Glide's 20 Best Albums of 2021

A former glam-rock guitarist, Aaron Lee Tasjan is more musically diverse than his 2016 Americana-leaning breakout *Silver Tears* may have suggested. On his fourth album *Tasjan! Tasjan! Tasjan!*, the Nashville-based singer-songwriter and guitarist fully explores his kaleidoscopic vision, fusing Petty-esque heartland rock, Velvet Underground-style art pop, Beatles-styled psychedelia, and modern Americana to craft a truly singular sound. Opening track \"Sunday Women\" is spacey and playful, with Tasjan\'s guitar, at times, mimicking a synthesizer. \"Computer of Love\" pairs incisive lyrics and an acid-laced arrangement to turn a keen eye on social-media-induced narcissism. And on tracks like \"Feminine Walk,\" \"Up All Night,\" and \"Dada Bois,\" Tasjan frankly acknowledges his own gender and sexual fluidity, with vulnerability, heart, and a healthy dose of humor. It\'s appropriate that Tasjan offered this LP as a (cleverly) self-titled project, as it\'s his most fully realized work yet.

“As far as the actual musical experience of the record, I really hope that it is a rollercoaster,” Amigo the Devil, the nom de plume of artist Danny Kiranos, tells Apple Music. “And I hope it\'s somewhat confusing.” Confusing listeners isn’t a typical goal for a musician, but Kiranos’ music is anything but typical. Following two albums in 2018—*Volume 1* and *Everything Is Fine*—*Born Against* takes the dark, imagistic tendencies of Kiranos’ earlier work and fine-tunes it with an eye toward asking big questions alongside minimal, often unorthodox instrumentation. “I hope that the album really allows people to realize, ‘All right, it\'s okay to question things,’ that blind faith might not be the best vessel to be a true believer.” Below, Amigo the Devil walks Apple Music through several of *Born Against*’s key tracks. **“Quiet as a Rat”** “When it began, it was a slow, fingerpicked ballad-style song about faith and doubt and all that. And to be honest, I kept playing it and playing it and it just didn\'t sound like it fit the actual concept that I was trying to portray there, the emotive nature of it. I figured it needed to be more cut and dry, and just, ‘Here\'s the imagery. Here\'s the question.’ And I think it ended up being one of my personal favorites on the record, only because it does have that inquisitive, almost whimsical sonic palette with these really, really dark, fable-based tales, essentially.” **“Murder at the Bingo Hall”** “We sat down at the end of it and we go, ‘All right, let\'s try something weird. Let\'s pull back everything and leave three instruments, whatever is necessary, only what is absolutely necessary.’ And so it ended up being the acoustic that you hear, the organ on top of it, the drums. And to be sure, there is a little bit of piano in there. But for the most part, it is just those three instruments.” **“Better Ways to Fry a Fish”** “So, the song right before it, ‘Drop for Every Hour,’ is the original concept of ‘Better Ways to Fry a Fish.’ Those two are linked, essentially. And when I was writing the original ‘Better Ways,’ which became ‘Drop for Every Hour,’ how I felt about it, it was too fun of a title to use for such a serious-esque song. So I ended up cutting up all of the graphic nature of ‘Drop for Every Hour,’ keeping the emotional aspect of the storyline. Then, ‘Better Ways to Fry a Fish’ ended up being almost this old TV show/Bob Wills-esque homage that is the physical aspect of the ‘Drop for Every Hour’ story. And I wish it was a little longer, because I ended up really liking how it sounded.” **“Another Man’s Grave”** “There are two songs on the record that are very, very explicitly personal, where there\'s no external narrative. They\'re very much a ‘this is how I feel’ kind of thing. ‘Another Man\'s Grave’ is one of them. And the first demo I had of that was the same exact guitar melody, same picking pattern, except the instrumentation behind it was a lot darker. And I wanted to have a little bit of a hopeful sound to it, a little bit of an uplifting nature, which is where the bells and things like that came into play.” **“24K Casket”** “So that Lamborghini line \[‘It seems a lot more comfortable to cry in a Lamborghini’\] is actually something my mom used to tell me when I was growing up. She was always very, very supportive of music, but anytime I wanted to do something that was just not going to advance my life, and I\'d be like, ‘I don\'t care about money, blah, blah, blah,’ she would always throw that line out, in Spanish, of course. Her version was a Ferrari, but in the song we swapped it out because ‘Lamborghini’ made more sense.” **“Letter From Death Row”** “That was definitely one of those sitting-there-staring-off-into-the-nothingness moments, just going down the spiral, wondering about humanity and all that. With a huge rise in serial-killer culture on Netflix and all that, there\'s an intrigue for people who have a lack of empathy or a lack of social acceptance, a lack of humanity. How would a person that\'s about to die on death row respond to still being in love with someone? Whether they loved them back or whether that connection is reciprocated or one-way, it doesn\'t really matter. I started asking myself those questions and then I tried my best to put myself in those shoes, not that I think anyone ever can unless you\'re there.”

A lot changed for Amythyst Kiah between the 2013 release of her debut album *Dig* and the making of *Wary + Strange*. The singer, songwriter, and instrumentalist gained significant notoriety as part of the roots music supergroup Our Native Daughters, with whom she earned a Grammy nomination (Best American Roots Song) for the song “Black Myself,” on which Kiah was the sole songwriter. Kiah reprises that powerful track here, though she does so in a way truer to her own personal musical sensibilities by fusing her love for both old-time music, which she studied at East Tennessee State University, and indie rock. *Wary + Strange* finds a rich middle ground between these seemingly disparate genres, primarily via the strength of Kiah’s songwriting and singing, the latter of which deserves just as much celebration as her masterful guitar playing, as well as studio assists from producer Tony Berg (Phoebe Bridgers, Andrew Bird).

“Straight away,” Dry Cleaning drummer Nick Buxton tells Apple Music. “Immediately. Within the first sentence, literally.” That is precisely how long it took for Buxton and the rest of his London post-punk outfit to realize that Florence Shaw should be their frontwoman, as she joined in with them during a casual Sunday night jam in 2018, reading aloud into the mic instead of singing. Though Buxton, guitarist Tom Dowse, and bassist Lewis Maynard had been playing together in various forms for years, Shaw—a friend and colleague who’s also a visual artist and university lecturer—had no musical background or experience. No matter. “I remember making eye contact with everyone and being like, ‘Whoa,’” Buxton says. “It was a big moment.” After a pair of 2019 EPs comes the foursome’s full-length debut, *New Long Leg*, an hypnotic tangle of shape-shifting guitars, mercurial rhythms, and Shaw’s deadpan (and often devastating) spoken-word delivery. Recorded with longtime PJ Harvey producer John Parish at the historic Rockfield Studios in Wales, it’s a study in chemistry, each song eventually blooming from jams as electric as their very first. Read on as Shaw, Buxton, and Dowse guide us through the album track by track. **“Scratchcard Lanyard”** Nick Buxton: “I was quite attracted to the motorik-pedestrian-ness of the verse riffs. I liked how workmanlike that sounded, almost in a stupid way. It felt almost like the obvious choice to open the album, and then for a while we swayed away from that thinking, because we didn\'t want to do this cliché thing—we were going to be different. And then it becomes very clear to you that maybe it\'s the best thing to do for that very reason.” **“Unsmart Lady”** Florence Shaw: “The chorus is a found piece of text, but it suited what I needed it for, and that\'s what I was grasping at. The rest is really thinking about the years where I did lots and lots of jobs all at the same time—often quite knackering work. It’s about the female experience, and I wanted to use language that\'s usually supposed to be insulting, commenting on the grooming or the intelligence of women. I wanted to use it in a song, and, by doing that, slightly reclaim that kind of language. It’s maybe an attempt at making it prideful rather than something that is supposed to make you feel shame.” **“Strong Feelings”** FS: “It was written as a romantic song, and I always thought of it as something that you\'d hear at a high school dance—the slow one where people have to dance together in a scary way.” **“Leafy”** NB: “All of the songs start as jams that we play all together in the rehearsal room to see what happens. We record it on the phone, and 99 percent of the time you take that away and if it\'s something that you feel is good, you\'ll listen to it and then chop it up into bits, make changes and try loads of other stuff out. Most of the jams we do are like 10 minutes long, but ‘Leafy’ was like this perfect little three-minute segment where we were like, ‘Well, we don\'t need to do anything with that. That\'s it.’” **“Her Hippo”** FS: “I\'m a big believer in not waiting for inspiration and just writing what you\'ve got, even if that means you\'re writing about a sense of nothingness. I think it probably comes from there, that sort of feeling.” **“New Long Leg”** NB: “I\'m really proud of the work on the album that\'s not necessarily the stuff that would jump out of your speakers straight away. ‘New Long Leg’ is a really interesting track because it\'s not a single, yet I think it\'s the strongest song on the album. There\'s something about the quality of what\'s happening there: Four people are all bringing something, in quite an unusual way, all the way around. Often, when you hear music like that, it sounds mental. But when you break it down, there\'s a lot of detail there that I really love getting stuck into.” **“John Wick”** FS: “I’m going to quote Lewis, our bass player: The title ‘John Wick’ refers to the film of the same name, but the song has nothing to do with it.” Tom Dowse: “Giving a song a working title is quite an interesting process, because what you\'re trying to do is very quickly have some kind of onomatopoeia to describe what the song is. ‘Leafy’ just sounded leafy. And ‘John Wick’ sounded like some kind of action cop show. Just that riff—it sounded like crime was happening and it painted a picture straight away. I thought it was difficult to divorce it from that name.” **“More Big Birds”** TD: “One of the things you get good at when you\'re a band and you\'re lucky enough to get enough time to be together is, when someone writes a drum part like that, you sit back. It didn\'t need a complicated guitar part, and sometimes it’s nice to have the opportunity to just hit a chord. I love that—I’ll add some texture and let the drums be. They’re almost melodic.” **“A.L.C”** FS: “It\'s the only track where I wrote all the lyrics in lockdown—all the others were written over a much longer period of time. But that\'s definitely the quickest I\'ve ever written. It\'s daydreaming about being in public and I suppose touches on a weird change of priorities that happened when your world just gets really shrunk down to your little patch. I think there\'s a bit of nostalgia in there, just going a bit loopy and turning into a bit of a monster.” **“Every Day Carry”** FS: “It was one of the last ones we recorded and I was feeling exhausted from trying so fucking hard the whole recording session to get everything I wanted down. I had sheets of paper with different chunks that had already been in the song or were from other songs, and I just pieced it together during the take as a bit of a reward. It can be really fun to do that when you don\'t know what you\'re going to do next, if it\'s going to be crap or if it\'s going to be good. That\'s a fun thing—I felt kind of burnt out, so it was nice to just entertain myself a bit by doing a surprise one.”

Ten years after the clangorous thrills of their debut LP, *New Brigade*, Iceage’s apocalyptic punk has led here: a hunger for comfort, refined goth grandeur. “If the last record is us heading out into a storm and feeling content doing so, this record is situated in the storm—longing for something we didn\'t have,” Iceage frontman Elias Bender Rønnenfelt tells Apple Music. “That could be shelter.” *Seek Shelter*, the Copenhagen band’s fifth studio album, is the group’s most expansive. Recording across 12 days in Lisbon, Portugal, the band worked with an outside producer for the first time—Sonic Boom (Spacemen 3’s Pete Kember). (“He’s a good bullshitter,” Rønnenfelt says.) *Seek Shelter* maintains the tenacity of the band’s hardcore roots, elevated with lush, unexpected experimentation, neo-psych dynamism (“Shelter Song”), a bluesy sinister dance (“Vendetta”), a fiery slow-burn and thunderous crescendo (“The Holding Hand”), and a mid-song interpolation of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” (“High & Hurt”). Below, Rønnenfelt takes us inside *Seek Shelter*, track by track. **“Shelter Song”** “We thought that a gospel choir would be the exact right thing. Cut forward: We\'re on the last day in Lisbon. We\'ve been bunkered up there for 12 days, collectively losing our minds, not necessarily knowing how to feel about everything we put down on tape. And having never worked with a choir before, we didn\'t really know if we were going to be able to speak the same language, but they instantly got it. They started flowing with the song and harmonizing and taking it in all sorts of directions. It became a very lovely collaboration.” **“High & Hurt”** “The melody started getting incorporated before we remembered what that hymn was. The lyrics of this song are, by nature, really quite scumbag-y, in a mythical sort of way. So it felt too tempting not to include ‘Will the Circle Be Unbroken.’ The contrast between that song and the additional lyrics felt kind of wrong, but deliciously so, you know?” **“Love Kills Slowly”** “Before the choir came in, I thought I was singing almost pitch perfect. As soon as my voice was paired with people who can actually sing, it became very apparent how rugged and broken it still is. I\'ve tried to make the lyrics as simple as possible, but that\'s the hardest thing to approach. How do you state something so obvious, but make it feel urgent and relevant and like it belongs to you? I\'m somebody who has always had a tendency to make lyrics overly voluptuous. This was an exercise in stripping things down. And of course it is still a bit corrupted.” **“Vendetta”** “‘Vendetta’ came about from me lending my little sister\'s plastic toy-store keyboard. I slowed the tempo way down and started playing with it. It is interesting to pair the pounding, dancy feel of the track with speaking about the omnipresence of crime in the world and have it be this discordant dance. We are always attracted to dualities, I guess. Traveling the world and growing up in Copenhagen or anywhere, you never have to scratch the surface very hard to discover that crime is an essential glue that binds a lot of society together.” **“Drink Rain”** “Definitely the most bizarre thing we ever been involved with writing. This was one of those moments where your hands just start writing, and then you take a look at a paper and you\'re like, \'What is this thing that I just wrote?\' It\'s this perverse creep that lurks around drinking from puddles of rain in the streets, because he has some delusion that it might bring him closer to some kind of love interest. In the studio, when we first listened back to the first take of it, we were like, \'I\'m not sure if we should be doing this.\' It feels like a transgression.” **“Gold City”** “It’s a ballad that speaks to how moments can be determined by a lot of factors culminating together: the weather, the air, your company, the levels of chemicals in your brain. Everything rumbles together.” **“Dear Saint Cecilia”** “It\'s a bit drunken and raving, and I wouldn\'t say uplifting. It\'s carefree, but also moving within chaos and trying to evoke the Catholic patron saint. It’s just a very carefree song that charges through the chaos of a modern society.” **“The Wider Powder Blue”** “It started out with one of my old heroes, Peter Schneidermann, who played in Denmark\'s first punk band, Sods. He recorded our first EP when we were 16, and he has always been a hero of mine. He asked me to write a song. I started out with what became this and I became too attached to it. I couldn\'t give it to him. That song is an ode to him and how his insane genius is quite morbid, but ultimately a glorious thing.” **“The Holding Hand”** “I can\'t remember the name in English for the instrument, but we had…like a xylophone, tubes of aluminum, or some kind of metal. The song is quite an abstract one, like a landscape scene in itself. It\'s more about describing a feeling of being in the world than describing the actual world. It plays with notions of power, how strength is sometimes weakness and how weakness is sometimes strength. It has this lost beauty in all that.”

“What do you think about a samurai Eddie?” That was the question Iron Maiden bassist, co-lyricist, and all-around mastermind Steve Harris posed to his bandmates when he came up with the Japanese theme for the imagery and title track of the band’s 17th studio album, *Senjutsu*. Roughly translated, the term means “tactics and strategy,” but the idea of Maiden’s shape-shifting mascot, Eddie, in full samurai regalia was immediately appealing. “Let\'s face it, we\'ve plundered a few cultures over the years with Eddie,” Maiden vocalist Bruce Dickinson tells Apple Music. “We had a Mayan Eddie and we\'ve had a sci-fi one. We\'ve had a space monster Eddie, an Egyptian Eddie, a mummy Eddie. We actually did have Eddie with a samurai sword on the *Maiden Japan* EP, but that was years and years ago. The band has always been quite popular in Japan, which is a pretty exotic place with a very rich samurai history. But most of the songs are unrelated.” Below, Dickinson comments on some of the album\'s highlights. **“Senjutsu”** “This starts out with some ominous drumbeats from what is intended to sound like those big Japanese taiko drums. Then Nicko \[McBrain\] comes in with this beat which is not the Keystone Cops, because I think we\'ve got to the point where we feel confident enough that we can be dramatic without being in a hurry about it. And ‘Senjutsu’ has got drama all over it. To me, it builds and builds and builds. There’s a vocal fugue in the middle with echoes going over the top and then another vocal line. It resolves beautifully into this really magisterial vocal line as you get towards the latter half of the tune. Does it have a chorus? No. There\'s millions of different ones, all strung together. For the most part, the vocal is done in a two-part harmony. It\'s one of my favorite tracks, and it\'s going to be a great way to open a set live.” **“Stratego”** “Stratego is a board game. I’ve never played it, but it’s kind of similar to chess. I was doing a little bit of searching and discovered that Stratego was based on a French board game from the 19th century. That game was based on something called military chess. Japanese military chess, in turn, is a game called shogi. The characters are basically flat stones with Japanese calligraphy on them, each denoting a warrior of some description. You’ve got a black side and a white side, but it’s entirely possible for characters to change sides. Not only that, but they can also transform into a different character. It’s a game of strategy and tactics, but also betrayal and intrigue.” **“The Writing on the Wall”** “The song is basically in two parts, and the intro sets the scene. When I first heard it, I was thinking, ‘This is a bit Tarantino here. It’s a little bit desert.’ I could see a Mad Max scenario opening up. I think \[guitarist\] Adrian \[Smith\] already had the title and a great riff, so we worked the body of the song around that. I thought it was a great title for what’s going on in the world now. There\'s lots of things coming up like objects in the rearview mirror—they may be closer than they appear. There’s a lot of choices people need to make about what kind of world they want to live in. I wrote the song without trying to preach, but to say, ‘You can’t bury your head in the sand. This stuff will bite you if you don’t do something about it.’” **“Lost in a Lost World”** “At the beginning, you would believe that you accidentally wandered into The Moody Blues or Pink Floyd doing something in about 1973, with the layered vocals and things like that. We’ve never done anything as explicitly detailed as that before. But it doesn\'t last for that long before some fiend comes out and hits you over the head with a mallet and the track kicks in. And then it takes you on a journey to a fantastical world that has ceased to exist.” **“Days of Future Past** “This track is as close as you\'re going to get to *Piece of Mind* or *Powerslave*-era Maiden. Four minutes, super high-energy riff, big anthemic chorus, big vocals—all that. Incredible riff from Adrian, and basically no guitar solo. The lyric is a reimagining of the graphic novel *Constantine*, particularly the movie version with Keanu Reeves. It’s kind of an interesting setup, because there’s always the assumption that God is the good guy. In this scenario, God seems to be a manipulative narcissist. He’s almost like a psychopath: ‘I\'m going to do all this horrible stuff to you, and then you just have to love me.’ How does that work? That’s what the song asks.” **“Darkest Hour”** “‘Darkest Hour’ refers not to just the movie about Winston Churchill—it’s about him as a person as well. A lot of people criticize Churchill because he made a lot of mistakes and did things people didn’t approve of. He was almost certainly a full-blown alcoholic, but a functioning one. He said horrible things about women. He did all these things that he would aptly be condemned for. But the bit that people forgive all that for—certainly, I do—is that he stood up to the Nazis and said, ‘No, these are barbarians. Even though the odds are stacked against us, we as a nation are going to resist.’ Half of his cabinet and government would’ve sided with the Nazis and done a deal. But he inspired the nation to do the right thing.” **“The Parchment”** “You really have to be careful about this one if you’re one of these people who likes flotation tanks and you’re going to put this one on in the headphones. It’s a processional, really. The end sounds like the emperor coming back, the prodigal son returning home after a long journey. But the whole middle section is absolutely hypnotic. It’s a monster track, but it\'s layer upon layer upon layer of different iterations and repetitions. If you get under the skin of it, it\'s really complex. I think Steve locked himself away for days to come up with this one. We had to learn it in pieces because it was the only way possible.” **“Hell on Earth”** “Steve is quite an unconventional personality. He\'s not an extroverted person—except onstage when he goes raving mad with a bass. But I think he feels a lot of things really deeply about the world he\'s in. The English band Blur had an album called *Modern Life Is Rubbish*, and I think Steve would concur with that sentiment and say, ‘What kind of world are we creating? Maybe I should just go to sleep. And then if I pass into the next life, maybe I\'ll come back and it\'s going to be better—because this place is hell on earth.’ But I don’t think he’s recommending accelerating your passage into the next world, because we’ve got a tour to do. But he’s genuinely concerned about stuff.”

“I like to use the inspiration from the past and combine it with the things that are in the present to create the future,” Jon Batiste says about *WE ARE*, a collection of autobiographical sketches that explore pivotal moments from his life and how they connect with his lineage. “We\'re finally at a point where we\'re starting to untangle the way that my grandparents, and even my parents, experienced America. It feels like the culmination in the coming of age of what many generations have built, fought for, and poured into.” The Louisiana-born pianist, composer, and bandleader/musical director of Stay Human, the house band for *The Late Show With Stephen Colbert*, came up with the blueprint for the album during a six-day period from his dressing room at the Ed Sullivan Theater alongside singer-songwriter Autumn Rowe. But it took him eight months of bringing in the right collaborators to help meld his narrative with classic and modern styles of R&B, jazz, gospel, soul, and hip-hop into a body-shaking celebration. “As heavy as these themes are, the overall message of the album is love, joy, and community,” Batiste says. “That, and also the power of social revolution, in the sense of what we have to do in the culture to make room for everybody to be able to fully be who they are.” Here, Batiste guides us through his life journey. **WE ARE** “‘WE ARE’ is the overture of the album. I wanted to have the marching band from my high school on this record, because it\'s a historically Black high school that has a lot of legendary alumni. I was in that high school band and I graduated from that school. It also features three of four generations of my family. My grandfather and my nephews are all on this track. It was a really special one because it goes from Southern marching band culture to gospel to what I call \'horror disco,\' all within the span of four minutes.” **TELL THE TRUTH** “We recorded it at the legendary Sound City recording studios \[in Los Angeles\]. All of us were in the same room at the same time, and it was done in one take. James Gadson, who plays the drums, played with Bill Withers and on all the classic records with the Jackson 5. He\'s a living legend who still plays like he was in his prime. It’s about the advice that my dad told me when I was 17 years old, when I left New Orleans to move to New York and go to Juilliard to start my career. He told me to stay true to who I am, no matter what you\'re looking for, no matter what you\'re looking to do.” **CRY** “The loss of innocence is something that is not quantifiable. It\'s oftentimes something that we can\'t fully understand until generations later. The decisions we make collectively sometimes seep into our consciousness or our subconscious mind. And we don\'t know why we have this weight on our shoulders. You could be living your life every day, and then one day, you just feel this overwhelming weight—and you don\'t understand where it comes from. I think that, collectively, we all felt that in this past year with the pandemic and all the social unrest.” **I NEED YOU** “It’s the same message as ‘CRY,’ but it’s the opposite. ‘I NEED YOU’ is Black social music mixed in with a pop song. It’s like if you took the music that Little Richard or James Brown, or my father and uncles, would play in the Chitlin’ Circuit in the 1940s. The type of dance like the jitterbug and the Lindy hop you would see in Harlem. You mix that with contemporary pop and hip-hop and that\'s what you would get with this song.\" **WHATCHUTALKINBOUT** “I had a vision of the way you come through this career as you become more and more successful—especially as a Black entertainer in America. It’s like going through a video game, where in every level you beat, you get to the next level and the boss is harder. I imagined myself jumping into the TV and running through different levels of a video game. You get to this point in the song where there\'s this 16-bit interlude, and I called my boy Pomo to help me craft this to have more pandemonium. I don\'t even believe in genres, but I will call it \'punk video game jazz rock.\'” **BOY HOOD** “It’s not just a song about growing up; the sound of it feels like what it felt like. We went to the studio with Jahaan Sweet. I remember him when he was 18 and he moved to New York from Florida. Now he’s producing for Drake, Kehlani, and all these people. He called me up and he was like, ‘Man, you’re the only one I know up here.’ We used to rap and make beats in the dorm room. I knew that he could help me to channel the feeling of what it’s like to live in the South.” **MOVEMENT 11’** “‘BOY HOOD,’ ‘MOVEMENT,’ and ‘ADULTHOOD’ is the spine of the record. Those three songs are a literal representation of my coming of age. When you get to ‘BOY HOOD,’ I\'m telling you literally what it was like. And then ‘MOVEMENT 11\'’ is my growth into an adult when I moved to New York at 17 to go to Juilliard.” **ADULTHOOD** “The transition from ‘MOVEMENT’ is this rich, multilayered classical-esque kind of thing where, all of a sudden, you just mature. The first half of the album has all of these different things going on in terms of just the universal and communal. And then on the second half, it goes into this place of just the internal and personal. That’s like how it is when you’re young and you got fire; you’re figuring out who you are and you’re looking at the world around you. And people give you advice, and you hear all these things about the past. You’re trying to reconcile it all. Then, all of a sudden, you\'re an adult. **MAVIS** “Mavis \[Staples\] is fantastic. I was talking to her during the pandemic, and she was dropping all of these gems on the phone. I wanted to really capture that and share it with people because I felt privileged to be able to be her friend and to collaborate with her over the years, to really learn from her. She said the words that are on the song and I said to her, ‘Can you say that one more time and let me record?’ It was one of those things that you can’t plan, because if you try to plan it, it won’t be the same.” **FREEDOM** “If you think about movies back in the day, you wouldn’t show a Black man with a white woman, or you wouldn\'t show a Black relationship, or you wouldn\'t show a woman in a certain role. That is our sexuality and how people are represented. That\'s what people like James Brown, or when we saw Elvis with the twist in the hips, did. They were unlocking something in people that they were trying to hold in. These people became beacons of freedom, and you look at the way they move and the way that they express who they are onstage. That becomes the way that you want to be in life.” **SHOW ME THE WAY** “This is a beautiful song to play when you’re cruising in the car with someone you care about. Or just cruising by yourself and doing your thing. It’s a homage to the many different culture creators who inspire me. I’ve been doing Zoom sessions with my friend Zadie Smith, who is a writer and sings on this record. We’ll do these virtual jam sessions and have real conversations about the music we want to listen to. So it’s really a homage to all the great Black musicians, and also great creators of all races, that have inspired us.” **SING** “‘Sing’ is the closing-credits song of this thing, because the album is like a movie. It\'s meant to be listened to like that. You\'ve had this journey and this experience. When you don\'t have words to say and you feel overwhelmed with emotion, just sing. You really have experienced the power of that through the course of that movie.” **UNTIL** “This is a moment of celebration, but it’s also undetermined. What are we going to do? Who are we? Until this or that happens, it’s all a question. That’s how I wanted to end the album, because if you go back to the beginning in a loop it’ll keep feeding you. It’s constructed to be cyclical.”

In his native country of Niger, singer-songwriter Mdou Moctar taught himself to play guitar by watching videos of Eddie Van Halen’s iconic shredding. When you hear his unique psych-rock hybrid—a mix of traditional Tuareg melodies with the kinds of buzzing strings and trilling fret runs that people often associate with the recently deceased guitar god—it makes sense. Moctar has honed that stylistic fingerprint over the course of five albums, after first being introduced to Western audiences via Sahel Sounds’ now cult classic compilation *Music From Saharan Cellphones, Vol. 1*, and in the process has been heartily embraced by indie rock fans based on his sound alone (he also plays on Bonnie \"Prince” Billy and Matt Sweeney’s *Superwolves* album). The songs that make up *Afrique Victime* alternate between jubilant, sometimes meandering and jammy (the opening “Chismiten”)—mirroring his band’s explosive live shows—and more tightly wound, raga-like and reflective (the trance-inducing “Ya Habibti”). But within the music, there’s a deeper, often political context: Recorded with his group in studios, apartments, hotel rooms, backstage, and outdoors, the album covers a range of themes: love, religion, women’s rights, inequality, and the exploitation of West Africa by colonial powers. “I felt like giving a voice to all those who suffer on my continent and who are ignored by the Western world,” Moctar tells Apple Music. Here he dissects each of the album’s tracks. **“Chismiten”** “The song talks about jealousy in a relationship, but more importantly about making sure that you’re not swept away too quickly by this emotion, which I think can be very harmful. Every individual, man or woman, has the right to have relationships outside marriage, be it with friends or family.” **“Taliat”** “It’s another song that addresses relationships, the suffering we go through when we’re deeply in love with someone who doesn’t return that love.” **“Ya Habibti”** “The title of this track, which I composed a long time ago, means ‘oh my love’ in Arabic. I reminisce about that evening in August when I met my wife and how I immediately thought she was so beautiful.” **“Tala Tannam”** “This is also a song I wrote for my wife when I was far away from her, on a trip. I tell her that wherever I may be, I’ll be thinking of her.” **“Asdikte Akal”** “It’s about my origins and the sense of nostalgia I feel when I think about the village where I grew up, about my country and all those I miss when I’m far away from them, like my mother and my brothers.” **“Layla”** “Layla is my wife. When she gave birth to our son, I wasn’t allowed to be by her side, because that’s just how it is for men in our country. I was on tour when she called me, very worried, to tell me that our son was about to be born. I felt really helpless, and as a way of offering comfort, I wrote this song for her.” **“Afrique Victime”** “Although my country gained its independence a long time ago, France had promised to help us, but we never received that support. Most of the people in Niger don’t have electricity or drinking water. That’s what I emphasize in this song.” **“Bismilahi Atagah”** “This one talks about the various possible dangers that await us, about everything that could make us turn our back on who we really are, such as the illusion of love and the lure of money.”

The intense process of making a debut album can have enduring effects on a band. Some are less expected than others. “It made my clothes smell for weeks afterwards,” Squid’s drummer/singer Ollie Judge tells Apple Music. During the British summer heatwave of 2020, the UK five-piece—Judge and multi-instrumentalists Louis Borlase, Arthur Leadbetter, Laurie Nankivell, and Anton Pearson—decamped to producer Dan Carey’s London studio for three weeks. There, Carey served them the Swiss melted-cheese dish raclette, hence the stench, and also helped the band expand the punk-funk foundations of their early singles into a capricious, questing set that draws on industrial, jazz, alt-rock, electronic, field recordings, and a Renaissance-era wind instrument called the rackett. The songs regularly reflect on disquieting aspects of modern life—“2010” alone examines greed, gentrification, and the mental-health effects of working in a slaughterhouse—but it’s also an album underpinned by the kindness of others. Before Carey hosted them in a COVID-safe environment at his home studio, the band navigated the restrictions of lockdown with the help of people living near Judge’s parents in Chippenham in south-west England. A next-door neighbor, who happens to be Foals’ guitar tech, lent them equipment, while a local pub owner opened up his barn as a writing and rehearsal space. “It was really nice, so many people helping each other out,“ says Borlase. “There’s maybe elements within the music, on a textural level, of how we wished that feel of human generosity was around a bit more in the long term.” Here, Borlase, Judge, and Pearson guide us through the record, track by track. **“Resolution Square”** Anton Pearson: “It’s a ring of guitar amps facing the ceiling, playing samples. On the ceiling was a microphone on a cord that swung around like a pendulum. So you get that dizzying effect of motion. It’s a bit like a red shift effect, the pitch changing as the microphone moves. We used samples of church bells and sounds from nature. It felt like a really nice thing to start with, kind of waking up.” Ollie Judge: “It sounds like cars whizzing by on the flyover, but it’s all made out of sounds from nature. So it’s playing to that push and pull between rural and urban spaces.” **“G.S.K.”** OJ: “I started writing the lyrics when I was on a Megabus from Bristol to London. I was reading *Concrete Island* by J. G. Ballard, and that is set underneath that same flyover that you go on from Bristol to London \[the Chiswick Flyover\]. I decided to explore the dystopic nature of Britain, I guess. It’s a real tone-setter, quite industrial and a bit unlike the sound world that we’ve explored before. Lots of clanging.” **“Narrator”** OJ: “It’s almost like a medley of everything we’ve done before: It’s got the punk-funk kind of stuff, and then newer industrial kind of sounds, and a foray into electronic sounds.” Louis Borlase: “It’s actually one of the freest ones when it comes to performing it. The big build-up that takes you through to the very end of the song is massively about texture in space, therefore it’s also massively about communication. That takes us back to the early days of playing in the Verdict \[jazz venue\] together, in Brighton, where we used to have very freeform music. It was very much about just establishing a tonality and a harmony and potentially a rhythm, and just kind of riding with it.” **“Boy Racers”** OJ: “It’s a song of two halves. The familiar, almost straightforward pop song, and then it ends in a medieval synth solo.” LB: “We had started working on it quite crudely, ready to start performing it on tour, in March 2020, just before lockdown. In lockdown, we started sending each other files and letting it develop via the internet. Just at the point where everything stops rhythmically and everything gets thrown up into the air—and enter said rackett solo—it’s the perfect depiction of when we were able to start seeing each other again. That whole rhythmic element stopped, and we left the focus to be what it means to have something that’s very free.” **“Paddling”** OJ: “The big, gooey pop centerpiece of the album. There’s a video of us playing it live from quite a few years ago, and it’s changed so much. We added quite a bit of nuance.” AP: “It was a combined effort between the three of us, lyrically. It started off about coming-of-age themes and how that related to readings about *The Wind in the Willows* and Mole—about things feeling scary when they’re new sometimes. That kind of naivety can trip you up. Then also about the whole theme of the book, about greed and consumerism, and learning to enjoy simple things. That book says such a beautiful thing about joy and how to get enjoyment out of life.” **“Documentary Filmmaker”** OJ: “It was quite Steve Reich-inspired, even to the point where when I played my girlfriend the album for the first time she said, ‘Oh, I thought that was Steve Reich. That was really nice.’” LB: “It started in a bedroom jam at Arthur’s family house. We had quite a lazy summer afternoon, no pressure in writing, and that’s preserved its way through to what it is on the album.” AP: “Sometimes we set out with ideas like that and they move into the more full-band setting. We felt was really important to keep this one in that kind of stripped-back nature.” **“2010”** OJ: “I think it’s a real shift towards future Squid music. It’s more like an alternative rock song than a post-punk band. It’s definitely a turning point: Our music has been known to be quite anecdotal and humorous in places, but this is quite mature. It doesn’t have a tongue-in-cheek moment.” LB: “Lyrically, it’s tackling some themes which are quite distressing and expose some of the problematic aspects of society. Trying to make that work, you’re owing a lot to the people involved, people that are affected by these issues, and you don’t want to make something that doesn’t feel truly thought about.” **“The Flyover”** AP: “It moulds really nicely into ‘Peel St.’ after it, which is quite fun—that slow morphing from something quite calm into something quite stressful. Arthur sent some questions out to friends of the band to answer, recorded on their phones. He multi-tracked them so there’s only ever like three people talking at one time. It’s just such a hypnotic and beautiful thing to listen to. Lots of different people talking about their lives and their perspectives.” **“Peel St.”** AP: “That’s the first thing we came up with when we met up in Chippenham, after having been separate for so long. It was this wave of excitement and joy. I don’t know why, when we’re all so happy, something like that comes out. That rhythmic pattern grew from those first few days, because it was really emotional.” LB: “It was joyful, but when we were all in that barn on the first day, I don’t think any of us were quite right. We called it ‘Aggro’ before we named it ‘Peel St.,’ because we would feel pretty unsettled playing it. It was a workout mentally and physically.” **“Global Groove”** OJ: “I got loads of inspiration from a retrospective on Nam June Paik—who’s like the godfather of TV art, or video installations—at the Tate. It’s a lot about growing up with the 24-hour news cycle and how unhealthy it is to be bombarded with mostly bad news—but then sometimes a nice story about an animal \[gets added\] on the end of the news broadcast. Growing up with various atrocities going on around you, and how the 24-hour news cycle must desensitize you to large-scale wars and death.” **“Pamphlets”** LB: “It’s probably the second oldest track on the album. The three of us were staying at Ollie’s parents’ house a couple of summers ago and it was the first time we bought a whiteboard. We now write music using a whiteboard, we draw stuff up, try and keep it visual. It also makes us feel quite efficient. ‘Pamphlets’ became an important part of our set, particularly finishing a set, because it’s quite a long blow-out ending. But when we brought it back to Chippenham last year, it had changed so much, because it had had so much time to have so many audiences responding to it in different ways. It’s very live music.”

As The War on Drugs has grown in size and stature from bedroom recording project to sprawling, festival-headlining rock outfit, Adam Granduciel’s role has remained constant: It’s his band, his vision. But when the pandemic forced recording sessions for their fifth LP *I Don’t Live Here Anymore* to go remote in 2020, Granduciel began encouraging his bandmates to take ownership of their roles within each song—to leave their mark. “Once we got into a groove of sending each other sessions, it was this really cool thing where everyone had a way of working on their own time that really helped,” he tells Apple Music. “I think being friends with the guys now and collaborative for so many years, each time we work together, it\'s like everyone\'s more confident in their role and I’m more confident in my desire for them to step up and bring something real. I was all about giving up control.” That shift, Granduciel adds, opened up “new sonic territory” that he couldn’t have seen by himself. And the sense of peace and perspective that came with it was mirrored—if not made possible—by changes in his personal life, namely the birth of his first child. A decade ago, Granduciel would have likely obsessed and fretted over every detail, making himself unwell in the process, “but I wasn\'t really scared to turn in this record,” he says. “I was excited for it to be out in the world, because it\'s not so much that you don\'t care about your work, but it’s just not the most important thing all the time. I was happy with whatever I could contribute, as long as I felt that I had given it my all.” Here, Granduciel guides us through the entire record, track by track. **“Living Proof”** “It felt like a complete statement, a complete thought. It felt like the solo was kind of composed and was there for a reason, and it all just felt buttoned up perfectly, where it could open a record in kind of a tender way. Just very deliberate and right.” **“Harmonia’s Dream”** “It’s mostly inspired by the band Harmonia and this thing that \[keyboardist\] Robbie \[Bennett\] had done that was blowing my mind in real time. I started playing those two chords, and in the spur of the moment he wrote that whole synth line. We went on for about nine minutes, and I remember, when we were doing it, I was like, ‘Don\'t hit a wrong note.’ Because it was so perfect what he was just feeling out in the moment, at 2 am, at some studio in Brooklyn. I was so lucky that I got to witness him doing that.” **“Change”** “I had started it at the end of 2017’s *Deeper Understanding* and it was like this piano ballad in half-time. Years later, we’re in upstate New York, and I\'m showing it to \[bassist\] Dave \[Hartley\] and \[guitarist\] Anthony \[LaMarca\]. I\'m on piano and they\'re on bass and drums and it\'s not really gelling. At some point Anthony just picks up the drumsticks and he shifts it to the backbeat, this straight-ahead pop-rock four-on-the-floor thing. It immediately had this really cool ‘I\'m on Fire’ vibe.’” **“I Don’t Wanna Wait”** “\[Producer-engineer\] Shawn \[Everett\], for the most part, puts the vocal very front and center on a lot of songs, very pop-like. I think as you get more confident in your songs it\'s okay to have the vocals there. But for this one I was thinking about Radiohead, like it would be cool if we just processed the vocals in this really weird way. I wanted to have fun with them, because we’ve already got so many alien sounds happening with those Prophet keyboards and the moodiness of the drum machine. I wanted to give it something that felt like you were sucked into some weird little world.” **“Victim”** “Ten years ago if we had had this song, we wouldn\'t have a chorus on it—it would just be like a verse over and over. Now I feel like we\'ve progressed to where you have this hypnotic thing but it actually goes somewhere. We’d had it done, but the vocals were a little weird. I told Shawn I wasn’t sure about them, because this song had such a vibe. When he asked me to describe it in one word, I was like, ‘back alley,’ like steam coming out of a fucking manhole cover or something. And then he puts his headphones on and I see him work in some gear for like 30 minutes—and then he turns the speakers on. I was like, ‘Oh, dude. That\'s it.’” **“I Don’t Live Here Anymore”** “I\'ll be the first to say it has that \'80s thing going, but we kind of pushed it in that way. At one point Shawn and I ran everything on the song—drums, the girls, bass, everything—through a JC-120 Roland amplifier, which is like the sound of the \'80s, essentially. I saw it just sitting there at Sound City \[Studios in Los Angeles\]. We spent like a day doing that, and it just gave it this sound that was a familiar heartbeat or something. It sounds huge but it also felt real—in my mind it was basically just a bedroom recording, because everything was done in my tiny little room, directly into my computer.” **“Old Skin”** “I demoed it in one afternoon, in like 30 minutes. Then I showed it to the band, and from the minute we started playing, it was just so fucking boring. But I knew that there was something in the song I really liked, and we kept building it up and building it up, and then one day, I asked Shawn to mute everything except the two things I liked most: the organ and the single note I was playing on the Juno. I brought the drums in at the right moment and it was like, \'Oh, that\'s the fucking song.’ Lyrically, I felt like it was about the concept of pushing back against everything that tries to hold you down—and having a song about that and then having it be as dynamic as it is, with these drums coming out of nowhere, it just feels like a really special moment. It’s my favorite song on the record, I think.” **“Wasted”** “This song was actually a really early one that I kind of abandoned—I sent it to \[drummer\] Pat \[Berkery\] because I knew there was a song there but the drums were just very stale. I didn\'t know any of this, but the day that he was working out of my studio in Philly was the day that his personal life had kind of all come to a head: He was getting divorced from his wife of 15 years. He did the song and he sent it back to me and it was fucking ferocious. It just gave new life to it. Springsteen always talks about Max Weinberg on ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ and how it’s Max\'s greatest recorded performance. I said the same thing when I heard this: ‘It’s Pat’s greatest recorded performance.’” **“Rings Around My Father’s Eyes”** “I\'d been strumming those open chords for a couple years—I had the melody and I had that opening line. I wanted to express something, but I wasn\'t 100% sure how I was going to go about doing it—part of the journey was to not be embarrassed by a line or not think that something is too obvious and too sentimental. As time went on with this record, I became a dad, and I started seeing it from the other side. It’s not so much a reflection on my relationship with my own dad, but starting to think about being a dad, being a protector.” **“Occasional Rain”** “As a songwriter I just love it because it\'s really concise. Lyrically, I was able to wrap up some of the scenes that I wanted to try and talk about, knowing where it was going to go on the record. I just think it\'s one of those songs that\'s a perfect closer. It\'s the last song in our fifth album. It\'s like, if this was the last album we ever made and that was the last song, I\'d be like, ‘That\'s a good way to go out.’”

After Yola signed with Dan Auerbach’s Easy Eye recordings and released *Walk Through Fire*, her genre-melding full-length debut that earned her four Grammy nominations (including a 2020 nod for Best New Artist), she found herself facing a stubborn foe: writer’s block. Her increasingly demanding career yielded accolades and an ever-growing fanbase that included artists like The Highwomen and director Baz Luhrmann, but she found herself struggling to write at the height of it. “I had ideas right the way through, from 2013, when I was learning to play guitar, through to when I first started doing shows in late 2015,” she tells Apple Music. “But I hadn\'t had a single idea from 2019 into the pandemic—just nothing. That level of being busy just completely poached my ability to write. I started deconstructing my process of how my brain likes to function when I\'m creating.” If she started humming a tune while straightening up the house, she wouldn\'t immediately try to interrogate it. She sought out stillness and space, a contrast to what she calls the “excessively conscious” state she often found herself in. “When that part of my brain was off, ideas would appear almost instantly,” she says. “I clearly had inspiration, but there were situations that stopped the ideas coming to the fore, stopped me being able to access them.” Eventually, Yola wrote her way out of writer’s block and into *Stand for Myself*, an album that meets the high standard she set with *Walk Through Fire* while drawing in new sounds (namely disco, which drives the groove of “Dancing Away in Tears”) and doubling down on vintage vibes (notably the ’70s soul of “Starlight”) and declarations of self-empowerment. New collaborators came along for the soulful journey, too: Joy Oladokun, Ruby Amanfu, and Natalie Hemby co-wrote songs for the album (as did Auerbach, who produced the album, along with *Walk Through Fire*), and Brandi Carlile lends her voice to “Be My Friend,” an all-too-timely celebration of allyship. Below, Yola talks through a few of the songs on the album and how they helped get her back on track. **“Barely Alive”** “The first song on the record, ‘Barely Alive,’ is co-written by Joy Oladokun. We were talking about what it\'s like to be Africans and isolated, and playing guitar, and singing songs, and being into a very broad spectrum of music—and growing up having to explain our existence, and ourselves. You are so often called on to minimize yourself. It can be that your life experience is uncomfortable to somebody and it\'s triggering their white fragility, so they\'re encouraging you to speak less on it, or better still, not at all, and to suffer in silence. If you can\'t speak on your life, then you can\'t address what\'s right and wrong with it. That\'s where the album jumps off from: It\'s a very concise narrative on my journey, from that place of being a doormat to having some agency over my own life.” **“Break the Bough”** “‘Break the Bough’ dates back to 2013, and was started on the evening of my mother\'s funeral. It doesn\'t sound like a song that was written on the horns of a funeral; it\'s a real party song. In that moment I realized that none of us are getting out of this thing called life alive, and so whatever we think we\'re doing with our lives, we better do a better job of it—just manifest the things that you want to manifest, and be the you that you most want to be. I\'d been in a writing block up until that point, and that sparked me to decide to learn to play guitar and inexorably start writing songs again—and that led me here.” **“Be My Friend”** “‘Be My Friend’ was one of the songs to arrive in my mind almost complete. That was a real moment, when I was able to come up with something that felt really real, really true, really about the time I was in, but also about my journey. It was as much about allyship \[as\] it was the idea of what I needed to get to this point in the first place. I thought it was important to call Brandi to sing with me: She\'d had the same conversation with me pertaining to queerness, and the pursuit of not being a token, and to manifest your most true self in your art so you don\'t feel like you\'re apologizing for yourself or hiding yourself in your art.” **“Stand for Myself”** “The song ‘Stand for Myself’ is the ultimate conclusion of a concept. It starts with referencing the \'Barely Alive\' version of myself: \'I understand why you\'re essentially burying your head in the sand: You want to feel nothing.\' But also, it can speak on people that are experiencing white fragility. It\'s like, I get it, it makes you feel uncomfortable. You don\'t want to have to feel empathy for people that aren\'t like you, because it feels like work. But then it\'s saying, \'I was like that, I was an absolute parrot, and I didn\'t have any sets of perspective of what I might stand to gain from not being such an anxious twonk.\' That\'s really where we get to: But I did do it, because I was left without choice. Now I feel like I\'m actually alive, and it\'s really great. You can have this, too, if you\'re actually willing to do the work—go and take the implicit test, find out what your biases are, work on them, feel things for other people that aren\'t clones of you—and that\'s really everything. When someone goes, \'Hey, this album should be called *Don\'t Mess With Yola!*,\' I\'m like, you\'ve missed the point of this record. It\'s not a *don\'t mess with*. It\'s not *I\'m a strong Black woman*. It\'s the deserving of softness and a measure of kindness and of support and friendship and love. And that\'s really all encapsulated in \'Stand for Myself.\'”