On her expansive debut album, singer/songwriter/producer Hayden Silas Anhedönia introduces her alter ego Ethel Cain, a Southern anti-belle desperate to escape the smothering grip of familial trauma, Christianity, and the American dream. On *Preacher’s Daughter*, the Florida-reared conceptualist and recovered Southern Baptist finds a sense of freedom in darkness and depravity, spinning a seedy, sweeping, slowcore yarn of doomed love and patriarchal oppression with cinematic ambition. Cain allows the titular preacher the first word on droning opener “Family Tree (Intro),” then teases a little pop-star charm on the twangy “American Teenager,” before digging her teeth deep into sex, drugs, violence, and rock ‘n’ roll with the provocative pout of Lana Del Rey. She laments a lost love on the heartland heartbreaker “A House In Nebraska,” hitchhikes west on the sprawling Americana saga “Thoroughfare,” and spirals into Dante’s hell on the thunderous industrial nightmare “Ptolemaea.” Cain’s voice haunts and lingers like a heavy fog, long after she’s devoured by a cannibalistic lover—in a blaze of glam-metal guitar—on the album’s grandiose finale, “Strangers.”
When Let’s Eat Grandma’s Jenny Hollingworth and Rosa Walton were making their third album, *Two Ribbons*, someone from their record label told them, “You know you don’t have to put yourselves through this, don’t you?” The album is a visceral exploration of the love, loss, grief, and devastation they’ve experienced in recent years. And for the electronic-pop duo from Norwich, England, best friends since childhood, this was the only way through. “I was like, ‘We’re going through it anyway,’” Hollingworth tells Apple Music. “It was hard making the record, but that’s because it was a hard time in general. Even though it was extremely challenging, it gives you a place to put the amount of emotion you have. It was a way of trying to forge meaning out of stuff, especially when it all feels a bit meaningless.” Here, their intricately woven synth-pop brings out a lightness in the darkest of subjects. This is an album about the duo’s personal ordeals, as Hollingworth tries to make sense of the tragic passing of her boyfriend, the singer Billy Clayton, who died at just 22 from a rare form of bone cancer, with both reflecting on cracks in their friendship. “It was the first time that we’ve written that honestly about our lives, and that felt really important,” says Walton. “It’s just very down the line and quite brutally honest. That was important for both of us.” All of which has resulted in a profound and poignant artistic statement—and an album that sees Walton and Hollingworth’s songcraft reaching new peaks. Here, they talk us through *Two Ribbons*, track by track. **“Happy New Year”** Rosa Walton: “I actually started writing this with the intention of it being for the Cyberpunk 2077 game but, in the end, the brief for that was so specific, and I wrote a different track instead. I had the main hook chords for this and then I just sung the words ‘best friend’ and I was like, ‘Oh, wait, I know what this should be about.’ I had loads of things that felt really pressing to write about mine and Jenny’s relationship and looking back on that in a nostalgic way and also looking forward to a new chapter. It made sense to use the metaphor of New Year because it’s often a time when you do that.” **“Levitation”** RW: “This was written about the surreal mental state of feeling detached from reality, in a way that you almost feel high, and there’s positives about it, but then also it can be really scary and alienating. I wanted to write about two sides of that. It’s one that we both sing, and Jenny brought lyrics to it later in the process.” **“Watching You Go”** Jenny Hollingworth: “I wanted to make something that reflected the pent-up emotion of grief and the kind of tension that you feel when you’re in a lot of confusion and distress. The way that the song’s built, there aren’t really clear chords through most of it; it’s very bass-led and kind of churning and then, at the end, there’s this big guitar release. It represents, to me, just how difficult I found it at the time to express myself. There’s a lot of nature imagery on the record because a lot of the record was written spending a huge amount of time outside. This one looks at the images of beauty but also the horror of nature at the same time.” **“Hall of Mirrors”** RW: “This was very production-led in that the shiny, bright metallic sounds came before any of the lyrics or the story. They almost informed the lyrics, in a way. The idea of writing about the hall of mirrors came from the image of the shiny, delayed synth sounds that were like reflections in a mirror, and then from there I realized that I wanted to write a song about my sexuality, which I hadn’t written about before. That was something that I felt like, at that point, I was ready to talk about in a song and the many different emotions in relation to that. I knew that I wanted it to be an uplifting and positive song, but then, in the same way, there’s a lot of secrecy and guilt mixed in there as well. I knew that I wanted to keep it a dance-pop song at the core.” **“Insect Loop”** RW: “This one is very painful and a raw, emotional song. I see it in sections, and all of the sections represent different facets of how you feel about a person. There’s anger, there’s guilt, there’s tenderness in the middle section, and then a release at the end, and we used the production to build that. The end section I imagine as being set on a beach: The big, reverb-y, distorted guitars are like the crashing waves. Both of us are really influenced by our environment and influenced by the Norfolk coastline and the Norfolk countryside.” **“Half Light”** RW: “This was written as a segue between ‘Insect Loop’ and ‘Sunday’ because they’re both very heavy, emotionally intense songs, and we felt like we needed to put in a breather there.” **“Sunday”** RW: “I started writing this one at the beginning of lockdown. I was about to break up with my boyfriend at the time and it was written ahead of that, as a kind of way to prepare myself for the break-up. I really wanted to write something very warm-sounding, which is interesting with it being about a break-up. The warmness was like a longing for how I wanted to feel and how I once felt in the relationship. I think there’s something extra sad about that. A lot of the sounds are very delicate and fragile, and also just really pretty. Again, there’s something really sad about using those sounds in a way which is about something which is ending.” **“In the Cemetery”** RW: “This was a track that Jenny had started, and then I wrote a bit of instrumental around it and then put in some shitty recordings of birds off the internet, and then Jenny went to the cemetery and recorded actual birds. Again, we just felt like we needed to have something in there that just created a bit of space and a break from the high volumes of lyrics.” **“Strange Conversations”** JH: “It’s complicated to talk about this because I feel like a lot of the lyrics are mysterious, even to me. I think when Billy passed away, it made me think a lot about spirituality, not in the literal sense of religion, but just in terms of meaning and what happens when we die, and you are quite confronted with that aspect of life in a way that you’re not previously. It not only represents a conversation with either some sort of higher power or a god, but also the questions that you have for the person that you love who’s passed away, and the way that your relationship continues even when they’ve passed away. I guess the strangeness of it is the fact that it’s obviously one-sided and that you can’t actually get the answers that you’re looking for.” **“Two Ribbons”** JH: “It wasn’t immediately obvious to me as a closer, but it made sense as the record came together because it just felt like it had a mood that was difficult to bounce back from. It also ended up creating a kind of circular, because ‘Happy New Year’ is almost like a response to ‘Two Ribbons.’ Ending on ‘Two Ribbons’ and then starting again with ‘Happy New Year,’ it’s almost like you hear the songs differently the second time you listen on loop because of the context of this song.”
The band's new album, 'Two Ribbons', tells the story of the last three years from both Jenny Hollingworth and Rosa Walton's points of view. As a body of work, it is astonishing: a dazzling, heart-breaking, life-affirming and mortality-facing record that reveals their growing artistry and ability to parse intense feeling into lyrics so memorable you'd scribble them on your backpack.
Twenty years into their time together as a band—and approaching the 10-year milestone of being a hugely successful one—The 1975 felt in better shape than ever. Self-reflection, sobriety, even fatherhood have influenced the way the four-piece, assisted by producer Jack Antonoff, approached the creation of their fifth studio album, resulting in 11 songs that distill the essence of The 1975 without ever feeling like they’re treading old ground. “The working title, up until I chickened out, was *At Their Very Best*,” singer/guitarist Matty Healy tells Apple Music. “But I knew we were coming out in sunglasses and suits, and it could look like a bit of a joke. I’m not joking.” It wouldn’t have been an unfair assumption. Healy has carved out a reputation for building to a punchline—in his lyrics, in conversation, on social media. But he has (mostly) put that defensive reflex aside for this album, dialing back the sardonic interrogations of society that dominated previous records in favor of more soul-baring tracks. “My work has been defined by postmodernism, nihilism, individualism, addiction, need, all that kind of stuff,” says Healy. “As you get a bit older, life starts presenting you with different ideas, such as responsibility? Family? Growing up in general? But they’re less sexy, less transgressive ideas. It would be easy to do another record where I’m being clever and funny. What’s hard to do is just be real and super open.” *Being Funny in a Foreign Language* is indisputable evidence that those 20 years together and the experience gained has paid off. “This is the first time that we’ve been really good artists *and* really good producers *and* grown men at the same time,” Healy says. “It was the right time for this album to not just reaffirm, but almost celebrate who we are. It was a self-analysis and then a reinvention.” Here, he guides us through that reinvention, track by track. **“The 1975”** “On the first three albums, ‘The 1975’ was a rework of the same piece of music. It came from video games, like how you would turn on a Sega Mega Drive, and it had a check-in, load-up sound. The purpose it serves on this album, apart from being this conceptual thing that we’ve done, is to be like the status update. On our previous albums, the whole record has been about the cultural environment, but here I’m setting that scene up right at the beginning, and then the rest of the album is about me living in this environment and talking about how it makes these bigger ideas of love and home and growing up and things like that really difficult.” **“Happiness”** “‘Happiness’ is where we acknowledged that there was a certain lyrical and sonic identity to what The 1975 was. We felt like it wouldn’t be a ’75 record if we didn’t have a song that owned what we did best. The thing is, we weren’t actually very ’80s; we just used loads of sounds that grunge and Britpop made unfashionable because they were associated with Phil Collins or whoever, but we were like, ‘No, that sounds better than *that*.’ It’s a live record, so there’s a lot of call-and-response, a lot of repetition, because we were in the room, jamming.” **“Looking for Somebody (To Love)”** “If I’m going to talk about guns, it’s probably good for me to talk about the thing that I probably understand or empathize with the most, which is that the only vocabulary or lexicon that we provide for young boys to assert their dominance in any position is one of such violence and destruction. There’s a line that says, ‘You’ve got to show me how to push/If you don’t want a shove,’ which is me saying we have to try and figure this crisis out because there are so many young men that don’t really have guidance, and a toxic masculinity is inevitable if we don’t address the way we communicate with them.” **“Part of the Band”** “I really just trusted my instinct. As a narrative, I don’t know what the song is about. It was just this belief that I could talk, and that was OK, and it made sense, and I didn’t have to qualify it that much. I have a friend who is much more articulate than me, and there’s been so many times that he’s explained my lyrics back to me better than I ever could. So, I’ve learned I can sit there and spend five hours articulating what I mean, but I don’t think I need to. A movie doesn’t start by explaining what’s going to happen; it opens on a conversation, and you get what’s going on straight away. So, there’s a level of abstraction in this song where I’m giving the audience the benefit of the doubt.” **“Oh Caroline”** “The chorus of this song came first—‘Oh Caroline/I wanna get it right this time/’Cos you’re always on my mind’—and it just felt really, really universal. I was like, ‘OK, this doesn’t have to be about me. It doesn’t have to be “I was in Manchester in my skinny jeans.”’ You don’t need to have lived a story to write one. Caroline is whoever you want it to be—you can change that name in your head. Sometimes we call songs like this ‘“song” songs’ because they can be covered by other people and still make sense. Well, ‘“getting cucked,” I don’t need it’ would be a weird line for someone, but it’s close enough.” **“I’m in Love With You”** “I was trying to make it like a traditional 1975 song. I wanted to debase the sincerity. But \[guitarist, Adam\] Hann and George \[Daniel, drummer\] really challenged me on it, so I was like, ‘OK, fuck it. I’ll just write a song about being in love.’ At the time, I was in a relationship with a Black girl who was so beautiful, and I was in love with, and there were all these things that came up—especially with the political climate over the last two years—that you can only really learn from experience and living together. Like, our bathroom was full of specific products for skincare and stuff like that. Things you can’t just get at \[UK high-street drugstore\] Boots. So, there’s the line that goes ‘You show me your Black girl thing/Pretending that I know what it is (I wasn’t listening),’ which came from this moment when she was talking about something that I had no cultural understanding of, and all I was thinking was, ‘I’m in love with you.’ And maybe I should have been focusing on what it was, but in that moment, I didn’t care about anything cultural or political. I just loved her.” **“All I Need to Hear”** “Thinking objectively as a songwriter, ‘All I Need to Hear’ is maybe one of my best songs. I was in a big Paul Simon phase, and I was kind of trying to do something similar to what he did on ‘Still Crazy \[After All These Years\].’ He can be as verbose as me, but that song was really, really tight. Almost lullaby-esque. I wanted to write something that was earnest and sincere and didn’t require me, specifically, to deliver it. I almost hope it will be covered by someone else, and that will become the definitive version.” **“Wintering”** “This is very much a vignette, a little story in the middle that paints a picture but doesn’t really tell you much of where I’m at. It’s kind of about my family, and it’s kind of a Christmas song, but it’s also that thing of relatable specificity because everyone knows that feeling of getting home for Christmas and the wanting to, but the not wanting to, but the needing to, and having to do all the driving and that whole thing. Other parts of the record have a bit more purpose, even though they’re slightly more abstract, but ‘Wintering’ is just this moment of brevity, and I think it’s really nice.” **“Human Too”** “There’s lines on the record where I talk about being canceled and acknowledge that it was something that I was dealing with. There’s no insane smear campaign. No one is going to the trouble of ruining my life for a hobby like they do with Meghan Markle. But it does sting when it happens, and this is the first time I’m saying, ‘It does affect me *a bit*. I totally get it, I’m a messy person...but I’m a good person. Give me a break *a bit*.’ I was worried about this song because I didn’t want to sound self-pitying, but it works because it’s really just about empathy and giving each other the benefit of the doubt as humans. We’re all people—let’s not pretend that we’re not going to make mistakes.” **“About You”** “Warren Ellis from Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds came in to do the arrangement for this song. It was really simple—it sounded like ‘With or Without You’ essentially—and he made it all weird and shoegazey. Even though it’s major key, he gave it this terror, which makes my performance in it a lot less romantic because everything is mushing together, and it’s violent. I think this has a similar vibe to ‘Inside Your Mind’ from the third album. I’ve always loved those kinds of \[David\] Cronenberg, body-horror analogies, the tension between death and sex. I think that the morose can be quite sensual, and there’s quite a bit of that in my work.” **“When We Are Together”** “The album was finished with. ‘About You’ was Track 11 and there was a Track 10 called ‘This Feeling.’ But because of what the song was about, and also sonic reasons, I was like, ‘That song can’t be on the album.’ But we had to deliver it in four days. So, I said if I could get to New York tomorrow, and Jack \[Antonoff\] was around, with a drum kit and a bass, I had a half-finished acoustic song that would be better for the record. It needed to finish, and at that moment, it didn’t—there was no emotional resolve. So, I went out there, a bit heartbroken post-breakup, and this was written, recorded, and mixed in 30 hours, which is the perfect example of what making this album was like. There’s always been this ‘will they/won’t they?’ question with The 1975. Are they going to split up? Will Matty go mental? That sort of thing. Totally created by me. But I’ve stopped doing that, and I think of it more as installments of your favorite thing. Or like seasons from a TV show. ‘When We Are Together’ is the end of this season.”
The 1975 return with new album, ‘Being Funny In A Foreign Language’, released on 14th October via Dirty Hit. The band’s fifth studio album was written by Matthew Healy & George Daniel and recorded at Real World Studios in Wiltshire, United Kingdom and Electric Lady Studios in New York. Formed in Manchester in 2002, The 1975 have established themselves as one of the defining bands of their generation with their distinctive aesthetic, ardent fanbase and unique sonic approach. The band’s previous album, 2020’s ‘Notes On A Conditional Form’, became their fourth consecutive No. 1 album in the UK. The band were named NME’s ‘Band of the Decade’ in 2020 after being crowned ‘Best Group’ at the BRIT Awards in both 2017 & 2019. Their third studio album, ‘A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships’, also won ‘Mastercard British Album of the Year’ at the 2019 ceremony.
For Dublin singer-songwriter CMAT, making music is the purest form of self-expression. Her songs—a glorious fusion of country, pop, and indie—are where Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson channels how she’s feeling. “I’m not one of these writers that sits down every day and thinks, ‘What am I going to write about today?’” she tells Apple Music. “There needs to be something going on. There needs to be something that’s stressing me out or upsetting me or some kind of demon I need to exorcise.” It’s all there on her debut album, *If My Wife New I’d Be Dead*. On a record that has a warming uplift about it even in its darkest moments, there are songs about breakups and breakdowns, loss and loneliness, mental health and religion. Whether they’re delivered with a synth-pop groove, an Americana sway, or a rock stomp, Thompson is at the center of these songs, her classic melodicism elevating them. “The thing that connects them all is me and whatever I’m going through,” she says. “This collection of songs is specifically about the pitfalls of my personality as opposed to being about an outside source. It’s really introspective and it’s me wreaking havoc through comedy and humor. This record is me trying to cope with the fact that I don’t cope with anything.” CMAT takes us through a debut that defines her, track by track. **“Nashville”** “This sums up the whole album, a song that I wrote because I have really, really been a very depressed person. I was thinking about the fact that during the times of the most depression, just unable to cope with the world, completely struggling, I’m the most craic—I’m so funny, I’m the best, a good-time gal. I listened to a podcast called *You’re Wrong About* and there was an episode on the study of suicide. One of the hosts talked about a friend of his who planned his death six months in advance. For those six months, he was the best guy, so much fun, so excited about life. He told everybody that he was moving to California and had all of his friends go to a going-away party, and then took his own life. I remember thinking that that is exactly what I would’ve done if I had got to the point. And it was an instinctive thought of, ‘Oh, if that was me, I would’ve said I was moving to Nashville,’ because everyone knows I wanted to move to Nashville. It’s a really difficult song to play to people because it makes me very self-aware of how bad I have been and how bad I was for a while.” **“I Don’t Really Care for You”** “This took me a year and a half to finish because I couldn’t figure out what to write the song about. And then, I went through a breakup, and I was like, ‘Well, now I know what the song’s about.’ He broke up with me in March 2020. I got dumped—capital-D Dumped, as in ‘I never want to see you again’—and then I was locked inside my nanny and grandad’s house for COVID. It was just me in my room going, ‘What have I done?’ I think the guy likes to think that he did nothing wrong in his life, ever, but actually he did. But also, so did I and the two of us were as bad as each other. It wasn’t a good relationship.” **“Peter Bogdanovich”** “Again, this comes from a podcast, one called *You Must Remember This*. It was a series about the life of Polly Platt, who was the wife of Peter Bogdanovich. *The Last Picture Show* was the first big film that they made together, and he left her during the middle of filming for Cybill Shepherd, the lead actress. Everyone told Polly to go home, and she was like, ‘No, this is my film. I’m the art director. I scouted it. I adapted the screenplay. I did all the work. I’m not fucking leaving.’ I feel like I’ve been Polly—I’ve been the person that’s been cheated on in such a grotesque and public way. And I’ve also been Cybill, I’ve also been a little shit. I really wanted to write about it and use it as a way for getting to grips with the kind of shit that I’ve been pulling.” **“No More Virgos”** “As I was putting all the songs together, I realized that all of the songs were really dark or had some level of depth and too much darkness in them, and I just wanted one that was fun and not that deep and not that serious. This is about being a problem person for your friends by constantly going for the same guy over and over again. I used to be a serial monogamist. I’m not anymore, but I used to constantly get with the same kind of guy over and over again. They were like, ‘No, no, please, no, this is so annoying.’” **“Lonely”** “I wrote this about a time when I was living in Manchester. I lived there for two years, and I think that was the peak of my problem-person period. I worked in the TK Maxx, and I also worked as a sexy shots-lady in a nightclub in Deansgate-Castlefield. On a Friday and Saturday, I would work in TK Maxx and then there’d be two hours before my shift as a sexy shots-lady started. So, I would just stay in the Arndale Food Court and watch everyone just hanging out, being friends, having more money than me because I was really fucking broke, crying into my fucking Taco Bell Crunchwrap.” **“Groundhog Day”** “A lot of my problems in relationships come from the fact that I care quite a lot about myself over other things, and I’m also a musician. Whenever I get into a relationship, there comes a point where the other person is like, ‘Why are you spending so much time on that and why aren’t you spending time on me?’ I always have to be like, ‘There’s no point in putting any investment into me.’ I just love music. I love doing it. I love working. I love being busy and I don’t love lying in bed, watching YouTube clips and eating takeaway. I don’t like relaxing. It’s not fun. I don’t enjoy it.” **“Communion”** “This is a really old song. It’s about Catholicism and I recorded a bit of it in New York. I decided to notch up the tempo a little bit to see what happened and the drummer we had, Morgan, was like, ‘I’ve got half an hour left. Do you want me to just record some drum fills?’ She did all these crazy-fast drum fills over this and I was like, ‘Oh, this should be a fast song, this should be a really, really, really, really quick song.’” **“Every Bottle (Is My Boyfriend)”** “This is basically a mission statement. It’s not really about anything other than trying to describe myself. It’s just, ‘This is how I live and it’s not great, but also I’m still proud of myself, so shut up.’ I’m very messy. I love to drink. I love to cause a ruckus. I love to be an agent of chaos. I love to be really bold but, also, you’re not much better than me, so shut up. It’s inspired by the band Television and also Bombay Bicycle Club, who are my favorite band ever. I used to stalk them when I was a teenager.” **“2 Wrecked 2 Care”** “Before I launched myself really as an artist, I started renting a yoga studio because it was cheaper than renting a musical studio. I’d go in for four hours on a Wednesday after work and I’d write the song in the first two hours and then I’d record the song on video and then I’d post it on YouTube on Friday. This was one of the songs. At the time, I was working at a UPS as an admin assistant, and because of this song specifically, I was really late to work the next day and I got sacked. So, thanks, ‘2 Wrecked 2 Care’—I’m grateful. I didn’t want to work in a UPS.” **“Geography Teacher”** “My producer had a banjo and I started playing it and he was like, ‘I didn’t know you could play the banjo.’ All of the songs off of the second Laura Marling album are in G, and I learned how to play every single song off of that record when I was 15. So, I was like, ‘I know how to play in G.’ At the time, I was playing ‘Geography Teacher’ like a lot of other songs on the record, and he was like, ‘Should we not just do “Geography Teacher” on that?’ We tried it and it was perfect.” **“I Wanna Be a Cowboy, Baby!”** “Those two years that I had in Manchester, I didn’t really know who I was. I was really confused, and I was super-drinking as well, and the whole time I was in this bad relationship. Two days after he moved out, I got this urge: I can’t really go to the pub by myself because I don’t have a boyfriend anymore, and if people know that I’m single and I’m going to the pub, then I’ll get in trouble—someone will follow me home or someone will beat me up. I was really, really upset about it. I was like, ‘Damn, you really do need to depend on men for safety as a woman out in the world.’ I wrote this song in about a half an hour, and it was the first song that I’d written in two years. It’s the reason that I started writing songs again. I probably would not be doing music right now if I didn’t write this song.” **“I’d Want U”** “I wrote this when I was 17. I recorded a version and posted it on SoundCloud anonymously and it just took off. It was on all these blogs and there were people in America that were like, ‘Who is this girl?’ I ended up getting a manager and all those kinds of things. I wrote it about a girl that I’d met at a house party who I really liked. It’s a really important song to me and I haven’t ever released it properly, so I was like, ‘I need to give that song the time of day. I need to give her a thank-you.’ Also, country music is the reason that I do music in the first place, and so I needed to close this album with the most country song I have.”
Let‘s start with that speech. In September 2022, as Taylor Swift accepted Songwriter-Artist of the Decade honors at the Nashville Songwriter Awards, the headline was that Swift had unveiled an admittedly “dorky” system she’d developed for organizing her own songs. Quill Pen, Fountain Pen, Glitter Gel Pen: three categories of lyrics, three imagined tools with which she wrote them, one pretty ingenious way to invite obsessive fans to lovingly obsess all the more. And yet, perhaps the real takeaway was the manner in which she spoke about her craft that night, some 20 years after writing her first song at the age of 12. “I love doing this thing we are fortunate enough to call a job,” she said to a room of her peers. “Writing songs is my life’s work and my hobby and my never-ending thrill. A song can defy logic or time. A good song transports you to your truest feelings and translates those feelings for you. A good song stays with you even when people or feelings don’t.” On *Midnights*, her tenth LP and fourth in as many years—*if* you don’t count the two she’s just rerecorded and buttressed with dozens of additional tracks—Swift sounds like she’s really enjoying her work, playing with language like kids do with gum, thrilling to the texture of every turn of phrase, the charge in every melody and satisfying rhyme. Alongside longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff, she’s set out here to tell “the stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout \[her\] life,” as she phrased it in a message to Apple Music subscribers. It’s a concept that naturally calls for a nocturnal palette: slower tempos, hushed atmosphere, negative space like night sky. The sound is fully modern (synths you’d want to eat or sleep in, low end that sits comfortably on your chest), while the aesthetic (soft focus, wood paneling, tracklist on the cover) is decidedly mid-century, much like the *Mad Men*-inspired title of its brooding opener, “Lavender Haze”—a song about finding refuge in the glow of intimacy. “Talk your talk and go viral,” she sings, in reference to the maelstrom of outside interest in her six-year relationship with actor Joe Alwyn. “I just want this love spiral.” (A big shout to Antonoff for those spongy backup vocals, btw.) In large part, *Midnights* is a record of interiors, Swift letting us glimpse the chaos inside her head (“Anti-Hero,” wall-to-wall zingers) and the stillness of her relationship (“Sweet Nothing,” co-written by Alwyn under his William Bowery pseudonym). For “Snow on the Beach,” she teams up with Lana Del Rey—an artist whose instinct for mood and theatrical framing seems to have influenced Swift’s recent catalog—recalling the magic of an impossible night over a backdrop of pizzicato violin, sleigh bells, and dreamy Mellotron, like the earliest hours of Christmas morning. “I’ve never seen someone lit from within,” Swift sings. “Blurring out my periphery.” But then there’s “Bejeweled,” a late, *1989*-like highlight on which she announces to an unappreciative partner, a few seconds in: “And by the way, I’m going out tonight.” And then out Swift goes, striding through the center of the song like she would the room: “I can still make the whole place shimmer,” she sings, relishing that last word. “And when I meet the band, they ask, ‘Do you have a man?’/I could still say, ‘I don’t remember.’” There are traces of melancholy layered in (see: “sapphire tears on my face”), but the song feels like a triumph, the sort of unabashed, extroverted fun that would have probably seemed out of place in the lockdown indie of 2020’s *folklore* and *evermore*. But here, side by side with songs and scenes of such writerly indulgence, it’s right at home—more proof that the terms “singer-songwriter” and “universal pop star” aren’t mutually exclusive ideas. “What’s a girl gonna do?” Swift asks at its climax. “A diamond’s gotta shine.” This special expanded version of *Midnights* includes seven additional songs.
In sharply differing ways, thoughts of place and identity run through Fontaines D.C.’s music. Where 2019 debut *Dogrel* delivered a rich and raw portrait of the band’s home city, Dublin, 2020 follow-up *A Hero’s Death* was the sound of dislocation, a set of songs drawing on the introspection, exhaustion, and yearning of an anchorless life on the road. When the five-piece moved to London midway through the pandemic, the experiences of being outsiders in a new city, often facing xenophobia and prejudice, provided creative fuel for third album *Skinty Fia*. The music that emerged weaves folk, electronic, and melodic indie pop into their post-punk foundations, while contemplating Irishness and how it transforms in a different country. “That’s the lens through which all of the subjects that we explore are seen through anyway,” singer Grian Chatten tells Apple Music’s Matt Wilkinson. “There are definitely themes of jealousy, corruption, and stuff like that, but it’s all seen through the eyes of someone who’s at odds with their own identity, culturally speaking.” Recording the album after dark helped breed feelings of discomfort that Chatten says are “necessary to us,” and it continued a nocturnal schedule that had originally countered the claustrophobia of a locked-down city. “We wrote a lot of it at night as well,” says Chatten. “We went into the rehearsal space just as something different to do. When pubs and all that kind of thing were closed, it was a way of us feeling like the world was sort of open.” Here, Chatten and guitarist Carlos O’Connell talk us through a number of *Skinty Fia*’s key moments. **“In ár gCroíthe go deo”** Grian Chatten: “An Irish woman who lived in Coventry \[Margaret Keane\] passed away. Her family wanted the words ‘In ár gCroíthe go deo,’ which means ‘in our hearts forever,’ on her gravestone as a respectful and beautiful ode to her Irishness, but they weren’t allowed without an English translation. Essentially the Church of England decreed that it would be potentially seen as a political slogan. The Irish language is apparently, according to these people, an inflammatory thing in and of itself, which is a very base level of xenophobia. It’s a basic expression of a culture, is the language. If you’re considering that to be related to terrorism, which is what they’re implying, I think. That sounds like it’s something out of the ’70s, but this is two and a half years ago.” Carlos O’Connell: “About a year ago, it got turned around and \[the family\] won this case.” GC: “The family were made aware \[of the song\] and asked if they could listen to it. Apparently they really loved it, and they played it at the gravestone. So, that’s 100,000 Grammys worth of validation.” **“Big Shot”** CO: “When you’ve got used to living with what you have and then all these dreams happen to you, it’s always going to overshadow what you had before. The only impact that \[Fontaines’ success\] was having in my life was that it just made anything that I had before quite meaningless for a while, and I felt quite lost in that. That’s that lyric, ‘I traveled to space and found the moon too small’—it’s like, go up there and actually it’s smaller than the Earth.” GC: “We’ve all experienced it very differently and that’s made us grow in different ways. But that song just sounded like a very true expression of Carlos. Perhaps more honest than he always is with himself or other people. All the honesty was balled up into that tune.” **“Jackie Down the Line”** GC: “It’s an expression of misanthropy. And there’s toxicity there. There’s erosion of each other’s characters. It’s a very un-beneficial, unglamorous relationship that isn’t necessarily about two people. I like the idea of it being about Irishness, fighting to not be eroded as it exists in a different country. The name is Jackie because a Dubliner would be called, in a pejorative sense, a Jackeen by people from other parts of Ireland. That’s probably in reference to the Union Jack as well—it’s like the Pale \[an area of Ireland, including Dublin, that was under English governmental control during the late Middle Ages\]. So it’s this kind of mutation of Irishness or loss of Irishness as it exists, or fails to exist, in a different environment.” **“Roman Holiday”** GC: “The whole thing was colored by my experience in London. I moved to London to be with my fiancée, and as an Irish person living in London, as one of a gang of Irish people, there was that kind of searching energy, there was this excitement, there was a kind of adventure—but also this very, very tight-knit, rigorously upkept group energy. I think that’s what influenced the tune.” **“The Couple Across the Way”** GC: “I lived on Caledonian Road \[in North London\] and our gaff backed onto another house. There was a couple that lived there, they were probably mid-seventies, and they had really loud arguments. The kind of arguments where you’d see London on a map getting further, further away and hear the shout resounding. Something like *The Simpsons*. And the man would come out and take a big breath. He’d stand on his balcony and look left and right and exhale all the drama. And then he’d just turn around and go back in to his gaff to do the same thing the next day. The absurdity of that, of what we put ourselves through, to be in a relationship that causes you such daily pain, to just always turn around and go back in. I couldn’t really help but write about that physical mirror that was there. Am I seeing myself and my girlfriend in these two people, and vice versa? So I tried to tie it in to it being from both perspectives at some point.” **“Skinty Fia”** GC: “The line ‘There is a track beneath the wheel and it’s there ’til we die’ is about being your dad’s son. There are many ways in which we explore doom on this record. One of them is following in the footsteps of your ancestors, or your predecessors, no matter how immediate or far away they might have been. I’m interested in the inescapability of genetics, the idea that your fate is written. I do, on some level, believe in that. That is doom, even if your faith is leading you to a positive place. Freedom is probably the main pursuit of a lot of our music. I think that that is probably a link that ties all of the stuff that we’ve done together—autonomy.” **“I Love You”** GC: “It’s most ostensibly a love letter to Ireland, but has in it the corruption and the sadness and the grief with the ever-changing Dublin and Ireland. The reason that I wanted to call it ‘I Love You’ is because I found its cliché very attractive. It meant that there was a lot of work to be done in order to justify such a basic song and not have it be a clichéd tune. It’s a song with two heads, because you’ve got the slow, melodic verses that are a little bit more straightforward and then the lid is lifted off energetically. I think that the friction between those two things encapsulates the double-edged sword that is love.” **“Nabokov”** GC: “I think there’s a different arc to this album. The first two, I think, achieve a sense of happiness and hope halfway through, and end on a note of hope. I think this one does actually achieve hope halfway through—and then slides back into a hellish, doomy thing with the last track and stuff. I think that was probably one of the more conscious decisions that we made while making this album.”
"2020’s A Hero’s Death saw Fontaines D.C. land a #2 album in the UK, receive nominations at the GRAMMYs, BRITs and Ivor Novello Awards, and sell out London’s iconic Alexandra Palace. Now the band return with their third record in as many years: Skinty Fia. Used colloquially as an expletive, the title roughly translates from the Irish language into English as “the damnation of the deer”; the spelling crassly anglicized, and its meaning diluted through generations. Part bittersweet romance, part darkly political triumph - the songs ultimately form a long-distance love letter, one that laments an increasingly privatized culture in danger of going the way of the extinct Irish giant deer."
“Right now, I’m still very much restless,” Charli XCX tells Apple Music. “Because I know that I would be an excellent humongous pop star. But I also unfortunately know that there’s a vision of who I am in the mainstream’s mind. It’s a constant headfuck, to be honest. While I’m a very defiant person, I’m also a human, and sometimes I do just want to be accepted, and I don’t understand why I’m not totally—even though sometimes I relish in the fact that I’m not.” Charlotte Aitchison is one of pop music’s more self-aware, self-deprecating, and self-examining artists. *CRASH* is her fifth studio album, and the final one to be released as part of a longtime record deal. It’s partly, as Charli says, an experiment. An opportunity to utilize a major label’s resources and dress up her left-leaning pop in something ultra luxe. A bold and refreshingly transparent attempt to move up a few rungs, it’s a considered move also designed to clear up some of Charli’s nagging what-ifs. “I’ve always questioned myself,” she says. “And it’s why I’ve made this entire album, really. I ask myself, am I a likable artist? Am I too opinionated? Do I look too weird? Am I too annoying? If I shut up and put out certain songs and do the right features, will I become more accepted, more liked, more commercial?” Of course, Charli’s notoriously engaged fanbase—with whom she exchanged ideas, including song lyrics, directly online for 2020’s quarantine album *how i’m feeling now*—would argue she doesn’t need any such validation. “It’s a blessing and a curse, to be extremely honest,” she says of her “Angels.” “I’m very lucky to have the fanbase that I have, who are extremely invested in literally every breath I take. They are very vocal and very smart, which draws me to them, because they’ve got great taste and amazing ideas—as I found out when doing *how i’m feeling now*. But you can’t please everyone. I’ve done so many different things that people are always going to gravitate to certain eras. Plus, I think that there’s an element where they like to root for an underdog, or an on-the-fringes personality like mine. Because we feel like we’ve been in it together for a really long time, the online discourse can be so vigorous. So I can’t lie, sometimes it’s a bit of a headfuck, because whilst I absolutely adore them, I don’t make music for them specifically when I’m sat in the studio—I’m making it for me. And I don’t think they would admire me as the artist I am if I just kept giving them what they expected.” It’s time to listen for yourself. Explore Charli’s premium pop with her own track-by-track guide. **“Crash”** “Until maybe a week before I made this song, the album was going to be called *Sorry If I Hurt You*. But one day, I was driving in my car and *CRASH* just came to me, and I called A. G. Cook. Even though he wasn\'t a *huge* part of this record, he\'s still very much my creative confidant. He agreed it made sense with the constant car references in my work—and I like the onomatopoeia, I like how it references \[2014 single\] ‘Boom Clap,’ and I like how it feels much more punchy and in-your-face than *how i’m feeling now*. I felt that the title needed a song, so A. G. and I got in the studio pretty quickly and knew we needed to make it sound extremely ’80s—if you could bottle the album into one song, this is it. We—plus the song’s co-producer George Daniel—had been sending a lot of new jack swing beats back and forth, and I knew I wanted this guitar solo, and to add these crazy Janet-esque stabs.” **“New Shapes” (feat. Caroline Polachek & Christine and the Queens)** “Caroline, Christine, and I had worked together many times in different forms, and it was time for the three of us to come together. And actually, this song was recorded a long time ago—pre-pandemic. I like how it\'s an antihero song. We’re saying to the love figure, ‘I haven\'t got what you need from me, because I am not typical. I don\'t operate in the way that you want me to. I want multiple partners. I want somebody else. I want no convention within sex and love.’ And I like that as a statement right after the sound of a car crash in the previous song. To do that song with them—two artists who I really feel have such a unique, defiant, and topsy-turvy vision of what pop music is—felt really classic and right for us. There’s a true connection between us now, in music and in our personal lives.” **“Good Ones”** “I think this song deserved to be bigger, but I will always think that of my work. But I do think it established the Cliffs Notes version of what the record is—it\'s got a darkness to it, and it\'s very pop. I like how drastic the jump was between coming out of *how i’m feeling now* into this, both sonically and in how they were made. *how i’m feeling now* was obviously my quarantine album made in my living room over five weeks by me and two trusted collaborators. This song is produced by Oscar Holter—an extremely active part of the Max Martin camp—and not really written hugely by myself but by two amazing topliners, Caroline Ailin and Noonie Bao. So it’s the absolute polar opposite.” **“Constant Repeat”** “This song features an imaginary scenario I created in my head, where I fell for somebody but imagined that they didn\'t want me—which turned out to not be the case. But it was this fear that I had, and my prediction of the situation. I think it\'s interesting that you can convince yourself of that. When you are falling for someone, unfortunately, I think human nature just crushes in on you and tells you you\'re not good enough, and fills you with doubt and dread and fear and all of those things. This song really poured out of me quite late in the album process, and it just felt so real and natural.” **“Beg for You” (feat. Rina Sawayama)** “Rina wanted to do something uptempo together, and give our fans a bit more of a moment. So when this song idea bubbled up, I called her immediately. She rewrote the second verse, and sounded incredible on it. It’s a very perfect-storm moment, because we’re two artists operating within the pop sphere, but always challenging it and doing something a little bit more left. She also has that hardcore, diehard fanbase—there’s a lot of crossover. Whilst maybe some of them were expecting something a little bit more experimental from us, I think, in a way, you can\'t deny that this actually is the perfect song for us in that we are paying a homage to a gay anthem \[‘Cry for You’ by September\]. She\'s queer, I\'m a queer ally, we\'re coming together to really just live our best lives and sing an iconic pop song.” **“Move Me”** “This song came from a writing camp that I was invited to by \[US producer and songwriter\] Ian Kirkpatrick. I hadn’t done a very classic camp for a while. Not because I\'m anti them—I actually think I thrive quite well in them and enjoy them. I ended up writing this with \[US songwriter and producer\] Amy Allen. We’re actually polar opposites in terms of our styles, which is why this song ended up being so beautiful—the aggressive parts of the song where I was basically yelling into a mic are very me, then you have the balance of Amy’s gorgeous verses. As we were doing it, everyone kept talking about how it’d be a great song for Halsey. I was like, ‘No, I love Halsey, but this is a great song for me and I’m fucking keeping it.’ People talk about writing-camp songs being fake and constructed in a test tube or whatever. But it’s very real. We write from our reality. That’s why we’re good songwriters.” **“Baby”** “This was one of the first tracks I made for this album, probably pre-pandemic, and with Justin Raisen—who was a very crucial part of my first album, *True Romance* \[2013\]. So it felt really good to be going back and working with him in the same house where we made part of the first album. This was a song that I always felt was so passionate and fiery and sexy. And I think the making of this song helped me feel powerful, and want to explore the sexier side of pop music and my artistry. It’s the song that helped me decide that I wanted to dance for this campaign, because I just couldn\'t stop wanting to move to it whilst we were making it.” **“Lightning”** “It began as one of those half demos that I took away and lived with. I then called up Ariel Rechtshaid, who was also a huge part of the first album, alongside Justin Raisen, and said, ‘OK, I have this song. I want to do *True Romance in 2022* with it.” And while I know he’s not really on that hype currently, I told him he was the king of the ’80s and if he felt it needed to go down that road, I trusted him because he has the most impeccable taste. So he sent it back to me, and there was a question mark over the Spanish guitar moment, which goes into a chorus. I sent it to A. G. to ask his opinion. He was like, ‘It\'s insane. I laughed out loud.’ And I was like, ‘OK, great. We\'re keeping it.’” **“Every Rule”** “It\'s the true story of me meeting my previous partner, and both of us being in relationships but knowing that we were meant to be together. I think that that\'s a story that a lot of my friends have also experienced—and obviously there\'s a lot of controversy that comes with that circumstance. People are afraid to talk about it. People feel shame. But it\'s also, it\'s really real. I think you have to be really brave to admit to yourself that you\'re not in love with maybe the person that you\'re with, and that you are in love with someone else. It\'s cruel on both sides, and I think you can really hear that. It was a song that I really only felt comfortable enough to make with A. G. He would never judge me for saying these things. It’s another pre-pandemic song, and A. G. was living in a place with a studio in his garage. There was a tree outside that was always covered in crickets. You can hear the crickets in the recording, which I think is really sweet and charming. Once we’d lived with the song for about a year, A. G. had the idea of asking Oneohtrix Point Never to add some things to the song, which I loved.” **“Yuck”** “I like the drastic gear change here. I like that it makes you laugh. I like those jarring moments on albums and in live shows where you\'re going from the most intimate, quiet song to the most hilarious or poptastic. That was the reasoning behind putting ‘Every Rule’ and ‘Yuck’ back to back. I really struggle with that feeling of being smothered. It\'s probably an only-child thing, or something. When you\'re like, ‘Get away from me, give me some fucking space’—that is seriously how I feel 50% of the time. It also reminds me of that gang vocal element of ‘Boom Clap’ and ‘Boys.’ Not sonically, but more in terms of the way that I\'m singing. I\'m definitely not the most technical singer ever—if you put me next to Ariana Grande and made us both sing the same song, I would sound absolutely insane, and she would sound absolutely gorgeous—but when it comes to singing like this, I feel pretty confident. That’s really nice for me, just in a technical way. It\'s really fun to be like, ‘Yeah. You know what? I can sing this song.’ Which I know sounds stupid because I am a professional ‘singer.’” **“Used to Know Me”** “I was trying to emulate myself on ‘Fancy’—or get back into that headspace. I really remember searching for the chorus melody to ‘Fancy’ in a way that I hadn\'t really searched for a melody before. Normally I\'m very instinctual and spontaneous when it comes to melodies, but with ‘Fancy,’ I had to really maneuver my brain around different corners to figure it out—to understand the formation of the notes. I wrote this on my own at Stargate’s studios, which probably made me feel like I had to write a really big pop song, and then when I was listening to it on repeat in my car, I just started singing the synth line to ‘Show Me Love’ by Robin S. So I called a few people and was like, ‘Is this possible?’ And everyone said, ‘Yes, but do you care about publishing?’ And I was like, ‘I guess not.’ It feels to me like a big song—it’s about reshaping who you are after a breakup.” **“Twice”** “I had reservations about making this the last song because it\'s such an obvious choice with the key change and outro. And generally speaking, I\'m anti the obvious choice. But then George Daniel, who is very good with tracklisting, simply said, ‘You\'re an idiot if you don\'t put this song last.’ It’s actually interesting lyrically, because it\'s about the end of the world and that you shouldn\'t think twice about intimate moments, or these off-the-cuff moments. Essentially, YOLO, and enjoy delving into these once-in-a-lifetime situations that everybody ends up in. I was picturing the scene from \[Lars von Trier’s 2011 film\] *Melancholia* where Kirsten Dunst’s character is sat on a hill waiting for the end of the world. It’s a perfect closer, and I also think it’s a very beautiful song.”
A great Yeah Yeah Yeahs song can make you feel like you’re on top of the world and have no idea what you’re doing at the same time. The difference here—on their first album since 2013’s *Mosquito*—is a sense of maturity: Instead of tearing up the club, they’re reminiscing about it (“Fleez”), having traded their endless nights for mornings as bright and open as a flower (“Different Today”). And after spending 20 years seesawing between their aggressive side and their sophisticated, synth-pop side, they’ve found a sound that genuinely splits the difference (“Burning”). Listening to Karen O’s poem about watching the sunset with her young son (“Mars”), two thoughts come to mind. One is that they’ve always been kids, this band. The other is that the secret to staying young is growing up.
It could only be called alchemy, the transformative magic that happens during the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ most tuned-in moments in the studio, when their unique chemistry sparks opens a portal, and out comes a song like “Maps” or “Zero” or the latest addition to their canon, “Spitting off the Edge of the World featuring Perfume Genius” — an epic shot-to-the-heart of pure YYYs beauty and power. A thunderstorm of a return is what the legendary trio has in store for us on Cool It Down, their fifth studio album and their first since 2013’s Mosquito. The eight-track collection, bound to be a landmark in their catalog, is an expert distillation of their best gifts that impels you to move, and cry, and listen closely.
Mitski wasn’t sure she’d ever make it to her sixth album. After the release of 2018’s standout and star-making record *Be the Cowboy*, she simply had nothing left to give. “I think I was just tired, and I felt like I needed a break and I couldn\'t do it anymore,” she tells Apple Music. “I just told everyone on my team that I just needed to stop it for a while. I think everyone could tell I was already at max capacity.” And so, in 2019, she withdrew. But if creating became painful, not doing it at all—eventually—felt even worse. “I was feeling a deep surge of regret because I was like, ‘Oh my god, what did I do?’” she says. “I let go of this career that I had worked so hard to get and I finally got, and I just left it all behind. I might have made the greatest mistake of my life.” Released two years after that self-imposed hiatus, *Laurel Hell* may mark Mitski’s official return, but she isn’t exactly all in. Darkness descends as she moves back into her own musical world (“Let’s step carefully into the dark/Once we’re in I’ll remember my way around” are this album’s first words), and it feels like she almost always has one eye on her escape route. Such melancholic tendencies shouldn’t come as a surprise: Mitski Miyawaki is an artist who has always delved deep into her experiences as she attempts to understand them—and help us understand our own. More unexpected, though, is the glittering, ’80s-inspired synth-pop she often embraces, from “The Only Heartbreaker”—whose opening drums throw back to a-ha’s “Take On Me,” and against which Mitski explores being the “bad guy” in a relationship—to the bouncy, cinematic “Should’ve Been Me” and the intense “Love Me More,” on which she cries out for affection, from a lover and from her audience, against racing synths. “I think at first, the songs were more straightforwardly rock or just more straightforwardly sad,” she recalls. “But as the pandemic progressed, \[frequent collaborator\] Patrick \[Hyland\] and I just stopped being able to stay in that sort of sad feeling. We really needed something that would make us dance, that would make us feel hopeful. We just couldn’t stand the idea of making another sad, dreary album.” This being a Mitski record, there are of course still moments of insular intensity, from “Everyone” to “Heat Lightning,” a brooding meditation on insomnia. And underneath all that protective pop, this is an album about darkness and endings—of relationships, possibly of her career. And by its finish, Mitski still isn’t promising to stick around. “I guess this is the end, I’ll have to learn to be somebody else,” she says on “I Guess,” before simply fading away on final track “That’s Our Lamp.”
We don’t typically look to pop albums to answer our cultural moment, let alone to meet the soul hunger left in the wake of global catastrophe. But occasionally, an artist proves the form more malleable and capacious than we knew. With Laurel Hell, Mitski cements her reputation as an artist in possession of such power - capable of using her talent to perform the alchemy that turns our most savage and alienated experiences into the very elixir that cures them. Her critically beloved last album, Be the Cowboy, built on the breakout acclaim of 2016’s Puberty 2 and launched her from cult favorite to indie star. She ascended amid a fever of national division, and the grind of touring and pitfalls of increased visibility influenced her music as much as her spirit. Like the mountain laurels for this new album is named, public perception, like the intoxicating prism of the internet, can offer an alluring façade that obscures a deadly trap—one that tightens the more you struggle. Exhausted by this warped mirror, and our addiction to false binaries, she began writing songs that stripped away the masks and revealed the complex and often contradictory realities behind them. She wrote many of these songs during or before 2018, while the album finished mixing in May 2021. It is the longest span of time Mitski has ever spent on a record, and a process that concluded amid a radically changed world. She recorded Laurel Hell with her longtime producer Patrick Hyland throughout the isolation of a global pandemic, during which some of the songs “slowly took on new forms and meanings, like seed to flower.” Sometimes it’s hard to see the change when you’re the agent of it, but for the lucky rest of us, Mitski has written a soundtrack for transformation, a map to the place where vulnerability and resilience, sorrow and delight, error and transcendence can all sit within our humanity, can all be seen as worthy of acknowledgment, and ultimately, love.
When a DIY ethos is baked into your core, your intuition is always likely to guide you right. Since forming in 2014, Nova Twins have established themselves as alt-rock explorers constantly crossing genre boundaries to absorb ideas and recast them in their own vision. The London-based duo of Amy Love and Georgia South approached their second album by dialing up both the brightness and heaviness of their debut, 2020’s *Who Are the Girls?*, operating on gut feel. “We have label support now, but it’s all still about us,” Love tells Apple Music. “It’s the shit we’ve always done, but they’ve helped us to facilitate the things we need to make the sound even bigger. There was no pressure, no schedule; we were just writing because we wanted to.” Written broadly during the pandemic and from within the Black Lives Matter movement, *Supernova* centers on the duo’s experiences of grief, heartbreak, erasure, and the empowerment of self-owned sexuality, as they battle their way through darkness to find light. The result is an album of intensity, energy, and enough fighting spirit to share around. “Life isn’t perfect, and we all have shit times,” says South. “But with *Supernova*, we want to give people that extra skip in their step, to feel like they can push through. Whatever you have going on, there is always a way to come out as a winner.” Let Nova Twins guide you through the album, track by track. **“Power (Intro)”** Georgia South: “We wanted a word that set the precedent for how we wanted the album to make people feel, and that word was ‘power.’” Amy Love: “It feels like a new beginning, a new era for the Nova Twins world. By putting this as the beginning and then ending on ‘Sleep Paralysis,’ it’s a wake-up call, like being born again.” GS: “It was just a nice little way to introduce the album and bookend the world that we created. If you were to be transported through a vortex, this is what it would sound like.” **“Antagonist”** AL: “This one came after the heavy lockdown. It felt so good to be able to finally meet up in person, and that energy and sense of connection is audible. It was just us together in a room, having fun.” GS: “We worked with Jim Abbiss again on production for the record, but in lockdown, we got really into Logic, the nitty-gritty of making beats and doing vocal production and sound effects ourselves. We learnt so much more about quality this time that a lot of the demos were good enough to go right on the album, and then, with Jim’s production style and live drums, we could focus on building up that really big sound.” **“Cleopatra”** AL: “The resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 was a traumatic time. It was so dark and depressing and terrifying, but when we all started unifying and marching, it felt like there was some sort of hope. It spurred us on to write something that would make people feel good, to feel powerful and proud of where they’re from. ‘Cleopatra’ was written in that moment of feeling truly part of something; we’re confident Black women, but it’s only when you start talking with others that you shine light on areas even you didn’t understand properly. We wanted to have a song that reflected the times, but also something which would give hope in the future.” **“K.M.B.”** GS: “With ‘K.M.B.’ \[Kill My Boyfriend\], we homed in on the sassy ’90s R&B that we both love. We love groups like Destiny’s Child, and we also love heavy music, so we thought that if we paired the two, we’d have the sassiest, most badass thing ever.” AL: “So many people can relate to the idea of getting revenge on a ex. When we read the lyrics back in isolation, we were like, ‘Is this a bit much?’ But then we were like, ‘Nah, it’s a joke. Right?!’” GS: “That’s why we made the music video so bright and colorful, to really get the joke across. The day of filming was so fun; the woman who owned the house came in and was like, ‘Can we rename the song “Kill My Husband?”’” AL: “He had cheated on her 47 times! She was like, ‘This video is the perfect send-off.’ She definitely saw the sense of humor in it.” **“Fire & Ice”** GS: “‘I tend to start with drums and then write riffs on top of the beat, building up in layers. We didn’t use any synths on the album, just bass, guitar, drums, and a bunch of pedals, which will make it a lot of fun to play live. I’m going to need a third leg!” AL: “Conceptually, it’s about all our moods as human beings. People assume that we’re scary or we’re this and that, but we’re all those things and the opposite. As women, we’re never just one thing; we can be moody, upset, loving, happy, vulnerable, sweet. It’s just about being a normal girl today—it’s not always pretty, but that duality is always going to be something you love about us.” **“Puzzles”** GS: “‘Puzzles’ puts us back in our ’90-2000s era. When you’re in a club, there’s those classic sexy tracks that you just want to dance to, like Khia’s ‘My Neck, My Back’ or ‘Pony’ by Ginuwine. We all want to feel sexy, to feel good about ourselves. We wanted it to be heavy—something you can mosh to but get down to at the same time.” AL: “It’s a fun song, but it’s also there to challenge people who are still living in the dark ages. There’s no line with Nova; we might like wearing baggy tracksuits, but at the same time, we also know how to let loose and have fun with our sexuality. If people are still uncomfortable about that, then a song like this is needed.” **“A Dark Place for Somewhere Beautiful”** AL: “We don’t always share our personal home truths in our music. Time is the biggest healer, and if something is still quite fresh, you can only talk about it so much. People can read between the lines and take what they want from it, but we all experience grief in our lives at some point, and this song is just describing what it feels like to go through that. A part of you disappears, but you also grow so much. Loss really does change you.” **“Toolbox”** GS: “It’s all about flipping the script on all the social pressures and beauty ideals that are usually aimed at women—changing up the roles so we’re singing it to a man. We’ve had to say, ‘Fuck you’ to so many men all the way along our career, and it’s built us into these strong women as a result. I’m grateful for it because it comes across in tunes like this.” **“Choose Your Fighter”** GS: “This was the last song we finished; we only had 24 hours to do it because of vinyl lead time. We were in the home studio writing, really tired. Whenever one of us was lagging, we’d have a tea break, put ‘Work Bitch’ by Britney Spears on, and then be like, ‘OK, we can do this.’ We truly have to thank Britney for this one—without her, we would have just slept.” AL: “In lockdown, we were sending songs back and forth, and then, suddenly, this was one where we were like, ‘I guess we’re writing an album.’ Lockdown was terrible, but it really helped us to find our way to this body of work, to say all the things that we wanted to say.” **“Enemy”** AL: “‘Enemy’ is about the time in our career where people weren’t quite getting it. We’ve seen other people be able to walk through so much easier because they fit the mold of what people perceive to be a riot grrrl. This was our kick back to the people who said that we look like we should only be doing hip-hop.” GS: “It’s pure rage, but we were also laughing so much while making it, putting people on our imaginary hit list. Obviously, we’re not trying to promote violence, but people can relate to that feeling in the moment. They can listen on their headphones going to work with their horrible boss, or at school if somebody’s picking on them. It’s a song about standing up for yourself.” **“Sleep Paralysis”** GS: “We were playing with different dynamics. It feels like you’re on a crazy loop because it joins back with the intro, and it’s a bit trippy and chaotic. It was definitely reflective of where we were at the time. We were locked down, BLM was going on, there was so much loss, and it was just like, ‘This is a full-on nightmare.’” AL: “We created this world where it almost felt like *Stranger Things*, The Upside Down. Everything seems really peaceful and calm and then, suddenly, the chorus hits. That gnarly hellscape feeling truly felt like what we were living through. It shows that we’re not afraid to not be super loud, that we don’t put boundaries on ourselves. Everything we’ve done with this band, we don’t plan; we just jump and see what happens. It’s always worked for us, so we’re going to keep jumping.”
For any band, signing to a major label at the beginning of your career is a dream come true. For LGBTQ+ Los Angeles power pop-rock trio MUNA (musicians Katie Gavin, Josette Maskin, and Naomi McPherson all identify as queer), it was merely their first milestone. Great freedom and success came later, when they were dropped by their label after releasing two albums and just as quickly picked up by Phoebe Bridgers’ Saddest Factory Records. Now an independent band on their self-titled third full-length, they never sounded more confident. “\[*MUNA*\] has a lot to do with identity and agency and self-definition, the ideas that we project onto other people,” Maskin tells Apple Music. “It’s an interrogation of interpersonal relationships, and sexuality, and desire, and just trying to be a person in the world and present in your life.” Those complicated ideas are articulated with an eclectic musical nuance, from the country-folk of “Kind of Girl” and the Peter Gabriel-indebted “Solid” to the jagged, Robyn-esque synth-pop of “What I Want” and the playful pop of “Silk Chiffon.” “Music helps us feel less alone in our human experience, and I think we want people to feel that,” Gavin says. “There’s a hope that these songs can foster moments of connection and joy for people, like for our queer community—we want these songs to be a soundtrack to new experiences that aren\'t full of torment.” Below, MUNA walks Apple Music through their new album, track by track. **“Silk Chiffon” feat. Phoebe Bridgers** Naomi McPherson: “The song has been kicking about since the end of 2019. Katie wrote it, and at the time it was just the pre-chorus. The bridge lyrics were in the place of the chorus. It was synth-ier, but Jo and I had the instinct to make it feel like opening credits of a late-\'90s, early-aughts rom-com. We had been kicking around the idea of having someone feature on the second verse, and Phoebe came to mind—this was prior to us signing to her label. She loved the song and was so stoked to hop on it, which made us feel so, so good.” **“What I Want”** Katie Gavin: “This was a song that started as actually a Zoom co-write. I did it with Leland, who is an amazing songwriter and artist in his own right, and who has also done a lot of work on songs in the universe of *RuPaul\'s Drag Race*. I had a couple beats from Naomi, and I took them into the session and we both liked that one. After the session, I sent a demo to Naomi and Jo, and I remember Naomi freaking out and knowing that it was going to be a banger and wanting to work on it. I was a little bit scared of the song initially because of how much of a banger it is. There are strings in the chorus that were very inspired by \'Toxic,\' the classic Britney song.” **“Runner’s High”** NM: “MUNA’s anti-running song. The funny thing about this track is, I think, that the beat came about in the most peculiar way. During 2020, a friend of ours was letting us use her studio for very cheap, and we were trying to take making music very seriously. We wanted to do something where it\'s like, we had no songs that we were currently working on, so we came up with a game called \'the five-minute game,\' where each of us had to make a part in a five-minute period, and then someone else adds a part on top. The start of this song came from that game. And I don\'t think I\'ve ever heard a song that has this specific metaphor; obviously, it is one of a kind and the song slaps. So, you can run to it. We won\'t, but we hope that people do.” **“Home by Now”** Josette Maskin: “This came about in a pretty classic MUNA way. All the songs have different trajectories and paths, but this one was something that Katie wrote when we were on tour with Phoebe in the fall of 2021. We sometimes find that being on the road can be pretty inspiring. When you\'re away from your stuff and you don\'t have the obligation to work on an album that has a pending deadline, it can take you out of your element and inspire you in a way.” **“Kind of Girl”** KG: “For songs that I start on my own, there\'s two categories: I did it on Ableton, which was \'Home by Now,\' or I did it on an acoustic guitar, which is \'Kind of Girl.\' \'Kind of Girl\' I wrote in a bathtub. I wrote it from start to finish, chronologically, first the pre-chorus, then the chorus. I was thinking about the power that the words we choose to identify with have on the way that our story unfolds. How those affect what we think is possible and not possible and what we think is fixed or unfixed. We recorded just a bunch of layers of acoustic guitar and Josette\'s slide through a toy amp and built this world out.” **“Handle Me”** JM: “Katie wrote this song in January 2020. When we first did this song, Naomi and I were thinking a lot about, funny enough, 311—there’s a guitar part based on those early-2000s songs, something that would be on *The O.C.* Naomi felt really inspired about changing the drums and then I played the guitar part slightly differently and we tried to make it more of a lo-fi sexy track. I really fought for the song to be on the record, because I was like, ‘Oh, we don\'t really have a song in our discography that is sexy in this specific way.\' It shows a different side of MUNA.” **“No Idea”** NM: “‘No Idea’ started at the top of 2020. At the time we were toying with the idea of the third record being an alternative reimagining of the past wherein we were the biggest boy band in the late \'90s and early 2000s. But we are ourselves, and gay, we cast ourselves into that canon. I think of \'No Idea\' as our \'90s Max Martin moment meets a little bit of LCD Soundsystem and Daft Punk. Katie had written the song, it was pretty finished, but there wasn\'t a second verse. We had a session with Mitski; she came over to me and Jo’s apartment at the time, and we talked about disco. She thought the song was hot and fun to work on; she gave us a kick into the direction that the song found itself in.” **“Solid”** NM: “‘Solid’ has been around since 2018, 2017, I think. It just didn\'t have a place on the second record. It was in the archive for a bit and then it reappeared. It is one of my favorites. We’re always super inspired by \'80s music. I mean, who doesn\'t, that makes pop music nowadays? That artistic innovation, computerized sound, and synthesized sound. It was just fun to work on after all these years. It bops.” **“Anything But Me”** KG: “I wrote this song in my car. I had my laptop, and I was eating a burrito, and I came up with the first lines of the song and I was just like, ‘That\'s so stupid, but it\'s stupid in a way that\'s almost brilliant.’ This song is in 12/8, a really specific groove, and it has a buoyant energy. I had written the verse and the pre-chorus and had the basic groove down, and I sent it to Naomi and Jo. Naomi was like, \'There needs to be a section after the pre-chorus where you\'re doing something very like Shania \[Twain\] with the word “me,” holding it out and having a moment with it.\' We fleshed it out from there. When Jo and Naomi were working on it, they had some influence from Mariah Carey.” **“Loose Garment”** NM: “‘Loose Garment’ started because I was looking at furniture and I made a beat and called it ‘Teak Wood Nine.’ I sent Katie a bunch of beats that had wood and furniture names. We all love Imogen Heap and her collaboration with Guy Sigsworth. The band Frou Frou, they\'re a touchstone for us, both her solo project and that band; it felt like maybe \[the song\] could live in that universe. We switched the beat up and gave it a pulsating feel that motivated the song. It’s definitely a sad one. Cynthia Tolson killed it. She played strings on it and just went off.” **“Shooting Star”** KG: “This song was written literal weeks before we turned in the album. That\'s very MUNA. I always write until it is pencils down. I had written this on acoustic guitar, and it was this folky bassline guitar part that really turned Josette off, and I remember I wanted it. We always intended for this to be a 10-song record. There\'s a certain kind of guitar that we got obsessed with using, and I feel like we associate it a lot with the sound of music in LA: It\'s a rubber-bridge, vintage acoustic guitar, and Jo reworked the guitar part into something that was better. It was Naomi\'s idea to have kind of this Coldplay moment at the end where the song explodes into this more cathartic beat and arrangement, and that was really, I think, a big moment for that song as well.”
MUNA is magic. What other band could have stamped the forsaken year of 2021 with spangles and pom-poms, could have made you sing (and maybe even believe) that “Life’s so fun, life’s so fun,” during what may well have been the most uneasy stretch of your life? “Silk Chiffon,” MUNA’s instant-classic cult smash, featuring the band’s new label head Phoebe Bridgers, hit the gray skies of the pandemic’s year-and-a-half mark like a double rainbow. Since MUNA — lead singer/songwriter Katie Gavin, guitarist/producer Naomi McPherson, guitarist Josette Maskin — began making music together in college, at USC, they’d always embraced pain as a bedrock of longing, a part of growing up, and an inherent factor of marginalized experience: the band’s members belong to queer and minority communities, and play for these fellow-travelers above all. But sometimes, for MUNA, after nearly a decade of friendship and a long stretch of pandemic-induced self-reckoning, the most radical note possible is that of bliss. MUNA, the band’s self-titled third album, is a landmark — the forceful, deliberate, dimensional output of a band who has nothing to prove to anyone except themselves. The synth on “What I Want” scintillates like a Robyn dance-floor anthem; “Anything But Me,” galloping in 12/8, gives off Shania Twain in eighties neon; “Kind of Girl,” with its soaring, plaintive The Chicks chorus, begs to be sung at max volume with your best friends. It’s marked by a newfound creative assurance and technical ability, both in terms of McPherson and Maskin’s arrangements and production as well as Gavin’s songwriting, which is as propulsive as ever, but here opens up into new moments of perspective and grace. Here, more than ever, MUNA musters their unique powers to break through the existential muck and transport you, suddenly, into a room where everything is possible — a place where the disco ball’s never stopped throwing sparkles on the walls, where you can sweat and cry and lie down on the floor and make out with whoever, where vulnerability in the presence of those who love you can make you feel momentarily bulletproof, and self-consciousness only sharpens the swell of joy.
There are many reasons why you might be left *reeling*, not all of them positive. It’s the perfect word to describe the people and events that knock us off our axis. As the tracks on The Mysterines’ debut album help to reveal, singer/guitarist Lia Metcalfe knows them well. A fan of The Doors with a passion for poetry like her hero Jim Morrison, she started writing songs at the age of nine. Her teenage years provided more meaningful material to write about, much of which formed a basis for songs on *Reeling*. Completed by guitarist Callum Thompson, bassist George Favager, and drummer Paul Crilly, Liverpool’s The Mysterines specialize in an emotive brand of garage rock that takes inspiration from a variety of sources. Musically, the debut albums by The Strokes and Arcade Fire were the blueprint for youthful swagger and experimentalism, respectively; the films of directors Alejandro Jodorowsky and Terrence Malick provided canvases on which the quartet could imagine new soundtracks. *Reeling* was produced by Catherine Marks, who, having worked with PJ Harvey and Wolf Alice, is adept at pairing dynamic instrumentals and a voice imbued with a soulful sense of lived experience. “It got pretty intense at times,” Metcalfe tells Apple Music. “It’s such a chunk of my life and represents many big moments.” Here, she and Crilly take us through the album, track by track. **“Life’s a Bitch (But I Like It So Much)”** Lia Metcalfe: “It’s a pretty energetic song and a good introduction to the record because we’re all together in this one moment that’s over before you know it. It’s similar to previous stuff that we’ve done, so we guess that people’s ears are already attuned to this sound of ours. Almost everything else on the record took about 15 to 20 takes, but on this, we did three or four, and Catherine Marks said we had done enough. We knew that we wanted it to be a single but couldn’t due to the frequent uses of the word ‘bitch.’” **“Hung Up”** LM: “I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily about revenge, but it’s a song that was written to stop me from *being* vengeful, I guess. Lyrically, it’s one of my favorite songs on the record and it’s pretty intimate. While some of the record is made up of stories rather than things that have happened in real life, this one is quite personal and, listening to the lyrics, it’s fairly self-explanatory what it’s about.” **“Reeling”** LM: “It’s probably the best summary, lyrically, of what I experienced when we made the album. I did this strange demo that sounds super different to how the song turned out. I watched a film called *Santa Sangre* \[Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1989\], which has this sort of circus theme running through it. So, when I did the demo, I wanted it to sound like it had come from a circus. It was pretty weird, and when I played it to everyone else, they didn’t really understand how we’d frame it in a Mysterines sense.” Paul Crilly: “It was one of the first songs we recorded for the album, so set the tone for where we wanted to go with everything. Having not met Catherine before, it was a good way for us to sum up what we wanted to do, and she got on board with it fairly quickly.” **“Old Friends / Die Hard”** LM: “It’s about a friendship between two people that goes a bit wrong and ends in murder. We wanted the song to have a humorous aspect, rather than it be taken seriously and everyone think we’re mass murderers. Being from the north, you’re born with a natural sarcasm. Humor is, therefore, a big part of the band and our lives, so it’s really fun to write something like this, especially when people take it literally. It’s a moment of chaotic madness on the record—in a good way.” PC: “The initial demo was just Lia and a guitar. Then it slowly evolved because we wanted it to be funny, and so there were no limits. We threw all this crazy stuff on it, such as the whistling in the introduction.” **“Dangerous”** LM: “It’s one of the songs that has a lot of emotion attached to it, especially for me. I’ve always seen it as the gateway song. When I played it to the lads, we were all pretty sure it was going to be a single. It came together so naturally, with everyone knowing exactly what to do for the song, so when we came together to play it, it was already in place.” PC: “For me, it was probably the hardest to record because we were trying to recreate that moment, that spark, from when we first demoed it and it wasn’t quite working. Eventually, we got there though.” **“On the Run”** LM: “I watched the film *Badlands* \[Terrence Malick, 1973\] and really admired the intensity of the story, even though it feels like nothing really moves or happens. It definitely inspired the lyrics to ‘On the Run’ because that’s what Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek’s characters are doing. When we demoed ‘On the Run,’ I made this trailer for *Badlands* and kept putting the song over it until I thought the song was right and fitted with the visuals.” **“Under Your Skin”** LM: “I wrote the riff for this when I was 17 and the words came to me almost immediately. Around that time, I wasn’t writing anything else like that, so it was a bit of a fluke and a prediction of what was to come. I had the song for years and didn’t really know what to do with it. I needed to figure it out in order to present it to the band. A big reference was a song by The Doors called ‘My Wild Love.’ Once I had that, it made sense to put this song on the record, but the original version I played them is so different from how it has turned out.” **“The Bad Thing”** LM: “It’s essentially about digging someone you used to love up from a grave. It’s pretty fun to play and the poem is fun to sing, though I hope no one takes it seriously, as I’m not digging any bodies up…yet. The recording of this seemed to go on for ages. It was difficult because we wanted to ensure the intensity came through and there were no overdubs, so we had to make sure it was perfect.” PC: “I had to listen to some motivational speeches to get me to go back in and do more takes. The first couple were purely running on energy, but then when you get past a certain point, you start to overthink things and become more self-critical. And after all that, I think we ended up going with one of the first takes.” **“In My Head”** LM: “This was pretty simple. It was one of the last tracks we took to the studio. I showed it to the lads about two weeks before we went, and I certainly didn’t expect it to be the first single. There are some interesting touches to it, such as getting to scream down the mic and the feedback that runs all the way through it, which I created by running a drumstick up and down guitar strings for a whole song.” **“Means to Bleed”** LM: “It came out of nowhere. It’s largely based around the riff, but lyrically, it has reflections of other tracks \[on the album\]. We definitely referenced a \[Josh Homme project\] Desert Sessions tune when we were developing it. Callum came up with the riff and I already had these words, in the form of a poem, which had the same flow and were right for it. Many of the songs came from poems I’d written before and found again later on.” **“All These Things”** PC: “It took a while to warm to it because, musically, it strays away from the overall sound of the album quite a bit. It’s a bit happier as a track. It’s not that I’m miserable, but I felt that it interrupted the flow of a fairly serious album with this Wembley Stadium moment. After some time away from it, I realized it works. I’ve grown accustomed to it and it’s a great song.” **“Still Call You Home”** LM: “I wrote it when I was 17, and it was definitely necessary for me to write it at the time. For a while, when we played it live, I had to detach myself from what it actually meant, as it became difficult for me to put myself there. If I’m honest, I didn’t know if it was going to be on the record. It ended up feeling right though. The moment of recording it was weird, knowing that the band weren’t going to be on the song with me. It was me with one mic and a guitar. It was me and Catherine in the room, which made for an emotionally intimate moment together and drove me to do the song in a certain way. I also didn’t want to record it during the day—it had to be at night—because I was reliving the emotion of what it’s about. It was pretty hard, but that’s why people write music and listen to it, so it was necessary too.” **“Confession Song”** LM: “I think it was only me and Paul who agreed we wanted this on the record, and it always felt to us like the track to finish with. Everyone else didn’t really get it. It’s a summary of everything, sort of like the credits for the album. Me and Paul had some fun doing the demo, getting drunk on red wine, and listening to loads of Tom Waits beforehand, before throwing sticks at the wall and recording the results. We also put some reversed drums on it too.”
The four-piece band exude all the chintzy glamor of a hyper-stylized ’70s B-movie: its members hail from across the globe (Uruguay, Australia, Sweden, London), style themselves like mid-century French chanteuses, and are mainly here to vibe-out, man. But their debut album is seriously captivating: a breezy, all-instrumental tour through retro global psychedelia, from cumbia to Turkish psych to scuzzy surf-rock, furnished by vintage synths and produced by Franz Ferdinand’s Alex Kapranos. These are adventurous, evocative jams, calling to mind spaghetti western standoffs and oversized margaritas; there’s also an homage to Lindsay Lohan’s VIP beach resort, naturally (“Lindsay Goes to Mykonos”).
In the context of Nilüfer Yanya’s second album, the word “painless” has a few different meanings. “I was enjoying the process of making the record, and thinking, ‘Why do you have to beat yourself up in order to make something?’” the London singer/guitarist tells Apple Music. “Obviously, you have to work hard, but often the idea of really struggling is something that people inflict on others, just because it\'s the idea they sell to them, like, ‘Oh, you need to go through this.’” Yanya felt that she hadn\'t given herself enough time and space to make her 2019 debut, *Miss Universe*—a record based loosely, and playfully, around the concept of self-help and wellness, and what happens when you get too in your head about things. So, in the thick of the pandemic, she eased into making *PAINLESS*, writing the songs more collaboratively—mostly with producer Will Archer—than she had been used to. “I kind of felt a bit like, ‘Am I cheating?’ Because you\'re sharing the work, it feels lighter,” she says. \"But then because of that, I kind of delved in deeper and it got a bit darker.” (The album title actually comes from the “shameless” lyric “Until you fall, it\'s painless.”) Those depths can be felt both in Yanya\'s vocal dynamics and the sense of urgency that underpins much of the album, particularly on opener “the dealer” and “stabilise,” the first single. “I think the rhythm plays a big part in these songs,” Yanya says. “You feel like there needs to be an escape somewhere.” Here Yanya talks through *PAINLESS*, track by track. **“the dealer”** “It\'s like when someone\'s hiding behind their layers, or not being honest, but then also you\'re not being honest with yourself. My favorite lyric is \'I hope it\'s just the summertime you grew attached to,\' because it\'s like you\'re lying to yourself. You’re not saying, \'Oh, it was this person that made the difference, or it was this person that I miss.\' You\'re just saying, \'I had a great time,\' and you\'re not being honest about why.” **“L/R”** “\[Producer\] Bullion played me this beat, and it had this pitched drum in it. It just made me feel really happy and warm. It had this kind of marching feeling to it, which I really liked. It took us like a year to finish it, but the initial idea came really quickly. I like the almost spoken element to it, because it sounds like you\'re speaking rather than singing, but then the chorus is very much singing—and it took a while to get that right. It\'s kind of about so many things. In my notebook at the time, I\'d written, \'Do less things\'—like, less is more. That was my thinking behind the song: trying to enjoy simple things and not overcomplicate things.” **“shameless”** “It\'s a really intimate song. I felt like it was about someone that\'s trying to run away from stuff in their life, but they kind of don\'t have much hope. The vocals are very celestial—not something I really experimented with in the past. At first, I was going to kind of speak the words, but it needed a lighter touch, like something even more delicate.” **“stabilise”** “That was the first one me and Will did together. All the others kind of grew off that song. It\'s about environments and the way they impact you, and not being able to escape your environment, taking it with you wherever you go. And it kind of becomes your cage or the way you view things. You know when you\'ve been somewhere too long and then it\'s hard to imagine the world another way? Definitely a very lockdown song.” **“chase me”** “I really liked the line \'Through corridors your love will chase me,\' because it was like the safe feeling you can get when you know you are loved, but you don\'t necessarily want it. It\'s almost like an ego song for me. It\'s very confident.” **“midnight sun”** “I was digging into more of an overall feeling and a mood. I feel like it\'s a song about confidence and finding your own voice in order to speak up, whether that\'s about your own feelings or bigger issues: ‘I can\'t keep my mouth shut this time. I can\'t keep my head down. I\'m not going along with this anymore.’” **“trouble”** “That song is so sad—in a beautiful way, if I may say so. It also felt like quite a brave one for me because it\'s very different. When I was writing, I was like, \'Am I doing a straight-up pop song?\' It\'s not. I think it definitely has that take on it. The vocals needed to be more intimate. Like one voice, and it just all keeps spilling out. It\'s quite challenging to sing. ‘Trouble’ is one of those words—I think I heard it in a Cat Stevens song—\'Trouble, set me free\'—and I really loved the way it was being referred to almost like a person. In the lyrics here, it\'s something that\'s quite persistent and it\'s not going away. Something\'s definitely broken that you can\'t fix.” **“try”** “This one is about getting better, and feeling the need to connect on a deeper level, finding new depths and making new connections, but becoming confused, tired, and dejected with the effort it takes.” **“company”** “It\'s about giving up and you\'re not in a happy place. Originally it started out as, like, you\'re in a relationship that you are just really not sure about and you\'re trying to give signs across that you\'re trying to get rid of someone. But I think the song now is definitely about your inner demons, and they\'re not really going away.” **“belong with you”** “I did this with Jazzi Bobbi, who\'s in my band. She does more electronic stuff, so that definitely comes into play. I feel like builds are always my favorite things in songs, and at the beginning we actually tried to overcomplicate the song and there was like a whole other section and it changed tempo and it just wasn\'t working. And I was like, \'We just need to keep building and that\'s it.\' What it\'s about is like you\'re tied into something, but you know you\'re too good for it or you want to leave. I feel like these are all the songs, in a way. It’s like, escape—but you can\'t escape.” **“the mystic”** “It\'s about watching other people get on with their lives and feeling like you\'re being left behind. I spend a lot of time doing music, so that\'s where I put all my energy, and I was like, \'Oh, I thought we were all still doing that.\' Other people have got other plans and you\'re like, \'Oh, you\'re a grown-up. You\'re going to move in with your boyfriend,\' or, \'Oh, you can drive now.\' The verse is really sad, because it\'s about watching that happen, and feeling very insecure and unconfident.” **“anotherlife”** “For me, this has a completely different energy. It\'s kind of like you\'re admitting you\'re lost now, but in a parallel universe or in the future, you won\'t always be lost. It\'s not always bad to be in that kind of lost, super-emotional, flung-out state. I find sometimes when something bad happens and you get really upset, it\'s kind of— I don\'t want to say cleansing, but you see things with this new kind of brilliance and clarity. And that\'s kind of a beautiful moment.”
Nilüfer Yanya runs head first into the depths of emotional vulnerability on her anticipated sophomore record PAINLESS. Recorded between a basement studio in Stoke Newington and Riverfish Music in Penzance, the record is a more sonically direct effort, narrowing her previously broad palette to a handful of robust ideas. Yanya's debut album Miss Universe (2019) earned a Best New Music tag from Pitchfork and saw support tours with Sharon Van Etten, Mitski and The XX.
Unique, strong, and sexy—that’s how Beyoncé wants you to feel while listening to *RENAISSANCE*. Crafted during the grips of the pandemic, her seventh solo album is a celebration of freedom and a complete immersion into house and dance that serves as the perfect sound bed for themes of liberation, release, self-assuredness, and unfiltered confidence across its 16 tracks. *RENAISSANCE* is playful and energetic in a way that captures that Friday-night, just-got-paid, anything-can-happen feeling, underscored by reiterated appeals to unyoke yourself from the weight of others’ expectations and revel in the totality of who you are. From the classic four-on-the-floor house moods of the Robin S.- and Big Freedia-sampling lead single “BREAK MY SOUL” to the Afro-tech of the Grace Jones- and Tems-assisted “MOVE” and the funky, rollerskating disco feeling of “CUFF IT,” this is a massive yet elegantly composed buffet of sound, richly packed with anthemic morsels that pull you in. There are soft moments here, too: “I know you can’t help but to be yourself around me,” she coos on “PLASTIC OFF THE SOFA,” the kind of warm, whispers-in-the-ear love song you’d expect to hear at a summer cookout—complete with an intricate interplay between vocals and guitar that gives Beyoncé a chance to showcase some incredible vocal dexterity. “CHURCH GIRL” fuses R&B, gospel, and hip-hop to tell a survivor’s story: “I\'m finally on the other side/I finally found the extra smiles/Swimming through the oceans of tears we cried.” An explicit celebration of Blackness, “COZY” is the mantra of a woman who has nothing to prove to anyone—“Comfortable in my skin/Cozy with who I am,” ” Beyoncé muses on the chorus. And on “PURE/HONEY,” Beyoncé immerses herself in ballroom culture, incorporating drag performance chants and a Kevin Aviance sample on the first half that give way to the disco-drenched second half, cementing the song as an immediate dance-floor favorite. It’s the perfect lead-in to the album closer “SUMMER RENAISSANCE,” which propels the dreamy escapist disco of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” even further into the future.
When Kendrick Lamar popped up on two tracks from Baby Keem’s *The Melodic Blue* (“range brothers” and “family ties”), it felt like one of hip-hop’s prophets had descended a mountain to deliver scripture. His verses were stellar, to be sure, but it also just felt like way too much time had passed since we’d heard his voice. He’d helmed 2018’s *Black Panther* compilation/soundtrack, but his last proper release was 2017’s *DAMN.* That kind of scarcity in hip-hop can only serve to deify an artist as beloved as Lamar. But if the Compton MC is broadcasting anything across his fifth proper album *Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers*, it’s that he’s only human. The project is split into two parts, each comprising nine songs, all of which serve to illuminate Lamar’s continually evolving worldview. Central to Lamar’s thesis is accountability. The MC has painstakingly itemized his shortcomings, assessing his relationships with money (“United in Grief”), white women (“Worldwide Steppers”), his father (“Father Time”), the limits of his loyalty (“Rich Spirit”), love in the context of heteronormative relationships (“We Cry Together,” “Purple Hearts”), motivation (“Count Me Out”), responsibility (“Crown”), gender (“Auntie Diaries”), and generational trauma (“Mother I Sober”). It’s a dense and heavy listen. But just as sure as Kendrick Lamar is human like the rest of us, he’s also a Pulitzer Prize winner, one of the most thoughtful MCs alive, and someone whose honesty across *Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers* could help us understand why any of us are the way we are.
The second album from Melbourne’s Confidence Man is unapologetic in its love of ’90s rave and runway music. While their 2018 debut, *Confident Music for Confident People*, fizzed away like an electro-pop firework, *TILT* instead looks to vintage UK house music (“Holiday”) and warehouse raves for inspiration. Frontwoman Janet Planet is in playful form, slinking her way around the UK-garage-esque “Toy Boy” (“They say there’s seven wonders but my toy boy makes it eight/With a face like that there’s no conversation, with an ass like that there’s no hesitation”) and proving there’s substance to her swagger on “Woman” (“I’m a woman of many words, but words do not define me”). Though the quartet found creative inspiration in the studio from Gregg Alexander (New Radicals) and U2 producer Andy Barlow, Confidence Man self-produced *TILT*, pushing their euphoric dance-pop party to another level.
As frontman James Smith and bassist Ryan Needham were holed up in Leeds, writing the songs that make up Yard Act’s debut album, the pair weren’t thinking about a record until they almost had one in front of them. Instead, they were caught up in the sort of heady, creative whirl you get from a new group flexing their songwriting chops. “We knew we were writing a lot, but there was no form or structure to it; it was just loads of ideas,” Smith tells Apple Music. “It was when we started to realize how much material we had that we said, ‘All right, now is probably the time to go in and have a go at the album.’” That spirit of artistic delirium runs right through *The Overload*, where wiry post-punk grooves and buoyant indie anthems-in-waiting frame Smith’s wry, cutting observations on life in modern Britain. “We realized there was a theme running through the songs,” recalls Smith, “an anti-capitalist slant to the whole thing. We came up with this idea of an arc about this person’s journey trying to become a success and how that pans out.” *The Overload* is a thrilling snapshot of pre- and post-pandemic life, less a black mirror to the early 2020s and more a vivid, full-color one. Here, Smith and Needham guide us through it, track by track. **“The Overload”** James Smith: “The song was originally a really pounding house track that Ryan had sent, but I heard the beat differently and put this sped-up drum-and-bass loop over the top of Ryan’s bassline. As soon as I put that on it, the energy made more sense. There’s a chopped sample break running underneath the whole thing that really completed it and gave it that manic feel.” **“Dead Horse”** JS: “I was always pretty keen on this being early on in the album. It feels like the culmination of all the early singles, finally figuring out how to write in our own style.” Ryan Needham: “I think, lyrically, James had a little bit of extreme anger around the time of the Dominic Cummings \[a former Chief Adviser to the Prime Minister caught breaking public health restrictions during the first UK lockdown\] stuff.” JS: “Yeah, it did come from that little month of anger. The bass was on groove; it was really good. And the lyrics played well—there were some good lines in there. It represented where we had got to up until that point.” **“Payday”** JS: “This was written to fit in on the album to coax the narrative along. Originally, it was a really lo-fi demo and then we lost it. When we redid it, we built in all these 909 electronic drums and then Sam \[Shjipstone\] put this really mad funk guitar on it that was exactly what it needed. It is just one of the more straight-up songs, a vehicle to get onto some of the more creative stuff. I tried to be more abstract with the lyrics—didn’t want to do the overly talky thing, so I left a lot more space in the verses so that chorus can come through a bit.” **“Rich”** JS: “It’s a really simple bassline that I was hypnotized by. It was written when Yard Act had just started doing OK. As some of these crazier offers were coming in, I could see it maybe reaching a level where we became part of the culture and made a living off it. I pondered on this idea that music is one of those things where, if it *goes*, you don’t really have control over how much money you suddenly earn out of nowhere. For so long, you are on the bottom rung and money is tight, and then, all of a sudden, the floodgates open and you can make loads of money really easy. That was it, but applied to the narrative of anyone that has an idea that becomes popular.” **“The Incident”** RN: “This was loads of fun. It’s a bit of an outlier on the record—it’s what sounds most like us live. I had been listening to loads of stuff like Omni and stuff like Elastica—this wave of what everyone was calling post-punk bands at the time. I wrote guitars for this one, everything, I got carried away.” JS: “I think you came up with some really interesting, busy basslines for this one.” **“Witness (Can I Get A?)”** JS: “This predates this lineup and lockdown in terms of the lyrics and the bassline. It was sounding quite generic, a post-punk sort of tune from the really early days where we had a couple of jams in late 2019.” RN: “Then, we tried it like the Beastie Boys.” JS: “We wanted to do a hardcore song, but that wasn’t really working either. Then, we did that sort of Suicide drum thing with it. As soon as it went like that, it always reminded me of the start of ‘Doorman’ by slowthai \[and Mura Masa\]. We just wanted a really fun song to close the first side. There’s something about one-minute songs—they are underrated.” **“Land of the Blind”** JS: “Ryan sent this drum-and-bass groove, and I was instantly really smitten with it, and I wrote the lyrics really fast. It’s one which has most of the demo vocals on it. We were in lockdown and Ryan got his girlfriend—who clearly can sing, but she doesn’t consider herself a singer and doesn’t perform or anything—to do all the backing vocals. They just come out so human. If a proper singer had done them, it wouldn’t have sounded right. It really shaped the song.” **“Quarantine the Sticks”** JS: “This was one of the last songs written for the record, another one that joins the narrative. The basslines are really good on this—they dance between different keys, which makes it really unnerving, and it’s got Billy Nomates \[post-punk singer-songwriter Tor Maries\] doing backing vocals on it as well. It’s quite melodic and quite a strange melody, and my voice wasn’t really holding it on \[its\] own. But there was a hint of something there, so we asked Tor to sing on it.” **“Tall Poppies”** RN: “It started with that simple bassline and then it just went on—I looped that bassline. I would send James a loop and then, about an hour later, I would get back something fucking epic, like ‘Tall Poppies.’ There was no craftsmanship on my part; it was basically like handing James a trowel and some bricks and he comes back with a finished wall.” JS: “There was something about the motor of the bassline. The first thing I got from it was that it felt quite reflective and suspensive. Off the back of that, I had that spark for telling the story of this person’s whole life, from cradle to grave.” **“Pour Another”** JS: “This was one of the harder ones. Ali \[Chant, producer\] didn’t really like this one. He kept pushing it away, but we were adamant it was good and there was something in it. ” RN: “I wanted to have a bit of a Happy Mondays sort of thing. The lyrics are funny, and the humor carried it in that way.” **“100% Endurance”** JS: “We thought the album was probably going to end on ‘Tall Poppies,’ and then, at the last-minute, Ryan sent this new demo over and it became ‘100% Endurance.’ I wrote all the lyrics to a WhatsApp video loop of it playing on Ryan’s speaker in the studio. That is the audio we used on the recording. The first take I recorded on my computer that I sent to Ryan. It felt like we had finally figured out the album, which was interesting because when we went in that first week, we thought we might come away with four or five tracks and then see where we were at later in the year. We didn’t expect to finish the album in a week.”
Sound of the Morning is released on Heavenly Recordings on Friday 8th July 2022. Written and recorded in late 2021, Katy’s latest effort is co-produced by Ali Chant (Yard Act and the helm of Katy’s debut Return) and Speedy Wunderground head-honcho Dan Carey (Fontaines DC). Katy’s debut album, Return, released in November 2020, saw her go from Bristolian newcomer to a critically-acclaimed breakthrough star, selling out shows up and down the UK. Praised for “the arresting quality of [her] Kate Bush-meets-Dolly Parton vocal delivery” by The Times, labelled as “finding humanity in every moment” by DIY and with lead single ‘Take Back The Radio’ described as “a whoop of pure joy” in the Guardian, amidst the bleak toll of lockdown, something about this curiously optimistic album began to really resonate. It feels fitting then that, having provided an aural balm at just the right moment with her first album, its follow-up should reflect a world brimming with curiosity, back in action and wanting to expand its horizons. If Pearson’s extracurricular activities in recent months have shown that she can dip a toe into a multitude of genres - providing guest vocals on Orlando Weeks’ recent album ‘Hop Up’; popping up with Yard Act for a collaboration at End of the Road festival; singing on trad-folk collective Broadside Hacks’ 2021 project ‘Songs Without Authors’ - then forthcoming second album Sound of the Morning takes that spirit and runs with it. It’s still Katy J Pearson (read: effortlessly charming, full of heart and helmed by that inimitable vocal), but it’s Katy J Pearson pushing herself musically and lyrically into new waters. It’s an album that’s as comfortable revelling in the more laid-back, Real Estate-esque melodies of lead single ‘Talk Over Town’ - a track that attempts to make sense of her recent experiences, of “being Katy from Gloucester, but then being Katy J Pearson who’s this buzzy new artist” - as it is basking in the American indie pop of ‘Float’, penned with longtime pal Oliver Wilde of Pet Shimmers, or experimenting with the buoyant brass of ‘Howl’, in which Orlando repays the favour with a vocal guest spot. It all makes for a record that’s increasingly unafraid to explore life’s darker parts, but that does so with an openness that’s full of light. As an artist who professes to “always strive for the bittersweetness of things”, Sound of the Morning does just that, taking the listener’s hand and guiding them through the good and the bad, like the musical equivalent of an arm around the shoulder. “I want people to feel things with my music, but I don’t want to cause my listener too much trauma,” she notes with a cheeky glint. “Counselling is expensive, so you’ve got to pick your battles…”
“When I make records, I make them with the idea that no one else will hear them,” Florence Welch tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “When you get to the realization that this private dialogue is going to be completely public, it’s like I’ve tricked myself again.” On her band’s fifth album *Dance Fever*, such private dialogues include rejecting real love (“Girls Against God”), dance as the greatest form of release (the anxious synth-folk of “Free”), embracing less healthy coping mechanisms in her past (“Morning Elvis”), and the push-pull between a creative career and the possible desire to start a family. “I am no mother, I am no bride, I am king,” Welch declares in baritone on “King,” in which she ponders one of *Dance Fever*’s most prominent themes: her complicated relationship with her own artistry. “A lot of it is questioning what it gives to me as well, and being like, ‘Why do I need this so much, sometimes at the cost of more sustainable forms of intimacy or more stable relationships?’” she says. “I think this record is questioning, ‘How committed am I to my own loneliness? How committed am I to my sense of a tragic figure?’” Work on the album had begun alongside producer Jack Antonoff in New York in early 2020 before the pandemic forced Welch back to London, where her creativity was stifled for six long months. *Dance Fever*, then, also covers writer’s block (the cathartic “My Love,” a track intended to help shake off Welch’s blues, and our own) and her despair of what was lost in a locked-down world. Her lyrics occasionally poke fun at the image she has created of herself (“I think there\'s a humor also in self-knowledge that runs through this record that I\'ve actually found really liberating,” says Welch), but they are often as strikingly vulnerable as on 2018’s *High as Hope*. And even if the singer admits on “King” that she is “never satisfied,” her band’s fifth album has brought her rare peace. “I feel like I managed to take everything that I learned in the last 15 years and consolidate it into this record, into this art, into the videos,” she says. “I felt like, if I had to prove something to myself, somehow I did it on this record.” Read on as Welch talks us through a selection of tracks on *Dance Fever*. **“King”** “Sometimes songs just arrive fully formed, and it\'s always when you think you\'ll never write a song again. I felt like my creative abilities were finally at the peak of how I understood myself as an artist and what I wanted to do. But if I wanted to have a family, there was this sense that suddenly I was being irresponsible with my time by choosing this thing that I\'ve known my whole life, which is performance, which is making songs, which is striving to be the best performer that I can be. Somehow, it would be your fault if you miss the boat. I think that scream at the end of ‘King,’ it\'s just one of frustration, and confusion as well. I was thinking about Nick Cave and Leonard Cohen. I was thinking about how they can commit their body entirely to the stage. I was like, ‘Oh my god, I\'m not going to be able to do that. I\'m going to have to make choices.’ It\'s a statement of confidence, but also of humor that the album has, of ‘If I\'m going to sacrifice these other things in my life, I have to be the best.’ I was like, ‘Why not me? Why can\'t I be king?’” **“Free”** “I think out of all the Florence + the Machine songs, it\'s sort of the purest sentiment of why I do it, distilled into why music is so important to me, why I need it, why performance is so important to me. Sometimes you just know a song is working: When we started playing it before it had even come out, just this ripple started in the audience of people catching onto the chorus and starting to move. And it was one of those moments where I was like, ‘Oh, this is a special one. This is really hitting something in people.’ And that\'s so magical for me. That\'s when the celebration starts.” **“Daffodil”** “I thought I\'d lost my mind, because I remember coming home and being like, ‘Okay, I wrote a song today. It might be the most Florence + the Machine thing I\'ve ever done. We\'re a year into the pandemic, I think maybe I\'m losing it. The chorus is just “daffodil” over and over again.’ I was like, ‘Can you do that? That\'s a crazy thing to do.’ There were so many moments where I had nearly gave up on this record. There were so many moments where I nearly went, ‘It just feels like the way that the world is, this is just too hard to finish.’” **“The Bomb”** “There\'s a lot of nods, I think, to the previous records. All three of them are in this album, which is nice. Because I feel like somehow I\'m bridging the gaps between all of them on this record, like all the things I\'ve been interested in. This song is nodding to what I was thinking about, in terms of unavailability in people, in *High as Hope* in songs like ‘Big God,’ with like the obsession of someone who\'ll never text you back. Why is the person who creates the most space and gives you nothing the most appealing person? And really that\'s because if you\'re a songwriter, they give you the most enormous space for fantasy and you can write anything you want because they don\'t really exist. Every time I think in my life I\'ve been in a stable place, something or someone will come up and be like, ‘How do you feel about blowing all this up?’ It\'s also a fear of growing up and a fear of getting older, because if you regenerate yourself constantly through other people by blowing up, changing everything, you never have to face aging or death.” **“Morning Elvis”** “I\'m obsessed with Nick Cave as a performer, but the performer he\'s obsessed with is Elvis. So that\'s how it feeds back to me. I was at home and stuck and there was an Elvis documentary. It made me remember us, when we were on tour in New Orleans, it would have maybe been on the second record. The wheels were really coming off for me, in terms of drinking and partying. I just got very in the spirit of New Orleans and was at a party and just went, \'You all leave without me, I\'m staying at this party.\' I ended up with my dress completely shredded, because I\'m always wearing these vintage things that basically just disintegrate: If you’re on a rager, you will come back with nothing. You would\'ve thought things were going so well for me. What was it about me that had such a death wish? I had such little care for myself. It didn\'t matter what I had done the night before, or the week before, or what chaos I had created, I knew if I got to the stage, something there would save me and that I would be absolved. And that song is about that feeling, but also a testament to all the performers I\'ve seen turn pain into something so beautiful.”
London duo Jockstrap first gained attention in 2018 with an almost unthinkable fusion of orchestral ’60s pop and avant-club music. On their debut album, conservatory grads Georgia Ellery and Taylor Skye continue to push against convention while expanding the outline of their sui generis sound. Skye’s electronic production is less audacious this time out; *I Love You Jennifer B* is more of a head listen than a body trip. There are a few notable exceptions: The opener, “Neon,” explodes acoustic strumming into industrial-strength orchestral prog; “Concrete Over Water” violently crossfades between a pensive melody reminiscent of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and zigzagging synths recalling Hudson Mohawke’s trap-rave. But most of the album trains its focus on guitars, strings, and Ellery’s crystalline coo, leaving all the more opportunities to marvel at her unusual lyricism. Her writing returns again and again to questions of desire and regret, and while it can frequently be cryptic, she’s not immune to wide-screen sincerity: In “Greatest Hits,” when she sings, “I believe in dreams,” you believe her—never mind that she’s soon free-associating images of Madonna and Marie Antoinette. And on “Debra,” when she sings, “Grief is just love with nowhere to go” over a cascading beat that sounds like Kate Bush beamed back from the 22nd century, all of Jockstrap’s occasional impishness is rendered moot. At just 24 years old, these two are making some of the most grown-up pop music around.
When Georgia Ellery and Taylor Skye make music as Jockstrap, the process and result has one definition: pure modern pop alchemy. Meeting in 2016 when they shared the same com- position class while studying at London’s Guildhall School of Music & Drama, Ellery and Skye founded Jockstrap as a creative outlet for their rapidly-developing tastes. While Ellery had moved from Cornwall to the English capital to study jazz violin, Skye arrived from Leicester to study music production. Both were delving deep into the varied worlds of mainstream pop, EDM and post-dubstep (made by the likes of James Blake and Skrillex), as well as classical composition, ‘50s jazz and ‘60s folk singer-songwriters. The influence of the club and a dancier focus, which was hinted at on previous releases, now scorches through their new material like wildfire. Take the thumping, distorted breakbeats of ‘50/50’ –inspired by the murky quality of YouTube mp3 rips –as well as the sparkling synth eruptions of ‘Concrete Over Water’, as early evidence of where Jockstrap are heading next. Jockstrap’s discography is restless and inventive, traversing everything from liberating dancefloor techno to off-kilter electro pop, trip-hop and confessional song writing; an omnivorous sonic palette that takes on a cohesive maturity far beyond their ages of only 24 years old. They have cemented themselves as one of the most vital young groups to emerge from London’s melting pot of musical cultures.
On his third solo album, Fred Gibson (better known as Fred again..) returns with his fingers firmly on the pulse of everything around him. Rounding out a deeply personal trilogy, *Actual Life 3* sees the London-based producer, DJ, and singer-songwriter once more thrive on the challenges of sound reinvention and renewal. “I think the feeling that I’ve become really obsessed with is taking very fleeting moments and exposing as much beauty as is in them,” he tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “You know how sometimes if you see something in normal timing, and then you see it in slow-mo, like, ‘Oh wow. There\'s a whole new emotional framing for this.’” Fred first envisioned this unique narrative in 2020 for his debut, *Actual Life*, released over lockdown as a remedy to the melancholic uncertainty of the time. Delivering three distinct chapters across 2021, the BRIT Award-winning producer (and longtime mentee of Brian Eno) dives deeper in his cache of bright snippets and samples from everyday scenes, fusing soul, R&B, and bass house elements for jaw-droppingly euphoric and intimate tracks. “Sometimes I’m conscious of it and sometimes I’m not,” he says. “But one thing I know is that when I’m there, I make loads of ideas.” Much of this LP was made on the move, via long airport stops, tube journeys, or lunchtime breaks. And, like its predecessors, this collection is predominantly influenced by this process, with tracks labeled after the people he’s worked with, or the inspirations behind them. Here, Gibson draws euphoria from fleeting emotions, filtering vocals from names including London rapper and singer BERWYN, Toronto poet Mustafa Ahmed, and G.O.O.D Music’s 070 Shake across woozy synths and deep, intrepid basslines. But *Actual Life 3* also differs in its greater worldly experience. As is the case with hits he’s penned for the likes of Ed Sheeran, BTS, George Ezra, and Stormzy, tracks including “Delilah (pull me out of this)” (sampling Delilah Montagu’s 2021 single “Lost Keys”) and “Bleu (better with time)” (slicing verses from Yung Bleu’s 2020 track “You’re Mines Still”) arrive with the boost of rapturous unveilings at Gibson’s online DJ sets and gig slots. Although getting the music to people’s ears on these occasions offered an ideal proving ground for his blossoming tracks, it was moments of solitude that gave him the most to work with. “When you\'re on your own,” he explains, “you can just be in the world—any place that gives you a conveyor belt of humanity, buzzing away in the background, often when there\'s a bubbling undercurrent of slight excitement, I think that’s just the ultimate gift.”
When it came to making their second album, *Anywhere but Here*, Sorry wanted to home in on the tricks they’d learned while touring their 2020 debut, *925*. Live, the songs from that record had been pulled in exciting new directions, and the five-piece led by North Londoners Asha Lorenz and Louis O’Bryen wanted to make sure their new material was approached with a similar sense of possibility. “We did the first album more in the studio, and then, when we played it live, it sounded way bigger, and we were like, ‘It’s annoying. We didn’t capture the new bits from playing live,’” Lorenz tells Apple Music. “That’s where this record was born: We wanted to make sure we got everything out of the song.” It’s a process that lends *Anywhere but Here* its sense of exploration, each song feeling part of the same piece while traversing different genres. To that end, the album takes in fuzzy ’90s rock, minor-chord orchestral folk, indie-disco darkness, and twisted ballads, all unified by the recurring themes of love and loss. “It’s a lot about learning to let go of things and trying to see the humor in sad things,” says Lorenz. “It’s kind of a second coming-of-age.” Here, Lorenz and O’Bryen take us through it, track by track. **“Let the Lights On”** Louis O’Bryen: “This was probably the last song we wrote for the album. We knew that the album needed a bit more energy in places, so we went into it with that in mind. It made sense to put at the start because it’s like opening credits for the album.” Asha Lorenz: “It feels a bit separate from the rest of the record, so it was nice to have that. And it starts the record with ‘I love you,’ so it’s kind of funny.” **“Tell Me”** LO’B: “This is a song that me and Ash wrote the parts for separately. It was two songs originally, and we liked sections of each of those songs, and the lyrics of those two songs worked well together, so we merged them together and played it with the band loads. It’s about reflecting on a relationship or something that has impacted you. I see it like when you think back on the more fiery aspects of a relationship, maybe not toxic but maybe just that kind of side of things. It’s reflecting on that stuff.” **“Key to the City”** AL: “Louis had a guitar riff that was the verse. He played it, and then all the lyrics just flew out. We demoed it, and then we knew that we wanted to put it on the album. It’s a sad, fuck-you kind of song.” **“Willow Tree”** AL: “This is more like a lullaby. It started with a guitar riff, and then me and Louis demoed it but wanted it to sound more like a Kinks-y kind of song. We’d written all the parts before, and then we got the band to play it, and it took on a new life. I imagine it as a little character on the flute or something. This one has a character inside of it.” LO’B: “We wanted the album to ebb and flow and make sure that it went on the right journey and space, the light and darkness out in a good balance—that was important to us.” **“There’s So Many People That Want to Be Loved”** AL: “This was a song I had lyrics for before, and then me and Louis did a demo of it that was really stripped back, just guitars and vocals. But then, when we brought it to the band, we wanted it to be like ‘Perfect Day’ by Lou Reed, and it’s also inspired by the Daniel Johnston song ‘True Love Will Find You in the End.’ We wanted it to be a good balance of humor and not giving up—it’s sad but also that you can see yourself in all the people in the choruses. We added some strings and stuff at the end that made it a bit cooler. We listened to a lot of David Bowie and tried to incorporate a lot of shit from that as well.” **“I Miss the Fool”** AL: “We demoed this around the same time that we did ‘There’s So Many People…’—they were kind of written together. Louis added some nice string bits in the chorus, and we built it up from the main lyric, and then they added some cool stuff, like the opera sample bits. It was written in a similar style to how we wrote songs on the first album, in terms of the process.” **“Step”** LO’B: “We wrote this in the studio that \[record label\] Domino have in Wandsworth. Ash was playing drums, and we were just jamming out, and Campbell \[Baum, bassist\] came and played saxophone. We went back and forth with this song, but I think something about it just stuck with us. We’d go back and listen to it, and it sounded like it had to be on the album. We fell in and out of love with it a bit, but then, in the end, it became an important song for the album.” **“Closer”** AL: “This was written around the same time as ‘Step.’ It’s a bit more grunge-y, a more indie kind of vibe. We wanted to have lots of different types of songs on the album, and we picked the genre that we thought would be the best vehicle for the song to drive.’” LO’B: “We didn’t take playing live that seriously at the start. It was secondary to recording. But now, we see them as both as important as each other—and that really influenced parts of the album.” **“Baltimore”** AL: “We started this one in the Wandsworth studio. We had a live take, but we hadn’t really edited it, and then we brought it to James Dring, who we produced the last record with, because it felt like we needed a bit more time on it. We organized all the guitars at the end and added a few new guitar bits and some synths and organized it so that it kind of went on a proper trip.” **“Hem of the Fray”** AL: “This was written around the vocals and the riff, but then, when he brought it to the band, it took on a new vibe. Then Louis added some sample bits that sound quite dark and Underworld-y. It’s got a cool atmosphere to it, and I think it’s captured quite well by Ali \[Chant, producer\].” **“Quit While You’re Ahead”** AL: “This was written in the first bit of the lockdown. I went to Louis’ house to stay there for a week, and we wrote this. It was kind of a dark time, but I was making it a bit comedic using the catchphrase of the title. It’s kind of a sad song and taking the piss out of some catchphrases. It’s just funny. You can’t really quit while you’re ahead when you’re ahead, because you’re ahead.” **“Screaming in the Rain”** LO’B: “This was one that me and Ash wrote apart and then worked together on it, and it all worked really well together. This is one of the songs that we’re still trying to nail, I think. In my mind, this song has loads of different characters which it could be. The one on the album, the character is a bit sad, and then the character that I think we’ll do for the next one is a bit happier, but more of an alien or something.” **“Again”** AL: “We really like the Portishead track ‘The Rip,’ the way it holds onto that note and it’s like a wave that doesn’t stop. We wanted a track to hold onto a different note—the idea of holding onto the note and you’re wanting it to change, but it doesn’t really change. I think that’s a lot of what the album was about: different forms of repetition but not thinking, at the time, that you’re getting a different outcome. But then you are, and time is moving forward, and we just have to go through these things in life. It’s just a shedding of the skin. We put it at the end because it sheds the whole skin of the album, and I’m sure all these things will happen again, but with different lights on them.”
London once again features as a prominent character on Sorry’s second studio album, Anywhere But Here. "If our first version of London in 925 was innocent and fresh-faced, then this is rougher around the edges. It's a much more haggard place," Louis says. Earwigged conversations, text messages, snatched speech recorded underground; the city’s discarded words fed into the lyrics which map the experience of urban life on a young and frustrated generation. Produced alongside Portishead’s Adrian Utley in Bristol, the result is an angular, acerbic, bittersweet triumph.
Since releasing her debut album Don’t Let the Kids Win in 2016, Melbourne’s Julia Jacklin has carved out a fearsome reputation as a direct lyricist, willing to excavate the parameters of intimacy and agency in songs both stark and raw, loose, and playful. If her debut announced those intentions, and the startling 2019 follow-up Crushing drew in listeners uncomfortably close, PRE PLEASURE is the sound of Jacklin gently loosening her grip. Stirring piano-led opener ‘Lydia Wears A Cross’ channels the underage confusion of being told religion is profound, despite only feeling it during the spectacle of its pageantry. The gentle pulse of ‘Love, Try Not To Let Go’ and dreamy strings of ‘Ignore Tenderness’ betray an interrogation of consent and emotional injury. The stark ‘Less Of A Stranger’ picks at the generational thread of a mother/daughter relationship, while the hymnal ‘Too In Love To Die’ and loose jam of ‘Be Careful With Yourself’ equate true love with the fear of losing it. Recorded in Montreal with co-producer Marcus Paquin (The Weather Station, The National), PRE PLEASURE finds Jacklin teamed with her Canada-based touring band, bassist Ben Whiteley and guitarist Will Kidman, both of Canadian folk outfit The Weather Station. It also introduces drummer Laurie Torres, saxophonist Adam Kinner and string arrangements by Owen Pallett (Arcade Fire) recorded by a full orchestra in Prague. PRE PLEASURE presents Jacklin as her most authentic self; an uncompromising and masterful lyricist, always willing to mine the depths of her own life experience, and singular in translating it into deeply personal, timeless songs.
“I just wanted to branch out,” beabadoobee tells Apple Music of making her second album *Beatopia*. After 2020’s insular, bedroom-crafted debut *Fake It Flowers*—on which she unflinchingly delved into the chaos of her teenage years—the London singer-songwriter was ready to get out of her own four walls, and her head. And so, once the worst of the pandemic restrictions lifted, beabadoobee (aka Beatrice Laus) holed up in a studio in South West London with friend and producer Jacob Bugden to try a new way of making music. “I feel like this record was the first time I was really intimately collaborative with another musician,” Laus tells Apple Music. (Three of this album’s songs were also written with The 1975’s Matty Healy, alongside a collab with PinkPantheress.) “I felt so much more comfortable. Everything just made sense.” Having turned to the sounds of the ’90s artists she idolized growing up for *Fake It Flowers*, she was also ready to broaden her horizons. “There were no rules,” remembers Laus. “We created a really long playlist of all the songs we love, and they were all so different. I don’t want to be tied to one genre. I realized I can make anything I want.” The result is an album that reveals a lighter side to beabadoobee, and on which the clouds that lingered over *Fake It Flowers* seem to have cleared. These are songs about being in love, staying out late on a weeknight, remembering to take care of yourself, and, most of all, appreciating the support network of true friends. “I feel like with *Fake It Flowers*, I talked quite a lot about negative experiences, and it really helped me through those situations,” says Laus. “But I think *Beatopia* was the moment that I finally accepted my past.” As for this album’s title (which Laus says should be pronounced *bay-a-topia*)? That’s all about self-acceptance too, a reference to a fantasy world a seven-year-old Laus had created to escape into, and which she disregarded after a primary school teacher shamed her for it. “Bringing back the idea of Beatopia was finally accepting things inside of me that I wasn\'t so confident about,” she says. “I finally felt myself just becoming a better person and being more comfortable with who I am.” Read on as beabadoobee guides us through her dreamlike second album. **“Beatopia Cultsong”** “It was quite experimental and different. And I think it was the best way to start *Beatopia*. I was really appreciating the people around me, and me and Jacob had made it with \[Laus’ boyfriend\] Soren and \[Bugden’s girlfriend\] Molly, and I guess it just happened out of nowhere. And I thought that was the best way to start the album, because it\'s like friendships and really just accepting and appreciating everyone who\'s helped me throughout my life. It was a way to thread into ‘10:36,’ which is more like, ‘You’re here.’” **“10:36”** “I honestly just wanted to have fun with this song. The main sonic inspiration was Frou Frou, and for the breakdown, we kind of riff off \[French band\] The Teenagers. I\'ve sat on that riff since before *Fake It Flowers*, and I just didn\'t know what to do with it. But afterwards we got in the studio, everything made sense. I just wanted something loud. I wanted something super catchy and repetitive and quite brutal. With *Fake It Flowers*, I was like, ‘Everything has to be about my life.’ This was the first time I really played with the idea that sometimes I don\'t have to write about my experiences. It was refreshing.” **“Sunny Day”** “I had always wanted to write a song like ‘Sunny Day’; I\'ve always wanted to make something quite R&B. And the only thing that was stopping me was what people thought. It was \[written\] during a really productive time with me and Jacob. It was easy, and I just wanted something quite poppy and hooky and just that sticks in your head, almost like a fun lullaby to dance to. I love Nelly Furtado, I love Corinne Bailey Rae. I was like, ‘I need something like that.’” **“See you Soon”** “I was 100% looking towards Broken Social Scene. Sonically, this song really matches the actual lyrics of the song. And I feel like Broken Social Scene would usually sing one lyric over and over again, and it would just hit you hard, because it just makes sense with it musically. I had written it just after I took shrooms, and I had such a crazy experience that I wanted to write something that reminded me of that. It was almost like a realization of everything in my life. This is still my favorite song off *Beatopia*. It\'s almost like talking to myself, like, ‘I\'ll see you soon,’ because I\'m tripping the hell out, almost leaving my body.” **“Ripples”** “Finding the balance with this song was quite challenging. The night before, Matthew \[Healy, of The 1975\] had shown me this video of Paul Simon writing a song on a TV show from scratch. And I realized I just wanted to make a good songwriter\'s song—a classic song. This is such a personal song: It’s about self-growth and reflection and depending on the friends around you to feel okay. But then I go away on tour and then I\'m alone. Sometimes going away makes you come back and appreciate everything around you so much more.” **“The Perfect Pair”** “The lyrics were quite difficult, because it was quite specific. It’s about realizing that the thing you hate about a person is the thing that reminds you of yourself, which is why it’s called ‘The Perfect Pair.’ It was a song I’d never made before—I just really wanted to make something with a bossa-nova-like beat. It was the first time I also really explored what my voice could do, too.” **“Broken Cd”** “I’ve been sitting on this since I was 17. I wanted it to sound like a broken CD, saying the same thing over and over again. I feel like this song in particular really showcases me and Jacob as two individuals working together. The saving grace of the song is where it’s like, ‘Oh, you can finally breathe and be happy.’ But then you come back to the beginning of it, and even though it’s the same lyrics and same chord progression, it’s almost feels different—like a different journey.” **“Talk”** “This is a song I knew I could write and do well. It’s the best I am at my craft. It was the first time we all played as a band live, and it was so fun and so messy, it was great. The main riff was like ‘Maps’ by Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but the four-track demo version. The whole idea for the song is it’s a Tuesday night, and it’s like, \'Fuck it.’ It’s not that deep. I wanted something really catchy in the chorus and something that was easy to understand. Again, I was like, ‘Let’s take the path of not taking everything so seriously.’” **“Lovesong”** “I love writing love songs. You can come up with the weirdest shit, and it would only relate to you. This is probably one of the most personal ones about my boyfriend. I always have to have a song on my record about my boyfriend, because he’s such a big part of my life. With the lyric ‘I missed the train again/I called your name as if you\'d drive it back,’ I feel like it best describes you when you are falling in love. When you\'re in love, it consumes your mind. All you think about is that person, and it just comes out without really realizing.” **“Pictures of Us”** “I give all the credit to Jacob and Matthew for this. It was Matty’s song: He gave it to me and I changed the first lyrics, which were about his childhood. I wanted to write about my childhood and a girl I knew, who I actually wrote about on *Fake It Flowers*. It was about the crazy shit we used to do back when we were teenagers. The lyric that Matty wrote was ‘She reminded me that God started with a capital letter.’ It’s so open to interpretation. To me personally, it means someone that you truly, truly admire, but not being able to be on the same page. But you’re trying to be.” **“Fairy Song”** “I wanted to make a song that was almost like the Ten Commandments, but my rules. I’ve also always wanted to make something that was very Cibo Matto-inspired. There’s a lyric in it that’s ‘I know you’re sad, because someone died, but I’m not gonna sit inside and do nothing.’ Jacob wrote it after MF DOOM died, because it affected him quite deeply. This song is about not being tied down to anything that makes you feel like shit and just focusing on things that you want to do actively to get better.” **“Don’t Get the Deal”** “I\'ve always wanted to make a song where it’s almost a call and response between the boy and girl. The male vocalist is Jacob, and we had written the song with Jack from Bombay Bicycle Club. He found the chords, and I felt like it just happened so naturally. It gets quite heavy at times, too, and then you have the middle eight where it almost takes you back to the kind of bossa nova section of the album. I think this song is just about the idea of manipulating someone or just not being the best person for that person, but you\'re just so co-dependent.” **“Tinkerbell Is Overrated”** “These are my favorite lyrics out of the whole record, because I talk about the crows that live on top of my room and the bugs that live in my room and just going fucking insane. I had written it in the studio, but I was thinking about the time I was isolating for COVID where I literally went crazy. But it was also one of the best times in my life, because I felt like I needed that. I wanted something very playful, and PinkPantheress really suited it—she encapsulated the melody really well. She’s a good friend of mine. I didn’t realize it at the time, but listening back to this album, it’s very friendship-related. It’s about people around me and appreciating everything. It made sense that the only collab I’d have would be with a friend.” **“You’re Here That’s the Thing”** “This is the last song on the album, and it’s 100% meant to be when the credits come on the screen. I wanted this whole album to feel like a movie or like a movie soundtrack, because that’s something I really, really want to do. It’s almost reminiscent to ‘You\'ve Got a Friend in Me’ from *Toy Story*, like something super sweet and cheeky and cute. I co-wrote this one with Matty Healy, too. I wrote the verses, and he showed me his chorus idea. I was like, ‘What do you mean by it?’ He said, ‘You know what? I don\'t know, but it\'s really fun.’ It was like, ‘Okay, go with it. It doesn\'t really matter what\'s illegal in California. It could be anything.’”
The most jarring part about listening to the London band black midi isn’t how much musical ground they cover—post-punk, progressive rock, breakneck jazz, cabaret—but the fact that they cover it all at once. A quasi-concept album that seems to have something to do with war (“Welcome to Hell,” “27 Questions”), or at least the violence men do more generally (“Sugar/Tzu,” “Dangerous Liaisons”), *Hellfire* isn’t an easy listen. But it’s funny (main character: Tristan Bongo), beautiful, at least in a garish, misanthropic way (the Neil Diamond bombast of “The Defence”), and so obviously playful in its intelligence that you just want to let it run over you. The first listen feels like being yelled at in a language you don’t understand. By the third, you’ll be yelling with them.
black midi’s new album Hellfire will be released on 15th July. Hellfire builds on the melodic and harmonic elements of Cavalcade, while expanding the brutality and intensity of their debut, Schlagenheim. It is their most thematically cohesive and intentional album yet.
“It was the fear of what people would think,” Stella Donnelly tells Apple Music. The Perth-raised, Melbourne-based singer-songwriter was unable to write songs for some time before beginning work on her second album, *Flood*. It began even before she’d released 2019’s *Beware of the Dogs*. Her debut album had been finished in 2018, months before its actual release date. But between touring and other commitments, she had only two weeks off in a year—and the constant hustle, not to mention the growing vulnerability that accompanied her expanding audience, took its toll. “I was gradually getting more and more creatively unwell,” she says. “When I’m able to create and write, I feel like I’m healthier in my mind. That was definitely blocked, which started creating all sorts of issues for my mental health—I was doubting myself, doubting whether I was a real musician.” Eventually, as the pandemic sent the world into silence, Donnelly found time to breathe, gather herself, and write new music—which she understandably describes as a massive relief. The end result is an 11-track snapshot of where she is in her life right now. From reflections on long-gone relationships to observations on how lockdowns affected us all to songs designed for future live performances, this is Stella Donnelly in 2022, for better or worse. “There’s a big scope as to who I am and what I think about, and it’s kind of varied,” she says. “I might not feel some of the songs when I’m listening back, but they’re a representation of where I was, so it’s important for me to set a timestamp on my life.” **“Lungs”** “I’d written the rest of the record, and I felt like I hadn’t been looking forward while writing these songs. I’d been doing a lot of looking back, and I hadn’t actually pictured myself performing the songs because there was no one performing any songs on any stage in the world at the time. I was like, ‘Oh, fuck, this is really slow.’ It felt kind of stuck in 2020 or 2021. I wanted to create a song that I’d really enjoy performing live and that would bring a certain energy to the stage and to the show.” **“How Was Your Day”** “It’s capturing a dynamic. I wanted to bring to life this feeling that often happens between people who love each other very much—that fear of losing that person, so you avoid having the difficult conversation, whether it leads to breaking up or not. And it was brought on by lockdown. A lot of people were either breaking up or getting married. It was like make or break. So, I feel like it was just trying to capture that feeling of the couples having to have that talk because they’re either going to have to choose to live together for 100 percent of their days or live separately for 100 percent of their days.” **“Restricted Account”** “This one came about in a weird way. I was getting kind of incessant DMs in my ‘other’ account on Instagram, and I would block that person, but they’d get another account and then message me on that account. It was always these really long, sprawling paragraphs of their life, and dotted between devotion towards me, but they were actually always talking about being devoted to someone else as well, so it was quite confusing. I wanted to try and capture that feeling of devotion to a stranger that so many people get. In some ways, it’s like a love song from someone else’s perspective. But there’s this uncomfortable feeling about it, and I was trying to bring that out in the flugelhorn and the piano, and the guitar at the end, building up to this almost unbearable frequency.” **“Underwater”** “I did an ambassadorship for the Patricia Giles Centre for Non-Violence in Western Australia, which is a women and children’s refuge for family and domestic violence situations. I met with some of the residents and staff members, and we received a lot of interesting education on the statistics. The most profound and interesting statistic I came away with was the fact that, on average, it takes seven attempts to leave a situation of coercion or any sort of abuse. It takes seven attempts before they are successful in leaving. I feel like there’s a lot of shame around not being able to leave an abusive relationship, and I hope that statistic provides some comfort to people. As worrying as it is, it’s the norm. So, I looked back at a particular relationship I’d been in, and I just wanted to kind of say a final fuck-you to that person and try and just kind of process that time in my life.” **“Medals”** “Life gets pretty tough for people who peaked in high school, and I think I’m just trying to capture that in a humorous, gentle way, like, ‘Come on, everyone’s waiting. You can get out of this funk. Like, you can let go of it. You can take your school medals off now. You can kind of go out and live your life and not be so scared of it.’ It’s definitely just a playful, fun song.” **“Move Me”** “’Move Me’ is a love song written to my mum, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s a few years ago. It’s kind of written from my child self, like, I’m almost having a bit of a tantrum about it. I’m kind of having a little bratty moment, but for the most part, in the verses, I’m just singing to her and keeping it kind of humorous because that’s how we speak to each other. But also finding a way to express the shock and the pain and the fear. But I wanted it to feel like it was quite free—people don’t always realize that it’s the years before you get a diagnosis that are the hardest. So, in a way, it’s almost like this celebration of mum being able to finally get the treatment she needs and find her way to live now with this thing.” **“Flood”** “I wrote this song in Melbourne. We were stuck in a six-month lockdown here, and I wanted to write a song that was kind of at the pace of walking, to capture the feeling of that one hour that we were allowed outside to exercise each day. I didn’t want to capture the feeling of being stuck at home, but I also still wanted to capture what it was like and the sadness that was around. So, it was this sad little adventure that I wanted to create. My representation of the feeling of lockdown, which was kind of warm but sad.” **“This Week”** “This song’s me trying to grow up. It’s just where you feel like you’re just winning at life for a bit, you know? You’re just doing all the shit that you say you’re going to do. And you just feel like a capable, upstanding citizen for a little while.” **“Oh My My My”** “I wrote this song about my grandmother, and so, in a way, that old-time feeling, that sort of gothic sound is feeling that forlorn, almost morbid sadness. I wanted to write a little homage to her and the feeling around when you lose someone that you love so much. I tried to capture that moment with grace and earnestness. I’d never been able to fully capture it on guitar for her. I just didn’t feel like it was genuine or just didn’t feel right. So, finding that keyboard sound was perfect—and it was actually on my housemate’s keyboard that his grandmother had bought for him.” **“Morning Silence”** “It’s a bit of a nod back to my EP \[2017’s *Thrush Metal*\] in a way. I really wanted it to be rough in its production—simple and capturing the feeling of hopelessness in the world and how I was feeling. It’s like a sequel to ‘Underwater’ in a way, but a far less hopeful one in some senses. I just wanted to have that little moment to say what I need to say and then have it over with, and not make it too big in its delivery.” **“Cold”** “I wanted to kind of keep looking forward with the record. Especially after ‘Morning Silence’ and ‘Oh My My My,’ I wanted to send it out the park, energy-wise, and look to the future in some way. It was such a fun song to make. It’s about an old argument with someone. It\'s just me trying to get the last word on it and just capturing that time, how fraught our relationship was. I’ve just always wanted to write a big song, and so that was my attempt.”
Like the many Banded Stilts that spread across the cover of her newest album Flood, Stella Donnelly is wading into uncharted territory. Here, she finds herself discovering who she is as an artist among the flock, and how abundant one individual can be. Flood is Donnelly’s record of this rediscovery: the product of months of risky experimentation, hard moments of introspection, and a lot of moving around. Donnelly’s early reflections on the relationship between the individual and the many can be traced back to her time in the rainforests of Bellingen, where she took to birdwatching as both a hobby and an escape in a border-restricted world. By paying closer attention to the natural world around her, Donnelly recalls “I was able to lose that feeling of anyone’s reaction to me. I forgot who I was as a musician, which was a humbling experience of just being; being my small self.” Reconnecting with this ‘small self’ allowed Donnelly to tap into creative wells she didn’t know existed. Looking back at the Banded Stilt, Donnelly ultimately appreciates how when “seen in a crowd they create an optical illusion, but on its own it’s this singular piece of art.” While each song in Flood is a singular artwork unto itself, the collective shares all of Stella Donnelly in abundance: her inner child, her nurturing self, her nightmare self; all of herself has gone into the making of this record, and although it would take an ocean to fathom everything she feels, it’s well worth diving in.
“I literally don’t take breaks,” ROSALÍA tells Apple Music. “I feel like, to work at a certain level, to get a certain result, you really need to sacrifice.” Judging by *MOTOMAMI*, her long-anticipated follow-up to 2018’s award-winning and critically acclaimed *EL MAL QUERER*, the mononymous Spanish singer clearly put in the work. “I almost feel like I disappear because I needed to,” she says of maintaining her process in the face of increased popularity and attention. “I needed to focus and put all my energy and get to the center to create.” At the same time, she found herself drawing energy from bustling locales like Los Angeles, Miami, and New York, all of which she credits with influencing the new album. Beyond any particular source of inspiration that may have driven the creation of *MOTOMAMI*, ROSALÍA’s come-up has been nothing short of inspiring. Her transition from critically acclaimed flamenco upstart to internationally renowned star—marked by creative collaborations with global tastemakers like Bad Bunny, Billie Eilish, and Oneohtrix Point Never, to name a few—has prompted an artistic metamorphosis. Her ability to navigate and dominate such a wide array of musical styles only raised expectations for her third full-length, but she resisted the idea of rushing things. “I didn’t want to make an album just because now it’s time to make an album,” she says, citing that several months were spent on mixing and visuals alone. “I don’t work like that.” Some three years after *EL MAL QUERER*, ROSALÍA’s return feels even more revolutionary than that radical breakout release. From the noisy-yet-referential leftfield reggaetón of “SAOKO” to the austere and *Yeezus*-reminiscent thump of “CHICKEN TERIYAKI,” *MOTOMAMI* makes the artist’s femme-forward modus operandi all the more clear. The point of view presented is sharp and political, but also permissive of playfulness and wit, a humanizing mix that makes the album her most personal yet. “I was like, I really want to find a way to allow my sense of humor to be present,” she says. “It’s almost like you try to do, like, a self-portrait of a moment of who you are, how you feel, the way you think.\" Things get deeper and more unexpected with the devilish-yet-austere electronic punk funk of the title track and the feverish “BIZCOCHITO.” But there are even more twists and turns within, like “HENTAI,” a bilingual torch song that charms and enraptures before giving way to machine-gun percussion. Add to that “LA FAMA,” her mystifying team-up with The Weeknd that fuses tropical Latin rhythms with avant-garde minimalism, and you end up with one of the most unique artistic statements of the decade so far.
Rina Sawayama thought she was done with trauma. Her debut album, *SAWAYAMA*, which was released to widespread critical acclaim under the isolating restrictions of the global pandemic, was a deceptively bombastic pop record, the production serving as a disguise for the heavy, existential lyrical content. Had it not been for the paradigm-shifting events of 2020, which left Sawayama experiencing her breakthrough success through screens, the electrifying follow up, *Hold the Girl*, would probably have been a very different record. “The thought I was really confronted with during lockdown was that I just did not feel connected to myself or my body,” Sawayama tells Apple Music. “I was constantly running on adrenaline because so many exciting things were happening, the album was doing better than I ever imagined, but I was so mentally unwell and completely numb to any real emotion.” *Hold the Girl* is the result of two years’ worth of forced self-reflection and “brutal” therapy, or what Sawayama calls a “‘can you be alone with your thoughts for two years?’ experiment.” Musically rooted in country and western—inspired by what she calls the “beautiful” writing on Kacey Musgraves\' *Golden Hour* and Dolly Parton’s appearance in the film *Dumplin’*—the album was intended to be recorded in Nashville to ground the songs in the culture she was referencing, but closed borders made travel impossible. Despite the unavoidable limitations, Sawayama has succeeded in capturing the spirit of the genre, tipping a Stetson to Shania Twain on the irreverent lead single “This Hell,” tapping into the atmosphere of a saloon at closing time with “Forgiveness,” and stitching mismatched elements of other genres like industrial metal and electronica into tracks like “Your Age” and “To Be Alive.” “I really connect with the storytelling aspect of country,” says Sawayama. “It’s very authentic, and grounded in reality, and that’s what I needed to tell the story of this record.” Here, she takes us through that story, track by track. **“Minor Feelings”** “The title of this song is kind of the secondary title of the record. It was inspired by a collection of essays called *Minor Feelings* by Cathy Park Hong. It’s the name she gives to this collective feeling that a lot of Asian Americans have about racial microaggressions, and I really connected with that, because for me it was a collection of all these minor feelings that has now led to a pretty major shutdown of emotions. In the music I wanted to play with the minor and the major chords, so in the chorus when I say ‘minor feelings’ it’s minor and then major when I say ‘majorly getting me down.’” **“Hold the Girl”** “I wrote this with Barney Lister and Jonny Lattimer in the first session I ever did with Barney. He was producing the song and I was throwing out all these ideas, like: ‘So, I want it to be country, and I want the beginning to sound like Bon Jovi, and I really also want to then do a garage drop.’ Luckily he agreed! It was a very, very hard song to balance: I think we must have gone back and forth about 20 times on the production, and then another 20 times on the mix. I was trying to make it really big and orchestral, but also a pop song. ‘Hold the Girl’ was the song that really unblocked me and made me excited to write again. It reminded me of how much fun you can have with production.” **“This Hell”** “On first listen, ‘This Hell’ could be a romantic love song, and I love that. It sort of has a double meaning—during lockdown there were certain people that I really held on to and it truly felt like ‘this hell is better with you’—but I’m specifically talking about my friends’ experiences of being shut out of religious communities for being queer. I wanted the music to channel the confidence Shania Twain has and tell the story like a country song, a bit tongue-in-cheek. I worked on it with Vic Jamieson, Lauren Aquilina, and Paul Epworth, who is one of my ultimate production idols. We were in Church Studios, which felt really apt, and I just remember ‘line dancing’ and lighting the whole studio up in red. It was one of the best moments.” **“Catch Me in the Air”** “One of the first in-person sessions I did for this album was with GRACEY in Oscar Scheller’s flat, and we couldn’t come up with anything. I just wasn’t feeling it. Halfway through, GRACEY was like, ‘Oh my god, Gwen Stefani is coming out with new music!’ As a writing exercise, we pretended we were going to be pitching to Gwen, and then the first melody flowed out. The song is about getting to a certain point in my relationship with my mum, and being able to see things from her perspective now I’m around the same age she was when she had me.” **“Forgiveness”** “I had to write this song over Zoom because I had just come into contact with someone who had COVID, so Jonny Lattimer and Rich Cooper were in one room and I was at home. The lyrics are about forgiving people in my past, and things I couldn’t control. It’s quite stripped back, as if I was in a grunge band, but doing pop. I asked Freddy Sheed to play the drums like he was exhausted and hungover, a little bit behind the beat. I wanted this feeling of dragging your feet down this path that you’re walking to get to forgiveness. I remember that I came out with the chorus melody pretty much straight away, but I hate using GarageBand and Logic so I was having to record it to my voice notes, then AirDrop it to myself, then send to Rich to put it in the song. It’s great when you have those moments where it just flows out, but actually getting the idea down on paper was so boring!” **“Holy (Til You Let Me Go)”** “This is where the record starts to get dark. The previous track talks about the idea that forgiveness is a winding road, and now we’re going off the beaten path for the next four or five songs. ‘Holy (Til You Let Me Go)’ is like the counterpart to ‘This Hell.’ I went to a Church of England school and I grew up hearing so much about religion and spirituality, but there was some dark stuff that went on there that was not handled very well, and I’m alluding to it in these songs. I think going to Christian girls’ schools can be very confusing. There’s this idea that girls are holy until a certain point in their life, and then they’re not. So I’m asking: ‘What does youth mean in that situation? What is good and bad?’ You can hear my friends Louis \[a school friend\] and Lauren Aquilina at the end, talking about what happened, and they’re just in shock about how the adults were behaving.” **“Your Age”** “‘Your Age’ started off with a banjo riff, but it’s massively inspired by Nine Inch Nails. The song is about the anger I had towards the adults that were around me when I was younger. Now that I’m an adult myself, I think I can legitimately be quite angry towards the adults of my youth, because I just never would have done things that way. I think when you get older, you look back at certain things you’ve experienced and the way the adults handled it, and you kind of can’t believe it. This was one of the last songs I wrote for the album; I wanted it to have this really dark moment. It’s a pretty direct message.” **“Imagining”** “So much of the confusion around so many mental health issues is that you don’t know if it’s real, and you assume that everyone else is feeling this way, so you minimize what you’re experiencing. It\'s like being in a club and feeling completely lost, which is the energy I wanted to have in the production. It’s very repetitive, the chorus is really shouty, and the lyrics don’t make the most sense. It’s sensory overload.” **“Frankenstein”** “I had two days in the studio with Paul Epworth, and we wrote ‘Frankenstein’ on the first day and ‘This Hell’ on the second. I was writing about realizing that it’s not okay to give one person in your life all this baggage to deal with—whether it\'s a lover or a best friend or someone else close to you—and asking them to put you back together when that’s not their job. I love Paul’s pop production, but for me it’s about the work he did with Bloc Party. It’s actually Matt Tong playing drums on this track, which is insane. I grew up going to gigs around my area in Camden, and it was one of the best, most hedonistic and chaotic times of my life, and I wanted to reference that frantic energy. I might incite a mosh when I perform it live.” **“Hurricanes”** “A little pop-rock moment: It’s about self-sabotage and running into situations that aren’t good for you. I originally wrote this with Clarence Clarity, and the production sounded a bit like The Cardigans, a bit ’60s surf, and it just wasn’t working. I needed it to sound more driving, like being propelled forward throughout the song, like a hurricane. When Stuart Price came on board later on, he was also working with The Killers, and he suggested listening to them as a reference for the drums. Once we rerecorded the drums, it all fell into place. ‘Hurricanes’ is probably my favorite track on the album right now. It ends on that nice major chord, and it’s like this resolve. The end of the chaos. It’s such a fun song to sing.” **“Send My Love to John”** “One of my really good friends has quite actively homophobic parents, and they’ve had a very difficult time because their parents have never been supportive of their queerness. Then one day my friend was on the phone with their mum and at the end of the call she said, ‘OK, I’ll speak to you soon, and send my love to John,’ meaning my friend’s long-term boyfriend. It was a breakthrough. And it’s insane because the mum is never going to say sorry, but this is something they can hold on to. A lot of people need to hear the word ‘sorry’ from their parents and they’re never going to get it, so I wanted to write from the perspective of a parent who regrets not supporting their child to the fullest extent.” **“Phantom”** “I can’t quite remember how this song came about, but I think I had written ‘phantom’ in my notes and I was like, ‘Let’s just try things and see how it sounds.’ We were having quite a free session, just coming up with ideas. It’s a proper rock ballad, almost a love song, about losing yourself and wanting that person back because you don’t like the person that you are now. I wanted it to have a real Aerosmith vibe.” **“To Be Alive”** “The production on ‘To Be Alive’ is inspired by ‘Ray of Light’ by Madonna. It’s got those propulsive breakbeats. I wanted to make an extremely euphoric last song, about the really pure realization that simple things can give us joy if we want them to. The last line of the song, and of the whole album, ‘Flowers are still pretty when they’re dying,’ is actually a lyric Lauren Aquilina suggested. It ends on a hopeful note, but it’s sad at the same time.”
Following on from her critically acclaimed debut “SAWAYAMA”, Rina Sawayama’s highly anticipated new record “Hold The Girl” sees Rina once again juxtapose intimate storytelling with arena-sized songs, creating another ambitious and original album to excite fans and critics alike. Written and recorded over the last year and a half, Rina once again teamed up with longterm collaborators Clarence Clarity and Lauren Aquilina as well as enlisting help from the likes of the legendary Paul Epworth (Adele, Florence & the Machine), Stuart Price (Dua Lipa, The Killers, Madonna) and Marcus Andersson (Demi Lovato, Ashnikko) for their magic touch. The product of Rina and these collective minds coming together is an album which melds influences from across the pop spectrum and is a bold and honest statement of Rina’s personal evolution; coming to terms with her own past and the jubilation of turning to the future.
A couple of years before she became known as one half of Wet Leg, Rhian Teasdale left her home on the Isle of Wight, where a long-term relationship had been faltering, to live with friends in London. Every Tuesday, their evening would be interrupted by the sound of people screaming in the property below. “We were so worried the first time we heard it,” Teasdale tells Apple Music. Eventually, their investigations revealed that scream therapy sessions were being held downstairs. “There’s this big scream in the song ‘Ur Mum,’” says Teasdale. “I thought it’d be funny to put this frustration and the failure of this relationship into my own personal scream therapy session.” That mix of humor and emotional candor is typical of *Wet Leg*. Crafting tightly sprung post-punk and melodic psych-pop and indie rock, Teasdale and bandmate Hester Chambers explore the existential anxieties thrown up by breakups, partying, dating apps, and doomscrolling—while also celebrating the fun to be had in supermarkets. “It’s my own experience as a twentysomething girl from the Isle of Wight moving to London,” says Teasdale. The strains of disenchantment and frustration are leavened by droll, acerbic wit (“You’re like a piece of shit, you either sink or float/So you take her for a ride on your daddy’s boat,” she chides an ex on “Piece of shit”), and humor has helped counter the dizzying speed of Wet Leg’s ascent. On the strength of debut single “Chaise Longue,” Teasdale and Chambers were instantly cast by many—including Elton John, Iggy Pop, and Florence Welch—as one of Britain’s most exciting new bands. But the pair have remained committed to why they formed Wet Leg in the first place. “It’s such a shame when you see bands but they’re habitually in their band—they’re not enjoying it,” says Teasdale. “I don’t want us to ever lose sight of having fun. Having silly songs obviously helps.” Here, she takes us through each of the songs—silly or otherwise—on *Wet Leg*. **“Being in Love”** “People always say, ‘Oh, romantic love is everything. It’s what every person should have in this life.’ But actually, it’s not really conducive to getting on with what you want to do in life. I read somewhere that the kind of chemical storm that is produced in your brain, if you look at a scan, it’s similar to someone with OCD. I just wanted to kind of make that comparison.” **“Chaise Longue”** “It came out of a silly impromptu late-night jam. I was staying over at Hester’s house when we wrote it, and when I stay over, she always makes up the chaise longue for me. It was a song that never really was supposed to see the light of day. So it’s really funny to me that so many people are into it and have connected with it. It’s cool. I was as an assistant stylist \[on Ed Sheeran’s ‘Bad Habits’ video\]. Online, a newspaper \[*The New York Times*\] was doing the top 10 videos out this week, and it was funny to see ‘Chaise Longue’ next to this video I’d been working on. Being on set, you have an idea of the budget that goes into getting all these people together to make this big pop-star video. And then you scroll down and it’s our little video that we spent about £50 on. Hester had a camera and she set up all the shots. Then I edited it using a free trial version of Final Cut.” **“Angelica”** “The song is set at a party that you no longer want to be at. Other people are feeling the same, but you are all just fervently, aggressively trying to force yourself to have a good time. And actually, it’s not always possible to have good times all the time. Angelica is the name of my oldest friend, so we’ve been to a lot of rubbish parties together. We’ve also been to a lot of good parties together, but I thought it would be fun to put her name in the song and have her running around as the main character.” **“I Don’t Wanna Go Out”** “It’s kind of similar to ‘Angelica’—it’s that disenchantment of getting fucked up at parties, and you’re gradually edging into your late twenties, early thirties, and you’re still working your shitty waitressing job. I was trying to convince myself that I was working these shitty jobs so that I could do music on the side. But actually, you’re kind of kidding yourself and you’re seeing all of your friends starting to get real jobs and they’re able to buy themselves nice shampoo. You’re trying to distract yourself from not achieving the things that you want to achieve in life by going to these parties. But you can’t keep kidding yourself, and I think it’s that realization that I’ve tried to inject into the lyrics of this song.” **“Wet Dream”** “The chorus is ‘Beam me up.’ There’s this Instagram account called beam\_me\_up\_softboi. It’s posts of screenshots of people’s texts and DMs and dating-app goings-on with this term ‘softboi,’ which to put it quite simply is someone in the dating scene who’s presenting themselves as super, super in touch with their feelings and really into art and culture. And they use that as currency to try and pick up girls. It’s not just men that are softbois; women can totally be softbois, too. The character in the song is that, basically. It’s got a little bit of my own personal breakup injected into it. This particular person would message me since we’d broken up being like, ‘Oh, I had a dream about you. I dreamt that we were married,’ even though it was definitely over. So I guess that’s why I decided to set it within a dream: It was kind of making fun of this particular message that would keep coming through to me.” **“Convincing”** “I was really pleased when we came to recording this one, because for the bulk of the album, it is mainly me taking lead vocals, which is fine, but Hester has just the most beautiful voice. I hope she won’t mind me saying, but she kind of struggles to see that herself. So it felt like a big win when she was like, ‘OK, I’m going to do it. I’m going to sing. I’m going to do this song.’ It’s such a cool song and she sounds so great on it.” **“Loving You”** “I met this guy when I was 20, so I was pretty young. We were together for six or seven years or something, and he was a bit older, and I just fell so hard. I fell so, so hard in love with him. And then it got pretty toxic towards the end, and I guess I was a bit angry at how things had gone. So it’s just a pretty angry song, without dobbing him in too much. I feel better now, though. Don’t worry. It’s all good.” **“Ur Mum”** “It’s about giving up on a relationship that isn’t serving you anymore, either of you, and being able to put that down and walk away from it. I was living with this guy on the Isle of Wight, living the small-town life. I was trying to move to London or Bristol or Brighton and then I’d move back to be with this person. Eventually, we managed to put the relationship down and I moved in with some friends in London. Every Tuesday, it’d get to 7 pm and you’d hear that massive group scream. We learned that downstairs was home to the Psychedelic Society and eventually realized that it was scream therapy. I thought it’d be funny to put this frustration and the failure of this relationship into my own personal scream therapy session.” **“Oh No”** “The amount of time and energy that I lose by doomscrolling is not OK. It’s not big and it’s not clever. This song is acknowledging that and also acknowledging this other world that you live in when you’re lost in your phone. When we first wrote this, it was just to fill enough time to play a festival that we’d been booked for when we didn’t have a full half-hour set. It used to be even more repetitive, and the lyrics used to be all the same the whole way through. When it came to recording it, we’re like, ‘We should probably write a few more lyrics,’ because when you’re playing stuff live, I think you can definitely get away with not having actual lyrics.” **“Piece of shit”** “When I’m writing the lyrics for all the songs with Wet Leg, I am quite careful to lean towards using quite straightforward, unfussy language and I avoid, at all costs, using similes. But this song is the one song on the album that uses simile—‘like a piece of shit.’ Pretty poetic. I think writing this song kind of helped me move on from that \[breakup\]. It sounds like I’m pretty wound up. But actually, it’s OK now, I feel a lot better.” **“Supermarket”** “It was written just as we were coming out of lockdown and there was that time where the highlight of your week would be going to the supermarket to do the weekly shop, because that was literally all you could do. I remember queuing for Aldi and feeling like I was queuing for a nightclub.” **“Too Late Now”** “It’s about arriving in adulthood and things maybe not being how you thought they would be. Getting to a certain age, when it’s time to get a real job, and you’re a bit lost, trying to navigate through this world of dating apps and social media. So much is out of our control in this life, and ‘Too late now, lost track somehow,’ it’s just being like, ‘Everything’s turned to shit right now, but that’s OK because it’s unavoidable.’ It sounds very depressing, but you know sometimes how you can just take comfort in the fact that no matter what you do, you’re going to die anyway, so don’t worry about it too much, because you can’t control everything? I guess there’s a little bit of that in ‘Too Late Now.’”
Phoebe Green's debut studio album 'Lucky Me' coming 19th August. With the release of her debut record Lucky Me, at last, we find Phoebe. Across 13 acts, it’s a frustrated self-interrogation, blinding herself with torchlight to extract explanations for her own behaviours, contradictions and complexities – but through this process of knowing herself, she arrives at a place of peace and self-forgiveness.
Loyle Carner has always made music out of the things he’s been through in life. Sometimes, the South London rapper and songwriter wishes he could weave some fictional tales so he could save something for himself, but that’s not how it works for him. “It’s the only thing that inspires me to write,” he tells Apple Music. He was feeling uninspired after the release of his second album, *Not Waving, But Drowning*, in 2019, but the news that his girlfriend was pregnant opened the creative floodgates. What has emerged is *hugo*, a remarkable record that not only sees Carner reflect on life as a new father but also prompted him to iron out the troubled relationship he has with his own dad. “It was really useful to have the space to be able to write about it and reflect on it in real time to help me make sense of my thoughts,” he says. “But other times it was quite exhausting. Sometimes it was good, sometimes it was tough.” It makes for a cathartic listen. Let him guide you through it, track by track. **“Hate”** “We made it really quickly, a stream of consciousness. It’s not a big, smash-hit single, but it was the one that summed up where I was at the beginning of the process and it couldn’t go anywhere else. It had to be the first thing that people heard from the album. When you pick up the album, I want you to come on a journey with me, because I started in a bad place and I ended in a good place. I want people to go on that with me.” **“Nobody Knows (Ladas Road)”** “This was probably the first song I wrote for the album. It was before lockdown, even before I found out my girlfriend was pregnant. I had already been thinking about a lot of the subjects on the album, and this was one of the first times where I tapped into something and was like, ‘OK, this is the start of a new project. I can see that I have an idea here.’ I tried to put the songs that I made at the beginning of the process at the beginning of the album. It’s quite autobiographical and you need it to run in a linear fashion, it needs to be chapters of a story.” **“Georgetown” (feat. John Agard)** “This was produced by Madlib. I was saving it for a project with him. I’ve got loads of music that we’ve made together, and we wanted to do a MadLoyle tape, which is a dream come true for me. But I played this to my friend Mike, who was working as an A&R and a collaborator on this project, and he was like, ‘You have to put this on the album. It’s too good to be held back just in case you drop it later.’ I think it really tapped into the same story as the rest of the album. It was really close to ‘Nobody Knows’ but one of them is self-depreciative and the other one is self-fulfilling, really lifted and full of self-belief. They work nicely together.” **“Speed of Plight”** “I was in the studio with Rebel Kleff, who’s a longtime collaborator of mine, and Jordan Rakei and Nick Mills, who’s my engineer and good friend. It came together quite quickly, as did a lot of the stuff for this album. It was such a relief to be really letting fly, not being afraid to be a bit more aggressive, a bit more frustrated, to have a place to vent. That’s what this song really was.” **“Homerton”** “Homerton \[in East London\] was where my son was born. All these songs are little pieces of a journey between me and my father and where I was at. I used to see my father as flawed, and in the first few tracks on the album, he’s very flawed to me. ‘Homerton’ is really that middle point where I start to look at my son and then I’m able to finally, as a father, see myself as flawed as well. Then I’m able to begin the journey of understanding where my father was at and how difficult it is to be a parent and how nobody is a bad person. People make bad decisions and some people have no tools to deal with some of the things that get thrown at them.” **“Blood on My Nikes”** “After ‘Homerton,’ my mind then went to, ‘OK, but what happens when my son grows up in the area that we live in?’ A young boy’s life was taken over a pair of shoes near where my girlfriend teaches around the time that I was writing this song, and I was so moved by it. I was really quite surprised at how numb I had become to hearing these stories and seeing this loss in the communities that I had grown up in. It was important to reflect on this story that’s told by many artists, but through my lens and through my words. I enlisted \[activist and writer\] Athian Akec to help me be able to speak to a younger generation with his voice, to reflect on what it is to see how many young people’s lives we’re losing and how the music is not the problem.” **“Plastic”** “At the end of ‘Blood on My Nikes,’ Athian is eloquently disrespecting the government and saying that where we’re at politically, socially is not good enough, that we’re putting emphasis on the wrong things. ‘Plastic’ is my version of his speech where I also attack these big companies that are making mistakes and hold them accountable, but also hold society accountable, hold myself accountable for putting emphasis on the wrong thing, wanting nice flashy trainers and a new iPhone instead of other bits. But I love my iPhone, so I can’t say anything about it. It’s just trying to find the balance between soul and commerce. Yes, everyone has to make money and live, but we also need to just take a step back, walk into nature and relax, and not put so much pressure on material things.” **“A Lasting Place”** “I was reading a book by Philippa Perry recently called *The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (And Your Children Will Be Glad That You Did)*. There’s a large part about rupture and repair and this idea that you’re having a bad day and you shout at your kid. That’s going to happen, because people get angry. But the repair is the important part, going to your son or daughter and being, ‘Hey, Dad’s having a rubbish day and I took it out on you and that’s not right. It must have made you feel like X, Y, and Z, and I apologize.’ That’s what this song is about, making mistakes and being like, ‘It’s OK.’” **“Polyfilla”** “Towards the end of ‘A Lasting Place,’ it starts to feel like, ‘OK, I’ve got it made, I’m a dad, I’m brilliant, I’m repairing my ruptures. Yeah, I’ve got this in the bag.’ And I think ‘Polyfilla’ is that crashing back down to earth with another mistake or losing my temper or getting frustrated or being late to pick up my son or whatever it is. Battling with that thing of, ‘Man, maybe I’m not cut out for this.’ That worry of impostor syndrome: ‘Maybe I’m not a good parent. Maybe I’m not a good person.’” **“HGU”** “This is about forgiving my dad, and forgiveness in general. It’s not even forgiving for him, it’s about forgiveness for myself: ‘If I hold on to this, carry around this albatross my whole life, it’s weighing me down.’ I’ve taken so much from hip-hop and I wanted to give something back. Within rap, everyone else is like, ‘If your dad left and he’s rubbish, you don’t need to forgive him, just let that anger be your motivation.’ I think that’s cool to an extent, but it can cripple you if you let it go further than an initial youthful rebellion. It’s a nice little reveal at the end that we’re in the car. The album is called *hugo* because my dad’s car was called Hugo and he taught me to drive over lockdown. It’s a small story, but with some big topics.”
Anyone encountering the gorgeous, ’70s-style orchestral pop of *And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow* might be surprised to learn that Natalie Mering started her journey as an experimental-noise musician. Listen closer, though, and you’ll hear an album whose beauty isn’t just tempered by visions of almost apocalyptic despair, but one that also turns beauty itself into a kind of weapon against the deadness and cynicism of modern life. After all, what could be more rebellious in 2022 than being as relentlessly and unapologetically beautiful as possible? Stylistically, the album draws influence from the gold-toned sounds of California artists like Harry Nilsson, Judee Sill, and even the Carpenters. Its mood evokes the strange mix of cheerfulness and violent intimations that makes late-’60s Los Angeles so captivating to the cultural imagination. And like, say, The Beach Boys circa *Pet Sounds* or *Smiley Smile*, the sophistication of Mering’s arrangements—the mix of strings, synthesizer touches, soft-focus ambience, and bone-dry intimacy—is more evocative of childhood innocence than adult mastery. Where her 2019 breakthrough, *Titanic Rising*, emphasized doom, *Hearts Aglow*—the second installment of a stated trilogy—emphasizes hope. She writes about alienation in a way that feels both compassionate and angst-free (“It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody”), and of romance so total, it could make you as sick as a faceful of roses (“Hearts Aglow,” “Grapevine”). And when the hard times come, she prays not for thicker armor, but to be made so soft that the next touch might crush her completely (“God Turn Me Into a Flower”). All told, *And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow* is the feather that knocks you over.
August 25th, 2022 Los Angeles, CA Hello Listener, Well, here we are! Still making it all happen in our very own, fully functional shit show. My heart, like a glow stick that’s been cracked, lights up my chest in a little explosion of earnestness. And when your heart's on fire, smoke gets in your eyes. Titanic Rising was the first album of three in a special trilogy. It was an observation of things to come, the feelings of impending doom. And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow is about entering the next phase, the one in which we all find ourselves today — we are literally in the thick of it. Feeling around in the dark for meaning in a time of instability and irrevocable change. Looking for embers where fire used to be. Seeking freedom from algorithms and a destiny of repetitive loops. Information is abundant, and yet so abstract in its use and ability to provoke tangible actions. Our mediums of communication are fraught with caveats. Our pain, an ironic joke born from a gridlocked panopticon of our own making, swirling on into infinity. I was asking a lot of questions while writing these songs, and hyper isolation kept coming up for me. “It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody” is a Buddhist anthem, ensconced in the interconnectivity of all beings, and the fraying of our social fabric. Our culture relies less and less on people. This breeds a new, unprecedented level of isolation. The promise we can buy our way out of that emptiness offers little comfort in the face of fear we all now live with – the fear of becoming obsolete. Something is off, and even though the feeling appears differently for each individual, it is universal. Technology is harvesting our attention away from each other. We all have a “Grapevine” entwined around our past with unresolved wounds and pain. Being in love doesn’t necessarily mean being together. Why else do so many love songs yearn for a connection? Could it be narcissism? We encourage each other to aspire – to reach for the external to quell our desires, thinking goals of wellness and bliss will alleviate the baseline anxiety of living in a time like ours. We think the answer is outside ourselves, through technology, imaginary frontiers that will magically absolve us of all our problems. We look everywhere but in ourselves for a salve. In “God Turn Me into a Flower,” I relay the myth of Narcissus, whose obsession with a reflection in a pool leads him to starve and lose all perception outside his infatuation. In a state of great hubris, he doesn’t recognize that the thing he so passionately desired was ultimately just himself. God turns him into a pliable flower who sways with the universe. The pliable softness of a flower has become my mantra as we barrel on towards an uncertain fate. I see the heart as a guide, with an emanation of hope, shining through in this dark age. Somewhere along the line, we lost the plot on who we are. Chaos is natural. But so is negentropy, or the tendency for things to fall into order. These songs may not be manifestos or solutions, but I know they shed light on the meaning of our contemporary disillusionment. And maybe that’s the beginning of the nuanced journey towards understanding the natural cycles of life and death, all over again. Thoughts and Prayers, Natalie Mering (aka Weyes Blood)
*NO THANK YOU*—the follow-up to 2021’s Mercury Prize-winning *Sometimes I Might Be Introvert*—emphatically deepens Little Simz’s connection with producer Inflo, and provides further confirmation of the Islington rapper’s generational abilities. The initials of the title of her soul-searching fourth LP spelled out her first name, and the name of its surprise follow-up also hints at a purposeful double meaning. Perhaps a kindly expression of gratitude for the flowers given since *SIMBI*’s success? More likely an act of defiance. Either way, within this trademark ambiguity Simz gets her shine on across 10 sumptuous tracks. BRIT Awards Producer Of The Year 2022 Dean Josiah Cover—aka Inflo—taps into the rich, bluesy elements of his enigmatic Sault music for urgent dispatches from Simbi Ajikawo. It’s a rich sonic seam: A returning undercurrent of gospel-rooted R&B reinforces lines with spiritual resonance. From tone-setting opener “Angel” (dedicated to the model Harry Uzoka, who died in January 2018), soft choral flourishes and dreamy Cleo Sol vocals help Simz pick up where she left off in 2021. “Revoke access, I’m running it back, yes/Missing opportunities, I wish I was that pressed.” Building on a deep-rooted synergy, Simz and Inflo go the whole length on the gut feeling that has made their partnership so prolific. For Simz, an artist who’s always operated to her own set of standards, an equally clear-sighted collaborator (Inflo is also across the keys, chords, and strings) finds her at her most compassionate and precise, tackling family trauma and the emotional isolation of success. Within the streams of sharp, self-analyzing rhymes, scattered samples, and prolonged orchestral sections—“Sideways” and “Control”—lies the sound of a winning combo firmly in the groove. As Simz continues to soar, she’s evidently still clearing house. By facing down the dark reaches of the mind and the tests of her daily environment, emotional and soulful highs and lows are wonderfully bared across her tightest lyrical offering to date.
If there’s anything Lauran Hibberd likes to do, it’s to confound people. Born and raised on the Isle of Wight but with an unshakable affection for ’90s power-punk, her music gives off a noticeable duality, sharing stories both angsty and insecure. “There’s been a lot of labels flying around: indie rock, pop punk, power pop, slacker-pop,” she tells Apple Music. “But I have kind of grown to love the fact that nobody can really settle on what it is. Especially in the lockdown, having that much time and listening to so much music, I was like, ‘Why limit yourself? I’m just going to squeeze my brain and see what comes out.’” What has come out feels something like resilience. Building on her previous EPs, 2019’s *Everything Is Dogs* and 2021’s *Goober*, her debut album, *Garageband Superstar*, introduces an array of vivid characters, from an endearingly clueless gamer guy to various iterations of Hibberd herself, working through anxiety, heartbreak, and issues of body image with Day-Glo charisma and teen-movie humor. If a debut album can mark a cinematic coming of age, Hibberd makes for a deeply relatable hero, finding scrappy new ways to strike gold in the everyday. “I’m not out here changing the world,” she says. “I’m not writing ‘Yellow’ by Coldplay. Most of us are just at work, looking out our windows, watching a movie when we get home. I’m just saying what I see and what’s in my weird head, and it feels good to let it out.” Let Hibberd talk you through the inspiration behind each track. **“Rollercoaster”** “For me, the perfect place to open any album is to talk about falling off a roller coaster and ringing your mum off a Motorola. I very much write how I speak—very easily distracted and taken off with different things, like a dog who’s caught a scent. So, it feels like a good place to start for that reason alone, but it’s really about the pressure on women to look and act a certain way, how tiring that can be, but still trying to laugh in the face of it all. It has that opening-credits feel, like it could soundtrack a montage of me trying on different outfits in the mirror for my first day at high school, even though I’m way past that.” **“Still Running (5K)”** “Getting DJ Lethal \[Limp Bizkit, House of Pain\] to scratch on this track is probably the coolest thing that’s ever happened to me. I slid into his DMs not expecting anything back. When he replied the next day, I literally threw my phone across the room because I was so excited. When you’re recording an album, you get so in your own head, so for one of my heroes to say that he loved the track and wanted to be on it, it was like nothing else mattered from that point. It’s probably the proudest I’ve ever been.” **“Step Mum”** “Maybe a week before I was due to record the album, I felt like I was missing a fast-paced, really punky, throw-everything-out-the-window kind of song. My favorite movie growing up was *A Cinderella Story*, so I had this idea of writing this angsty song about stepmums, how they’re villainized in movies as these really awful people. Growing up with my own stepmum and seeing my mum be one, I’ve realized it’s actually not like that at all, but it was a fun idea to write about.” **“Average Joe”** “‘Average Joe’ is based on a group of people, and not even people that I know personally—just an overall genre of male, taking all their worst and best habits and putting them into this one person. Even though it feels like I’m mocking him, laughing at the fact that he thinks a leg day at the gym is unmissable or that he loves taking pictures of his car, there’s a real sympathy in it, and an envy too. I feel like my mind is so complicated all the time—maybe if I was content with everyday, simple things like Average Joe, I would be happier.” **“Hot Boys” (feat. Viji)** “This started out as a joke. I never intended it to make the album. I’ve always been so worried about being credible, and then I remembered that my favorite band is Weezer, and I grew up loving Katy Perry. If I want to lean into the pop curve, I should let myself. The female character is calling the shots and moving from guy to guy—it was quite refreshing to celebrate that. It feels like a summer track where you’ve just been dumped, your friends have dragged you on a plane to Ibiza, and you say you don’t want to go but, low-key, you really do. It’s ‘I’m too cool to go on holiday to get over a man, but also, while I’m here, I may as well have a look…’” **“That Was a Joke”** “More roller coasters. When I was demoing this one, I was imagining myself at a circus theme park with a Coke bigger than my head—more sugar than I should ever consume. That’s kind of where I feel I fit musically. But I do love a happy-sad contrast. This is about being in denial over being left, being like, ‘I’m so fine, I’m so happy’ when, deep down, you’re being sick in your mouth. It’s inevitable that most people will feel like that at some point in our lives, but I do think it’s how you look back and laugh at yourself afterwards that counts.” **“Get Some”** “Halfway through the album, I stopped listening to all the things that I grew up on, the Weezer- and Courtney Barnett-style songs, and started listening to a lot of hip-hop. I was listening to a lot of A Tribe Called Quest and got really obsessed with the first Kanye album. I think it’s evident in songs like ‘Get Some’ that there were other influences creeping in because I just started talking really fast, almost like a rapper would. I ended up writing a really wordy album.” **“Garageband Superstar” (feat. Wheatus)** “When I first started out, I’d sit and play on GarageBand for hours, not really knowing what I was doing but being like, ‘Wow, Mum, check this out!’ It’s about that weird delusional feeling you have when you’re a kid and you’ve learnt something new for the first time and you’re showing everyone and they don’t really care, but you feel amazing. I had the name ‘Garageband Superstar’ in my head for ages. I loved the way it sounded, like a tour from the ‘Teenage Dirtbag,’ ‘Stacy’s Mom’ era—all these loser kids getting their redemption. I’ve always loved songs like that.” **“Hole in the Head”** “I nearly had a breakdown recording this. It’s the furthest I’ve had to push my voice, but when I finally got it, it felt great to be able to scream and shout like that. It’s about being in a relationship with someone who’s in a relationship with their Xbox. I was trying to go on tour and make myself a successful musician, and he was at home playing Zelda on Nintendo Switch. And I was jealous! He was so relaxed and content. After realizing how stupid the whole thing was, I bought a PS4 and tried it for myself, but I just can’t concentrate long enough to get past hard levels. That said, I do love Animal Crossing. I think my house on there might be better than my real-life one.” **“I’m Insecure”** “Comparing yourself to people, being on Instagram and seeing other people that you feel are doing better than you—I think I’ll always have those moments where I go in on myself and worry how I’m doing. But writing about it normalizes it to everyone, and I feel so lucky to be a musician now because we truly talk about that stuff. If people can listen in and feel even a little bit better, that’s great.” **“Slimming Down”** “I always wanted a bit of a spotlight moment towards the end of the record where I go back to basics a little bit. The song is just about falling in love for the first time, being so attached to someone that you’re almost eaten up by them, and then, when they’re gone, you feel like they’ve taken a good chunk of you. But then, there’s always that dark, rubbish humor in there as well, like, ‘I’m heartbroken, but at least I’ve lost a bit of weight because of it.’ It was all recorded live in one take, so it was nice to just capture the moment.” **“Last Song Ever”** “I feel like I spend the whole album talking about all these deep things but ultimately brushing them off with bizarre jokes. ‘Last Song Ever’ is where I cut all the shit and admit I’m about to lose it. It’s just about feeling sick of the way you feel. Sometimes you’ve just got to tell the people who don’t add anything to your life to fuck off, have the rant on Facebook, have those moments where you just scream into your pillow, and throw a party just for yourself.”
From his formative days associating with Raider Klan through his revealing solo projects *TA13OO* and *ZUU*, Denzel Curry has never been shy about speaking his mind. For *Melt My Eyez See Your Future*, the Florida native tackles some of the toughest topics of his MC career, sharing his existential notes on being Black and male in these volatile times. The album opens on a bold note with “Melt Session #1,” a vulnerable and emotional cut given further weight by jazz giant Robert Glasper’s plaintive piano. That hefty tone leads into a series of deeply personal and mindfully radical songs that explore modern crises and mental health with both thematic gravity and lyrical dexterity, including “Worst Comes to Worst” and the trap subversion “X-Wing.” Systemic violence leaves him reeling and righteous on “John Wayne,” while “The Smell of Death” skillfully mixes metaphors over a phenomenally fat funk groove. He draws overt and subtle parallels to jazz’s sociopolitical history, imagining himself in Freddie Hubbard’s hard-bop era on “Mental” and tapping into boom bap’s affinity for the genre on “The Ills.” Guests like T-Pain, Rico Nasty, and 6LACK help to fill out his vision, yielding some of the album’s highest highs.
Melt My Eyez See Your Future arrives as Denzel Curry’s most mature and ambitious album to date. Recorded over the course of the pandemic, Denzel shows his growth as both an artist and person. Born from a wealth of influences, the tracks highlight his versatility and broad tastes, taking in everything from drum’n’bass to trap. To support this vision and show the breadth of his artistry, Denzel has enlisted a wide range of collaborators and firmly plants his flag in the ground as one of the most groundbreaking rappers in the game.
Stormzy’s third studio album finds the Merky rapper in a whole new headspace. “I started in LA, trying to record the album there, but the pandemic hit, and a few other things,” he tells Apple Music. “Suddenly, I wasn’t feeling the energy of the music I was making—so I came back home with a new plan: to get all of the producers in one place, and record this album there.” Sanctuary was eventually found on Osea Island—an enchanting and secluded haven in Essex—gifting the Londoner fertile ground to plot his third record with handpicked musicians and writers. The result is his most mature—and consciously soulful—offering to date. “This album is also testament to producer Stormz, the kind of Stormzy that people don’t really know,” he says. “One of my skills is being able to produce from an executive view, guiding other musicians towards my vision. I’ve always had the ethos where the best idea wins. So I might want to \[record\] something, but if there’s someone better for it, I’ll always allow them to do it.” In many ways, the gentle, soul-searching sound of this LP should come as no surprise—after all, Stormzy records often attempt to integrate R&B and gospel. But *This Is What I Mean* has a far more explicit through line: a desire to interrogate the experience of losing love. Speaking from the heart—aided by a string of songwriters (Jacob Collier, Tems) and top production talent (P2J, PRGRSHN)—Stormzy finds the words for heartfelt ballads (“Firebabe”) and poignant duets (“Holy Spirit”), while he employs Sampha as an emotional conduit on a spirited intermission (“Sampha’s Plea”). By the time we reach the stunning closer (“Give It to the Water”), it becomes clear the opportunity to reshape and remold himself in the face of such pain was simply too important to pass up. “I think back to what \[co-president of 0207 Def Jam\] Twin B told me before \[headlining\] Glastonbury \[in 2019\]: ‘As much as it’s Glasto, it’s another show in a park, and you’ve done hundreds of them,’” he says. “And it’s true: Once you kill the size, or the magnitude, of the task, that’s when you allow people to be at their most real and honest.” Below, he takes us through the story of *This Is What I Mean*, track by track. **“Fire + Water”** “This track came from my first session with PRGRSHN on my return to London. And it was quite spiritual. The first half is what he made that day—and everything you hear me sing, even the structure of my verse, was put down right at that moment. From here, this song went on a two-year journey. Tendai came along and helped on the transition part, and then we got to Osea Island—where Debbie made ‘Pour Me Water.’ Later I was on tour, listening to the song for ages, and eventually had a lightbulb moment: I realized I needed a transition to get from the beginning of the song to ‘Pour Me Water.’ Even that took six months to figure out the drums and the tempo, but, we got there in the end.” **“This is What I Mean”** “I made this with Knox Brown and P2J, and it started extremely different to how it ended up. The only thing that’s the same, I guess, is the sparse intro—leading to the drop. P2J had this wicked idea to sample Jacob Collier, and make an insane rhythm out of \[layering\] his vocals. I’ve always thought that Ms Banks is one of the coldest rappers, I’ve said this to her, I just love her tone. So she killed her bit, and Amaarae sang the melody on it. There\'s also something in her voice, her style and attitude that’s so sick. Lastly, I wanted a second verse from another rapper, but we went around in circles and it never really moved along. Until Twin went to Ghana and I think he had an idea for Black Sherif to ad-lib me, but Black Sherif heard the riddim, went into the booth, and laid this fucking insane outro.” **“Firebabe”** This is the second song I made with Debbie—and it started out with George Moore playing some chords. They’re currently making a track that’s one of my favorite songs of all time, I heard it and knew I needed to get with them both. After fiddling with the chords, Debbie and I got down to writing and we came up with this.” **“Please”** “During this process, I became fascinated with the word ‘please,’ its many meanings and the sincerity of it. It’s a word we use all the time, but I’d never heard it isolated and repeated before. Please is painful, please is desperate…so many things, and it just made me think of what *my* please would be.” **“Need You”** “This is probably the only song we had the intention to make before the album. Between myself, Twin, \[#Merky A&R\] Jermaine Agyako, and Kassa \[PRGRSHN\], there was this excitement to be making a song that encapsulates the three words we had up on the whiteboard: ‘Afro,’ ‘expensive,’ and ‘royal.’” **“Hide & Seek”** “Yes, that’s \[Nigerian singer\] Teni \[The Entertainer\] on the intro, but it was actually PRGRSHN that came up with that harmony. One of his God-given gifts, as well as being an incredible producer, is he’s an amazing songwriter and melody man.” **“My Presidents Are Black”** “I had the instrumental for maybe a year and a half. And for ages, I only had the first eight bars down. Everyone would ask when I was writing to it, and it just wasn’t the right time. Because of those bars, it started very intentionally, and I knew, ‘This ain’t the time to chat rubbish.’ Not even being purposely profound or deep, but what that piece of music was telling my spirit: ‘Rap your arse off, but say *something*.’” **“Sampha’s Plea”** “In terms of a voice with truth, emotion, and pain—you\'ll be hard-pressed to find one with more *feeling* than Sampha’s. I made ‘Please,’ and every time I heard it, I’d think, ‘How amazing would it be to hear Sampha sing this?’ I feel like it would be interesting to see what the word means to other artists, and Sampha is the first artist that I thought of. ‘Please’ feels like a confession booth, or an altar, that you’re just going to with your version. And Sampha came in and did that. It was just beautiful and breathtaking.” **“Holy Spirit”** “I was in the studio at the time with Dion Wardle \[aka ‘Chord Lord’\], and I was feeling really, really close to God. All my career, I’ve known Dion, he’s been on all of my albums, and has been the foundation on which I’ve built my songwriting and my melodies—I would sit in a room with him and a mic, he would play chords, and I would just sing to them. I’ve got loads of demos with Dion, beautiful, unfinished songs. So ‘Holy Spirit’ was probably a defining moment in my time working with him. The whole track is just one take of his chords and my melodies, and then I came back in and added lyrics.” **“Bad Blood”** “This is the only track we created outside of the bubble we created on Osea Island. It’s probably the song I was the most drawn to in a spiritual way. I saw the vision for this and felt it in my spirit, even if a lot of people on my team felt like it was the one \[track\] that didn’t need to exist on the album.” **“I Got My Smile Back”** “This is the last track I made for this album. So, at the camp, I asked Jacob \[Collier\] for two samples, a beautiful R&B one and a dark rap one, and he came back with this a cappella—so beautifully arranged. I didn’t even know what to do at first. I tried to sing, I tried to rap, but it was such a stunning piece of music that I wanted to tread lightly. For this one, I asked the amazing India.Arie to come and sing it. I’ve never worked with such a respected and phenomenal artist, but she approached it with class, grace, and so much service to the music. It was such a pleasure to work with her.” **“Give It to the Water”** “The only way to end this is by giving it to the water. I’ve bared my whole soul on this album—in terms of doing the work, accountability, forgiving myself and just allowing God to do the rest. I had just returned from Jamaica, which was a very extremely spiritual trip for me. And before we left, we went to the side of the ocean and we gave things away, our fears, our stresses, saying: ‘We’re not taking things back home, we leave those things here.’ In my first session back with Debbie, we got to the hook, trying to figure it out, and I was like, ‘Just give it to the water.’ Debbie asked me what it meant, so I explained that it’s just a beautiful way of saying, ‘Give it to God.’”
Alvvays never intended to take five years to finish their third album, the nervy joyride that is the compulsively lovable Blue Rev. In fact, the band began writing and cutting its first bits soon after releasing 2017’s Antisocialites, that stunning sophomore record that confirmed the Toronto quintet’s status atop a new generation of winning and whip-smart indie rock. Global lockdowns notwithstanding, circumstances both ordinary and entirely unpredictable stunted those sessions. Alvvays toured more than expected, a surefire interruption for a band that doesn’t write on the road. A watchful thief then broke into singer Molly Rankin’s apartment and swiped a recorder full of demos, one day before a basement flood nearly ruined all the band’s gear. They subsequently lost a rhythm section and, due to border closures, couldn’t rehearse for months with their masterful new one, drummer Sheridan Riley and bassist Abbey Blackwell. At least the five-year wait was worthwhile: Blue Rev doesn’t simply reassert what’s always been great about Alvvays but instead reimagines it. They have, in part and sum, never been better. There are 14 songs on Blue Rev, making it not only the longest Alvvays album but also the most harmonically rich and lyrically provocative. There are newly aggressive moments here—the gleeful and snarling guitar solo at the heart of opener “Pharmacist,” or the explosive cacophony near the middle of “Many Mirrors.” And there are some purely beautiful spans, too—the church- organ fantasia of “Fourth Figure,” or the blue-skies bridge of “Belinda Says.” But the power and magic of Blue Rev stems from Alvvays’ ability to bridge ostensible binaries, to fuse elements that seem antithetical in single songs—cynicism and empathy, anger and play, clatter and melody, the soft and the steely. The luminous poser kiss-off of “Velveteen,” the lovelorn confusion of “Tile by Tile,” the panicked but somehow reassuring rush of “After the Earthquake”. The songs of Blue Rev thrive on immediacy and intricacy, so good on first listen that the subsequent spins where you hear all the details are an inevitability. This perfectly dovetailed sound stems from an unorthodox—and, for Alvvays, wholly surprising—recording process, unlike anything they’ve ever done. Alvvays are fans of fastidious demos, making maps of new tunes so complete they might as well have topographical contour lines. But in October 2021, when they arrived at a Los Angeles studio with fellow Canadian Shawn Everett, he urged them to forget the careful planning they’d done and just play the stuff, straight to tape. On the second day, they ripped through Blue Rev front-to-back twice, pausing only 15 seconds between songs and only 30 minutes between full album takes. And then, as Everett has done on recent albums by The War on Drugs and Kacey Musgraves, he spent an obsessive amount of time alongside Alvvays filling in the cracks, roughing up the surfaces, and mixing the results. This hybridized approach allowed the band to harness each song’s absolute core, then grace it with texture and depth. Notice the way, for instance, that “Tom Verlaine” bursts into a jittery jangle; then marvel at the drums and drum machines ricocheting off one another, the harmonies that crisscross, and the stacks of guitar that rise between riff and hiss, subtle but essential layers that reveal themselves in time. Every element of Alvvays leveled up in the long interim between albums: Riley is a classic dynamo of a drummer, with the power of a rock deity and the finesse of a jazz pedigree. Their roommate, in-demand bassist Blackwell, finds the center of a song and entrenches it. Keyboardist Kerri MacLellan joined Rankin and guitarist Alec O’Hanley to write more this time, reinforcing the band’s collective quest to break patterns heard on their first two albums. The results are beyond question: Blue Rev has more twists and surprises than Alvvays’ cumulative past, and the band seems to revel in these taken chances. This record is fun and often funny, from the hilarious reply-guy bash of “Very Online Guy” to the parodic grind of “Pomeranian Spinster.” Alvvays’ self-titled debut, released when much of the band was still in its early 20s, offered speculation about a distant future—marriage, professionalism, interplanetary citizenship. Antisocialites wrestled with the woes of the now, especially the anxieties of inching toward adulthood. Named for the sugary alcoholic beverage Rankin and MacLellan used to drink as teens on rural Cape Breton, Blue Rev looks both back at that country past and forward at an uncertain world, reckoning with what we lose whenever we make a choice about what we want to become. The spinster with her Pomeranians or Belinda with her babies? The kid fleeing Bristol by train or the loyalist stunned to see old friends return? “How do I gauge whether this is stasis or change?” Rankin sings during the first verse of the plangent and infectious “Easy on Your Own?” In that moment, she pulls the ties tight between past, present, and future to ask hard questions about who we’re going to become, and how. Sure, it arrives a few years later than expected, but the answer for Alvvays is actually simple: They’ve changed gradually, growing on Blue Rev into one of their generation’s most complete and riveting rock bands.
“The de-evolution of man.” That’s how Viagra Boys frontman Sebastian Murphy sums up the theme of the band’s third album. “My inspirations were how divided everyone is, people’s ideas of why things are happening, and just general craziness—especially reactions to the pandemic,” he tells Apple Music. “I was also very inspired by a few documentaries about monkeys.” As always, the American-born vocalist of the Swedish punk group puts a witty and humorous spin on the subject matter, but its roots come from the genuine despair he feels viewing his home country from abroad. “I definitely use the States as a reference point because it’s a real melting pot of insanity, in my opinion,” he says. “I mean, those types of people definitely exist here in Sweden, but they’re not storming the Capitol or anything.” Below, he discusses each track. **“Baby Criminal”** “My girlfriend said, ‘I used to be a baby, now I’m just a criminal.’ She said she had that feeling once, and I could really relate to that. There’s been times in my life where I’ve excused everything I do because I was just a kid. And then it just got to this point where I’m dealing drugs and getting into trouble. I’m just a criminal. But I took a more playful twist on it—I made up a character named Jimmy, who’s this guy sitting in his basement making a nuclear reactor. That’s inspired by a true story. I think there was a kid in the States who did that when he was 14 or something.” **“Cave Hole”** “This is a freestanding interlude made by a guy called DJ Hayden. He works with our producer, and he was working side by side with us while we were recording some of these songs. He makes super-cool electronic music, and I just wanted to have a few weird interludes between the songs. I actually wanted to call the album *Cave Hole*. I like it because it reminds you of a K-hole, so I’m glad I got to fit it into the tracklist.” **“Troglodyte”** “If one of these school shooters or mass shooters were to live back in the days when we were apes, and they had these ideas of doing a mass murder or some shit like that, they wouldn’t have a chance because the other apes would just maul the shit out of them. It’s basically a mixture of me saying that we would have been better off as monkeys, and at the same time, it’s a fuck-you to a lot of these angry idiots with extreme right-wing ideas.” **“Punk Rock Loser”** “I’m painting a picture of this guy who’s a real asshole, but at the same time, I’ve been that asshole as well. It’s a song I could’ve written a couple of albums ago because I was that person. Sometimes I definitely feel like I’m a punk-rock loser. It’s like a flashback to my life five years ago. I’m making fun of it, and I’m also kind of romanticizing it in a way, like when you’re walking down the street and you feel like you’re the king of the world. I love that feeling, but it’s not often I get to feel that way.” **“Creepy Crawlers”** “This is very inspired by this dude I saw get interviewed by Channel 5 News. He started ranting about the vaccine causing kids to grow tails and animal hair. I’m like, ‘How do you know if the hair is human or animal?’ But I have a love for extreme absurdities, like stuff you would read in the *Weekly World News*—stories about two-headed babies or the idea of Hillary Clinton using adrenochrome to stay young, or the idea that the global elite are these reptiles plotting against us. So, this is me putting myself in the shoes of a conspiracy theorist.” **“The Cognitive Trade-Off Hypothesis”** “This is based on a documentary about chimpanzees that has the same title. It’s about this trade-off that happened millions of years ago, when we were all still chimpanzees and lived up in the trees. We could count at incredible speeds to assess a threat really easily, like a pack of predators coming in. When the chimpanzees moved from the trees down to the savanna, they suddenly developed a need to communicate with each other about these threats, like, ‘There’s a lion over there—maybe don’t go there.’ So, they developed the ability to speak, and the theory is that we traded our ability to count things really fast—really good short-term memories—for long-term memories. And my idea is, that’s what fucked us. Long-term memories gave us the ability to plan murder and shit like that. Monkeys don’t think about that. They live in the now.” **“Globe Earth”** “That’s another DJ Hayden thing, and the name is obviously from flat-earthers. When they try to diss us globe-earthers, that’s what they call us. Like, ‘You fucking globe-earther.’ I love it.” **“Ain’t No Thief”** “This is about being accused of something that I obviously did, but being a bit delusional about it, which I have been in many periods of my life. Especially when I was a speed freak, I would get accused of something and I would just be like, ‘How the fuck could you think that about me?’ Like this feeling of being betrayed because someone thinks that you’re a certain way, when in fact you are that way. It’s supposed to be a bit funny.” **“Big Boy”** “We were pretty drunk in the studio at, like, 3 am, and we had this idea of sounding like a ’70s rock band recording a blues song. So, we all got in there and we’re playing our instruments and it sounded like shit. But at the same time, it was cool. We ended up adding a hip-hop beat, and I made up lyrics on the spot that were the stupidest thing I could think of—feeling like a big boy. It goes back to that feeling you had when you were a kid, but you’re an adult. Like, ‘I’m a big boy. I’ve got an apartment with a big TV’—as if that makes you a grown person. It doesn’t. You can still be very childish and pay your rent.” **“ADD”** “I wanted to write a song about ADD because it’s been a part of my life since I was a teenager. I’ve just always had this inability to concentrate, and I forget things all the time. I’ll leave the house without my keys or put something down and forget it right away. Or someone sends me an important email and I’m like, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m going to answer this.’ And then I never do. It’s about this inability to do menial tasks—that’s what defines ADD for me. I just can’t motivate myself to do the easiest thing in the world.” **“Human Error”** “This is another DJ Hayden instrumental.” **“Return to Monke”** “I saw a meme that was just a picture of a monkey, and it said, ‘Return to Monke,’ spelled like that. I love meme culture, and especially that meme. So simple and yet so strong. When I wrote the song, I imagined us playing live and I pictured people in the crowd completely losing it and turning into monkeys—flying all over the place, throwing shit, taking off their clothes. It was inspired by Rage Against the Machine as well. I wanted to create a song that people could sing along to, like chanting in a cult. That phrase ‘leave society, be a monkey’ is just taking the piss out of these people who think the world is a big conspiracy against them. Maybe they should just leave.”
Josh Tillman, aka Father John Misty, has released five albums in the last decade—and each one is an expansion of and challenge to his indie-folk instrumental palette. From the stark rock/folk contrasts of *Fear Fun*’s ballads and anthems to the mariachi strains of *I Love You, Honeybear*’s love notes to the wry commentary and grand orchestrations of *Pure Comedy* and *God’s Favorite Customer*, Tillman has a penchant for pairing his articulate inner monologue with arrangements that have only grown more eclectic and elaborate. *Chloë and the Next 20th Century* builds on all of the above—the micro-symphonies, the inventive percussion, the swift shift from dusty country-western nostalgia to timeless dirges plunked out on a dive-bar piano. A swooning sax solo in a somber jazz number (“Buddy’s Rendezvous”) is immediately followed by the trill of a psychedelic harpsichord (“Q4”); “Goodbye Mr. Blue” recalls the acoustic inclinations of his early work, and warm strings wash over the record, from its first single, the romantic “Funny Girl,” through “The Next 20th Century,” the album’s sardonic closer, which resurfaces the ever-simmering existential dread of *Pure Comedy*. “If this century’s here to stay,” he sings on the track, “I don’t know about you, but I’ll take the love songs/And the great distance that they came.”
Father John Misty returns with Chloë and The Next 20th Century, his fifth album and first new material since the release of God’s Favorite Customer in 2018. Chloë and the Next 20th Century was written and recorded August through December 2020 and features arrangements by Drew Erickson. The album sees Tillman and producer/multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Wilson resume their longtime collaboration, as well as Dave Cerminara, returning as engineer and mixer. Basic tracks were recorded at Wilson’s Five Star Studios with strings, brass, and woodwinds recorded at United Recordings in a session featuring Dan Higgins and Wayne Bergeron, among others. Chloë and The Next 20th Century features the singles “Funny Girl,” “Q4,” “Goodbye Mr. Blue,” and “Kiss Me (I Loved You),” and will be available April 8th, 2022 worldwide from Sub Pop and in Europe from Bella Union.