On *Compliments Please*, her 2019 debut as Self Esteem, Rebecca Taylor reintroduced herself to the world in a way that stunned fans of her previous work as one half of Sheffield indie-folk duo Slow Club. Here was Taylor fully realized as an artist—a millennial Madonna delivering personal polemic within a kaleidoscopic blast of bombastic pop. For this follow-up, Taylor has doubled down on that MO, creating a record that is bigger, better, and even more unapologetically true to herself. “On my first album I didn’t know what Self Esteem was, really,” she tells Apple Music. “Back then we were finding out and, now I know what it is, it’s a much more self-assured way to work. I knew I wanted to make *Compliments Please 2*, essentially. I wanted to do similar production but bigger and bolder. If there’s one violin, I want it to be a quartet. If it’s three-part harmony, I want it to be a choir. I just wanted to build it and make it more massive.” Over 13 frank, funny, and vital tracks, *Prioritise Pleasure* finds Taylor exploring sex and sexuality, misogyny, and toxic relationships. “Lyrically, I’ll always reflect where I’m at in my life,” she adds. “A lot of changes have happened between the first record and the second record.” Above all else though, it’s a record that uses skyscraping pop bangers to deliver a triumphant message of self-acceptance. Here, Taylor talks us through it, track by track. **“I’m Fine”** “With that slow beat opening it, me and my producer were like, ‘This would be an amazing first song…’ I’d wanted to write about something that’s happened to me. I wanted to reclaim my independence and my sexuality and my right to live my life however I want after that had been taken in a traumatic way. It has become this sort of mission statement at the top of the record for the thing I’m singing about. But for anyone who feels like they have to live their life because of the way society is—it’s for you.” **“Fucking Wizardry”** “If I had my time again, I wouldn’t put this on because I feel so overwhelmed singing it back. But it was very much where I was at when I was writing. I was in a relationship. I really, really loved him and we could have had a really good relationship, but his ex didn’t leave him alone during it. I had to get a thicker skin and build myself back up and say, ‘Do you know what? I’m not doing this.’ I did feel really hurt. I succumbed to jealousy and fear and I didn’t feel good enough. I’m embarrassed by my spitefulness, but it’s also very human and it’s important for me to show all the sides of myself on the record.” **“Hobbies 2”** “Kate Bush was someone I was thinking about when I was making this. She was an artist first and foremost and created the work. If it happened to be a hit then cool, but she was never going to deviate from just coming out of her head. This feels like a 2021 \[1985 Bush hit\] ‘Running Up That Hill.’ It’s so funny too. I’m basically saying I’ve got time to have this fuck buddy, but only if I’m not busy. I think that’s a very modern thing to have committed to song.” **“Prioritise Pleasure”** “All of my songs link to each other, because I’m always thinking about sex, sense of self, heartbreak, or defiance. They’re always in there. *Prioritise Pleasure* is sexy and it’s about prioritizing yourself in that way, but also it’s about prioritizing just what you want every day. As a woman, I’ve people-pleased and shapeshifted and sort of begged the world to not be mad with me my whole life. The turnaround and the key to my happiness is to not do that anymore.” **“I Do This All The Time”** “I’d wanted to a song that was like \[Baz Luhrmann’s ‘Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)’\]. And a song that’s like ‘Dirrty’ by Christina Aguilera. I did one take. It’s almost like it possessed me. I had to just make it. There was this moment when I was tracking and recording the string line, I walked home, listened to it and thought, ‘I could just stop now.’ There was this part of me that was like, ‘This is it. This is what I’ve always wanted to do. This is always what I wanted to say.’ I’ve not had that feeling before.” **“Moody”** “I loved the keyboard sound and Johan \[Karlberg, producer\] just smashed a loop out. I had the lyric ‘Sexting you at the mental health talk seems counterproductive’ for ages so I put that in and that set the tone of what I wanted to write about. Spelling-out pop choruses are always L-O-V-E or whatever, I’ve always had this idea of spelling out something that has negative connotations. I thought it would be funny to do a song where I’m saying what I’m saying in the form of very sugary pop. It’s a bit of a piss-take really, me being sarcastic about girly pop music.” **“Still Reigning”** “That’s a sister song to ‘She Reigns’ on the first record. I’m obsessed with acceptance at the minute and letting things just be. I’ve always been someone who wants to strong-arm reality into what I need it to be, rather than just letting it happen. I was a very convincing kid. I remember convincing my dad to get a dog by drawing a pamphlet that I pretended was from the RSPCA, where I listed the benefits of having a dog. That was cute, but I was just being a manipulative little shit. I’ve always been like, ‘I want this, why not?’ That’s how I was approaching a relationship that I wanted to continue and they didn’t. Finally, the penny dropped about letting things go with the flow and about acceptance and love.” **“How Can I Help You”** “‘Black Skinhead’ was something we were going for in mood. Everything comes back to Kanye production every time we’re stuck. It’s a weird song but I’m a punk at my core. I love pop but I cut my teeth playing in a lot of punk bands. It’s a little nod to the tapestry of me and my music. Being a woman is hard enough. Being someone who wants to please everyone is very hard. Then being in the music industry has been really hard. So \[the lyrics are about\] all of it.” **“It’s Been A While”** “Me and Johan both really love trap and I requested a very, very deep, dark trap loop. This one is a bit of another timestamp. I’m addicted to my phone and the sort of weariness from it. I’ll be texting someone I’m seeing. Then I’m on Twitter making some sort of joke. Then I’m reading some news report about something awful. Then I’m on Instagram liking some cute woman’s picture. It’s round and round and round and my eyes are consuming so much all day. Also, I was still going out with that guy that was treating me pretty cheap. Again, it comes back to trying to strong-arm the world into doing what I want. It’s about all those things.” **“The 345”** “It’s me singing to me. It’s very on-the-nose. I just wondered what a love song to myself would be. I sing so many love songs to these people that come in and out of my life. I wondered what would happen if I sang to the person that’s not going to go anywhere, which sounds quite sad.” **“John Elton”** “It’s playing on the idea that these people come into your life and you love them and then they go and then that’s it. I’ve always struggled with that. Someone I loved who I had the joke with, and the joke was a really shit joke, but it still makes me laugh. Then you go to chat about it but everyone’s lives have moved on. People get married and have children and I’m just still out here laughing at the stupid joke we had. It’s an interesting little jolt back to reality and all part of the experience. I end the song by saying it’s all for me. No matter what, all of this is mine and all of these experiences are mine and that’s it.” **“You Forever”** “This is coming from a place of deciding whether or not to get back with someone. At one point in time, I really wanted to and I said that, and the other person said, ‘You need to be braver.’ Also an acceptance is creeping in where I’ve been all right on my own and I will be all right on my own. That’s important to hold on to. Modern dating is as much about not wanting to be alone as it is about trying to meet someone you like. To be all right on your own really does mean if you meet someone and they add something to your life, that’s what it should be about.” **“Just Kids”** “With a lot of my songs, when it’s not just romantic relationships, it’s about the frustration and the desire to be loved by someone who just won’t. Deciding to stop trying is what the song is about. Accept it and leave it with love but move forward in your life. It feels like a good place to try and put that to bed before I write the next album.”
As Amyl and the Sniffers came off the road in late 2019, they moved into a house together in Melbourne. “It had lime green walls and mice,” frontwoman Amy Taylor tells Apple Music. “Three bedrooms and a shed out back that we took turns sleeping in. We knew we were going to come back for a long period of time to write. We just didn’t know how long.” Months later, as the bushfires gave way to a global pandemic, the Aussie punk outfit found themselves well-prepared for lockdown. “We’ve always kind of just been in each other’s pocket, forever and always,” Taylor says. “We’ve toured everywhere, been housemates, been in a van, and shared hotel rooms. We’re one person.” With all rehearsal studios closed, they rented a nearby storage unit where they could workshop the follow-up to their ARIA-winning, self-titled debut. The acoustics were so harsh and the PA so loud that guitarist Dec Martens says, “I never really heard any of Amy’s lyrics until they were recorded later on. She could’ve been singing about whatever, and I would have gone along with it, really.” And though *Comfort to Me* shows a more serious and personal side—as well as a range of influences that spans hardcore, power pop, and ’70s folk—that’s not necessarily a byproduct of living through a series of catastrophes. “I was pretty depressed,” Taylor says. “It’s hard to know what was the pandemic and what was just my brain. Even though you can’t travel and you can’t see people, life still just happens. I could look through last year and, really, it’s like the same amount of good and bad stuff happened, but in a different way. You’re just always feeling stuff.” Here, Taylor and Martens take us inside some of the album’s key tracks. **“Guided by Angels”** Amy Taylor: “I feel like, as a band, everyone thinks we’re just funny all the time. And we are funny and I love to laugh, but we also are full-spectrum humans who think about serious stuff as well, and I like that one because it’s kind of cryptic and poetic and a bit more dense. It’s not just, like, ‘Yee-haw, let’s punch a wall,’ which there’s plenty of and I also really love. We’re showing our range a little bit.” **“Freaks to the Front”** AT: “We must’ve written that before COVID. That’s absolutely a live-experience song and we’re such a live band—that’s our whole setup. We probably have more skills playing live than we do making music. It’s the energy that is contagious, and that one’s just kind of encouraging all kind of freaks, all kind of people: If you’re rich or poor or smart or fat or ugly or nice or mean, everyone just represent yourself and have a good time.” **“Choices”** Dec Martens: “\[Bassist\] Gus \[Romer\] is really into hardcore at the moment, and he wanted a really animalistic, straight-up hardcore song.” AT: “Growing up, I went to a fair handful of hardcore shows, and I personally liked the aggression of a hardcore show. In the audience, people kind of grabbing each other and chucking each other down, but then also pulling each other up and helping each other. I also just really like music that makes me feel angry. I constantly am getting unsolicited advice—or women, in general, are constantly getting told how to live and what to do. Everybody around the world is, and sometimes it’s really helpful—and I don’t discount that—but other times it’s just like, ‘Let me just fucking figure it out myself, and don’t tell me what kind of choices I can and can’t make, because it’s my flesh sack and I’ll do what I want with it.’” **“Hertz”** AT: “I think I started writing it at the start of 2020, pre-lockdown. But it’s funny now, because currently, being in lockdown again, I’m literally dying. I just want to get to the country and fucking not be in the city. So, the lyrics have really just come to fruition. I was thinking about somebody that I wasn’t really with at the time. It’s that feeling of feeling suffocated—you just want to look at the sky, just be in nature, and just be alive.” **“No More Tears”** DM: “I was really inspired by this ’70s album called *No Other* by Gene Clark, which isn’t very punk or rock. But I just played this at a faster tempo.” AT: “And also inspired heaps by the Sunnyboys, an Australian power pop band. Last year was really tough for me, and that song’s about how much I was struggling with heaps of different shit and trying to, I guess, try and make relationships work. I was just feeling not very lovable, because I’m all fucked in the head, but I’m also trying to make it work. It’s a pretty personal song.” **“Knifey”** AT: “It’s about my experience—and I’m sure lots of other people’s experience—of feeling safe to walk home at night. The world’s different for people like me and chicks and stuff: You can carry a weapon and if somebody does something awful and you react, it comes back to you. I remember when I was a kid, being like, ‘Dad, I want to get a knife,’ and he was like, ‘You can’t get a knife because you’ll kill someone and go to jail.’ But so be it. If somebody wants to have a go, I’m very happy to react negatively. At the start, I was like, ‘I don’t know if I want to do these lyrics. I don’t know if I’d want to play that song live.’ It’s probably the only song that I’ve ever really felt like that about. It hit up the boys in the band in an emotional way. They were like, ‘Fuck, this is powerful. Makes me cry and shit,’ and I was like, ‘That’s pretty dope.’” **“Don’t Need a C\*\*t (Like You to Love Me)”** AT: “It’s a fuck-you song. When I’m saying, ‘Don’t need a c\*\*t like you to love me,’ it’s pretty much just any c\*\*t that I don’t like in general. There could be some fucking piss-weak review of us or if I worked at a job and there was a crap fucking customer—it’s all of that. I wasn’t thinking about a particular bloke, although there’s many that I feel like that about.” **“Snakes”** “A bit of autobiography, an ode to my childhood. I grew up in a small town near the coast—kind of bogan, kind of hippy. I grew up on three acres, and I grew up in a shed with my sister, mom, and dad until I was about nine or 10, and we all shared a bedroom and would use the bath water to wash our clothes and then that same water to water the plants. Dad used to bring us toys home from the tip and we’d go swimming in the storms and there was snakes everywhere. There was snakes, literally, in the bedroom and the chick pens, and there’d be snakes killing the cats and snakes at school—and this song’s about that.”
“I wanted to get a better sense of how African traditional cosmologies can inform my life in a modern-day context,” Sons of Kemet frontman Shabaka Hutchings tells Apple Music about the concept behind the British jazz group’s fourth LP. “Then, try to get some sense of those forms of knowledge and put it into the art that’s being produced.” Since their 2013 debut LP *Burn*, the Barbados-raised saxophonist/clarinetist and his bandmates (tuba player Theon Cross and drummers Tom Skinner and Eddie Hick) have been at the forefront of the new London jazz scene—deconstructing its conventions by weaving a rich sonic tapestry that fuses together elements of modal and free jazz, grime, dub, ’60s and ’70s Ethiopian jazz, and Afro-Caribbean music. On *Black to the Future*, the Mercury Prize-nominated quartet is at their most direct and confrontational with their sociopolitical message—welcoming to the fold a wide array of guest collaborators (most notably poet Joshua Idehen, who also collaborated with the group on 2018’s *Your Queen Is a Reptile*) to further contextualize the album’s themes of Black oppression and colonialism, heritage and ancestry, and the power of memory. If you look closely at the song titles, you’ll discover that each of them makes up a singular poem—a clever way for Hutchings to clue in listeners before they begin their musical journey. “It’s a sonic poem, in that the words and the music are the same thing,” Hutchings says. “Poetry isn\'t meant to be descriptive on the surface level, it\'s descriptive on a deep level. So if you read the line of poetry, and then you listen to the music, a picture should emerge that\'s more than what you\'d have if you considered the music or the line separately.” Here, Hutchings gives insight into each of the tracks. **“Field Negus” (feat. Joshua Idehen)** “This track was written in the midst of the Black Lives Matter protests in London, and it was a time that was charged with an energy of searching for meaning. People were actually starting to talk about Black experience and Black history as it related to the present, in a way that hadn\'t really been done in Britain before. The point of artists is to be able to document these moments in history and time, and be able to actually find a way of contextualizing them in a way that\'s poetic. The aim of this track is to keep that conversation going and keep the reflections happening. I\'ve been working with Joshua for 15 years and I really appreciate his perspective on the political realm. He\'s got a way of describing reality in a manner which makes you think deeply. He never loses humor and he never loses his sense of sharpness.” **“Pick Up Your Burning Cross” (feat. Moor Mother & Angel Bat Dawid)** “It started off with me writing the bassline, which I thought was going to be a grime bassline. But then in the pandemic lockdown, I added layers of horns and woodwinds. It took it completely out of the grime space and put it more in that Antillean-Caribbean atmosphere. It really showed me that there\'s a lot of intersecting links between these musics that sometimes you\'re not even aware of until you start really diving into their potential and start adding and taking away things. It was really great to actually discover that the tune had more to offer than I envisioned in the beginning. Angel Bat Dawid and Moor Mother are both on this one, and the only thing I asked them to do was to listen to the track and just give their honest interpretation of what the music brings out of them.” **“Think of Home”** “If you\'re thinking poetically, you\'ve got that frantic energy of \'Burning Cross,\' which signifies dealing with those issues of oppression. Then at the end of that process of dealing with them, you\'ve got to still remember the place that you come from. You\'ve got to think about the utopia, think about that serene tranquil place so that you\'re not consumed in the battle. It\'s not really trying to be a Caribbean track per se, but I was trying to get that feeling of when I think back to my days growing up in Barbados. This is the feeling I had when I remember the music that was made at that time.” **“Hustle” (feat. Kojey Radical)** “The title of the track links back to the title of our second album, *Lest We Forget What We Came Here to Do*. The answer to that question is to hustle. Our grandparents came and migrated to Britain, not to just be British per se, but so that they could then create a better life for themselves and their families and have the future be one with dignity and pride. I gave these words to Kojey and he said that he finds it difficult to depict these types of struggles considering that he\'s not in the present moment within the same struggle that he grew up in. He felt it was disingenuous for him to talk about the struggle. I told him that he\'s a storyteller, and storytelling isn\'t always autobiographical. His gift is to be able to tell stories for his community, and to remember that he\'s also an orator of their history regardless of where his personal journey has led him.” **“For the Culture” (feat. D Double E)** “Originally, we\'d intended D Double E to be on \'Pick Up Your Burning Cross.\' But he came into the studio and it really wasn\'t the vibe that he was in. We played him the demo of this track and his face lit up. He was like, \'Let\'s go into the studio. I know what to do.\' It was one take and that was it. I think this might be one of my favorite tunes on the album. The reason I called it \'For the Culture\' is that it puts me back into what it felt like to be a teenager in Barbados in the \'90s, going into the dance halls and really learning what it is to dance. It\'s not just all about it being hard and struggling and striving; there is that fun element of celebrating what it is to be sensual and to be alive and love music and partying and just joyfulness.” **“To Never Forget the Source”** “I gave this really short melody to the band, maybe like four bars for the melody and a very repeated bassline. We played it for about half an hour, where the drums and bass entered slowly and I played the melody again and again. The idea of this, when we recorded in the studio, is that it needs to be the vibe and spirit of how we are playing together. So it wasn\'t about stopping and starting and being anxious. We need to play it until the feeling is right. The clarinets and the flutes on this one is maybe the one I\'m most proud of in terms of adding a counterpoint line, which really offsets and emphasizes the original saxophone and tuba line.” **“In Remembrance of Those Fallen”** “The idea of \'In Remembrance of Those Fallen\' is to give homage to those people that have been fighting for liberation and freedom within all those anti-colonial movements, and remember the ongoing struggle for dignity within especially the Black world in Africa. It\'s trying to get that feeling of \'We can do this. We can go forward, regardless of what hurdles have been done and of what hurdles we\'ve encountered.\' But, musically, there\'s so many layers to this. I was excited with how, on one side, the drums are doing what you\'d describe as Afro-jazz, and on the other one, it\'s doing a really primal sound—but mixing it in a way where you feel the impact of those two contrasting drum patterns. This is at the heart of what I like about the drums in Kemet. Regardless of what they\'re doing, the end result becomes one pulsating, forward-moving machine.” **“Let the Circle Be Unbroken”** “I was listening to a lot of \[Brazilian composer\] Hermeto Pascoal while making the album, and my mind was going onto those beautiful melodies that Hermeto sometimes makes. Songs that feel like you remember them, but they\'ve got a level of harmonic intricacy, which means that there\'s something disorienting too. It\'s like you\'re hearing a nursery rhyme in a dream, hearing the basic contour of the melody, but there\'s just something below the surface that disorientates you and throws you off what you know of it. It\'s one of the only times I\'ve ever heard that midtempo soca descend into brutal free jazz.” **“Envision Yourself Levitating”** “This one also features one of my heroes on the saxophone, Kebbi Williams, who does the first saxophone solo on the track. His music has got that real New Orleans communal vibe to it. For me, this is the height of music making—when you can make music that\'s easy enough to play its constituent parts, but when it all pieces together, it becomes a complex tapestry. It\'s the first point in the album where I do an actual solo with backing parts. This is, in essence, what a lot of calypso bands do in Barbados. So when you\'ve got traditional calypso music, you\'ll get a performer who is singing their melody and then you\'ve got these horn section parts that intersect and interact with the melody that the calypsonian is singing. It\'s that idea of an interchange between the band backing the chief melodic line.” **“Throughout the Madness, Stay Strong”** “It\'s about optimism, but not an optimism where you have a smile on your face. An optimism where you\'re resigned to the place of defeat within the big spectrum of things. It\'s having to actually resign yourself to what has happened in the continued dismantling of Black civilization, and how Black people are regarded as a whole in the world within a certain light; but then understanding that it\'s part of a broader process of rising to something else, rising to a new era. Also, on the more technical side of the recording of this tune, this was the first tune that we recorded for the whole session. It\'s the first take of the first tune on the first day.” **“Black” (feat. Joshua Idehen)** “There was a point where we all got into the studio and I asked that we go into these breathing exercises where we essentially just breathe in really deeply about 30 times, and at the end of 30, we breathe out and hold it for as long as you can with nothing inside. We did one of these exercises while lying on the floor with our eyes shut in pitch blackness. I asked everyone to scream as hard as we can, really just let it out. No one could have anything in their ears apart from the track, so no one was aware of how anyone else sounded. It was complete no-self-awareness, no shyness. It\'s like a cathartic ritual to really just let it out, however you want.”
With her incisive lyrics and gift for harnessing classic UK garage samples, PinkPantheress very quickly became one of 2021’s breakout stars. Her debut mixtape, *to hell with it*, is a bite-size collection of moreish pop songs and a small slice of the 20-year-old singer and producer’s creative output over the nine months since her first viral TikTok moment. “I basically put together the songs that I put out this year that I felt were strongest,” she tells Apple Music. “I sat in the studio with my manager and a good friend from home whose ear I trust, and I said, ‘Does this sound cohesive to you? Are the songs in a similar world?’” The world of *to hell with it* is one of sharp contrasts existing together in perfect balance: sweet, singsong vocals paired with frenetic breakbeats, floor-filler samples through a bedroom pop filter, confessional lyrics about mostly fictionalized experiences, and light, bright production with a solidly emo core. “They’re all vividly sad,” PinkPantheress says of the 10 tracks that made the cut. “I think I\'ve had a tendency, even on a particularly happy beat, to sing the saddest lyrics I can. I paint a picture of the actual scenarios where someone would be sad.” Here, the Bath-born, London-based artist takes us through her mixtape, track by track. **“Pain”** “In my early days on TikTok I was creating a song a day. Some of them got a good reception, but ‘Pain’ was the first one where people responded really well and the first one where the sound ended up traveling a little bit. It didn\'t go crazy, but the sound was being used by 30 people, and that got me quite excited. A lot of people haven’t really heard garage that much before, and I think that for them, the sample \[Sweet Female Attitude’s 2000 single ‘Flowers’\] is a very palatable way to ease into garage breakbeats, very British-sounding synths, and all those influences.” **“I must apologise”** “This track was produced by Oscar Scheller \[Rina Sawayama, Ashnikko\]. I was trying to stay away from a sample at this point, but there’s something about this beat \[from Crystal Waters’ 1991 single ‘Gypsy Woman (She’s Homeless)’\] which drugged me. When we started writing it, Oscar gave me the idea for one of the melodies and I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this actually is probably going to end up being one of my favorite songs just based off of this great melody that he\'s just come up with.’” **“Last valentines”** “My older cousin introduced me to LINKIN PARK; *Hybrid Theory* is one of my favorite albums ever. I went through the whole thing thinking, ‘Could I sample any of this?’ and when I listened to ‘Forgotten’ I just thought: ‘This guitar in the back is amazing. I can\'t believe no one\'s ever sampled it before!’ I looped it, recorded to it, mixed it, put it out. This was my first track where it took a darker turn, sonically. It really is emo through and through, from the sample to the lyrics.” **“Passion”** “To me, a lack of passion is just really not enjoying things like you used to—not having the same fun with your friends, finding things boring. I haven’t experienced depression myself, but I know people that have and I can attempt to draw comparisons of what I see in real life. Like it says in the lyrics, ‘You don’t see the light.’ I think I got a lot more emotional than I needed to get, but I\'m still glad that I went there. The instruments are so happy, I feel like there needed to be something to contradict it and make it a bit more three-dimensional.” **“Just for me”** “I made this song with \[UK artist and producer\] Mura Masa. I was sat with him, just going through references, and he started making the loop. I’ve never said this before, but I remember being like, ‘I don’t know if I’m going to be able to write anything good to this,’ and then it just came, after 20 minutes of sitting there wondering what I could do. The line ‘When you wipe your tears, do you wipe them just for me?’ just slipped off the tongue.” **“Noticed I cried”** “This is another track with Oscar Scheller and the first song I made without my own production. I held back a lot from working with producers, because I like working by myself, but Oscar is really good, so it ended up just being an easy process. He understood the assignment. I think it’s my favorite song I’ve ever released. It’s the top line, I’m just a big fan of the way it flows. I hope that people like it as much as I do.” **“Reason”** “Zach Nahome produced this track. He used to make a lot of garage, drum ’n’ bass, jungle, but his sound is quite different to that nowadays. So this was a bit of a different vibe for him. We made the beat together. I told him what kind of drums I wanted, what kind of sound and space I wanted, and he came up with that. With garage music, I just enjoy the breakbeats of it, the drums. It’s also quintessentially British. We birthed it. I think it’s always nice to go back to your roots.” **“All my friends know”** “I wanted to try something a bit different, and there were a few moments with this one where I wasn’t sure if I really liked it or not. After I stopped debating with myself it got a lot easier to enjoy it and I ended up feeling like it could actually be a lot of people’s favorite. The instrumental part of it is really beautiful; both producers—my friends Dill and Kairos—did a good job. It’s sentimental in a musical sense, and it’s sentimental in a personal sense as well.” **“Nineteen”** “This is a song that stems from personal experience, and kind of the first time in any of my songs where I’m like, ‘I’m actually speaking the truth here, this actually happened to me.’ Nineteen was a year of confusion, emotional confusion. I didn’t want to do my uni course, I wanted to do music. I didn\'t want people to laugh at me. I didn\'t want to tell myself out loud and then have it not happen. Internally, I was very sure and certain that it was going to happen, just because I\'m a big believer in manifestation. So 19 was that transition year. Once I\'d settled down and started doing what I loved, I felt a lot more comfortable, and actually, a lot more safe.” **“Break It Off”** “‘Break It Off’ was, I guess, my breakthrough track. It was the first time my name was being chucked around a fair bit. I fell in love with the original \[Adam F’s 1997 single ‘Circles’\] and I just wanted to hear what a top line would sound like on the track. So I found the instrumental, played around with it a little bit, and then sang on top. I think it got 100,000 likes on TikTok when I wasn’t really getting likes in that number before. The lyric is really tongue-in-cheek, and I think a lot of people on TikTok like tongue-in-cheek.”
“I’m not sure how I’m going to feel about people dancing to my own sadness,” David Balfe tells Apple Music. “When I was writing this at first, it was never meant for the public. I pressed 25 copies and gave them to my friends, who this record is about.” *For Those I Love* is about one of the Dublin artist’s friends in particular: his closest friend, collaborator and bandmate, the poet and musician Paul Curran—who died by suicide in February 2018. This extraordinary album is a love letter to that friendship. A self-produced, spoken-word masterpiece set to tenderly curated samples and exhilarating house beats, breaks and synths (“our youth was set to a backdrop of listening to house music in s\*\*t cars, so it made perfect sense to retell those stories with an electronic palette”), it’s also a tribute to working-class communities, art, grief and survival. “Growing up where we did in Dublin, my friends and I learned very young that life is a very fragile and temporary thing,” Balfe says. “We first navigated the world in survival mode, but we soon realized that you have to express love. Because it haunts you as a regret if you don’t. An expression of love could be the difference between somebody’s being here or not being here. For us, that’s where being that vocal about love came from. I hope that’s not rare.” Read on for Balfe’s track-by-track guide to his important, thrilling record. **I Have a Love** “I wrote 75 or 76 songs for this album—this was the 15th, and it was also the first one that actually made it onto the record. It set the tone for how I wanted it all to feel and sound and flow, with the density and the texture that I wanted. The vast majority of samples that made it on had a very weighted significance to myself and my friends—they were very complementary to or important within the singular relationships that I was writing about. Here, the opening piano chords are from Sampha’s \'(No One Knows Me) Like the Piano.\' It’s is a very important song for myself and Paul. It dominated so much of the soundtrack to our intimate moments. I had written the instrumental before Paul had passed away and it was already going to be a track about my relationship with him. I was very lucky that I got to play that instrumental for him before he passed, and I got to share some of the lyrics. They very much had to do with this endless love that we both had. After Paul passed, the weight of the song and the samples themselves took on quite a different life me, and allowed me to reframe how I was writing the lyrics. I revisited \'(No One Knows Me),\' and I revisited \[the song’s other sample\] \'Let Love Flow On\' by Sonya Spence. Despite having this disco heart, I’ve always found that to be a warm safety blanket of a song. A gorgeous reassurance of hope and love against the difficulties of live and tragedy. The main refrain—\'I have a love, and it never fades\' was written long before Paul passed, and I was very lucky to have been able to share with him. I think a lot of people have the impression that it was something I had written in response to his death, but it wasn’t. It was a response to our friendship and 13 years of being inseparable. It’s quite curious and tragic that it held so much more weight in the aftermath. So I rewrote the whole history of that song and the whole history of our life around that refrain afterwards. It’s a strange song for me.” **You Stayed / To Live** “This is a song that’s very much rooted in storytelling. So many of my relationships with my friends involved fields and barren wasteland—hanging out and spending time just being together, discussing and planning our ideas. It was rare to walk into these areas without there being a fire of some kind. I’m still entranced by it—I find even the visual of fire to be very intoxicating. Anyway, most of the record was made in the shed at my ma’s—but this was made up in the box bedroom. It was a Thursday night after training, and I was laying on the bed writing about this time that myself and Paul stole a couch and walked it over the motorway to this field at three in the morning, intending to set it on fire the next day and film it. We woke up the next morning and the couch had already been set on fire. There’s something magic about that field—time does not work in a linear fashion there. As I was writing the song, one of the cars across the road got set on fire—over a debt, I found out. There are so many things about the recording of this album that has made me rethink how I engage with the world in regard to fate, or observations of spirituality. And I get it: everything holds this other significance when you’ve gone through that kind of tragedy, and you read into things as a source of comfort more than anything. And you allow yourself to be enchanted by it. Really, of course, it’s all just chance.” **To Have You** “This is built around ‘Everything I Own’ by Barbara Mason. The start of the track also has this audio clip from when the band I was in with Paul \[Burnt Out\] were filming the video for a track called ‘Dear James,’ and the song continues from there. We wanted to have this atmospheric smoke bellowing out of our bins in the lane behind my house. One of my best mates, Robbie, was like, ‘I can make a smoke bomb out of tin foil and ping pong balls.’ And we did it. For us, it was just this moment of such monumental success. It was like this really traditional, hands-on success of our labor. I wanted to bring a reminder for myself and my friends of the things that we had done together and felt so much collective beauty for. We’re never going to lose that memory now. This is also the only song on the album that includes my harp playing, which has allowed me to not feel guilty about buying a harp in the first place and not following through with learning how to play it. Paul was always like, ‘You’re a f\*\*king lunatic for buying that. But deadly, cool. Go for it.’” **Top Scheme** “The synth patch that I used is something I built years and years ago for a project that I did with one of my best mates, Pamela \[Connolly\], who’s now in a great band called Pillow Queens. We made music together in my ma’s shed for years for a project called Mothers and Fathers, and I wanted to bring a nod to that—it was important to me that I acknowledge so many of the different parts of my shared musical history with my friends for this album. Myself and Paul also had plans to start a separate project called Top Scheme, which was going to involve biting social commentary over some electronic, very aggressive, off-grid punk. We’d started making demos, but kept putting it off to focus on Burnt Out. I wanted to write a spiritual successor to that project and was very conscious where it would fit into the record. The song starts the curve from speaking very much about the love that we all shared together, into capturing about the worlds we grew up in—with this song speaking very specifically about the economic and social inequality that we faced being in a 1990s’ working-class community. It also speaks about the worlds we started to move into—when the geography of your world opens and suddenly you feel that sense of alienation that you once felt as a young child. You might be experiencing an economic disparity or a social divide that you’re unable to bridge. You hear people absolutely dehumanize others and reduce people down to scumbags based on their economic standing or, particularly as this song speaks about, really punishing people verbally for being addicts. Stripping them of their humanity, not caring about the sickness that ails them and seeing them as a plague. Just seeing them as a plague. This song speaks to that anger and disassociation—but there’s also supposed to be a very dark humor across it.” **The Myth / I Don’t** “This is the darkest moment on the record, and it’s the most difficult one to revisit because I am very much walking back into a mental and physical space that I’ve fortunately recovered from. It talks about where I was at before I had access to therapy and medication, then when I did and was trying to justify the exorbitant cost of dealing both those things—trying to value your own health over economic stability. It was very important that the music was sonically intoxicating. It spirals and I tried to make its density change and shift over time—with the shape of each sound morphing slowly and sometimes frantically towards its peak. I wanted it to feel like the same chaos, discomfort, and internal fear I felt during that period, but also capture the same drive toward this one singular end point. It needed to move towards this sonic oblivion at the end, because that’s what I was seeking at that point in my life. It’s also worth noting that for all the darkness that that song does bring, the times where I’ve gotten to perform it have probably been the most giving and actually traditionally cathartic things that I’ve been able to experience.” **The Shape of You** “Some of the samples took months to clear, but the Smokey Robinson one here went through like clockwork, overnight. I don’t know why, I didn’t ask why, I don’t need to know why. It’s a defining moment on the record for me—I listened to ‘The Tracks of My Tears’ when everything was going to s\*\*t and I felt heard in somebody else’s music, and suddenly understood that within my own music I could have somebody speak for me with an elegance that I would never be able to get. The beauty of sampling is being able to be intelligent enough to recognize when the choice to use other people who have walked that ground before is the right one. The lyrics cover me breaking my leg at a Belgian punk festival in 2007 and experiencing this terrifying, very chaotic time—before the relief and beauty and safety I felt when I saw my best friend arrive at the hospital. Everything that could possibly go wrong had gone wrong, but your best mate is there beside you, and you suddenly feel like it’s all going to be OK—and that you might even find some value in the chaos of it all.” **Birthday / The Pain** “One of the important things about this track is the juxtaposition of its make-up. It was quite a methodical choice. I understood that if I was to write about something like a dead body on bricks being found on my street while I was six years old with the sonic palette you would usually anticipate, then it would never have the comfort level for people to engage with that story. It’s a little bit of a cheat in order to allow people to find an entry point into the reality of that kind of world. The song’s built around a sample from ‘She Won’t be Gone Long’ by The Sentiments. It’s a slow dance, that song, and I find it to be quite a comfort to fall into the rhythm of it. The other special part of the song is the inclusion of crowd chanting at the start—from a specific game at Tolka Park, where our \[soccer\] team, Shelbourne FC, play. It was the first match of the season after Paul had passed and we were scattering his ashes that night on the pitch after the game. It was one of those games where you channel everything you have left in your life into those 90 minutes, into that jersey. It was 3-2 Shels in the end, with a 93rd minute penno. It’s all of us and the fans chanting, recorded on my phone. It was important to be able to bring the importance of that audio, that team, those friends and those strangers onto the record.” **You Live / No One Like You** “I think this is the best song, musically. It has all the warmth and texture that I want in a piece of music. I wasn’t trying to write pop anthems here—and that’s nothing against great pop anthems at all—because you can get so much into the weeds, the maths and the make-up of a song that way. But really it’s my favorite because it’s a song where I get to most clearly speak about my greatest love: my friends, and the survival that we’ve had together. It’s the song I get to most directly speak about them by name and channel years and years of friendship into this one moment. It’s therefore the song that gives me the most hope. And it gave me the most hope when I recorded it, too. It’s a lot easier to feel affected by something when you observe it than when you live it, I think, and to see my friends so emotionally invested and elated when they see and hear themselves immortalized, that’s where the value lies for me. It’s also nice to be able to revisit and revel in so many of monoliths of Irish culture—stemming back to people like John B. Keane and Brendan Behan. The song is very much a place of warmth, where I can go to remember what’s good, what’s left and what I value still.” **Leave Me Not Love** “I felt it was important to me to be able to close the book on this record and bring the listener back around to its inception. To really focus on that eternal return to the same, coming back to the original notes and scale that open the album. Where this track moves in quite a different direction to the others is at the end. It’s perhaps the only time where I unapologetically express something without hope. I turn back to the reality that I lived at the time, which was something explicitly void of hope and embedded in pain. I felt it would have been disingenuous of me not to bring the album back to the really graphic darkness that’s still there. I think I’m responsible enough to offer pockets and avenues that I have found to escape it, while stripping away any pretense and present the reality of that grief. What follows is ‘Cryin’ Like a Baby’ by Jackson C. Frank, which is a song that was very important to Paul and I, and speaks very directly, with a finesse I couldn’t have found by myself, to the days directly after Paul’s passing. It was the only way to end the record.”
“Sometimes I’ll be in my own space, my own company, and that’s when I\'m really content,” Little Simz tells Apple Music. “It\'s all love, though. There’s nothing against anyone else; that\'s just how I am. I like doing my own thing and making my art.” The lockdowns of 2020, then, proved fruitful for the North London MC, singer, and actor. She wrestled writer’s block, revived her cult *Drop* EP series (explore the razor-sharp and diaristic *Drop 6* immediately), and laid grand plans for her fourth studio album. Songwriter/producer Inflo, co-architect of Simz’s 2019 Mercury-nominated, Ivor Novello Award-winning *GREY Area*, was tapped and the hard work began. “It was straight boot camp,” she says of the *Sometimes I Might Be Introvert* sessions in London and Los Angeles. “We got things done pronto, especially with the pace that me and Flo move at. We’re quite impulsive: When we\'re ready to go, it’s time to go.” Months of final touches followed—and a collision between rap and TV royalty. An interest in *The Crown* led Simz to approach Emma Corrin (who gave an award-winning portrayal of Princess Diana in the drama). She uses her Diana accent to offer breathless, regal addresses that punctuate the 19-track album. “It was a reach,” Simz says of inviting Corrin’s participation. “I’m not sure what I expected, but I enjoyed watching her performance, and wrote most of her words whilst I was watching her.” Corrin’s speeches add to the record’s sense of grandeur. It pairs turbocharged UK rap with Simz at her most vulnerable and ambitious. There are meditations on coming of age in the spotlight (“Standing Ovation”), a reunion with fellow Sault collaborator Cleo Sol on the glorious “Woman,” and, in “Point and Kill,” a cleansing, polyrhythmic jam session with Nigerian artist Obongjayar that confirms the record’s dazzling sonic palette. Here, Simz talks us through *Sometimes I Might Be Introvert*, track by track. **“Introvert”** “This was always going to intro the album from the moment it was made. It feels like a battle cry, a rebirth. And with the title, you wouldn\'t expect this to sound so huge. But I’m finding the power within my introversion to breathe new meaning into the word.” **“Woman” (feat. Cleo Sol)** “This was made to uplift and celebrate women. To my peers, my family, my friends, close women in my life, as well as women all over the world: I want them to know I’ve got their back. Linking up with Cleo is always fun; we have such great musical chemistry, and I can’t imagine anyone else bringing what she did to the song. Her voice is beautiful, but I think it\'s her spirit and her intention that comes through when she sings.” **“Two Worlds Apart”** “Firstly, I love this sample; it’s ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy’ by Smokey Robinson, and Flo’s chopped it up really cool. This is my moment to flex. You had the opener, followed by a nice, smoother vibe, but this is like, ‘Hey, you’re listening to a *rap* album.’” **“I Love You, I Hate You”** “This wasn’t the easiest song for me to write, but I\'m super proud that I did. It’s an opportunity for me to lay bare my feelings on how that \[family\] situation affected me, growing up. And where I\'m at now—at peace with it and moving on.” **“Little Q, Pt. 1 (Interlude)”** “Little Q is my cousin, Qudus, on my dad\'s side. We grew up together, but then there was a stage where we didn\'t really talk for some years. No bad blood, just doing different things, so when we reconnected, we had a real heart-to-heart—and I heard about all he’d been through. It made me feel like, ‘Damn, this is a blood relative, and he almost lost his life.’ I thank God he didn’t, but I thought of others like him. And I felt it was important that his story was heard and shared. So, I’m speaking from his perspective.” **“Little Q, Pt. 2”** “I grew up in North London and \[Little Q\] was raised in South, and as much as we both grew up in endz, his experience was obviously different to mine. Being a product of an environment or system that isn\'t really for you, it’s tough trying to navigate that.” **“Gems (Interlude)”** “This is another turning point, reminding myself to take time: ‘Breathe…you\'re human. Give what you can give, but don\'t burn out for anyone. Put yourself first.’ Just little gems that everyone needs to hear once in a while.” **“Speed”** “This track sends another reminder: ‘This game is a marathon, not a sprint. So pace yourself!’ I know where I\'m headed, and I\'m taking my time, with little breaks here and there. Now I know when to really hit the gas and also when to come off a bit.” **“Standing Ovation”** “I take some time to reflect here, like, ‘Wow, you\'re still here and still going. It’s been a slow burn, but you can afford to give yourself a pat on the back.’ But as well as being in the limelight, let\'s also acknowledge the people on the ground doing real amazing work: our key workers, our healers, teachers, cleaners. If you go to a toilet and it\'s dirty, people go in from 9 to 5 and make sure that shit is spotless for you, so let\'s also say thank you.” **“I See You”** “This is a really beautiful and poetic song on love. Sometimes as artists we tend to draw from traumatic times for great art, we’re hurt or in pain, but it was nice for me to be able to draw from a place of real joy in my life for this song. Even where it sits \[on the album\]: right in the center, the heart.” **“The Rapper That Came to Tea (Interlude)”** “This title is a play on \[Judith Kerr’s\] children\'s book *The Tiger Who Came to Tea*, and this is about me better understanding my introversion. I’m just posing questions to myself—I might not necessarily have answers for them, I think it\'s good to throw them out there and get the brain working a bit.” **“Rollin Stone”** “This cut reminds me somewhat of ’09 Simz, spitting with rapidness and being witty. And I’m also finding new ways to use my voice on the second half here, letting my evil twin have her time.” **“Protect My Energy”** “This is one of the songs I\'m really looking forward to performing live. It’s a stepper, and it got me really wanting to sing, to be honest. I very much enjoy being around good company, but these days I enjoy my personal space and I want to protect that.” **“Never Make Promises (Interlude)”** “This one is self-explanatory—nothing is promised at all. It’s a short intermission to lead to the next one, but at one point it was nearly the album intro.” **“Point and Kill” (feat. Obongjayar)** “This is a big vibe! It feels very much like Nigeria to me, and Obongjayar is one of my favorites at the moment. We recorded this in my living room on a whim—and I\'m very, very grateful that he graced this song. The title comes from a phrase used in Nigeria to pick out fish at the market, or a store. You point, they kill. But also metaphorically, whatever I want, I\'m going to get in the same way, essentially.” **“Fear No Man”** “This track continues the same vibe, even more so. It declares: ‘I\'m here. I\'m unapologetically me and I fear no one here. I\'m not shook of anyone in this rap game.’” **“The Garden (Interlude)”** “This track is just amazing musically. It’s about nurturing the seeds you plant. Nurture those relationships, and everything around you that\'s holding you down.” **“How Did You Get Here”** “I want everyone to know *how* I got here; from the jump, school days, to my rap group, Space Age. We were just figuring it out, being persistent. I cried whilst recording this song; it all hit me, like, ‘I\'m actually recording my fourth album.’ Sometimes I sit and I wonder if this is all really true.” **“Miss Understood”** “This is the perfect closer. I could have ended on the last track, easily, but, I don\'t know, it\'s kind of like doing 99 reps. You\'ve done 99, that\'s amazing, but you can do one more to just make it 100, you can. And for me it was like, ‘I\'m going to get this one in there.’”
In spring 2020, Sam Fender had nowhere to go. When the first lockdown descended, an existing health condition required him to isolate and shield inside his home for three months. It was a frustrating turn for a BRIT Award-winning singer-songwriter who’d drawn inspiration for his debut album, 2019’s *Hypersonic Missiles*, from lives and conversations around him in his home of North Shields on England’s northeast coast. When you can’t go out, you eventually look in, and Fender’s songwriting began to dig through memories of his childhood, analyzing his internal wiring and reflecting on behaviors and insecurities that troubled him. “Writing was therapy before I got therapy,” he tells Apple Music. “That was always my starting point. A lot of things that you pass off as insignificant parts of your life end up becoming very significant parts of your character. Therapy gave me the tools to articulate what was going on in my life as a kid and to understand how that has affected me and why I am the way I am in certain situations.” Fender has too much empathy for *Seventeen Going Under* to be entirely introspective, though. The pandemic also exposed the struggles and poverty faced in towns such as North Shields, and his ire at the government’s handling of COVID and Brexit—as well as his dismay at an opposition party that seemed to have abandoned working-class communities—burns through “Aye” and “Long Way Off.” Forthright in message and poetic in delivery, his words are set to a sound that continues to explore Americana and indie rock, funneling everything through big-hearted choruses. “I feel like it is a celebratory record,” he says. “It’s a triumph over adversity. Celebrate the loves and friendships that you have over the journey of your life and celebrate those who aren’t here anymore.” Read on as he talks us through all of the album’s tracks. **“Seventeen Going Under”** “It’s completely autobiographical. When I was 17, my mother was being hounded by the DWP \[Department for Work and Pensions\]. She had fibromyalgia and she was suffering from other ailments and mental health issues. But she got sent to court three times to prove that she wasn’t fit to work. This is a woman who’s worked for 40 years of her life as a nurse. She’s not a liar and she’s not a benefit cheat. She was a hard-working, fantastic, empathetic, incredible woman. And they dragged her through the mud and made her ill. I saw how the government was treating good, honest working-class people who have fallen on their back. They ripped apart every safety net for people in that position. I was old enough to understand what was going on, but I wasn’t old enough to be able to do anything about it.” **“Getting Started”** “I had my outside life as a kid, and then I’d go back home and see my mother in turmoil. ‘Getting Started’ is about a conversation between us, me going like, ‘This is shit, but I need to just be a kid, to go out and live my life. I’ve just turned 18. I want to go out to the pub, to see my mates.’ I needed my escapism. These stories, they’re mine, but that frustration with the DWP—how you’re trapped as a person who’s fallen on a hard time by your government—is a unanimous story for so many millions of people in this country.” **“Aye”** “On the first album, I talked about politics as if I knew what I was talking about, but I realized I don’t. This record, I’m like, ‘I don’t know what I’m talking about, but I fucking hate those bastards over there who’ve got the hedge funds—whose taxes I’m paying, who come after my mum, who come after the disabled, who come after all of these people, plunging them into poverty and plunging kids out onto the streets. Yet they’re getting away with that tax-dodging.’” **“Get You Down”** “It’s about insecurities, how jealousy and feelings of emasculation and low self-worth can really, really destroy a relationship—and had done with my relationships. The worst thing about it was I could see the way I was acting, and I knew why, but I couldn’t stop it. That’s why I started doing therapy. I was coming back home after being started on by a bunch of lads but not doing anything about it because I was on my own. So I’d punch walls and stuff. I used to do that all the time in my early twenties. It’s toxic behavior. You can’t do that. I’m on a path of self-discovery and trying to heal a lot of that.” **“Long Way Off”** “This is about political polarity and how the working classes feel, or how I felt, abandoned by a lot of the left wing. There’s a sect of snooty liberalism in the media world that completely alienates working-class people. Blyth Valley \[a constituency a few miles from North Shields\] went Tory \[in the 2019 general election\]; it’s been a Labour seat since its inception. That’s not good, but we’re in a dangerous, dangerous place, politically. It was the arrogance and incompetence of politicians thinking that they could sail through \[Brexit\]. They’ve fucked the country completely. There should be trials—for the lies, for the deception of a nation. My family members who voted for it voted for it because they thought that they were going to get money for the NHS. They’d seen their mothers pass away in the arms of people who worked for the NHS. They’d seen their family members on wards suffering. And they thought, ‘I’m going to vote for that.’ **“Spit of You”** “It’s about my dad. It’s about our inability to communicate about emotions because of the way we were raised. Our inability to have an argument without wanting to kill each other. It’s toxic masculinity at its finest. But it’s also about how much I love him, how I saw him as a son. My grandmother was a really small woman, and when she was dying, she looked like a child. He kissed her. I was reminded that I’m going to be that person one day—saying goodbye to him, potentially with another young kid behind me looking at me thinking the same thing.” **“Last to Make It Home”** “At the beginning, I’m talking to the Virgin Mary, a Mary pendant. I’m realizing I need to get ahold of myself. In the second half, Mary becomes personified. She becomes just some girl on Instagram. It’s that like desperate, horrible shit line of ‘Hit the ‘like’/In the hopes I’d coax you out of my derelict fantasy.’ In the hopes that I’d be noticed. It’s really an anthem for losers—because we’ve all been a loser once. I’ve been a loser hundreds of times.” **“The Leveller”** “This is about depression and rising out of it. It’s a fighting song. But the leveler is the lockdown itself. It leveled everything.” **“Mantra”** “You find yourself in the company of sociopaths in this business. And you sometimes worry that maybe that means you are too. And I don’t think I’m a sociopath. Got too much empathy for that one. I think I’m a vulnerable narcissist at worst. This song’s about figuring out that you can’t pay so much attention to these people who genuinely don’t care about you and they’re only there to bolster themselves. I’ve had low self-esteem for a long time. I’ve always tried to seek validation from people that aren’t actually that nice.\" **“Paradigms”** “It’s a roundup of all of the things that I’ve thought about in the album. So it’s a self-esteem rock song. People shouldn’t live miserably, they shouldn’t have to. I lost another friend to suicide last year. And I got all of my friends from home, some of them who knew him as well, to sing that last line, ‘No one should feel like this.’ It’s a choir of people from Shields. I think it’s a really powerful moment.” **“The Dying Light”** “This is a sequel to ‘Dead Boys’ \[2018 track examining male suicide\]. It’s in the perspective of somebody who’s actually thinking that they might take their own life. I wanted it to be the triumph over it—in the moment when you decide, ‘No, I’m not going to do this, or I can’t leave those behind.’”
“Everything I make comes from the ethos of wanting to move the body, the mind, and the soul,” composer and trumpeter Emma-Jean Thackray tells Apple Music. “It’s music with a message, something to make us realize our common humanity, as opposed to focusing on our differences.” It is a musical mantra that perfectly reflects the Yorkshire-born musician’s open-ended approach to her craft. Having started out playing in local brass bands, the chance discovery of a Miles Davis version of a trumpet concerto sent Thackray crate-digging for jazz and ultimately to London to study jazz composition. Here, Thackray made a name for herself within the city’s burgeoning jazz scene, collaborating with the likes of pianist Elliot Galvin and drummer Dougal Taylor—but also acted as a creative resident with the London Symphony Orchestra and featured on work by UK post-punk band Squid and with MC Pinty. Her debut album on her own imprint Movementt is just as varied and creatively searching. “I was getting pissed off that I was only being called a trumpeter, when I am actually so much more than that—so I decided to make this record a showcase of all the creative facets of me,” she says. The resulting 14 tracks, *Yellow*, are produced by Thackray and feature her own vocals front and centre, singing about everything from psychedelic experiences on the ’70s jazz-funk of “Say Something” to Vedic mythology on the Afrobeat-inflected “Rahu & Ketu.” “*Yellow* is giving people the space to be moved, in whichever way they want,” Thackray says. Read on for her in-depth thoughts on the album, track by track. **“Mercury”** “This was the first track I wrote for the album—the bassline and melody just popped into my head fully formed after a meditation and the sound world was there. I love how McCoy Tyner voices melodies on the piano, and that was a reference I gave for how my keys player Lyle Barton could approach the Rhodes on this track. Mercury is the planet of communication, and I have a poem at the end of the song showing how we can build love through it, by talking and listening to each other.” **“Say Something”** “This follows on thematically from ‘Mercury’ as it’s about getting someone to speak their mind, rather than saying what they think they should say or saying nothing at all. There is a tight, housey beginning which should feel a little restricting and then it opens up into a bridge with a huge soundscape, like someone opening up their mind and finding their voice.” **“About That”** “I had this idea for a drum groove that I got Dougal to play and then I sampled and looped it to layer everything else on top at home. Usually I have the whole song worked out in my head before I begin, but for this it developed naturally, from the bass drum resonances to the bassline—it all has an electric Miles Davis, *Bitches Brew* feel to it.” **“Venus”** “Venus is the planet of love and passion, and I wanted to emulate that in this song, to get the listeners into a trancelike state. The music is in a measure of five but there is a 4/4 feeling going through it, and where these different time signatures intersect is where the trance happens—it is a sacred combination. There is also chanting in the song, calling out to love ourselves, which can be a really hard journey to go on in a world that sometimes feels set up to tell you not to.” **“Green Funk”** “A German promoter once brought my band some weed before a show and he called it ‘green funk,’ and from that moment, we just started calling it that too. I’m a big fan of P-Funk, and I wanted this to sound like my love for that music, rather than a copy of P-Funk itself—so it’s packed with playful vocals and horn stabs.” **“Third Eye”** “Charles Stepney from Rotary Connection is a massive hero of mine, and this track builds a sound world that is something of an homage to him. I’m really proud of this one, as it’s a bit of fun essentially playing around with two chords and encouraging people to use their intuition in the lyrics, to engage with that ‘third eye.’” **“May There Be Peace”** “This is an adaptation of a prayer that Alice Coltrane had recorded, and the tune plays as a dedication to her and her use of sound as a religious practice and spiritual connection. I have a few sizes and pitches of medicine bowls which feature on the song, and it all acts as a palate cleanser. We’re halfway through the record and this is a break to say you’re safe—you haven’t lost your mind!” **“Sun”** “This tune plays as if jazz met house, which is how I told my drummer Dougal to approach the groove. It also has an outro at the end, which is a nod to the outros I really love in hip-hop—these skits and short stories which come after something heavy in the song itself. That section just came from a jam in the studio that we played to shake off some nervous energy.” **“Golden Green”** \"This is about as close to a love song as I can get—if you listen to the lyrics, they’re about my partner, since he really does smell like biscuits and weed and cocoa butter! Musically, I wanted to create a mixture between an LA hip-hop feel and a 1970s spacious synth sound.” **“Spectre”** “‘Spectre’ is about dealing with mental health problems in yourself and in your loved ones—it can often feel like this spectral presence following you around. It was one of the first things I wrote for the album, since the image of someone feeling like a photocopy of themselves when they are in a bad period was so clear in my mind. Hearing it out loud in the studio was very cathartic, and there are bells at the end to cleanse the energy and to drive away any negative spirits.” **“Rahu & Ketu”** “This is based on a Vedic myth of this immortal being who is split into two after betraying the god Shiva and then these two parts are forced to live as opposites, like the head and the tail or the sun and moon. I love this duality of opposition and balance; it reminds me of the Taoist ideals I was brought up with. Musically, there is a representation of balance with this cyclical feel we create by not marking out the downbeat.” **“Yellow”** “This is another homage to the spiritual works of Alice Coltrane. I wanted to capture the spirit of an ashram, where people have shed all outside life and are focusing on truth, which is what I’ve tried to do in this record too. I use yellow to embody positivity and gratitude in my meditation, and the lyrics are the simplest way I can express the need for sharing love and providing oneness with each other.” **“Our People”** “The lyrics explain everything in this song. I’m singing that I want everyone to love each other and realize that we all come from the same stuff but that we’re also not all the same. Backgrounds and cultures give us a unique story, which we need to be respectful of. There’s a cosmic, jazz-funk vibe to the music, inspired by Stanton Davis.” **“Mercury (In Retrograde)”** “We recorded this straight after ‘Mercury’ in the studio, and it is a cosmic reference to bookend the record. It is musically retrograded, since the bassline and chord sequence is backwards and the voices are backwards, which sounds like ‘here we come,’ and I really love that. It feels like a new beginning in an ending.”
“It wasn\'t forced, it wasn\'t pressured, it wasn\'t scary,” Billie Eilish tells Apple Music of making *Happier Than Ever*. “It was nice.” Once again written and recorded entirely with her brother FINNEAS, Eilish’s second LP finds the 19-year-old singer-songwriter in a deeply reflective state, using the first year of the pandemic to process the many ways her life has changed and she’s evolved since so quickly becoming one of the world’s most famous and influential teenagers. “I feel like everything I\'ve created before this, as much as I love it, was kind of a battle with myself,” she says. “I\'ve actually talked to artists that are now going through the rise and what I\'ve said to them is, ‘I know what it\'s like, but I also don\'t know what it\'s like for you.’ Because everybody goes through something completely different.” A noticeable departure from the genre-averse, slightly sinister edge of 2019’s *WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?*, much of the production and arrangements here feel open and airy by comparison, inspired in large part by the placid mid-century pop and jazz of torch singer Julie London. And whether she’s sharing new perspective on age (“Getting Older”), sensuality (“Oxytocin”), or the absurdity of fame (“NDA”), there’s a sense of genuine freedom—if not peace—in Eilish’s singing, her voice able to change shape and size as she sees fit, an instrument under her control and no one else\'s. “I started to feel like a parody of myself, which is super weird,” she says. “I just tried to listen to myself and figure out what I actually liked versus what I thought I would have liked in the past. I had to really evaluate myself and be like, \'What the hell do I want with myself right now?\'” It’s a sign of growth, most striking in the clear skies of “my future” and the emotional clarity of the album’s towering title cut, which starts as a gentle ballad and blossoms, quite naturally and unexpectedly, into a growing wave of distorted guitars and distant screams. Both sound like breakthroughs. “There was no thought of, ‘What\'s this going to be? What track is this?’” she says of the writing process. “We just started writing and we kept writing. Over time, it just literally created itself. It just happened. It was easy.”
If Olivia Rodrigo has a superpower, it’s that, at 18, she already understands that adolescence spares no one. The heartbreak, the humiliation, the vertiginous weight of every lonesome thought and outsized feeling—none of that really leaves us, and exploring it honestly almost always makes for good pop songs. “I grew up listening to country music,” the California-born singer-songwriter (also an experienced actor and current star of Disney+’s *High School Musical: The Musical: The Series*) tells Apple Music. “And I think it’s so impactful and emotional because of how specific it is, how it really paints pictures of scenarios. I feel like a song is so much more special when you can visualize and picture it, even smell and taste all of the stuff that the songwriter\'s going through.” To listen to Rodrigo’s debut full-length is to know—on a very deep and almost uncomfortably familiar level—exactly what she was going through when she wrote it at 17. Anchored by the now-ubiquitous breakup ballad ‘drivers license’—an often harrowing, closely studied lead single that already felt like a lock for song-of-the-year honors the second it arrived in January 2021—*SOUR* combines the personal and universal to often devastating effect, folding diary-like candor and autobiographical detail into performances that recall the millennial pop of Taylor Swift (“favorite crime”) just as readily as the ’90s alt-rock of Elastica (“brutal”) and Alanis Morissette (“good 4 u”). It has the sound and feel of an instant classic, a *Jagged Little Pill* for Gen Z. “All the feelings that I was feeling were so intense,” Rodrigo says. “I called the record *SOUR* because it was this really sour period of my life—I remember being so sad, and so insecure, and so angry. I felt all those things, and they\'re still very real, but I\'m definitely not going through that as acutely as I used to. It’s nice to go back and see what I was feeling, and be like, ‘It all turned out all right. You\'re okay now.’” A little older and a lot wiser, Rodrigo shares the wisdom she learned channeling all of that into one of the most memorable debut albums in ages. **Let Your Mind Wander** “I took an AP psychology class in high school my junior year, and they said that you\'re the most creative when you\'re doing some type of menial task, because half of your brain is occupied with something and the other half is just left to roam. I find that I come up with really good ideas when I\'m driving for that same reason. I actually wrote the first verse and some of the chorus of **‘enough for you’** going on a walk around my neighborhood; I got the idea for **‘good 4 u’** in the shower. I think taking time to be out of the studio and to live your life is as productive—if not more—than just sitting in a room with your guitar trying to write songs. While making *SOUR*, there was maybe three weeks where I spent like six, seven days a week of 13 hours in the studio. I actually remember feeling so creatively dry, and the songs I was making weren\'t very good. I think that\'s a true testament to how productive rest can be. There\'s only so much you can write about when you\'re in the studio all day, just listening to your own stuff.” **Trust Your Instincts** “Before I met my collaborator, producer—and cowriter in many instances—Dan Nigro, I would just write songs in my bedroom, completely by myself. So it was a little bit of a learning curve, figuring out how to collaborate with other people and stick up for your ideas and be open to other people\'s. Sometimes it takes you a little while to gain the confidence to really remember that your gut feelings are super valid and what makes you a special musician. I struggled for a while with writing upbeat songs just because I thought in my head that I should write about happiness or love if I wanted to write a song that people could dance to. And **‘brutal’** is actually one of my favorite songs on *SOUR*, but it almost didn\'t make it on the record. Everyone was like, ‘You make it the first \[track\], people might turn it off as soon as they hear it.’ I think it\'s a great introduction to the world of *SOUR*.” **It Doesn’t Have to Be Perfect** “I wrote this album when I was 17. There\'s sort of this feeling that goes along with putting out a record when you\'re that age, like, ‘Oh my god, this is not the best work that I\'ll ever be able to do. I could do better.’ So it was really important for me to learn that this album is a slice of my life and it doesn\'t have to be the best work that I\'ll ever do. Maybe my next record will be better, and maybe I\'ll grow. It\'s nice, I think, for listeners to go on that journey with songwriters and watch them refine their songwriting. It doesn\'t have to be perfect now—it’s the best that I can do when I\'m 17 years old, and that\'s enough and that\'s cool in its own right.” **Love What You Do** “I learned that I liked making songs a lot more than I like putting out songs, and that love of songwriting stayed the same for me throughout. I learned how to nurture it, instead of the, like, ‘Oh, I want to get a Top 40 hit!’-type thing. Honestly, when ‘drivers license’ came out, I was sort of worried that it was going to be the opposite and I was going to write all of my songs from the perspective of wanting it to chart. But I really just love writing songs, and I think that\'s a really cool position to be in.” **Find Your People** “I feel like the purpose of ‘yes’ people in your life is to make you feel secure. But whenever I\'m around people who think that everything I do is incredible, I feel so insecure for some reason; I think that everything is bad and they\'re just lying to me the whole time. So it\'s really awesome to have somebody who I really trust with me in the studio. That\'s Dan. He’ll tell me, ‘This is an amazing song. Let\'s do it.’ But I\'ll also play him a song that I really like and he’ll say, ‘You know what, I don\'t think this is your best song. I think you can write a better one.’ There\'s something so empowering and something so cool about that, about surrounding yourself with people who care enough about you to tell you when you can do better. Being a songwriter is sort of strange in that I feel like I\'ve written songs and said things, told people secrets through my songs that I don\'t even tell some people that I hang out with all the time. It\'s a sort of really super mega vulnerable thing to do. But then again, it\'s the people around me who really love me and care for me who gave me the confidence to sort of do that and show who I really am.” **You Really Never Know** “To me, ‘drivers license’ was never one of those songs that I would think: ‘It\'s a hit song.’ It\'s just a little slice of my heart, this really sad song. It was really cool for me to see evidence of how authenticity and vulnerability really connect with people. And everyone always says that, but you really never know. So many grown men will come up to me and be like, ‘Yo, I\'m happily married with three kids, but that song brought me back to my high school breakup.’ Which is so cool, to be able to affect not only people who are going through the same thing as you, but to bring them back to a time where they were going through the same thing as you are. That\'s just surreal, a songwriter\'s dream.”
Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak were already hard at work on what would become *An Evening With Silk Sonic* when the pandemic shut down live music in early 2020, but they weren’t going to let that stop them from delivering a concert experience to their fans. “All of a sudden, my shows get canceled, Andy\'s shows get canceled,” Mars told Ebro Darden during their R&B Now interview. “This fear of ‘we’ll never be able to play live again’ comes into play. And to take that away from guys like us, that\'s all we know. So we\'re thinking, all right, let\'s put an album together that sounds like a show.” It began with the project’s lead single, “Leave the Door Open,” a syrupy-sweet piece of retro soul that Mars considers something of a backbone for the project. After its completion, he and .Paak began building out the nine songs of *An Evening With Silk Sonic*, soliciting help, in the few instances where they needed it, from friends like Bootsy Collins, Thundercat, and even Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds. Their access to HOF-worthy firepower notwithstanding, the pair always understood that their own combined musicality was the real draw. “We just wanted it to feel special,” Mars says. “Instead of trying to get too cute with the concept, it\'s like, what\'s more special than Anderson .Paak behind a drum set singing a song and me having his back when it\'s my turn, you know? And the band moving in the same direction? It was just like a musician\'s dream.” Below, the pair talk through some of the tracks that make *An Evening With Silk Sonic* an experience fans won’t soon forget. **“Leave the Door Open”** Bruno Mars: “Me and Andy come from the school of performing and playing live instruments. We wrote ‘Leave the Door Open’ and it was just one of those songs like, dang, I can’t believe we a part of this, and we don\'t know what it\'s gonna do, we don\'t care that it\'s a ballad or a whatever you wanna call it—to us, this just feels right and it\'s important. So no matter what, if it hit No. 1 or it didn\'t, me and Andy both know that that was the best we could do. And we were cool with that.” **“Fly as Me”** Anderson .Paak: “‘Fly as Me’ is a joint hook \[Mars\] had for a minute. He was trying to figure out some verses for it, trying to figure out the groove, and we spent some time on that.” Mars: “Andy goes behind the drum set one day and says, ‘The groove gotta be like this,’ and starts playing his groove. D’Mile is on the bass, I\'m on the guitar. After all the grooves we tried, I don\'t know what it is, there\'s something about someone in the studio, someone that you trust, saying, \'It\'s gotta be like this.’ And the groove you hear him playing, which is not an easy groove to play, was what he showed me and D. And we just followed suit.” **“After Last Night” (with Thundercat & Bootsy Collins)** Mars: “That one got a lot of Bootsy on it. And my boy Thundercat came in and blessed us. It’s just one of them songs—everything was built to be played live, so that song is one of those we can keep going for 10 minutes.” **“Smokin Out the Window”** Mars: “‘Smokin Out the Window’ was an idea we started four or five years ago on tour. It didn\'t sound nothing like how it does now, but we just had the idea. On \[.Paak’s\] birthday, I called him over. He was hysterical that night. After every take he was like, \'I\'m the king of R&B! I’m the best! Tell me I’m not the hottest in the game!\' We were going back and forth with the lines and who can make who laugh, and we end up finishing that song and he was like, \'I’m out, what we doing tomorrow?\'” **“Put On a Smile”** Mars: “I had a song that I played for Andy and I said, ‘What do you think about this?’ and he said, ‘It sucks.’ I start singing it again and he gets behind the drums and that\'s when the magic happens. So we come up with this hook and these chords and that\'s when we start cooking, when everything starts moving in the studio. The song\'s starting to sound real good now. I don’t wanna mess it up, so I call Babyface. I only call Face to know if I got something good, you know, ’cause he’ll tell me too, \'This is wack.\' For all of us to finish that record together, that was one of my favorite experiences on this album.” **“Skate”** Mars: “It\'s hard to be mad on some rollerskates. So really, that\'s kinda the essence of this album: If me and Andy were to host a party, what would that feel like? Summertime. Outside. Set up the congas and the drums and amplifiers, and what would that sound like? And this is what our best effort was: \'Skate.\'”
Slow builds, skyscraping climaxes, deep melancholy tempered by European grandeur: You pretty much know what you’re getting when you come to a Mogwai album, but rarely have they given it up with such ease as they do on *As the Love Continues*, their 10th LP. For a band whose central theme has remained almost industrially consistent, they’ve built up plenty of variations on it: the sparkling, New Agey electronics of “Dry Fantasy,” the classic indie rock sound of “Ceiling Granny” and “Ritchie Sacramento,” the ’80s dance rhythms of “Supposedly, We Were Nightmares.” Even when they reach for their signature build-and-release (“Midnight Flit”), you get the sense of a band not just marching toward an inevitable climax but relishing in texture, nuance, and note-to-note intricacies that make that climax feel fresh again. And while they’ve always been beautiful, they’ve also seemed to treat that beauty as an intellectual liability, something to be undermined in the name of staying sharp.
There\'s power in reclamation, and Jazmine Sullivan leans into every bit of it on *Heaux Tales*. The project, her fourth overall and first in six years, takes the content and casual candor of a group chat and unpacks them across songs and narrative, laying waste to the patriarchal good girl/bad girl dichotomy in the process. It\'s as much about “hoes” as it is the people who both benefit from and are harmed by the notion. Pleasure takes center stage from the very beginning; “Bodies” captures the inner monologue of the moments immediately after a drunken hookup with—well, does it really matter? The who is irrelevant to the why, as Sullivan searches her mirror for accountability. “I keep on piling on bodies on bodies on bodies, yeah, you getting sloppy, girl, I gotta stop getting fucked up.” The theme reemerges throughout, each time towards a different end, as short spoken interludes thread it all together. “Put It Down” offers praise for the men who only seem to be worthy of it in the bedroom (because who among us hasn\'t indulged in or even enabled the carnal delights of those who offer little else beyond?), while “On It,” a pearl-clutching duet with Ari Lennox, unfolds like a three-minute sext sung by two absolute vocal powerhouses. Later, she cleverly inverts the sentiment but maintains the artistic dynamism on a duet with H.E.R., replacing the sexual confidence with a missive about how “it ain\'t right how these hoes be winning.” The singing is breathtaking—textbooks could be filled on the way Sullivan brings emotionality into the tone and texture of voice, as on the devastating lead single “Lost One”—but it\'d be erroneous to ignore the lyrics and what these intra- and interpersonal dialogues expose. *Heaux Tales* not only highlights the multitudes of many women, it suggests the multitudes that can exist within a single woman, how virtue and vulnerability thrive next to ravenous desire and indomitability. It stands up as a portrait of a woman, painted by the brushes of several, who is, at the end of it all, simply doing the best she can—trying to love and protect herself despite a world that would prefer she do neither.
When IDLES released their third album, *Ultra Mono*, in September 2020, singer Joe Talbot told Apple Music that it was focused on being present and, he said, “accepting who you are in that moment.” On the Bristol band’s fourth record, which arrived 14 months later, that perspective turns sharply back to the past as Talbot examines his struggles with addiction. “I started therapy and it was the first time I really started to compartmentalize the last 20 years, starting with my mum’s alcoholism and then learning to take accountability for what I’d done, all the bad decisions I’d made,” he tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “But also where these bad decisions came from—as a forgiveness thing but way more as a responsibility thing. Two years sober, all that stuff, and I came out and it was just fluid, we \[Talbot and guitarist Mark Bowen\] both just wrote it and it was beautiful.” Talbot is unshrinkingly honest in his self-examination. Opener “MTT 420 RR” considers mortality via visceral reflections on a driving incident that the singer was fortunate to escape alive, before his experiences with the consuming cycle of addiction cut through the pneumatic riffs of “The Wheel.” There’s hope here, too. During soul-powered centerpiece “The Beachland Ballroom,” Talbot is as impassioned as ever and newly melodic (“It was a conversation we had, I wanted to start singing”). It’s a song where he’s on his knees but he can discern some light. “The plurality of it is that perspective of *CRAWLER*, the title,” he says. “Recovery isn’t just a beautiful thing, you have to go through a lot of processes that are ugly and you’ve got to look at yourself and go, ‘Yeah, you were not a good person to these people, you did this.’ That’s where the beauty comes from—afterwards you have a wider perspective of where you are. And also from other people’s perspectives, you see these things, you see people recovering or completely enthralled in addiction, and it’s all different angles. We wanted to create a picture of recovery and hope but from ugly and beautiful angles. You’re on your knees, some people are begging, some people are working, praying, whatever it is—you’ve got to get through it.” *CRAWLER* may be IDLES’ most introspective work to date, but their social and political focus remains sharp enough on the tightly coiled “The New Sensation” to skewer Conservative MP Rishi Sunak’s suggestion that some people, including artists and musicians, should abandon their careers and retrain in a post-pandemic world. With its rage and wit, its bleakness and hope, and its diversions from the band’s post-punk foundations into ominous electronica (“MTT 420 RR”), glitchy psych textures (“Progress”), and motorik rhythms butting up against free jazz (“Meds”), *CRAWLER* upholds Talbot’s earliest aims for the band. In 2009, he resolved to create something with substance and impact—an antidote to the bands he’d watched in Bristol and London. “They looked beautiful but bored,” he says. “They were clothes hangers, models. I was so sick of paying money to see bored people. Like, ‘What are you doing? Where’s the love?’ I was at a place where I needed an outlet, and luckily I found four brothers who saved my life. And the rest is IDLES.”
“Straight away,” Dry Cleaning drummer Nick Buxton tells Apple Music. “Immediately. Within the first sentence, literally.” That is precisely how long it took for Buxton and the rest of his London post-punk outfit to realize that Florence Shaw should be their frontwoman, as she joined in with them during a casual Sunday night jam in 2018, reading aloud into the mic instead of singing. Though Buxton, guitarist Tom Dowse, and bassist Lewis Maynard had been playing together in various forms for years, Shaw—a friend and colleague who’s also a visual artist and university lecturer—had no musical background or experience. No matter. “I remember making eye contact with everyone and being like, ‘Whoa,’” Buxton says. “It was a big moment.” After a pair of 2019 EPs comes the foursome’s full-length debut, *New Long Leg*, an hypnotic tangle of shape-shifting guitars, mercurial rhythms, and Shaw’s deadpan (and often devastating) spoken-word delivery. Recorded with longtime PJ Harvey producer John Parish at the historic Rockfield Studios in Wales, it’s a study in chemistry, each song eventually blooming from jams as electric as their very first. Read on as Shaw, Buxton, and Dowse guide us through the album track by track. **“Scratchcard Lanyard”** Nick Buxton: “I was quite attracted to the motorik-pedestrian-ness of the verse riffs. I liked how workmanlike that sounded, almost in a stupid way. It felt almost like the obvious choice to open the album, and then for a while we swayed away from that thinking, because we didn\'t want to do this cliché thing—we were going to be different. And then it becomes very clear to you that maybe it\'s the best thing to do for that very reason.” **“Unsmart Lady”** Florence Shaw: “The chorus is a found piece of text, but it suited what I needed it for, and that\'s what I was grasping at. The rest is really thinking about the years where I did lots and lots of jobs all at the same time—often quite knackering work. It’s about the female experience, and I wanted to use language that\'s usually supposed to be insulting, commenting on the grooming or the intelligence of women. I wanted to use it in a song, and, by doing that, slightly reclaim that kind of language. It’s maybe an attempt at making it prideful rather than something that is supposed to make you feel shame.” **“Strong Feelings”** FS: “It was written as a romantic song, and I always thought of it as something that you\'d hear at a high school dance—the slow one where people have to dance together in a scary way.” **“Leafy”** NB: “All of the songs start as jams that we play all together in the rehearsal room to see what happens. We record it on the phone, and 99 percent of the time you take that away and if it\'s something that you feel is good, you\'ll listen to it and then chop it up into bits, make changes and try loads of other stuff out. Most of the jams we do are like 10 minutes long, but ‘Leafy’ was like this perfect little three-minute segment where we were like, ‘Well, we don\'t need to do anything with that. That\'s it.’” **“Her Hippo”** FS: “I\'m a big believer in not waiting for inspiration and just writing what you\'ve got, even if that means you\'re writing about a sense of nothingness. I think it probably comes from there, that sort of feeling.” **“New Long Leg”** NB: “I\'m really proud of the work on the album that\'s not necessarily the stuff that would jump out of your speakers straight away. ‘New Long Leg’ is a really interesting track because it\'s not a single, yet I think it\'s the strongest song on the album. There\'s something about the quality of what\'s happening there: Four people are all bringing something, in quite an unusual way, all the way around. Often, when you hear music like that, it sounds mental. But when you break it down, there\'s a lot of detail there that I really love getting stuck into.” **“John Wick”** FS: “I’m going to quote Lewis, our bass player: The title ‘John Wick’ refers to the film of the same name, but the song has nothing to do with it.” Tom Dowse: “Giving a song a working title is quite an interesting process, because what you\'re trying to do is very quickly have some kind of onomatopoeia to describe what the song is. ‘Leafy’ just sounded leafy. And ‘John Wick’ sounded like some kind of action cop show. Just that riff—it sounded like crime was happening and it painted a picture straight away. I thought it was difficult to divorce it from that name.” **“More Big Birds”** TD: “One of the things you get good at when you\'re a band and you\'re lucky enough to get enough time to be together is, when someone writes a drum part like that, you sit back. It didn\'t need a complicated guitar part, and sometimes it’s nice to have the opportunity to just hit a chord. I love that—I’ll add some texture and let the drums be. They’re almost melodic.” **“A.L.C”** FS: “It\'s the only track where I wrote all the lyrics in lockdown—all the others were written over a much longer period of time. But that\'s definitely the quickest I\'ve ever written. It\'s daydreaming about being in public and I suppose touches on a weird change of priorities that happened when your world just gets really shrunk down to your little patch. I think there\'s a bit of nostalgia in there, just going a bit loopy and turning into a bit of a monster.” **“Every Day Carry”** FS: “It was one of the last ones we recorded and I was feeling exhausted from trying so fucking hard the whole recording session to get everything I wanted down. I had sheets of paper with different chunks that had already been in the song or were from other songs, and I just pieced it together during the take as a bit of a reward. It can be really fun to do that when you don\'t know what you\'re going to do next, if it\'s going to be crap or if it\'s going to be good. That\'s a fun thing—I felt kind of burnt out, so it was nice to just entertain myself a bit by doing a surprise one.”
When UK trio Drug Store Romeos started making music together as teenagers, their sound was indebted to post-punk, heavy and raw. But then Sarah Downie, Charlie Henderson, and Jonny Gilbert started listening to such cosmic trailblazers as Spacemen 3, Galaxie 500, and Broadcast, and their approach transformed, their songs taking on a more dreamy and hypnotic form. On the group’s debut album, *The world within our bedrooms*, they craft a series of indie-pop gems out of the haze, balancing sonic exploration with enchanting hooks and intricate dynamism. Their minimalist approach was forced on them by necessity, but it has opened up exciting new avenues. “I started playing keyboards, which meant I couldn’t play the bass,” Downie tells Apple Music. “We had to pick between guitar or bass, because we only have so many hands, and Charlie started playing bass. It meant our songs had to be stripped-back. Charlie started playing the bass in a more melodic way rather than just trying to fill in the foundation.” Their lean, lo-fi grooves are the perfect soundbed for tales of isolation and reflection, trying to make sense of a chaotic world as their teens became their early twenties. “We came from a very small town,” says Downie. “We were cut off a lot from the world, and I think that introspectiveness, with all the time we had to overanalyze ourselves, wrote itself into the music.” It is, explains Downie, an album that captures a coming-of-age, a record that fills you with hope when you come out the other side. Here, the three-piece take us through their journey, track by track. **“Building Song”** Sarah Downie: “It does what it says on the tin. We gave it that name but kept going, ‘We need to find a good name for this. That’s such a cop-out.’ And it just became that. I think it’s quite fitting.” Charlie Henderson: “It’s got a feeling, an atmosphere, that’s quite central to the world that we were trying to create. Naturally, throughout the song, it layers up over time and everything—it feels like a nice way to introduce the whole sound of the album.” **“Secret Plan”** CH: “This was written at 2 in the morning whilst my housemates were having a drum ’n’ bass party downstairs. I made the synth line and the bass part, and then, for the vocals, I was just improvising while this intense drum ’n’ bass was going on downstairs. It was quite chaotic. If ‘Building Song’ is the establishing shot, this is the first scene that’s in this slightly spooky, surreal suburban town. I hope people can dance to it, but also I imagine people listening to this album alone on headphones.” **“Bow Wow”** SD: “This was written when I got a Casio Casiotone CT 1000P, which has shaped a lot of our music. If you have headphones on and you’re listening carefully enough, you can just about hear my heartbeat in this song. Me and our producer, George Murphy, were in the studio at 2 am and we were pretty knackered, doing vocals over and over again. The lyrics—‘My heart rate increases’—were going through my head and I needed to get more energy in my body, so I started running around the studio. Then I put the microphone on my shirt and we recorded my heartbeat. George quantized it so that it’s going along with the kick.” **“Elevator”** CH: “I did a lot of experimenting, a lot of different things went onto that, but it was quite surprising it worked. They’re quite similar—both emotional and intense. The melody feels like it’s coming from a similar place, and they just locked together.” **“Walking Talking Marathon”** SD: “I wanted a song that didn’t fit into some chorus-verse-chorus, strophic structure. I pieced together from magazines, from things I’d been watching at the time, any little bits and bobs, phrases. The goal is to have as little friction between me and my instruments and what’s coming out of my mouth as possible.” **“Frame of Reference”** CH: “I spent about a year struggling with depression, but I’d still gone to festivals that summer. And so, a couple of times, there were hundreds of people dancing around me, and I was dancing, but I felt really crushed and empty, yet dense at the same time—whilst also being on ecstasy. The strangeness of that feeling, that artificial euphoria with this deep human sadness combining, was such a potent and unique emotion to me.” **“Feedback Loop”** CH: “I was really happy with the lyrics in this song. To me, this is, like, an 11 pm song—as you’re walking home, you don’t particularly want to go home and you’re aimlessly wandering around a little bit. I remember me and Sarah were in my garden and I was so obsessed with Molly Nilsson’s song ‘Hey Moon!’ I smoked a joint and listened to it five times and then came in, and then we wrote the chorus of ‘Feedback Loop.’” **“What’s on Your Mind”** SD: “Half of this was improvised in the studio. I think there was some technical difficulty that George was trying to figure out, and we were just mucking around, and he thought it was quite interesting so he pressed *record* and that was one of those lovely studio moments where a song comes out quite a lot differently than when it came in.” **“No Placing”** Jonny Gilbert: “This was written at a marijuana-and-music evening at Charlie’s house. It wasn’t an organized band writing session—more of an impromptu, just-for-enjoyment session. It was an evening of getting down parts that Charlie then spent more time crafting over the next few weeks, and with the help of Sarah, he brought it into a full song. It’s one of the most uptempo ones we’ve got, but to me, it will always feel nighttime because it was written entirely at nighttime.” **“Vibrate”** CH: “It was quite different to what we really wanted to do, and then our managers said it was pretty much their favorite song we’d ever written. We wanted to make songs that were dreamier and playful, but this one is quite dark and a bit serious. I like it now though.” **“Electric Silence”** SD: “This was around the time I was reading the *The Secret Life of Plants*, which is a book that talks a lot about Cleve Backster and his experiments in the 1960s with a polygraph test and plants. It’s a fun little one. I guess it’s just a cute little song. On my Casio, we had this auto-bass that makes these different rhythms and stuff, and we use one which I’m pretty sure is ABBA. We used that a lot.” JG: “It’s very *bop-bop-boop-boop*.” **“Kites”** SD: “‘Kites’ was written when I was in Winchester with my dad in the first part of lockdown. There was this hill that I would go to most days. It was carved out by the surrounding foothills of Winchester, and when you were on the hill, you could see the city in the foreground and this little hill adjacent from my hill. You could see people having picnics and dogs running up, people running up. I guess I was inspired by the open space, and I kind of wanted to spin up out of my body and be one with the clouds.” **“Put Me on the Finish Line”** SD: “This song was hanging around for ages. I created the keyboard line, but I didn’t really know where to go from there. I had this verse, but I could never, ever get a chorus for it. It means that the person that wrote that song all those years ago feels like a completely different person to who I was finishing it. But, thankfully, those two people seem to get along.” **“Cycle of Life”** SD: “This was written in about 20 minutes. Jonny had been watching this documentary on life cycles, nature, sandstorms, and the movement of currents and diatoms.” JG: “I started writing down what they said in the documentary to try and understand it, and it was on the wall when Sarah was making music. She started to fit it into her lyrics, and we realized it could be a thing.” SD: “It’s our most factual song. It’s a little palate cleanser.” **“Adult Glamour”** SD: “This is our oldest song. It feels like family to me. We spent months mixing it in my dad’s study in Fleet, encasing it in as many layers as we could. It was finished after this very intense acid trip that me and Charlie had where we got extremely into the personalities of sounds, thinking about the tones and what they create, just getting very into the tiny intricacies. It’s about the desensitizing nature of technology. After that acid trip, I got rid of my phone for about a year. It was a naive thing to do but was also quite good for me. As most people are, I was very addicted to my phone and I hated that.”
In his native country of Niger, singer-songwriter Mdou Moctar taught himself to play guitar by watching videos of Eddie Van Halen’s iconic shredding. When you hear his unique psych-rock hybrid—a mix of traditional Tuareg melodies with the kinds of buzzing strings and trilling fret runs that people often associate with the recently deceased guitar god—it makes sense. Moctar has honed that stylistic fingerprint over the course of five albums, after first being introduced to Western audiences via Sahel Sounds’ now cult classic compilation *Music From Saharan Cellphones, Vol. 1*, and in the process has been heartily embraced by indie rock fans based on his sound alone (he also plays on Bonnie \"Prince” Billy and Matt Sweeney’s *Superwolves* album). The songs that make up *Afrique Victime* alternate between jubilant, sometimes meandering and jammy (the opening “Chismiten”)—mirroring his band’s explosive live shows—and more tightly wound, raga-like and reflective (the trance-inducing “Ya Habibti”). But within the music, there’s a deeper, often political context: Recorded with his group in studios, apartments, hotel rooms, backstage, and outdoors, the album covers a range of themes: love, religion, women’s rights, inequality, and the exploitation of West Africa by colonial powers. “I felt like giving a voice to all those who suffer on my continent and who are ignored by the Western world,” Moctar tells Apple Music. Here he dissects each of the album’s tracks. **“Chismiten”** “The song talks about jealousy in a relationship, but more importantly about making sure that you’re not swept away too quickly by this emotion, which I think can be very harmful. Every individual, man or woman, has the right to have relationships outside marriage, be it with friends or family.” **“Taliat”** “It’s another song that addresses relationships, the suffering we go through when we’re deeply in love with someone who doesn’t return that love.” **“Ya Habibti”** “The title of this track, which I composed a long time ago, means ‘oh my love’ in Arabic. I reminisce about that evening in August when I met my wife and how I immediately thought she was so beautiful.” **“Tala Tannam”** “This is also a song I wrote for my wife when I was far away from her, on a trip. I tell her that wherever I may be, I’ll be thinking of her.” **“Asdikte Akal”** “It’s about my origins and the sense of nostalgia I feel when I think about the village where I grew up, about my country and all those I miss when I’m far away from them, like my mother and my brothers.” **“Layla”** “Layla is my wife. When she gave birth to our son, I wasn’t allowed to be by her side, because that’s just how it is for men in our country. I was on tour when she called me, very worried, to tell me that our son was about to be born. I felt really helpless, and as a way of offering comfort, I wrote this song for her.” **“Afrique Victime”** “Although my country gained its independence a long time ago, France had promised to help us, but we never received that support. Most of the people in Niger don’t have electricity or drinking water. That’s what I emphasize in this song.” **“Bismilahi Atagah”** “This one talks about the various possible dangers that await us, about everything that could make us turn our back on who we really are, such as the illusion of love and the lure of money.”
Lil Nas X is nothing if not a testament to the power of being true to yourself. His breakthrough single, “Old Town Road,” forced the industry to revisit old conversations about the limitations of genre, race, and who is kept out (or locked in) by the definitions we use to talk about music. The Georgia-born singer-rapper responded in kind with a remix and remixes to that remix that rocketed him up the charts and simultaneously highlighted the fickleness of the entire endeavor—did Billy Ray Cyrus suddenly prove his country bona fides any more than the addition of Young Thug proved his trap ones or Diplo his electronic? But that\'s the magic of Lil Nas X and of his debut album *MONTERO*: He knows that pop music is whatever the artist creating it wants it to be, an exercise of vulnerable imagination packaged as unyielding, larger-than-life confidence. “I feel like with this album, I know what I wanted,” he tells Apple Music\'s Zane Lowe. “I know what I want. I know where I want to be in life. And I know that\'s going to take me being more open and bringing it out of myself no matter how much it hurts or feels uncomfortable to say things that I need to say.” But any such ambivalence doesn\'t explicitly manifest in the songs here, as Lil Nas X roams his interior spaces as openly as he does assorted styles—which span everything from emo and grunge to indie pop and pop punk. On “DEAD RIGHT NOW,” a thunderous track complete with choral flourishes, he recaps the journey to this moment, how it almost didn\'t happen, and the ways his personal relationships have changed since. “If I didn’t blow up, I would\'ve died tryna be here/If it didn’t go, suicide, wouldn’t be here,” he sings, adding, “Now they all come around like they been here/When you get this rich and famous everybody come up to you singing, \'Hallelujah, how’d you do it?\'” All throughout—on songs like “SUN GOES DOWN” or “DONT WANT IT”—the weight of his burdens exists in contrast to the levity of his sound, a particular kind of Black and queer disposition that insists on a joy that is far more profound than any pain. And make no mistake, there is plenty of joy here. On “SCOOP,” he finds an effervescent kindred spirit in Doja Cat, while “DOLLA SIGN SLIME,” which features Megan Thee Stallion, is a trapped-out victory lap. Elsewhere, the dark riffs on the outstanding “LIFE AFTER SALEM” bring him to new creative lands altogether. The album brims with surprises that continuously reveal him anew, offering a peek into the mind of an artist who is unafraid of himself or his impulses, even with the knowledge that he\'s still a work in progress. “Don\'t look at me as this perfect hero who\'s not going to make mistakes and should be the voice for everybody,” he says. “You\'re the voice for you.” And to that effect, *MONTERO* is a staggering triumph that suggests not just who Lil Nas X is but the infinite possibilities of who he may be in the future, whether that falls within the scope of our imaginations or not.
As they worked on their third album, Wolf Alice would engage in an exercise. “We liked to play our demos over the top of muted movie trailers or particular scenes from films,” lead singer and guitarist Ellie Rowsell tells Apple Music. “It was to gather a sense of whether we’d captured the right vibe in the music. We threw around the word ‘cinematic’ a lot when trying to describe the sound we wanted to achieve, so it was a fun litmus test for us. And it’s kinda funny, too. Especially if you’re doing it over the top of *Skins*.” Halfway through *Blue Weekend*’s opening track, “The Beach,” Wolf Alice has checked off cinematic, and by its (suitably titled) closer, “The Beach II,” they’ve explored several film scores’ worth of emotion, moods, and sonic invention. It’s a triumphant guitar record, at once fan-pleasing and experimental, defiantly loud and beautifully quiet and the sound of a band hitting its stride. “We’ve distilled the purest form of Wolf Alice,” drummer Joel Amey says. *Blue Weekend* succeeds a Mercury Prize-winning second album (2017’s restless, bombastic *Visions of a Life*), and its genesis came at a decisive time for the North Londoners. “It was an amazing experience to get back in touch with actually writing and creating music as a band,” bassist Theo Ellis says. “We toured *Visions of a Life* for a very long time playing a similar selection of songs, and we did start to become robot versions of ourselves. When we first got back together at the first stage of writing *Blue Weekend*, we went to an Airbnb in Somerset and had a no-judgment creative session and showed each other all our weirdest ideas and it was really, really fun. That was the main thing I’d forgotten: how fun making music with the rest of the band is, and that it’s not just about playing a gig every evening.” The weird ideas evolved during sessions with producer Markus Dravs (Arcade Fire, Coldplay, Björk) in a locked-down Brussels across 2020. “He’s a producer that sees the full picture, and for him, it’s about what you do to make the song translate as well as possible,” guitarist Joff Oddie says. “Our approach is to throw loads of stuff at the recordings, put loads of layers on and play with loads of sound, but I think we met in the middle really nicely.” There’s a Bowie-esque majesty to tracks such as “Delicious Things” and “The Last Man on Earth”; “Smile” and “Play the Greatest Hits” were built for adoring festival crowds, while Rowsell’s songwriting has never revealed more vulnerability than on “Feeling Myself” and the especially gorgeous “No Hard Feelings” (“a song that had many different incarnations before it found its place on the record,” says Oddie. “That’s a testament to the song. I love Ellie’s vocal delivery. It’s really tender; it’s a beautiful piece of songwriting that is succinct, to the point, and moves me”). On an album so confident in its eclecticism, then, is there an overarching theme? “Each song represents its own story,” says Rowsell. “But with hindsight there are some running themes. It’s a lot about relationships with partners, friends, and with oneself, so there are themes of love and anxiety. Each song, though, can be enjoyed in isolation. Just as I find solace in writing and making music, I’d be absolutely chuffed if anyone had a similar experience listening to this. I like that this album has different songs for different moods. They can rage to ‘Play the Greatest Hits,’ or they can feel powerful to ‘Feeling Myself,’ or ‘they can have a good cathartic cry to ‘No Hard Feelings.’ That would be lovely.”
There’s a handful of eyebrow-raising verses across Tyler, The Creator’s *CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST*—particularly those from 42 Dugg, Lil Uzi Vert, YoungBoy Never Broke Again, Pharrell, and Lil Wayne—but none of the aforementioned are as surprising as the ones Tyler delivers himself. The Los Angeles-hailing MC, and onetime nucleus of the culture-shifting Odd Future collective, made a name for himself as a preternaturally talented MC whose impeccable taste in streetwear and calls to “kill people, burn shit, fuck school” perfectly encapsulated the angst of his generation. But across *CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST*, the man once known as Wolf Haley is just a guy who likes to rock ice and collect stamps on his passport, who might whisper into your significant other’s ear while you’re in the restroom. In other words, a prototypical rapper. But in this case, an exceptionally great one. Tyler superfans will remember that the MC was notoriously peeved at his categoric inclusion—and eventual victory—in the 2020 Grammys’ Best Rap Album category for his pop-oriented *IGOR*. The focus here is very clearly hip-hop from the outset. Tyler made an aesthetic choice to frame *CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST* with interjections of shit-talking from DJ Drama, founder of one of 2000s rap’s most storied institutions, the Gangsta Grillz mixtape franchise. The vibes across the album are a disparate combination of sounds Tyler enjoys (and can make)—boom-bap revival (“CORSO,” “LUMBERJACK”), ’90s R&B (“WUSYANAME”), gentle soul samples as a backdrop for vivid lyricism in the Griselda mold (“SIR BAUDELAIRE,” “HOT WIND BLOWS”), and lovers rock (“I THOUGHT YOU WANTED TO DANCE”). And then there’s “RUNITUP,” which features a crunk-style background chant, and “LEMONHEAD,” which has the energy of *Trap or Die*-era Jeezy. “WILSHIRE” is potentially best described as an epic poem. Giving the Grammy the benefit of the doubt, maybe they wanted to reward all the great rapping he’d done until that point. *CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST*, though, is a chance to see if they can recognize rap greatness once it has kicked their door in.
While making their fifth album, The Vaccines experienced something they hadn’t felt for a while: youthfulness. “One of the reasons a band’s most successful record is often their first one is because there is this youthful, reckless abandon,” singer/guitarist Justin Young tells Apple Music. “You’re not crippled with self-doubt, not overthinking things. There’s a purity to all of it.” The Londoners felt that spirit being squeezed out of them early on. On the back of a platinum-selling debut of effervescent garage rock, 2011’s *What Did You Expect From the Vaccines?*, they were ravenously anointed as the saviors of guitar music by the UK press. “It stifled us for a while,” says Young. “We were obsessed with building on the first record, not just in terms of how good it was, but how big it was. I think we got a little bit lost along the way.” Almost a decade later, The Vaccines felt rejuvenated by recording *Back in Love City*. It’s the first album they’ve made as a five-piece, adding drummer Yoann Intonti to a lineup of keyboardist Timothy Lanham (who came on board for 2018’s *Combat Sports*) and founding members Young, guitarist Freddie Cowan, and bassist Árni Árnason. “So, in many ways, we are a new band,” says Young. They were excited by the songs they’d written and inspired by the studio—Sonic Ranch, a sprawling residential complex in the middle of a pecan orchard near El Paso, Texas. The music that emerged embellishes their punk spirit and pop nous with disco flourishes, industrial clangs, and a distinctive flavor of spaghetti Westerns. Young jokingly calls it “Morricone indie-rock” and uses it as a backdrop for lyrics that explore how human expression is becoming increasingly binary. The songs imagine a dystopia where emotions are finite commodities—with Love City as a place where you can replenish your stocks for the right price. For Young, it’s an album that goes some way to solving the enduring puzzle of songwriting. “We’ve always tried to evolve but, at the same time, figure out our core and what makes The Vaccines *The Vaccines*,” he says. “You want to remain interested and interesting and keep pushing yourself forward, but you want to pull everyone along with you. That keeps me awake at night.” Here, he talks us through this particular solution, track by track. **“Back in Love City”** “We were trying to write something that was kind of garage-y and a little punky but had more of a disco or fun groove to it. The first verse, I’m singing about arriving in Love City. I always remember driving, a few years ago, from San Francisco to Vegas with some friends, taking all day. Just as we were pulling into Vegas, the sun was going down and the neon lights were firing up. I imagine this song existing in quite a similar space. It\'s the beginning of the story.” **“Alone Star”** “I was told quite far into the writing process of *English Graffiti*, our third record, that we didn’t have any singles. And I ended up writing all of the singles in a week—‘Dream Lover’ on the Tuesday, ‘20/20’ on the Wednesday, ‘Handsome’ on the Thursday. I wrote ‘Alone Star’ on Monday and we just couldn’t get it right. It felt a bit ham-fisted and we wanted to try to create a bit more nuance around the arrangement, instrumentation, and production. We picked it up again for *Combat Sports* and, again, couldn’t make it sound right within the context of that record. We picked it up for this record, too, and very nearly dropped it but ended up in a place where we all fell in love with it. It’s funny when you see the odd comment on social media, ‘This isn’t The Vaccines I know.’ I like reminding myself that, ‘Actually, yes, it is. It was written on the exact same week as all the songs that you love and know already.’” **“Headphones Baby”** “There is a bit of a theme across the record of fatalism. Not necessarily wanting to die—more wanting to throw caution to the wind, doing whatever you want. There’s a hedonism and euphoria, too. I remember the second I wrote this song, being very excited about it. It felt very euphoric. There were a few comments that it was maybe too pop, but I see it in the lineage of big Vaccines singles. The first time I sang the chorus to ‘If You Wanna’ out loud, we all laughed because we thought it was so cheesy and poppy. We’ve always written songs like that with those big, euphoric choruses.” **“Wanderlust”** “I suppose it sounds like it belongs in the desert and belongs in Texas. I think it’s potentially the heaviest Vaccines song to date. It’s obviously super pop as well, but I would say it’s more rock than punk rock.” **“Paranormal Romance”** “I’m touching on hyperbole and being really over the top, wanting to feel in ways that we hear about in songs and read about in books and see in movies and just have that feeling that’s out of this world and impossible or improbable or immortal. I think this is the first moment where \[the album’s\] not just Western-inspired or South-inspired, but it’s quite cinematic as well.” **“El Paso”** “This was written in LA with Daniel \[Ledinsky\], who ended up producing the record. He was telling me about Sonic Ranch that day. He’d just been there with Dave Sitek or Miguel or someone, and was telling me how amazing it was, telling me all these crazy stories. I said, ‘Oh, I’m flying to El Paso tomorrow morning because Vaccines are playing in Juarez.’ So, as we finished the song that evening, we named the file ‘El Paso.’ And then, six months later, when we asked him to produce the record, he said, ‘We should go to El Paso.’ Here was all this nice poetry and serendipity; it felt destined to be made there. Once we got there, it was impossible not to ham that up a little bit, given the environment, but we were headed for that Morricone indie-rock stuff long before we decided to go to Texas.” **“Jump Off the Top”** “We first recorded this when we recorded ‘All My Friends Are Falling in Love,’ which was a stand-alone single in 2018. Again, we couldn’t quite get it right, but it consistently has one of the best reactions live. I think the most popular Vaccines songs do have this kind of tempo to them. They’re quite frenetic. They’re obviously upbeat and fun and a little dumb, maybe. And there’s this happy/sad thing. There’s a slightly dark undertone to the lyrics, but it’s also sung on top with this kind of nursery rhyme melody.” **“XCT”** “\[The title\] is like ‘Ex-city.’ We thought it would be funny to call it that and have it open Side Two. I liked the idea of everything falling apart and ending up in a dilapidated, abandoned version of Love City. Someone once told me that when the central business district of Detroit was pretty much abandoned, they found a grizzly bear living on the 20th floor of this old office block. Whether or not that’s true, I had that in my mind as I was writing this song. It’s a quite brittle-feeling song, in places a little industrial or nu-metal, even.” **“Bandit”** “This is a good example of a song being written very much with Love City in mind, and the idea that someone can steal your heart or steal your feelings. It’s building on the idea that this world exists where there might even be gangs of love, this kind of underworld, this underbelly.” **“Peoples’ Republic of Desire”** “It’s the title of an amazing documentary about kids in China. I watched it one night and it was like, ‘They’ve made a documentary about this place I didn’t even realize existed.’ It’s just building on this notion that there’s a place where you can go to feel something you didn’t think you could feel anymore.” **“Savage”** “‘Savage’ came from a riff that Freddie sent me. I immediately found it very exciting. We’d never really successfully written a song that, like, swung. It was obviously very glammy—it just got me excited and it felt quite primal or savage.” **“Heart Land”** “This is the one song I’ve been worried about people taking the wrong way. But I hope that it’s obvious that it’s being written from this quite naive, optimistic perspective of this 13-year-old English boy who’s never been to America before, but has grown drunk on a diet of American pop culture. It’s less about commenting on where America has ended up and more about trying to capture that feeling of where I once thought it was.” **“Pink Water Pistols”** “I finished the lyrics before the song existed, so I was just waiting for a song to come along where they’d be able to fit. And when Freddie sent me this melody, I was like, ‘Oh, wow, great.’ I think it’s probably quite obvious it’s about wanting to be better and get better, and thinking you might be able to find that with someone else.”
“Take this opportunity to learn from my mistakes. You don’t have to guess if something is love. Love is shown through actions. Stop making excuses for people who don’t show up for you. Don’t ignore the red flags. And don’t think you have to stay somewhere ’cause you can’t find better—you can and you will. Don’t settle for less—you don’t deserve it and neither does your family.” —Summer Walker, in an exclusive message she provided to Apple Music about her second album
“I don’t like to agonize over things,” Arlo Parks tells Apple Music. “It can tarnish the magic a little. Usually a song will take an hour or less from conception to end. If I listen back and it’s how I pictured it, I move on.” The West London poet-turned-songwriter is right to trust her “gut feeling.” *Collapsed in Sunbeams* is a debut album that crystallizes her talent for chronicling sadness and optimism in universally felt indie-pop confessionals. “I wanted a sense of balance,” she says. “The record had to face the difficult parts of life in a way that was unflinching but without feeling all-consuming and miserable. It also needed to carry that undertone of hope, without feeling naive. It had to reflect the bittersweet quality of being alive.” *Collapsed in Sunbeams* achieves all this, scrapbooking adolescent milestones and Parks’ own sonic evolution to form something quite spectacular. Here, she talks us through her work, track by track. **Collapsed in Sunbeams** “I knew that I wanted poetry in the album, but I wasn\'t quite sure where it was going to sit. This spoken-word piece is actually the last thing that I did for the album, and I recorded it in my bedroom. I liked the idea of speaking to the listener in a way that felt intimate—I wanted to acknowledge the fact that even though the stories in the album are about me, my life and my world, I\'m also embarking on this journey with listeners. I wanted to create an avalanche of imagery. I’ve always gravitated towards very sensory writers—people like Zadie Smith or Eileen Myles who hone in on those little details. I also wanted to explore the idea of healing, growth, and making peace with yourself in a holistic way. Because this album is about those first times where I fell in love, where I felt pain, where I stood up for myself, and where I set boundaries.” **Hurt** “I was coming off the back of writer\'s block and feeling quite paralyzed by the idea of making an album. It felt quite daunting to me. Luca \[Buccellati, Parks’ co-producer and co-writer\] had just come over from LA, and it was January, and we hadn\'t seen each other in a while. I\'d been listening to plenty of Motown and The Supremes, plus a lot of Inflo\'s production and Cleo Sol\'s work. I wanted to create something that felt triumphant, and that you could dance to. The idea was for the song to expose how tough things can be but revolve around the idea of the possibility for joy in the future. There’s a quote by \[Caribbean American poet\] Audre Lorde that I really liked: ‘Pain will either change or end.’ That\'s what the song revolved around for me.” **Too Good** “I did this one with Paul Epworth in one of our first days of sessions. I showed him all the music that I was obsessed with at the time, from ’70s Zambian psychedelic rock to MF DOOM and the hip-hop that I love via Tame Impala and big ’90s throwback pop by TLC. From there, it was a whirlwind. Paul started playing this drumbeat, and then I was just running around for ages singing into mics and going off to do stuff on the guitar. I love some of the little details, like the bump on someone’s wrist and getting to name-drop Thom Yorke. It feels truly me.” **Hope** “This song is about a friend of mine—but also explores that universal idea of being stuck inside, feeling depressed, isolated, and alone, and being ashamed of feeling that way, too. It’s strange how serendipitous a lot of themes have proved as we go through the pandemic. That sense of shame is present in the verses, so I wanted the chorus to be this rallying cry. I imagined a room full of people at a show who maybe had felt alone at some point in their lives singing together as this collective cry so they could look around and realize they’re not alone. I wanted to also have the little spoken-word breakdown, just as a moment to bring me closer to the listener. As if I’m on the other side of a phone call.” **Caroline** “I wrote ‘Caroline’ and ‘For Violet’ on the same, very inspired day. I had my little £8 bottle of Casillero del Diablo. I was taken back to when I first started writing at seven or eight, where I would write these very observant and very character-based short stories. I recalled this argument that I’d seen taken place between a couple on Oxford Street. I only saw about 30 seconds of it, but I found myself wondering all these things. Why was their relationship exploding out in the open like that? What caused it? Did the relationship end right there and then? The idea of witnessing a relationship without context was really interesting to me, and so the lyrics just came out as a stream of consciousness, like I was relaying the story to a friend. The harmonies are also important on this song, and were inspired by this video I found of The Beatles performing ‘This Boy.’ The chorus feels like such an explosion—such a release—and harmonies can accentuate that.” **Black Dog** “A very special song to me. I wrote this about my best friend. I remember writing that song and feeling so confused and helpless trying to understand depression and what she was going through, and using music as a form of personal catharsis to work through things that felt impossible to work through. I recorded the vocals with this lump in my throat because it was so raw. Musically, I was harking back to songs like ‘Nude’ and ‘House of Cards’ on *In Rainbows*, plus music by Nick Drake and tracks from Sufjan Stevens’ *Carrie & Lowell*. I wanted something that felt stripped down.” **Green Eyes** “I was really inspired by Frank Ocean here—particularly ‘Futura Free’ \[from 2016’s *Blonde*\]. I was also listening to *Moon Safari* by Air, Stereolab, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Tirzah, Beach House, and a lot of that dreamy, nostalgic pop music that I love. It was important that the instrumental carry a warmth because the song explores quite painful places in the verses. I wanted to approach this topic of self-acceptance and self-discovery, plus people\'s parents not accepting them and the idea of sexuality. Understanding that you only need to focus on being yourself has been hard-won knowledge for me.” **Just Go** “A lot of the experiences I’ve had with toxic people distilled into one song. I wanted to talk about the idea of getting negative energy out of your life and how refreshed but also sad it leaves you feeling afterwards. That little twinge from missing someone, but knowing that you’re so much better off without them. I was thinking about those moments where you’re trying to solve conflict in a peaceful way, but there are all these explosions of drama. You end up realizing, ‘You haven’t changed, man.’ So I wanted a breakup song that said, simply, ‘No grudges, but please leave my life.’” **For Violet** “I imagined being in space, or being in a desert with everything silent and you’re alone with your thoughts. I was thinking about ‘Roads’ by Portishead, which gives me that similar feeling. It\'s minimal, it\'s dark, it\'s deep, it\'s gritty. The song covers those moments growing up when you realize that the world is a little bit heavier and darker than you first knew. I think everybody has that moment where their innocence is broken down a little bit. It’s a story about those big moments that you have to weather in friendships, and asking how you help somebody without over-challenging yourself. That\'s a balance that I talk about in the record a lot.” **Eugene** “Both ‘Black Dog’ and ‘Eugene’ represent a middle chapter between my earlier EPs and the record. I was pulling from all these different sonic places and trying to create a sound that felt warmer, and I was experimenting with lyrics that felt a little more surreal. I was talking a lot about dreams for the first time, and things that were incredibly personal. It felt like a real step forward in terms of my confidence as a writer, and to receive messages from people saying that the song has helped get them to a place where they’re more comfortable with themselves is incredible.” **Bluish** “I wanted it to feel very close. Very compact and with space in weird places. It needed to mimic the idea of feeling claustrophobic in a friendship. That feeling of being constantly asked to give more than you can and expected to be there in ways that you can’t. I wanted to explore the idea of setting boundaries. The Afrobeat-y beat was actually inspired by Radiohead’s ‘Identikit’ \[from 2016’s *A Moon Shaped Pool*\]. The lyrics are almost overflowing with imagery, which was something I loved about Adrianne Lenker’s *songs* album: She has these moments where she’s talking about all these different moments, and colors and senses, textures and emotions. This song needed to feel like an assault on the senses.” **Portra 400** “I wanted this song to feel like the end credits rolling down on one of those coming-of-age films, like *Dazed and Confused* or *The Breakfast Club*. Euphoric, but capturing the bittersweet sentiment of the record. Making rainbows out of something painful. Paul \[Epworth\] added so much warmth and muscularity that it feels like you’re ending on a high. The song’s partly inspired by *Just Kids* by Patti Smith, and that idea of relationships being dissolved and wrecked by people’s unhealthy coping mechanisms.”
The origins of Clairo (born Claire Cottrill) hold their own modern mythos: 2017’s lo-fi bedroom pop track “Pretty Girl” went viral, and a major-label record deal with Fader/Republic followed. Then came her debut LP, *Immunity*, and its sardonic indie pop punctuated by jazzy instrumentation, soft-rock harmonies, and diaristic revelations. On her sophomore album, *Sling*, produced by Jack Antonoff in a remote and rural part of upstate New York, Clairo has mined deeper into her well of self-possessed folk. The outdoors seems to have grounded her; even moments of ornate orchestration are stripped down to their emotional core, like in the fluttery horns and xylophone of “Wade,” the herd of violins on “Just for Today” and “Management,” or their psychic opposite—the heartbreaking piano ballad intro on “Harbor,” and the campfire stopper “Reaper.” Standout first single “Blouse” features backing vocals from Lorde, and borrows a familiarly devastating chord progression (think Big Star’s “Thirteen”). Everywhere you turn on *Sling*, there are careful, restrained, and wise observations on the human condition.
As The War on Drugs has grown in size and stature from bedroom recording project to sprawling, festival-headlining rock outfit, Adam Granduciel’s role has remained constant: It’s his band, his vision. But when the pandemic forced recording sessions for their fifth LP *I Don’t Live Here Anymore* to go remote in 2020, Granduciel began encouraging his bandmates to take ownership of their roles within each song—to leave their mark. “Once we got into a groove of sending each other sessions, it was this really cool thing where everyone had a way of working on their own time that really helped,” he tells Apple Music. “I think being friends with the guys now and collaborative for so many years, each time we work together, it\'s like everyone\'s more confident in their role and I’m more confident in my desire for them to step up and bring something real. I was all about giving up control.” That shift, Granduciel adds, opened up “new sonic territory” that he couldn’t have seen by himself. And the sense of peace and perspective that came with it was mirrored—if not made possible—by changes in his personal life, namely the birth of his first child. A decade ago, Granduciel would have likely obsessed and fretted over every detail, making himself unwell in the process, “but I wasn\'t really scared to turn in this record,” he says. “I was excited for it to be out in the world, because it\'s not so much that you don\'t care about your work, but it’s just not the most important thing all the time. I was happy with whatever I could contribute, as long as I felt that I had given it my all.” Here, Granduciel guides us through the entire record, track by track. **“Living Proof”** “It felt like a complete statement, a complete thought. It felt like the solo was kind of composed and was there for a reason, and it all just felt buttoned up perfectly, where it could open a record in kind of a tender way. Just very deliberate and right.” **“Harmonia’s Dream”** “It’s mostly inspired by the band Harmonia and this thing that \[keyboardist\] Robbie \[Bennett\] had done that was blowing my mind in real time. I started playing those two chords, and in the spur of the moment he wrote that whole synth line. We went on for about nine minutes, and I remember, when we were doing it, I was like, ‘Don\'t hit a wrong note.’ Because it was so perfect what he was just feeling out in the moment, at 2 am, at some studio in Brooklyn. I was so lucky that I got to witness him doing that.” **“Change”** “I had started it at the end of 2017’s *Deeper Understanding* and it was like this piano ballad in half-time. Years later, we’re in upstate New York, and I\'m showing it to \[bassist\] Dave \[Hartley\] and \[guitarist\] Anthony \[LaMarca\]. I\'m on piano and they\'re on bass and drums and it\'s not really gelling. At some point Anthony just picks up the drumsticks and he shifts it to the backbeat, this straight-ahead pop-rock four-on-the-floor thing. It immediately had this really cool ‘I\'m on Fire’ vibe.’” **“I Don’t Wanna Wait”** “\[Producer-engineer\] Shawn \[Everett\], for the most part, puts the vocal very front and center on a lot of songs, very pop-like. I think as you get more confident in your songs it\'s okay to have the vocals there. But for this one I was thinking about Radiohead, like it would be cool if we just processed the vocals in this really weird way. I wanted to have fun with them, because we’ve already got so many alien sounds happening with those Prophet keyboards and the moodiness of the drum machine. I wanted to give it something that felt like you were sucked into some weird little world.” **“Victim”** “Ten years ago if we had had this song, we wouldn\'t have a chorus on it—it would just be like a verse over and over. Now I feel like we\'ve progressed to where you have this hypnotic thing but it actually goes somewhere. We’d had it done, but the vocals were a little weird. I told Shawn I wasn’t sure about them, because this song had such a vibe. When he asked me to describe it in one word, I was like, ‘back alley,’ like steam coming out of a fucking manhole cover or something. And then he puts his headphones on and I see him work in some gear for like 30 minutes—and then he turns the speakers on. I was like, ‘Oh, dude. That\'s it.’” **“I Don’t Live Here Anymore”** “I\'ll be the first to say it has that \'80s thing going, but we kind of pushed it in that way. At one point Shawn and I ran everything on the song—drums, the girls, bass, everything—through a JC-120 Roland amplifier, which is like the sound of the \'80s, essentially. I saw it just sitting there at Sound City \[Studios in Los Angeles\]. We spent like a day doing that, and it just gave it this sound that was a familiar heartbeat or something. It sounds huge but it also felt real—in my mind it was basically just a bedroom recording, because everything was done in my tiny little room, directly into my computer.” **“Old Skin”** “I demoed it in one afternoon, in like 30 minutes. Then I showed it to the band, and from the minute we started playing, it was just so fucking boring. But I knew that there was something in the song I really liked, and we kept building it up and building it up, and then one day, I asked Shawn to mute everything except the two things I liked most: the organ and the single note I was playing on the Juno. I brought the drums in at the right moment and it was like, \'Oh, that\'s the fucking song.’ Lyrically, I felt like it was about the concept of pushing back against everything that tries to hold you down—and having a song about that and then having it be as dynamic as it is, with these drums coming out of nowhere, it just feels like a really special moment. It’s my favorite song on the record, I think.” **“Wasted”** “This song was actually a really early one that I kind of abandoned—I sent it to \[drummer\] Pat \[Berkery\] because I knew there was a song there but the drums were just very stale. I didn\'t know any of this, but the day that he was working out of my studio in Philly was the day that his personal life had kind of all come to a head: He was getting divorced from his wife of 15 years. He did the song and he sent it back to me and it was fucking ferocious. It just gave new life to it. Springsteen always talks about Max Weinberg on ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ and how it’s Max\'s greatest recorded performance. I said the same thing when I heard this: ‘It’s Pat’s greatest recorded performance.’” **“Rings Around My Father’s Eyes”** “I\'d been strumming those open chords for a couple years—I had the melody and I had that opening line. I wanted to express something, but I wasn\'t 100% sure how I was going to go about doing it—part of the journey was to not be embarrassed by a line or not think that something is too obvious and too sentimental. As time went on with this record, I became a dad, and I started seeing it from the other side. It’s not so much a reflection on my relationship with my own dad, but starting to think about being a dad, being a protector.” **“Occasional Rain”** “As a songwriter I just love it because it\'s really concise. Lyrically, I was able to wrap up some of the scenes that I wanted to try and talk about, knowing where it was going to go on the record. I just think it\'s one of those songs that\'s a perfect closer. It\'s the last song in our fifth album. It\'s like, if this was the last album we ever made and that was the last song, I\'d be like, ‘That\'s a good way to go out.’”
On his Red Hand Files website, Nick Cave reflected on a comment he’d made back in 1997 about needing catastrophe, loss, and longing in order for his creativity to flourish. “These words sound somewhat like the indulgent posturing of a man yet to discover the devastating effect true suffering can have on our ability to function, let alone to create,” he wrote. “I am not only talking about personal grief, but also global grief, as the world is plunged deeper into this wretched pandemic.” Whether he needs it or not, the Australian songwriter’s music does very often deal with catastrophe, loss, and longing. The pandemic didn’t inspire *CARNAGE* per se, but the challenges of 2020 clearly permitted both intense, lyric-stirring ideas and, with canceled tours and so on, the time and creativity to flesh them out with longtime collaborator and masterful multi-instrumentalist/songwriter Warren Ellis. The most direct reference to COVID-19 might be “Albuquerque,” a sentimental lamentation on the inability to travel. For the most part, Cave looks beyond the pandemic itself, throwing himself into a philosophical realm of meditations on humanity, isolation, love, and the Earth itself, depicted through observations and, as he is wont to do, taking on the roles of several other characters, sentient and otherwise. The album begins with “Hand of God.” There’s soft piano and lyrics about the search for “that kingdom in the sky,” until Ellis\' dissonant violin strikes away the sweetness and an electronic beat kicks in. “I’m going to the river where the current rushes by/I’m gonna swim to the middle where the water is real high,” he sings, a little manically, as he gives in to the current. “Hand of God coming from the sky/Gonna swim to the middle and stay out there awhile… Let the river cast its spell on me.” That unmitigated strength of nature is central to *CARNAGE*. Motifs of rivers, rain, animals, fields, and sunshine are used to depict not only the beauty and the bedlam he sees in the world, but the ways it changes him. On the sweet, delicate “Lavender Fields,” he sings of “traveling appallingly alone on a singular road into the lavender fields… the lavender has stained my skin and made me strange.” On “Carnage,” he sings of loss (“I always seem to be saying goodbye”), but also of love and hope, later depicting a “reindeer, frozen in the footlights,” who then escapes back into the woods. “It’s only love, with a little bit of rain,” goes the uplifting refrain. With its murky rhythm and snarling spoken-word lyrics, “White Elephant” is one of Cave’s most intense songs in years. It’s also the song that most explicitly references a 2020 event: the murder of George Floyd. “The white hunter sits on his porch with his elephant gun and his tears/He\'ll shoot you for free if you come around here/A protester kneels on the neck of a statue, the statue says, ‘I can’t breathe’/The protester says, ‘Now you know how it feels’ and he kicks it into the sea.” Later, he continues, as the hunter: “I’ve been planning this for years/I’ll shoot you in the f\*\*king face if you think of coming around here/I’ll shoot you just for fun.” It’s one of the only Nick Cave songs to ever address a racially, politically charged event so directly. And it’s a dark, powerful moment on this album. *CARNAGE* ends with a pair of atmospheric ballads—their soundscapes no doubt influenced by Cave and Ellis’ extensive work on film scores. On “Shattered Ground,” the exodus of a girl (a personification of the moon) invokes peaceful, muted pain—“I will be all alone when you are gone… I will not make a single sound, but come softly crashing down”—and “Balcony Man” depicts a man watching the sun and considering how “everything is ordinary, until it’s not,” tweaking an idiom with serene acceptance: “You are languid and lovely and lazy, and what doesn’t kill you just makes you crazier.” There is substantial pain, darkness, and loss on this album, but it doesn’t rip its narrator apart or invoke retaliation. Rather, he takes it all in, allowing himself to be moved and changed even if he can’t effect change himself. That challenging sense of being unable to do anything more than *observe* is synonymous with the pandemic, and more broadly the evolving, sometimes devastating world. Perhaps the lesson here is to learn to exist within its chaos—but to always search for beauty and love in its cracks.
In the wake of 2017’s *MASSEDUCTION*, St. Vincent mastermind Annie Clark was in search of change. “That record was very much about structure and stricture—everything I wore was very tight, very controlled, very angular,” she tells Apple Music. “But there\'s only so far you can go with that before you\'re like, ‘Oh, what\'s over here?’” What Clark found was a looseness that came from exploring sounds she’d grown up with, “this kind of early-’70s, groove-ish, soul-ish, jazz-ish style in my head since I was a little kid,” she says. “I was raised on Steely Dan records and Stevie Wonder records like \[1973’s\] *Innervisions* and \[1972’s\] *Talking Book* and \[1974’s\] *Fulfillingness’ First Finale*. That was the wheelhouse that I wanted to play in. I wanted to make new stories with older sounds.” Recorded with *MASSEDUCTION* producer Jack Antonoff, *Daddy’s Home* draws heavily from the 1970s, but its title was inspired, in part, by recent events in Clark’s personal life: her father’s 2019 release from prison, where he’d served nearly a decade for his role in a stock manipulation scheme. It’s as much about our capacity to evolve as it is embracing the humanity in our flaws. “I wanted to make sure that even if anybody didn\'t know my personal autobiography that it would be open to interpretation as to whether Daddy is a father or Daddy is a boyfriend or Daddy is a pimp—I wanted that to be ambiguous,” she says. “Part of the title is literal: ‘Yeah, here he is, he\'s home!’ And then another part of it is ‘It’s 10 years later. I’ve done a lot in those 10 years. I have responsibility. I have shit I\'m seriously doing. It’s playing with it: Am I daddy\'s girl? I don\'t know. Maybe. But I\'m also Daddy, too, now.” Here, Clark guides us through a few of the album’s key tracks. **“Pay Your Way in Pain”** “This character is like the fixture in a 2021 psychedelic blues. And this is basically the sentiment of the blues: truly just kind of being down and out in a country, in a society, that oftentimes asks you to choose between dignity and survival. So it\'s just this story of one really bad fuckin’ day. And just owning the fact that truly what everybody wants in the world, with rare exception, is just to have a roof over their head, to be loved, and to get by. The line about the heels always makes me laugh. I\'ve been her, I know her. I\'ve been the one who people kind of go, ‘Oh, oh, dear. Hide the children\'s eyes.’ I know her, and I know her well.” **“Down and Out Downtown”** “This is actually maybe my favorite song on the record. I don\'t know how other people will feel about it. We\'ve all been that person who is wearing last night\'s heels at eight in the morning on the train, processing: ‘Oh, where have we been? What did I just do?’ You\'re groggy, you\'re sort of trying to avoid the knowing looks from other people—and the way that in New York, especially, you can just really ride that balance between like abandon and destruction. That\'s her; I\'ve been her too.” **“Daddy\'s Home”** “The story is really about one of the last times I went to go visit my dad in prison. If I was in national press or something, they put the press clippings on his bed. And if I was on TV, they\'d gather around in the common area and watch me be on Letterman or whatever. So some of the inmates knew who I was and presumably, I don\'t know, mentioned it to their family members. I ended up signing an autograph on a receipt because you can\'t bring phones and you couldn\'t do a selfie. It’s about watching the tables turn a little bit, from father and daughter. It\'s a complicated story and there\'s every kind of emotion about it. My family definitely chose to look at a lot of things with some gallows humor, because what else are you going to do? It\'s absolutely absurd and heartbreaking and funny all at the same time. So: Worth putting into a song.” **“Live in the Dream”** “If there are other touchpoints on the record that hint at psychedelia, on this one we\'ve gone completely psychedelic. I was having a conversation with Jack and he was telling me about a conversation he had with Bruce Springsteen. Bruce was just, I think anecdotally, talking about the game of fame and talking about the fact that we lose a lot of people to it. They can kind of float off into the atmosphere, and the secret is, you can\'t let the dream take over you. The dream has to live inside of you. And I thought that was wonderful, so I wrote this song as if you\'re waking up from a dream and you almost have these sirens talking to you. In life, there\'s still useful delusions. And then there\'s delusions that—if left unchecked—lead to kind of a misuse of power.” **“Down”** “The song is a revenge fantasy. If you\'re nice, people think they can take advantage of you. And being nice is not the same thing as being a pushover. If we don\'t want to be culpable to something, we could say, \'Well, it\'s definitely just this thing in my past,\' but at the end of the day, there\'s human culpability. Life is complicated, but I don\'t care why you are hurt. It\'s not an excuse to be cruel. Whatever your excuse is, you\'ve played it out.” **“…At the Holiday Party”** “Everybody\'s been this person at one time. I\'ve certainly been this person, where you are masking your sadness with all kinds of things. Whether it\'s dressing up real fancy or talking about that next thing you\'re going to do, whatever it is. And we kind of reveal ourselves by the things we try to hide and to kind of say we\'ve all been there. Drunk a little too early, at a party, there\'s a moment where you can see somebody\'s face break, and it\'s just for a split second, but you see it. That was the little window into what\'s going on with you, and what you\'re using to obfuscate is actually revealing you.”
*Pink Noise*, Laura Mvula’s third full-length project, is a sexy album. “It really is,” Mvula tells Apple Music. “And I wanted it to be. I needed it to be.” Having felt boxed in by the success of her first two records, what she calls the “serious music” of 2013 debut *Sing to the Moon* and 2016’s *The Dreaming Room*, the UK singer-songwriter allowed herself to “paint using more colors than perhaps I let myself use before,” resulting in a vibrant, ’80s-influenced soundscape, shot through with rediscovered confidence and unabashed desire. Indebted to the era of MTV icons—Michael and Janet Jackson, Whitney Houston, Prince—this is sophisticated, luxurious, kinetic pop music. It demands that you dance. Mvula is deeply respected as an artist—classically trained, nominated twice for the Mercury Prize, the recipient of an Ivor Novello award—but *Pink Noise*, by deliberate design, presents her as not just a talent, but a superstar. “I had gotten so comfortable with everything being so focused on the music as its own thing, and somehow I was sort of separate from that,” she says. “This time I wanted to be front and center.” Here, Mvula walks us through *Pink Noise*, track by track. **“Safe Passage”** “\'Safe Passage\' was the first song I made that felt like the beginning of something. There’s a \[1988\] song by BeBe & CeCe Winans called ‘Heaven.’ And I knew I just needed to capture that sound, because that song was always played on a Sunday after church. And if I hear it now, I can smell Sunday dinner. I can go back there. I was creating the palette that this was going to be nostalgia. This body of work was going to be nostalgia, but brought into the present moment. It needed to make me and us feel good and safe and celebrated.” **“Conditional”** “I instinctively knew that ‘Conditional\' was going to be the most far-left thing that I\'d written or put out to that point. I didn’t grow up with hip-hop, so discovering it now in my own world, in my own way, since I started listening to Kanye, I\'ve just been floored by his level of creativity. A lot of what he does sounds like symphonies to me. The idea that you can make something so hypnotic and rich from the simplicity of a cyclical beat. There\'s so many thousands and millions of versions of how you can manipulate just one frequency. I remember messing around with that beat and then Dann Hume, who co-produced the album, took it to another level with the sounds that we were using.” **“Church Girl”** “Chris Martin FaceTimed me to tell me that this was his standout song. I\'d done it randomly on the train. And then I wrote the chorus chords like six months later, but didn\'t really have a melody or a verse for it. But the fact that the verse and the chorus lived in two different tonalities was always going to be the thing. The shifting gears is really important to me for the story of this song and letting go of the devils, so to speak, and figuring out how to dance. It\'s like looking back as well as looking forward all at the same time.” **“Remedy”** “I wanted to offer something direct to the struggle. It was during the time where people were taking to the streets and protesting. It needed to kick the way it did, it needed to slap the way it did, because I was pissed and tired and confused. I think that\'s all in that song. It was a direct point to Janet Jackson\'s *Rhythm Nation* and that whole era. The militant-ness of it was important for me. There\'s only so many times we can have the same conversation. My people are tired.” **“Magical”** “I only used to have a verse and chorus chords for this song for so long. I hated it. I rewrote the chorus, and once the chorus came, that’s when we knew it was a game-changer. My brother, my sister, my adopted brother from another mother came through, played guitar and sang on it. And we just basically put the song to bed. I can\'t describe to you the feeling when something becomes what it is: the mystery of music-making.” **“Pink Noise”** “The simplicity of this being a dance moment meant that I needed to draw, access things, tools I hadn\'t used before. I had to chip away at it slowly. It\'s not the kind of music where you play nine notes in a chord and it sounds lush. This is the kind of thing where if you put a few too many grains of whatever seasoning, it fucks the whole thing up. But you put it on and instantly you move, which is different for me. This is where the word ‘bop’ actually truly shines, because it is an actual bop.” **“Golden Ashes”** “My cry for help for anyone that feels like they suffer in silence. Which is unfortunately a universal truth, a very universal reality. I’ve always been good at crying and I’ve always been good at expressing my woes. I needed, in the midst of all this triumph, a space to do that on this record. Just towards the end where it peters out and you have this very strange dissonant harmony and the pulsating sort of circular breathing, it’s supposed to feel hypnotic, like \'Are we still here? Are we still in this moment?\' I\'m super proud of this song.” **“What Matters” (feat. Simon Neil)** “I don\'t think I\'ve said this before, but for me, this wasn\'t really going on the album. This was truly just for me, the Laura who doesn’t know what radio is, what streaming is—they don’t exist to me. It was like an afterthought, but then it became this lullaby anthem. Simon \[Neil, of Biffy Clyro\] is one of the most special humans I think I\'ll probably ever meet or work with, so reverent for music and the art of collaboration.” **“Got Me”** “I\'d been trying to pander to this picture of innocence and purity—all things that I do value on some level, but unfortunately, at a cost to ignoring a large part of who I am. I just needed a moment and an outlet to put into that. I feel like it serves a different purpose to any other song on the record. I don’t have to hide anymore in that way, and it’s really liberating.” **“Before the Dawn”** “When you are at a point where you\'re struggling and you feel like you\'re going through a moment in life where it\'s like, how on earth do you navigate this crisis? And you go back to the simple truths. My best friend said it to me first: ‘The night comes before the dawn.’ Which we all know, but it\'s just being reminded and reminding myself and singing to myself. Once I\'m in that and I reflect or meditate on that and it seeps more deeply into my subconscious, I find that I move with way more purpose and with less baggage.”
On their endlessly eclectic sophomore album, Bicep considers a musical inquiry most often circled by jazz and jam bands: What if tracks don’t need to be immutable, permanent records, but should instead transform and evolve? Taking inspiration from their first major tour—a two-year trek between festivals and clubs during which they’d regularly rework their tracks from the road—the Northern Irish duo freed themselves from the idea that songs had to be fixed. “Club music has to draw you out,” Matt McBriar tells Apple Music. “Headphone music has to pull you in. More often than not, we’d wind up with six different versions of each song. Eventually it was like, ‘Why do we have to choose?’” As a result, the album versions on *Isles* are simply jumping-off points—the best headphones-inclined versions the pair could cut (dance-floor edits will inevitably materialize when they bring the tracks into clubbier environments). “There’s no straight house or techno on this album; those versions will come later,” Andy Ferguson says. “We wanted to explore home listening to its fullest extent, and then explore the live show to its fullest extent. Rather than try to do both at once, we decided to serve each.” Taking this approach presented an interesting challenge: In order for the songs to be malleable *and* recognizable, they needed to have a strong foundation. “They couldn’t be reliant on a single composition, they had to work in different forms,” McBriar says. “We had to make sure they had strong DNA.” Below, the pair—self-described geeks and gear-heads eager to get technical—take us inside the creative process behind each track. **Atlas** McBriar: “This was the first track we finished after coming back from the tour. We tried to capture the feelings from the peak of the live show, that optimism and euphoria in the room when we performed. It set the tone for the rest of the album in terms of our process. Although we initially recorded several different melodies, the final form came together a few months later in a single afternoon on our modular. This riff was the strongest.” **Cazenove** Ferguson: “This was another early demo, and was sparked by our obsessive interest in ’90s technology—the old MPC controllers that Timbaland and Dilla used. That old equipment doesn’t produce instantly crisp sounds or perfect beats, but that’s where the beauty is. It’s fuzzy and imprecise. We were experimenting with a lot of ’90s lo-fi samplers and bit crushers, and the idea was to build a rhythm by feeding our MPC through a reverse reverb patch on the Lexicon PCM96. From there we just added layer upon layer. We wanted something fast and playful, but with a lot less emphasis on the dance floor.” **Apricots** McBriar: “This actually began as an ambient piece, and the strings sat on our hard drive for a year before we considered some vocals. One day, we picked up an amazing, recently released record called *Beating Heart - Malawi*. The vocals and polyrhythms of ‘Gebede-Gebede Ulendo Wasabwera’ stood out. They were captivating. We pitched snippets of them to our strings before building the rest of the track around them. The second sample is from the 1975 \[Bulgarian folk\] album *Le Mystere Des Voix Bulgares*. We connected with the mysterious chanting, and felt like it had parallels to the Celtic folk we grew up hearing.” **Saku (feat. Clara La San)** McBriar: “This began as a footwork-inspired track with a hang drum melody; we’d been looking into polyrhythms and more interesting drum programming. But when we slowed down the tempo from 150 to 130 BPM, it totally flipped the vibe for us. We experimented with several different vocals samples—including ‘Gebede-Gebede Ulendo Wasabwera’ before it wound up on ‘Apricots’—but ended up sending a stripped-back version to Clara La San, who brought a strong ’90s UKG/R&B vibe. We added some haunting synths at the end to bring contrast and some opposing dark and light elements. It was great to pull so many of our influences into one track.” **Lido** Ferguson: “This track was born from one of our many experiments with granular synthesis. We cut a single piano note from a catalog of 1970s samples and fed it into one of our granular samplers. As we experimented with recording it live, the synthesizer glitches and jumps added all this character and texture. It was pretty disorderly and hard to control, but we loved the madness it produced. There are a ton of layers to this track despite it sounding so simple. And mixing it was a lot of work, trying to get that balance between soothing and subtle chaos.” **X (feat. Clara La San)** McBriar: “This track was built around our Psycox SY-1M Syncussion. We’d been hunting for a Pearl original for years. It has all these uncompromising, metallic fizzes and bleeps that are so difficult to tame, you really need to start with it as the center of the track. Most tracks on the album began on the piano, but not this one. The frantic synth melody was actually improvised one afternoon on our Andromeda A6; it was a single take on a heavily customized and edited patch that we\'ve never been able to replicate. It was just one of those moments when you hit ‘record’ and get it right.” **Rever (feat. Julia Kent)** Ferguson: “We started this track in Bali in 2016. We were on tour and had access to a studio full of local instruments, and knew right away that we wanted to use them. We recorded long sessions of us playing them live, but never ended up using them in one of our finished tracks. Several years later, we were working with Julia Kent, who had recorded the strings for another demo, but it just wasn’t working. She tried some of the Bali instrumentals instead. It sounded really unique. The chopped-up vocal came last, edited and re-pitched to fit, almost like a melody.” **Sundial** McBriar: “One of the simplest tracks on the album, ‘Sundial’ grew from a faulty Jupiter 6 arp recording. Our trigger wasn’t working properly and the arp was randomly skipping notes. This was a small segment taken from a recording of Andy playing around with the arp while we were trying to figure out what was going wrong. We actually loved what it produced and wrote some chords around it, guided by the feeling of that recording.” **Fir** Ferguson: “We have a real soft spot for choral vox synths, and this track was born from an experiment with those. It\'s actually one of the fastest songs we\'ve ever made, and grew purely out of those days in the studio when we just jammed, trying new things. No direction, no preconceived ideas, we just felt it out.” **Hawk (feat. machina)** Ferguson: “The melody on ‘Hawk’ is actually our voices mapped and re-pitched to a granular sampler. We experimented a lot with re-pitching on this album; it brings this unique quality to vocals and melodies. We have a rare-ish Japanese synth, the Kawai SX-240, which creates all those super weird synth noises. Again, this track was the product of lots of experimentation. Machina\'s vocal\'s were actually for another demo which we were struggling on and it just worked perfectly.”
After the release of 2018’s *Wide Awake!*, Parquet Courts guitarist Austin Brown was feeling the effects of nearly a decade of touring and recording. “To be frank, I was a bit disillusioned with music in general,” he tells Apple Music. “There was this exhaustion. Maybe I was just a little bit bored with the state of rock music or indie music—it was a hard world to relate to, and I’m not sure we ever did. But I wanted to figure out a way to reject ideas of whatever was being pushed as culture, and I wanted to do it in a productive way by offering up something better.” That something is *Sympathy for Life*, his Brooklyn outfit’s seventh full-length. In an effort to branch out both musically and socially, Brown became a member of The Loft, New York’s longest-running (and most influential) underground dance party, ground zero for disco in the 1970s. While there is still plenty of rock to be found here (see: the hypnotic crunch of “Homo Sapien”), it’s often braided together with elements of dance music, in the spirit of Talking Heads, Happy Mondays, and Primal Scream. The emphasis was on rhythm, the goal to write songs a DJ could easily unfurl at a party. And to get there, they largely switched up their lyrics-first approach to writing, recording and editing together long stretches of improvisation. “We’ve been together for 10 years now,” Brown says. “One of the biggest influences on the sound of the record is us utilizing that. Our biggest asset and our best instrument is just us, playing together as a band.” Here, Brown guides us through songs from the album. **“Walking at a Downtown Pace”** “Every day in the mix session, we would spend a few hours just on this song, listening to the drums and moving stuff around, finding that sweet spot—what makes you move and what doesn\'t. We really wanted a song that a DJ can play at a party, and that\'s why we really needed to get the kick drum to hit, the snare drum to really be on that right beat. It was important for us to have that crossover feel, between rock and dance. But in trying to find what that would mean for us, it felt like a really important song for the band and for the record.” **“Black Widow Spider”** “A lot of the songs were cultivated from improvisations, and this is one of them. That guitar sound is super unique, and it\'s integral to this sound on this record. We fed Andrew\'s \[Savage\] rhythm guitar—and I think maybe the lead guitar as well—through the MS-20 synthesizer. I had this space station dub set up, where I had a 16-channel mixer, five synthesizers, but then also effects like tape echo and the harmonizer—the one that you would hear on David Bowie\'s *Low*. It\'s this vintage 8-bit digital pitch-shifting thing that I just am obsessed with.” **“Marathon of Anger”** “It\'s about living in quarantine during Black Lives Matter and just all of the things that were happening around that time, but also looking forward to what happens next. It\'s about getting to work to make the change that we need to see collectively in our personal lives and in our community. And right now, this is the marathon of anger, but what happens next? You can\'t just be angry, there has to be something that comes after this.” **“Just Shadows”** “Within the band there\'s been an ongoing conversation about recycling. And I guess this song is sort of summed up by that conversation for me: It just gets really frustrating when you\'re in your kitchen being like, ‘I\'m not really sure if this is recyclable, but I feel like if I don\'t do this right I\'m a bad person.’ And the rules about recycling are honestly so confusing, and they\'re put onto us as individuals, rather than the corporations which are literally making the products. The song lists the ways that we have these false choices about doing the right thing, how we find the things that are good for us, how do we know what\'s good for us or good for the world, and have these choices put in front of us that don\'t always make sense.” **“Plant Life”** “The word that \[producer\] Roddy \[McDonald\] used to describe it was ‘Balearic.’ It hit all these notes, and I had them build this up to be this Mediterranean island vibe, a Grace Jones ‘Pull Up to the Bumper’ kind of groove—more of a feeling or a mood. It’s like a sunset or a sunrise, a song that you could play on the beach during that time, but at night or in the morning. That late-’80s rock-meets-dance in England vibe: It was never about hard acid house. It was just about this mellow groove. It helped these guys that were in rock bands understand that transition between what can we do to integrate ourselves into this new rave world, this dance world. ‘Plant Life’ is probably the most pure expression of that on this record.” **“Application/Apparatus”** “The lyrics are sort of about this conflict between a person versus the robot algorithm takeover. I feel like the music really matches that in quality—it’s very electronic, robotic, a really direct expression of the lyrics. That song is sort of this total package, a complete circle of aesthetic and lyrical content and deeper meaning.” **“Homo Sapien”** “This is a song that Andrew brought fully realized. At first, it was the kind of track I was trying to avoid on this record—just more of a rock song. But the more that we worked on it, the more I thought, ‘This is actually cool and it fits in aesthetically.’ It feels like one of our more accomplished high-energy tracks. It\'s not beating you over the head with speed or anything—it’s got a groove to it. But the sound of all the guitars and everything just feels like it actually expresses the energy in an intuitive way that we haven\'t always had. It growls and snarls and just feels very primitive and caveman. But in a way that\'s got swagger to it, which I can really appreciate, because I\'m just getting a little old for that finger-wagging kind of punk.” **“Sympathy for Life”** “I was really obsessed with the intersection between Afrobeat and dub when I was thinking about songs for this record—really into polyrhythm and really wanting to incorporate that. I worked really hard, ended up in some pretty funky zones that were really, really hard to recreate live in the studio.” **“Zoom Out”** “It was really inspired by being at some of these parties that I\'ve been going to—dance parties and disco parties, the experience at The Loft. That song is more about the joy that you can experience through community, what you have when you take materialism out of your relationships.” **“Trullo”** “I think this is maybe my favorite song on the record. It’s another one that was cut up from a long improvisation. It’s a very sample-heavy track. I put in a guitar solo that came off of the song \'Bodies Made Of,’ off \[2014’s\] *Sunbathing Animal*. And there\'s some other hidden samples in there as well that I can\'t even remember. It’s about living inside of a house in the shape of a head, kind of like living in a skull.” **“Pulcinella”** “Pulcinella is this creepy Italian clown, or a masked figure sometimes appearing as a clown. It’s playful, it\'s kind of scary, it\'s sort of like a visual or a metaphorical antagonist for themes that pop up throughout the album. The lyrics I always come back to are where it talks about carrying a chain, because I think that carrying around a relationship\'s worth of experiences or a life\'s worth of experiences can get quite heavy and burdensome when you\'re trying to connect with people. The thing that I love about this song is how naked it feels, especially considering the production on a lot of the other songs. It felt like a sensitive way to close out the album.”
“Fifth records are actually a lot of people’s best records,” James Blake tells Apple Music. “You’ve had all the practice of making albums, taken a few different directions, and by then have usually reached your thirties where you’ve got a bunch of stuff out of your system. So you finally decide to just be yourself. And suddenly, everyone’s thrilled.” *Friends That Break Your Heart* is Blake’s fifth album. While he’s too coy to personally anoint it his best work, the record does feel invigoratingly apart from the North London-born, Los Angeles-based artist’s first four. There’s the emotional payload of any Blake enterprise, but here he detonates through an earthier and more unguarded sonic arsenal. “It’s the most direct songwriting of anything I’ve done,” he says. “Whether it’s a sad song or an uplifting song, each emotion I’ve gone for is a more raw version of that thing on at least the last two records. I was working stuff out on those records, and I am here, too, but at 32, I’m starting to become more sure of myself in lots of ways. This record is very sure of itself.” The title here suggests a twist on a classic breakup album—a documentation of how we negotiate non-romantic partings. “There doesn’t seem to be a protocol for how to treat someone who’s breaking up with a friend,” he says. “We’re expected to move on pretty quick from deep lifelong friendships. But you can’t make old friends, as they say.” Can the COVID-inspired events of 2020 and 2021 take the blame for the demise of certain relationships? “I think what’s happened partly makes the topic of this album so pertinent,” he says. “We lost some of the parameters that kept friendships together. And it’s been a time for analyzing and reflecting what the qualities in friends that you actually need in your life are—and facing up to your own failings as one. Being an infantilized C-list pop star doesn’t really set you up to be the best friend in the world. But also, when I needed them and help most, I realized that most of those people just didn’t know what to do.” Blake has been candid about requiring that help in the past, and fortunately, the various COVID lockdowns proved beneficial to the creation of this record—which had a positive knock-on effect for his mental health. “I realized that I actually have a lot of control over my mental health,” he says. “What the lockdowns did was force me to say, ‘I can actually do this. I can actually block this out, and actually lift myself out of certain things.’ Previously I’d relied on other means. And I think that allows music to flow easier because being present and overcoming mental ill health is good for creativity.” Below, Blake takes us through his beautiful album, track by track. **“Famous Last Words”** “I don\'t agonize over tracklisting. I think it\'s like a DJ set, and a DJ set needs its peaks and troughs and moments of reflection. I spend so long writing the actual song and producing the song, by the time it comes to sequencing the tracklist, I\'m like, ‘Oh god, just put it in an order, man.’ This isn\'t a love song. But it is kind of a love song. It\'s kind of a breakup song. It\'s weird. I think it blurs the line between friendship and romance. With friendships, it’s not necessarily that the feelings are romantic, but you can genuinely love someone and it hurt like that.” **“Life Is Not the Same”** “You meet some people and they can just have an effect on you. It could be that they just sparkle, and you’ve got no idea why, but you’re doing things differently, or saying different stuff to impress them, and it doesn’t mean you’re weak or easily influenced—well, maybe it means you’re easily influenced a little bit—but it takes a special person to do that. I can take accountability for being willing to bend for someone. Certain people, for example, have taught me that I needed to develop a thicker skin and that I was too ready to give up control to someone else. I clearly needed to have more self-belief, because if I was so easily swayed then maybe I’d miscalculated my own self-worth.” **“Coming Back” (feat. SZA)** “I was doing a session with \[US artist and songwriter\] Starrah, who casually mentioned SZA was going to come by the studio. So I played her a bunch of stuff, she sang over it, and we hit it off straight away. It took a while to figure out how to produce what we landed on, though. Long story short: My production wasn’t hitting. You could hear that SZA and I sounded good together—but I hadn’t figured out how to best support her vocal because it was a song with no chorus. We are used to those structures as a society, so when you start taking apart those structures, you’ve really got to replace it properly. A bit like gluten-free bread. I realized I needed to put a donk on it, essentially. I just had to make it more banger-y. I tried doing the ambient thing, I tried making it really beautiful, and it didn’t work. I have it in my locker, and occasionally that power needs to be drawn upon.” **“Funeral”** “This song is all me, done on a very sunny but slightly miserable day. I was thinking about how it feels not to be heard, and to worry that people have given up on you. During lockdown I specifically felt that. It had been many years since I had really popped up and done forward-facing stuff like interviews.” **“Frozen” (feat. JID & SwaVay)** “Quite a spooky instrumental, and my vocals come in a little off-kilter, a little creepy. JID and SwaVay kill it over a beat I actually originally wrote for JID. It ended up not really fitting his record, which I found very lucky because secretly I wanted it for myself. It felt a bit like when you set someone up to cancel on you—my favorite feeling. Jameela \[Jamil, Blake’s partner and co-producer on the album\] suggested putting SwaVay on it because I’d been working with him for a couple of years. Totally right. Good A&R instincts.” **“I\'m So Blessed You\'re Mine”** “The album is sort of split between these Frankenstein’s monsters that were very exciting to put together and songs that happened very quickly. This was somewhere in the middle, and I got to work with some of my favorite people on it—Khushi, Dominic Maker, Josh Stadlen, Jameela. I want to get out of the way so we end up with the best piece of music we can make. And maybe have a nice chat about something before we start. There was no chatting back on album one, say, because I had way too much social anxiety.” **“Foot Forward”** “Metro Boomin is back! He knows I’m often into his more esoteric stuff so played me this piano sample he’d made on the MPC \[music production center\] that sounded like it was from the ’70s but had this Metro-y bounce on it. I started improvising in the studio, and I remember seeing him dancing in the booth because it sounded so up. It felt very anthemic. Eventually I turned it into a song with Frank Dukes and Ali Tamposi—another genius who wrote the chorus melody.” **“Show Me” (feat. Monica Martin)** “Monica is an incredible singer and incredible person—she’s fucking hilarious, and we’ve become friends. The song felt quite bare without her. It needed someone to step in, and it had to be exactly the right person, otherwise it’s not going to work. Again, Jameela made the suggestion. She came into the studio with Khushi and I, did the take in exactly the way I imagined, and it was glorious. I was just so excited, she was excited, it was a lovely moment.” **“Say What You Will”** “Ah, those those dreamy ’60s vibes. This is my favorite song I’ve written in years. It’s the song that carries the most meaning in terms of my overall life. It’s more representative of my headspace as a whole, and I like songs that have a wider commentary baked into them. I was pleased with the reaction to it because I really tried to communicate where I am right now in an authentic way. At this point in my career, it can’t be any other way. The formula to putting a song out has never changed. A good song will out in every single scenario. It needs to resonate with people, or it will disappear. And I know that feeling—I have released songs that for whatever reason have not resonated with people.” **“Lost Angel Nights”** “It’s about a lot of things, but primarily it’s about worrying that you’ve missed your shot. And *maybe* there’s a little bit of finger-pointing in there as well. The way people take your original essence, copy it and move on, really. I’ve been super lucky in my career, but I think there was a time where there was a lot of looking at what the shiny new thing is, doing that, then moving on. You don’t need them anymore. It happens to a lot of people, but you have to contend with being a permanent person, a permanent artist. I want to be here for as long as I can and be as naturalistic and true to myself as I can be, and what other people do doesn’t affect that.” **“Friends That Break Your Heart”** “Perhaps weirdly, it was album title first, then this song. I wrote the melody in the car on the way to meet \[US songwriter and producer\] Rick Nowels. There were a couple of others that we didn’t put onto the record, but this one was just standout right away. It was a really fun process, because he just played the keys and I was left to singer-songwriter duties for once. The line ‘I have haunted many photographs’ is something we can hopefully all relate to—well, hopefully not, actually, because that would be terrible, but I feel like that’s a common feeling.” **“If I\'m Insecure”** “I like to go out on something either where it’s all harmonies or it just feels huge. This is the latter. It’s an apocalyptic love song—the world is ending, but you’re in love, so it’s all right. Which maybe captures where we are as a society in 2021, so perhaps I’ll come to think of this record as one big externalization of my COVID experience, but that wasn’t the original intention. I make a load of music and then eventually realize, ‘Oh, yes, roughly, it was about this.’”
Pop music is, by design, kaleidoscopic, and Doja Cat\'s third album takes full advantage of its fluidity. *Planet Her* is ushered in on the euphoric Afropop of “Woman” and moves seamlessly into the reggaetón-kissed “Naked,” the hip-hop-meets-hyperpop of “Payday,” and the whimsical ad-lib trap of “Get Into It (Yuh)”—and that\'s just the first four songs. Later, R&B ballads and club-ready anthems also materialize from the ether, encompassing the spectrum of contemporary capital-P Pop and also the multihued sounds that are simply just popular, even if only in their corners of the internet for now. This is Doja\'s strength. She\'s long understood how mainstream sensibility interacts with counterculture (or what\'s left of it anyway, for better and worse), and she\'s nimbly able to translate both. *Planet Her* checks all the right boxes and accentuates her talent for shape-shifting—she sounds just as comfortable rapping next to Young Thug or JID as she does crooning alongside The Weeknd or Ariana Grande—but it\'s so pristine, so in tune with the music of the moment that it almost verges on parody. Is this Doja\'s own reflection or her reflecting her fans back to themselves? Her brilliance lies in the fact that the answer doesn\'t much matter. The best pop music is nothing if not a blurring of the lines between reality and fantasy, its brightest stars so uniquely themselves and yet whatever else they need to be, too.
Ten years after the clangorous thrills of their debut LP, *New Brigade*, Iceage’s apocalyptic punk has led here: a hunger for comfort, refined goth grandeur. “If the last record is us heading out into a storm and feeling content doing so, this record is situated in the storm—longing for something we didn\'t have,” Iceage frontman Elias Bender Rønnenfelt tells Apple Music. “That could be shelter.” *Seek Shelter*, the Copenhagen band’s fifth studio album, is the group’s most expansive. Recording across 12 days in Lisbon, Portugal, the band worked with an outside producer for the first time—Sonic Boom (Spacemen 3’s Pete Kember). (“He’s a good bullshitter,” Rønnenfelt says.) *Seek Shelter* maintains the tenacity of the band’s hardcore roots, elevated with lush, unexpected experimentation, neo-psych dynamism (“Shelter Song”), a bluesy sinister dance (“Vendetta”), a fiery slow-burn and thunderous crescendo (“The Holding Hand”), and a mid-song interpolation of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” (“High & Hurt”). Below, Rønnenfelt takes us inside *Seek Shelter*, track by track. **“Shelter Song”** “We thought that a gospel choir would be the exact right thing. Cut forward: We\'re on the last day in Lisbon. We\'ve been bunkered up there for 12 days, collectively losing our minds, not necessarily knowing how to feel about everything we put down on tape. And having never worked with a choir before, we didn\'t really know if we were going to be able to speak the same language, but they instantly got it. They started flowing with the song and harmonizing and taking it in all sorts of directions. It became a very lovely collaboration.” **“High & Hurt”** “The melody started getting incorporated before we remembered what that hymn was. The lyrics of this song are, by nature, really quite scumbag-y, in a mythical sort of way. So it felt too tempting not to include ‘Will the Circle Be Unbroken.’ The contrast between that song and the additional lyrics felt kind of wrong, but deliciously so, you know?” **“Love Kills Slowly”** “Before the choir came in, I thought I was singing almost pitch perfect. As soon as my voice was paired with people who can actually sing, it became very apparent how rugged and broken it still is. I\'ve tried to make the lyrics as simple as possible, but that\'s the hardest thing to approach. How do you state something so obvious, but make it feel urgent and relevant and like it belongs to you? I\'m somebody who has always had a tendency to make lyrics overly voluptuous. This was an exercise in stripping things down. And of course it is still a bit corrupted.” **“Vendetta”** “‘Vendetta’ came about from me lending my little sister\'s plastic toy-store keyboard. I slowed the tempo way down and started playing with it. It is interesting to pair the pounding, dancy feel of the track with speaking about the omnipresence of crime in the world and have it be this discordant dance. We are always attracted to dualities, I guess. Traveling the world and growing up in Copenhagen or anywhere, you never have to scratch the surface very hard to discover that crime is an essential glue that binds a lot of society together.” **“Drink Rain”** “Definitely the most bizarre thing we ever been involved with writing. This was one of those moments where your hands just start writing, and then you take a look at a paper and you\'re like, \'What is this thing that I just wrote?\' It\'s this perverse creep that lurks around drinking from puddles of rain in the streets, because he has some delusion that it might bring him closer to some kind of love interest. In the studio, when we first listened back to the first take of it, we were like, \'I\'m not sure if we should be doing this.\' It feels like a transgression.” **“Gold City”** “It’s a ballad that speaks to how moments can be determined by a lot of factors culminating together: the weather, the air, your company, the levels of chemicals in your brain. Everything rumbles together.” **“Dear Saint Cecilia”** “It\'s a bit drunken and raving, and I wouldn\'t say uplifting. It\'s carefree, but also moving within chaos and trying to evoke the Catholic patron saint. It’s just a very carefree song that charges through the chaos of a modern society.” **“The Wider Powder Blue”** “It started out with one of my old heroes, Peter Schneidermann, who played in Denmark\'s first punk band, Sods. He recorded our first EP when we were 16, and he has always been a hero of mine. He asked me to write a song. I started out with what became this and I became too attached to it. I couldn\'t give it to him. That song is an ode to him and how his insane genius is quite morbid, but ultimately a glorious thing.” **“The Holding Hand”** “I can\'t remember the name in English for the instrument, but we had…like a xylophone, tubes of aluminum, or some kind of metal. The song is quite an abstract one, like a landscape scene in itself. It\'s more about describing a feeling of being in the world than describing the actual world. It plays with notions of power, how strength is sometimes weakness and how weakness is sometimes strength. It has this lost beauty in all that.”
In January 2019, Royal Blood traveled to LA to record with Josh Homme at the Queens of the Stone Age frontman’s Pink Duck studio. The sessions produced “Boilermaker,” a track from the Sussex rock duo’s third album *Typhoons*, but it was also a trip that generated two important changes for singer/bassist Mike Kerr and drummer Ben Thatcher. Firstly, Kerr stopped drinking. On a weekend break from recording, he headed to Vegas. “I was at a real crescendo,” he tells Apple Music’s Matt Wilkinson. “I was a nutter. I was like Ron Burgundy at the bar, washed up. And I could hear the same old monologue going on. I could see I was bored of my complaints about myself. I had a very clear moment of ‘Something’s got to change. I can’t expect things to get any better if I don’t really take responsibility for this.’” Secondly, Homme encouraged Kerr and Thatcher to worry less about perfection and explore the untapped possibilities for their music. “There’s a lot of wigs, a lot of fancy dress,” says Kerr about Pink Duck. “It’s a place to have fun. He is very good at creating an environment where you feel comfortable putting forward an idea no matter how crazy it might be. I think he says, ‘What if?’ more than anyone I’ve ever met. That mantra got drilled into us and we’ve carried that into the rest of this record.” Both developments resonate through *Typhoons*. Across two previous albums—double-platinum debut *Royal Blood* in 2014 and follow-up *How Did We Get So Dark?* in 2017— the duo minted ferocious, divergent rock from just drums, bass, and effects pedals. Even more free-spirited, *Typhoons* retools their sound for the dance floor, marshaling riffs to four-to-the-floor beats. It’s a limber, swaggering sound they’ve nicknamed “AC Disco”—but factor in the big pop melodies on “Million and One” and “Trouble’s Coming” and you could also call it Black ABBAth. And like all the best disco, *Typhoons* bears plenty of emotional weight, with the songs unflinchingly tracing Kerr’s turbulent path towards sobriety. “It was the only thing I had to write about,” he says. “I got to the point where I *really* understood who I was, and having that kind of genuine confidence is crucial for being creative. It allowed me to trust myself with it rather than second-guessing anything. I felt a little less exposed: It almost felt like the lyrics were a bit disguised because the music was so upbeat and euphoric. I felt amazing and so positive that I was in a much better place, yet the only thing I had to write about was incredibly dark. So it’s a strange duality on the album.” Only at the very end do the music’s rigor and strut drop, when Kerr swaps his bass for a piano on the airy, psychedelic ballad “All We Have Is Now.” “Perhaps it points towards the unknown of where we’re going next,” he says. “It ended up on the record because \[we thought\], ‘That’s really great.’ It doesn’t matter whether it aligns with what we’ve done before or what people say we’re allowed to do. As long as we’re not trying to fight for someone we used to be, or trying to jump too aggressively forwards to be a band we’re not yet, as long as we stay true to who we are in the moment, then we’ll be OK.”
For Ashnikko, the title of her debut mixtape, *DEMIDEVIL*, represents what she calls a “duality.” “There’s a side that’s a little bit more vulnerable and human,” the singer and rapper tells Apple Music. “And then there’s a devil side that\'s very tough and doesn\'t give a shit. It’s just confidence and sadness—I can’t do anything else.” It’s a neat summation of what you can expect from the 10 tracks here. There’s all the indestructibility seen on the viral hits that set Ashnikko up as a provocative new pop force—from 2019’s ex-eviscerating TikTok smash “STUPID” to 2020’s just-as-inescapable “Daisy.” But, set against her dizzyingly genre-evasive mash-up of pop, punk, and rap, the North Carolina-born artist also embraces that sadness, as she allows herself to be vulnerable in her music for the first time. “The character I’ve placed at the forefront of my music is very confident and strong, and I’m more confident now because of those songs,” says Ashnikko, real name Ashton Nicole Casey. “But it’s impossible to sustain without lying to yourself. Like all humans, I am flawed and I like to cry.” But if any of that sounds like Ashnikko’s empowering, unfiltered, and sex-positive energy has diminished, think again. On *DEMIDEVIL*, she continues to admonish toxic men and those yet to learn their way around a woman’s body (see the hilarious “Clitoris! The Musical”), all while championing female pleasure in her mission, as she puts it, to create “the opposite of the male gaze.” Buckle up as Ashnikko talks us through *DEMIDEVIL*, track by track. **Daisy** “When \[British producer\] Thomas Slinger and I wrote this, we were like, ‘This is a fucking banger. This is a hit.’ I rarely feel that way about my music. I like to have something visual to go along with the lyrics, like a character that I\'m tapping into. Here I have Daisy, who is a vigilante and who wears latex, blue diamonds, and massive, clear, icy platforms. She smashes the patriarchy and kills horrible men—think the Trump dudes of America. She looks amazing, and she leaves behind a daisy as a calling card.” **Toxic** “As a woman in music, I have definitely encountered a lot of toxic men. I always find it really difficult when people, especially men, are like, ‘I made you who you are.’ It\'s like, ‘No, actually, I worked extremely hard and you helped me with a lot of things, but I made this music.’ The unnamed man this song is about knows who he is—and he should feel bad. There are some songs that are very cathartic, and this is definitely one of them. It’s my power anthem, which is why the bass is extremely heavy. I wanted it to feel like a smack in the face.” **Deal With It (feat. Kelis)** “Kelis’ ‘Caught Out There’ is one of my favorite songs in the entire world, and I’m blown away that we got this cleared, let alone her wanting her name next to it. This is my breakup song—it wouldn’t be an Ashnikko project without one. It’s about choosing yourself, because that’s the best way to get through a breakup. Get some new sex toys, invest in yourself, learn something new, cut all your hair off if you want. Manifest your dreams, baby. This song is quite poppy. I\'m a pop girlie at the end of the day, and that\'s a side to me that I felt was very important to put on this mixtape.” **Slumber Party (feat. Princess Nokia)** “I love Princess Nokia and I\'ve been listening to her since she first started putting out music as Wavy Spice. She\'s just very unapologetically herself, and I really fuck with that. There’s an element of this song that plays on some sapphic tropes in pop music, like the ‘I Kissed a Girl’ tropes. I was kind of poking fun at it a little bit in the chorus, and then completely flipping it on its head in the verses. It’s about a girl who hurt my feelings. I always get in very messy relationship situations with taken women. The lyric is ‘She looks like the type to break it.’ Because I\'m very confident, but also I always get my heart broken.” **Drunk With My Friends** “I had a really wild few months of raving a lot, going to a lot of techno parties, and three-way kissing loads of people. And I remember spending my rent money on pills… I was in Berlin, so can you blame me? I\'m not really into it anymore because I truly can\'t do drugs—I have a mind that already sits on the precipice of disaster on any given day—so I have to sober rave. I wrote this song with \[London-based producer\] Oscar Scheller, who’s one of my best pals. We had a lot of fun writing this song.” **Little Boy** “I was dealing with some very toxic men in the music industry and toxic boys in my life and was just like, ‘I\'m over it. Don\'t treat me like shit anymore. I literally will not tolerate it.’ I was understanding what boundaries were. There’s sadness here, for sure, and I think a real disappointment with men. It\'s less ‘Go fuck yourself’ and more like ‘Please stop placing your emotional trauma onto me and just pay for therapy.’ I think the people who listen to my music will appreciate the vulnerability. It\'s very important to me that people understand that it\'s not all confidence.” **Cry (feat. Grimes)** “The context of this song is that I had a really heartbreaking moment when I was 19, when my best friend and boyfriend got together behind my back. I had just moved to London and they were my two family members. I was so sad—more with her because she was my best friend, and there\'s a certain code in friendship that shouldn’t be breached. With my boyfriend, it was like, ‘You’re a shithead, but that’s to be expected, I guess.’ I recognize that was a very problematic way of dealing with it. But I was so mad at her, to a point where I was just like, ‘We could have fought.’ I was broken. Grimes is a huge inspiration to me. I saw she followed me on Instagram and I just immediately was like, ‘Please feature on this song, I love you so much.’ And she said yes! It all happens over Instagram.” **L8r Boi** “When I was younger, I thought Avril Lavigne was a bad bitch. I knew I wanted to flip an Avril song, and when we looked at the lyrics of ‘Sk8er Boi,’ I was like, ‘Love Avril, love everything about her, but the lyrics are a bit problematic!’ Because it\'s mainly about ‘Fuck this girl. She doesn\'t appreciate my man. Fuck this girl for being into ballet.’ I wanted to update it a little bit and make it about not wanting skater boy. He\'s not the prized object in this song, whereas in the original he is.” **Good While It Lasted** “My serious song. It\'s reflecting on a relationship and being like, ‘I see now that maybe we both acted immature, and maybe I\'m not quite as blameless as I make out.’ I think it\'s a more mature approach. My favorite part is the first verse. It was a day when I was feeling really sad and very broken and it came from a really real place. It’s extremely raw and I just felt like it needed to be included because it meant a lot to me. All of my stuff is a therapy session. I\'m just bringing everyone along for a very public therapy session.” **Clitoris! The Musical”** “Putting this song next to ‘Good While It Lasted’ was a little joke of mine. Because I can’t be serious. It’s like, ‘I\'m serious, I\'m vulnerable, but also JK, I\'m not!’ This song was a skit that I wrote for my YouTube channel where I dressed up as a vagina and my face was the clitoris. I thought it was hilarious. I\'ve written a lot of songs about the cis-het man\'s journey to find the clitoris, because for some reason it’s some elusive mystery land. This song is really my little sex-education tidbit. I’m just trying to pay forward what I’ve learned.”