouraged it. No matter the life changes, that’s my partner. We are always thinking of pushing in different ways.” Comedy is an integral part of Thundercat’s personality. “If you can’t laugh at this stuff you might as well not be here,” he muses. He seems to be magnetically drawn to comedians from Zack Fox (with whom he collaborates regularly) to Dave Chappelle, Eric Andre and Hannibal Buress whom he counts as friends. “Every comedian wants to be a musician and every musician wants to be a comedian,” he says. “And every good musician is really funny, for the most part.” It’s the juxtaposition, or the meeting point, between the laughter and the pain that is striking listening to “It Is What It Is”: it really is all-encompassing. “The thing that really becomes a bit transcendent in the laugh is when it goes in between how you really feel,” Bruner says. “You’re hoping people understand it, but you don’t even understand how it’s so funny ‘cos it hurts sometimes.” Thundercat forms a cornerstone of the Brainfeeder label; he released “The Golden Age of Apocalypse” (2011), “Apocalypse” (2013), followed by EP “The Beyond / Where The Giants Roam” featuring the modern classic ‘Them Changes’. He was later “at the creative epicenter” (per Rolling Stone) of the 21st century’s most influential hip-hop album Kendrick Lamar’s “To Pimp A Butterfly”, where he won a Grammy for his collaboration on the track ‘These Walls’ before releasing his third album “Drunk” in 2017. In 2018 Thundercat and Flying Lotus composed an original score for an episode of Golden Globe and Emmy award winning TV series “Atlanta” (created and written by Donald Glover).

SONGHOY BLUES is a band whose experiences in Mali have opened their eyes to universal problems plaguing people everywhere. Using the pain and lessons learned from having to leave their hometowns in northern Mali, the band realizes that human rights is a concept that extends far beyond what they have seen with their own eyes and far beyond just the borders of Mali. In order for the band to see their homes restored, they understand the fight must be fought on all fronts, for everybody across the spectrum. They are no longer refugees or exiles or four people with instruments—they are SONGHOY BLUES, a musical voice for empowerment and equality. Working with Matt Sweeney, who encouraged the band to make the album they want to make, OPTIMISME confronts our world today. On “BADALA” and “GABI,” SONGHOY BLUES seeks the empowerment of women, asking for centuries-old misogynistic practices to be done away with. With “WORRY,” the band advises both the young and the old that positive vibes and persistence are the best tools to fight our struggles. In “ASSADA,” the band praises and thanks the everyday warriors who wake up everyday to sweat for the betterment of their communities and in “DOURNIA,” the band laments the lack of compassion and empathy between humans today in the face of increasing materialism and selfishness. “BON BON” warns of being fooled by shiny promises, and in “BARRE” the band asks for the youth to get involved at home for change while warning off those who wish to divide in “FEY FEY.” Each time SONGHOY BLUES steps to the mic on OPTIMISME the band confronts, consoles, praises, thanks, and encourages the listener toward a better world tomorrow.

Adrianne Lenker had an entire year of touring planned with her indie-folk band Big Thief before the pandemic hit. Once the tour got canceled, Lenker decided to go to Western Massachusetts to stay closer to her sister. After ideas began to take shape, she decided to rent a one-room cabin in the Massachusetts mountains to write in isolation over the course of one month. “The project came about in a really casual way,” Lenker tells Apple Music. “I later asked my friend Phil \[Weinrobe, engineer\] if he felt like getting out of the city to archive some stuff with me. I wasn\'t thinking that I wanted to make an album and share it with the world. It was more like, I just have these songs I want to try and record. My acoustic guitar sounds so warm and rich in the space, and I would just love to try and make something.” Having gone through an intense breakup, Lenker began to let her emotions flow through the therapy of writing. Her fourth solo LP, simply titled *songs* (released alongside a two-track companion piece called *instrumentals*), is modest in its choice of words, as this deeply intimate set highlights her distinct fingerpicking style over raw, soul-searching expressions and poignant storytelling motifs. “I can only write from the depths of my own experiences,” she says. “I put it all aside because the stuff that became super meaningful and present for me was starting to surface, and unexpectedly.” Let Lenker guide you through her cleansing journey, track by track. **two reverse** “I never would have imagined it being the first track, but then as I listened, I realized it’s got so much momentum and it also foreshadows the entire album. It\'s one of the more abstract ones on the record that I\'m just discovering the meaning of it as time goes on, because it is a little bit more cryptic. It\'s got my grandmother in there, asking the grandmother spirit to tell stories and being interested in the wisdom that\'s passed down. It\'s also about finding a path to home and whatever that means, and also feeling trapped in the jail of the body or of the mind. It\'s a multilayered one for me.” **ingydar** “I was imagining everything being swallowed by the mouth of time, and just the cyclical-ness of everything feeding off of everything else. It’s like the simple example of a body decomposing and going into the dirt, and then the worm eating the dirt, and the bird eating the worm, and then the hawk or the cat eating the bird. As something is dying, something is feeding off of that thing. We\'re simultaneously being born and decaying, and that is always so bewildering to me. The duality of sadness and joy make so much sense in that light. Feeling deep joy and laughter is similar to feeling like sadness in a way and crying. Like that Joni Mitchell line, \'Laughing and crying, it\'s the same release.\'” **anything** “It\'s a montage of many different images that I had stored in my mind from being with this person. I guess there\'s a thread of sweetness through it all, through things as intense as getting bit by a dog and having to go to the ER. It\'s like everything gets strung together like when you\'re falling in love; it feels like when you\'re in a relationship or in that space of getting to know someone. It doesn\'t matter what\'s happening, because you\'re just with them. I wanted to encapsulate something or internalize something of the beauty of that relationship.” **forwards beckon rebound** “That\'s actually one of my favorite songs on the album. I really enjoy playing it. It feels like a driving lullaby to me, like something that\'s uplifting and motivating. It feels like an acknowledgment of a very flawed part of humanness. It\'s like there\'s both sides, the shadow and the light, deciding to hold space for all of it as opposed to rejecting the shadow side or rejecting darkness but deciding to actually push into it. When we were in the studio recording that song, this magic thing happened because I did a lot of these rhythms with a paintbrush on my guitar. I\'m just playing the guitar strings with it. But it sounded like it was so much bigger, because the paintbrush would get all these overtones.” **heavy focus** “It\'s another love song on the album, I feel. It was one of the first songs that I wrote when I was with this person. The heavy focus of when you\'re super fixated on somebody, like when you\'re in the room with them and they\'re the only one in the room. The kind when you\'re taking a camera and you\'re focusing on a picture and you\'re really focusing on that image and the way it\'s framed. I was using the metaphor of the camera in the song, too. That one feels very bittersweet for me, like taking a portrait of the spirit of the energy of the moment because it\'s the only way it lasts; in a way, it\'s the only way I\'ll be able to see it again.” **half return** “There’s this weird crossover to returning home, being around my dad, and reverting back to my child self. Like when you go home and you\'re with your parents or with siblings, and suddenly you\'re in the role that you were in all throughout your life. But then it crosses into the way I felt when I had so much teenage angst with my 29-year-old angst.” **come** “This thing happened while we were out there recording, which is that a lot of people were experiencing deaths from far away because of the pandemic, and especially a lot of the elderly. It was hard for people to travel or be around each other because of COVID. And while we were recording, Phil\'s grandmother passed away. He was really close with her. I had already started this song, and a couple of days before she died, she got to hear the song.” **zombie girl** “There’s two tracks on the record that weren\'t written during the session, and this is one of them. It\'s been around for a little while. Actually, Big Thief has played it a couple of times at shows. It was written after this very intense nightmare I had. There was this zombie girl with this really scary energy that was coming for me. I had sleep paralysis, and there were these demons and translucent ghost hands fluttering around my throat. Every window and door in the house that I was staying in was open and the people had just become zombies, and there was this girl who was arched and like crouched next to my bed and looking at me. I woke up absolutely terrified. Then the next night, I had this dream that I was with this person and we were in bed together and essentially making love, but in a spirit-like way that was indescribable. It was like such a beautiful dream. I was like really close with this person, but we weren\'t together and I didn\'t even know why I was having that dream, but it was foreshadowing or foretelling what was to come. The verses kind of tell that story, and then the choruses are asking about emptiness. I feel like the zombie, the creature in the dream, represents that hollow emptiness, which may be the thing that I feel most avoidant of at times. Maybe being alone is one of the things that scares me most.” **not a lot, just forever** “The ‘not a lot’ in the title is the concept of something happening infinitely, but in a small quantity. I had never had that thought before until James \[Krivchenia, Big Thief drummer\] brought it up. We were talking about how something can happen forever, but not a lot of it, just forever. Just like a thin thread of something that goes eternally. So maybe something as small as like a bird shedding its feather, or like maybe how rocks are changed over time. Little by little, but endlessly.” **dragon eyes** “That one feels the most raw, undecorated, and purely simple. I want to feel a sense of belonging. I just want a home with you or I just want to feel that. It\'s another homage to love, tenderness, and grappling with my own shadows, but not wanting to control anyone and not wanting to blame anyone and wanting to see them and myself clearly.” **my angel** “There is this guardian angel feeling that I\'ve always had since I was a kid, where there\'s this person who\'s with me. But then also, ‘Who is my angel? Is it my lover, is it part of myself? Is it this material being that is truly from the heavens?’ I\'ve had some near-death experiences where I\'m like, \'Wow, I should have died.\' The song\'s telling this near-death experience of being pushed over the side of the cliff, and then the angel comes and kisses your eyelids and your wrists. It feels like a piercing thing, because you\'re in pain from having fallen, but you\'re still alive and returning to your oxygen. You expect to be dead, and then you somehow wake up and you\'ve been protected and you\'re still alive. It sounds dramatic, but sometimes things feel that dramatic.”

Since Bruce Springsteen last released an album with the E Street Band—*High Hopes*, 2014’s collection of re-recorded outtakes and covers—he’s spent a lot of time thinking about his past. He followed his 2016 memoir *Born to Run* the next year with a one-man Broadway show in which he reimagined his songs as part of an intimate narrative about his own life and career. And while his 20th LP was recorded completely live with the band in a four-day sprint—for the first time since 1984’s *Born in the USA*—the songs themselves bear the deliberation and weight of an artist who knows he’s running out of time to do things like this. “The impetus for a lot of the material was the loss of my good friend George Theiss,” Springsteen tells Apple Music. “When he passed away, it left me as the only remaining living member of the first band that I had, which was a very strange thought, and it gave rise to most of the material. There\'s aging and loss of people as time goes by, and that\'s a part of what the record is. And then at the same time, you\'re sort of celebrating the fact that the band goes on and we carry their spirits with us.” That combination of wistfulness and joy—propelled by the full force of an E Street Band that’s been playing together in some form for nearly 50 years, minus two departed founding members, Clarence Clemons and Danny Federici—drives “Last Man Standing” and “Ghosts” most explicitly, but imbues the entire project. Though this may have been recorded live and fast, nothing sounds ragged or rambunctious; the efficiency owes to the shorthand of a unit that knows each other’s moves before they make them. While most of the songs were written recently, “Song for Orphans,” “If I Was the Priest,” and “Janey Needs a Shooter” date back to the early ’70s, only adding to the feeling of loose ends being tied. And it’s not lost on Springsteen after this long period of reflection that this album fits into a larger story that he’s been telling for most of his life. “If you wanted to find a body of work that expressed what it was like to be an American, say from 1970 to now, in the post-industrial period of the United States—I\'d be a place you could go and get some information on that,” he says. “And so in that sense, I always try to speak to my times in the way that I best could.” Here he digs deeper into just a few of the highlights from *Letter to You*. **One Minute You’re Here** “It\'s unusual to start a record with its quietest song. The record really starts with \'Letter to You,\' but there\'s this little preface that lets you know what the record is going to encompass. The record starts with \'One Minute You\'re Here\' and then ends with \'I\'ll See You in My Dreams,\' which are both songs about mortality and death. It was just sort of a little tip of the hat to where the record was going to go and a little slightly connected to \[2019\'s\] *Western Stars*. It was a little transitional piece of music.” **Last Man Standing** “That particular song was directly due to George\'s passing and me finding out that out of that group of people, I\'m kind of here on my own, honoring the guys that I learned my craft with between the ages of 14 and 17 or 18. Those were some of the deepest learning years of my life—learning how to be onstage, learning how to write, learning how to front the band, learning how to put together a show, learning how to play for all different kinds of audiences at fireman\'s fairs, at union halls, at CYO \[Catholic Youth Organization\] dances, and just really honing your craft.” **Janey Needs a Shooter** and **If I Was the Priest** and **Song for Orphans** “We were working on a lot of stuff that I have in the vault to put out again at some time, and I went through almost a whole record of pre-*Greetings From Asbury Park* music that was all acoustic, and these songs were inside them. The guys came in and I said, ‘Okay. Today we\'re going to record songs that are 50 years old, and we\'re going to see what happens.\' The modern band playing those ideas that I had as a 22-year-old—and for some reason it just fit on the record, because the record skips through time. It starts with me thinking about when I was 14 and 15, and then it moves into the present. So those songs added a little touchstone for that certain period of time. I went back and I found a voice that really fit them, and they\'re a nice addition to the record.” **House of a Thousand Guitars** “Every piece of music has its demands—what tone in my voice is going to feel right for this particular piece of music—and you try to meet it in the middle. That\'s one of my favorite songs on the record; I\'m not exactly sure why yet. It\'s at the center of the record and it speaks to this world that the band and I have attempted to create with its values, its ideas, its codes, since we started. And it collects all of that into one piece of music, into this imaginary house of a thousand guitars.” **The Power of Prayer** “I grew up Catholic, and that was enough to turn me off from religion forever. And I realized as I grew older that you can run away from your religion, but you can\'t really run away from your faith. And so I carried a lot of the language with me, which I use and write with quite often—\'Promised Land\' or \'House of a Thousand Guitars\' and \'The Power of Prayer\' on this record. Those little three-minute records and the 180-second character studies that came through pop music were like these little meditations and little prayers for me. And that\'s what I turned them into. And my faith came in and filled those songs, and gave them a spiritual dimension. It\'s an essential part of your life.” **I’ll See You in My Dreams** “I remember a lot of my dreams and I always have. But that song was basically about those that pass away don\'t ever really leave us. They visit me in my dreams several times a year. Clarence will come up a couple times in a year. Or I\'ll see Danny. They just show up in very absurd, sometimes in abstract ways in the middle of strange stories. But they\'re there, and it\'s actually a lovely thing to revisit with them in that way. The pain slips away, the love remains, and they live in that love and walk alongside you and your ancestors and your life companions as a part of your spirit. So the song is basically about that: \'Hey. I\'m not going to see you at the next session, but I\'ll see you in my dreams.\'”

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

“I have such a personal connection to dance music,” Georgia Barnes tells Apple Music. “I grew up around the UK rave scene, being taken to the raves with my mum and dad \[Leftfield’s Neil Barnes\] because they couldn’t afford childcare. I\'d witness thousands of people dancing to a pulsating beat and I always found it fascinating, so I\'m returning to my roots. The story of dance music and house music is a familiar one—it helped my family, it gave us a roof over our heads.” Five years on from her self-titled debut, the Londoner channels the grooves and good times of the Detroit, Chicago, and Berlin club scenes on the single “About Work the Dancefloor,” “The Thrill,” and “24 Hours.” Tender, twinkling tracks like “Ultimate Sailor” recall Kate Bush and Björk, while her love of punk, dub, and Depeche Mode come through on “Ray Guns,” “Feel It,” and “Never Let You Go.” “My first record was a bit of an experiment,” she explains. “Then I knew exactly what needed to be done—I just locked myself away in the studio and researched all the songs that I love. I also got fit, I stopped drinking, I became a vegan, so these songs are a real reflection of a personal journey I went on—a lot happened in those five years.” Join Georgia on a track-by-track tour of *Seeking Thrills*. **Started Out** “Without ‘Started Out’ this album would be a completely different story. It really did help me break into the radio world, and it was really an important song to kickstart the campaign. Everything you\'re hearing I\'ve played: It\'s all analog synthesizers and programmed drum machines. We set the studio up like Frankie Knuckles or Marshall Jefferson did, so it’s got a real authenticity to it, which was important to me. I didn\'t just want to take the sounds and modernize them, I wanted to use the gear that they were using.” **About Work the Dancefloor** “During the making of this track I was very heavily listening to early techno music, so I wanted to create a song that just had that driving bassline and beat to it. And then I came up with that chorus, and I wanted it to be on a vocoder to have that real techno sound. Not many pop songs have a vocoder as the chorus—I think the only one is probably Beastie Boys’ ‘Intergalactic.’” **Never Let You Go** “I thought it\'d be really cool to have a punky electronic song on the record. So, ‘Never Let You Go’ started as this punk, garage-rock song, but it just sounded like it was for a different album. So then I wrote the chorus, which gave it this bit more pop direction. During the making of this record I was really disciplined, I wasn\'t drinking, I was on this very strict routine of working during the day and then finishing and having a good night’s sleep, so I think some of the songs have these elements of longing for something. I also liked the way Kate Bush wrote: Her lyrics were inspired by the elements, and I wanted to write about the sky like she did. It just all kind of came into one on that song.” **24 Hours** “This was written after I spent 24 hours in the Berghain club in Berlin. It was a life-changing experience. I was sober and observing all these amazing characters and having this kind of epiphany. I saw this guy and this girl notice each other on the floor, just find each other—they clearly didn\'t know each other before. They were dancing together and it was so beautiful. People do that even in an age where most people find each other on dating apps. That\'s where I got the line ‘If two hearts ever beat the same/We can beat it.’” **Mellow (feat. Shygirl)** “I wasn\'t drinking, but I\'ve had my fair share of doing crazy stuff. I wrote this song because I really wanted to go out and seek my hedonistic side. I wanted another female voice on it, and I heard Shygirl’s \[London singer and DJ Blane Muise\] music and really liked it. She understood the type of vibe I was going for because she likes to drink and she likes to go out with her girls. I didn\'t want many collaborations on the record, I just wanted that one moment in this song.” **Till I Own It** “I\'ve got a real emotional connection to this song. I was listening a lot to The Blue Nile, the Glaswegian band, who were quite ethereal and slow. I was interested in adding a song that was a bit more serious and emotive—so I wrote this because I just had this feeling of alienation in London at the time. Also, during the making of this record Brexit happened, so I wrote this song to reflect the changing landscape.” **I Can’t Wait** “‘I Can’t Wait’ is about the thrill of falling in love and that feeling that you get from starting something new. I was listening to a lot of reggae and dub and I\'d wanted to kind of create a rhythm with synthesizers that was almost like ragga. But this is definitely a pop record—and quite a sweet three-minute pop song.” **Feel It** “This was one of the first songs that I recorded for the second record. It’s got that kind of angry idea of punk singers. There are a couple of moments on this record where I was definitely listening to John Lydon and Public Image Ltd., and it\'s also an important song because I felt like it empowers the listener. I wanted people to listen to these songs and do something in their lives that is different, or to go and experience the dance floor. I think \'Feel It\' does that.” **Ultimate Sailor** “‘Ultimate Sailor’ was something that just came along unexpectedly. I really wanted to create a song that just put the listener somewhere. All the elemental things really inspired this record: skies, seas, mountains, pyramids. I think that is one of the things that\'s rubbed off on me from Kate Bush. She’s the artist that I play most in the studio.” **Ray Guns** “I had a concept before I wrote this song about an army of women shooting these rays of light out of these guns, creating love in the sky to influence the whole world. It\'s about collective energy again. I was influenced by all the Chicago house and Detroit techno, and how bravery came from this new explosive scene. And \'Ray Guns\' was meant to try and instill a sense of that power to the listener.” **The Thrill (feat. Maurice)** “At this point I was so influenced by Chicago house and just feeling like I wanted to create a song in homage to it. I wanted a song that took you on a journey to this Chicago house party, and then you have these vocals that induce this kind of trip. Maurice is actually me—it’s an alter ego! That\'s just my voice pitched down! I thought, ‘I’m going to fuck with people and put \'featuring Maurice.’” **Honey Dripping Sky** “I love the way Frank Ocean has the balls to just put two songs together and then take the listener on a journey. This song has a quite dub section at the end, and it\'s about the kind of journey that you go through on a breakup, so it’s really personal. It’s also quite an unusual track, and I wanted to end the album on a thrilling feeling. It\'s a statement to end on a song like that.”

The Wants’ debut full-length LP, “Container” is a meticulously self-produced art pop record, combining elements of post-punk, synth pop, and minimal techno. Available in a variety of combinations including bundles with a full colour photobook and a 12" Clearly A Crisis vinyl. Out on 13th March 2020.