God Is In The TV's Albums of 2022

Like most people on this embattled earth, Maggie Rogers spent the better part of 2020 in isolation—in her case, in Maine, where *Surrender* took shape. “I started this record there,” she tells Apple Music. “And I was really drawn to big drums and distorted guitar, because I missed music that made me feel something physically. I missed the physicality of being at a festival”: a big feeling, she says—a little overwhelming, a little cold, a little drunk. The noise was a symbol of chaos, but also of liberation. “Like, in all the craziness in the world, being able to play with something like that,” she says, “it was as if it could make my body let go of the tension I was feeling.” So think of the album’s title as a possibility, or even a goal: that even at her most commanding—the electro-pop of “Shatter,” the country swagger of “Begging for Rain” and barroom folk of “I’ve Got a Friend”—Rogers can explore what it means to relinquish control without sacrificing the polish and muscle that makes her music pop. “When we’re cheek to cheek, I feel it in my teeth,” she sings on “Want Want”: an arthouse on paper, a blockbuster in sound. When Rogers started the album, she was so burned out from touring she could barely talk. “I hadn’t been to a grocery store in four years,” she says. “I was ready to bite. And this record is the bite. But when I listen back, there’s so much joy. I think that’s the thing that surprised me more than anything—that *that* was the place I escaped to, and it was the thing that became the way I survived it, or the way I worked through it. This idea of joy as a form of rebellion, as something that can be radical and contagious and connective and angry.” “Are you ready to start?” she sings on “Anywhere With You.” And then she repeats herself, a little louder each time.

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“I don’t know if anyone else has the kind of ride-or-die support that I have,” Jamie Treays tells Apple Music. “The support can be a double-edged sword, but it’s just wonderful. It’s pretty much set in stone by this stage that it takes me a long time to make an album, so luckily everyone gives me a break on that.” Treays is perhaps being a bit tough on himself. The 13 songs on *The Theory of Whatever*—the South Londoner’s fifth studio album—were carefully trimmed down from “probably 175, maybe more” across the five or so years since the release of *Trick* (which came relatively hot on the heels of 2014’s *Carry On the Grudge*). But thanks to his aversion to social media, some unflinching testimonies on battles with anxiety, and a devout following that becomes even more fervent during his extended absences, we’re conditioned to treat new music from Jamie T as an event—a moment to savor in case there’s another lengthy wait. Fortunately, there’s a lot to savor here. Treays has channeled what he calls “troubled” periods through the pandemic (“like everyone had, I think”) with a “look after your neighbor” spirit to create something both joyfully fan-delighting and relevant. “I want hope and positivity to be the takeaways here,” he says. \"That ride-or-die spirit I think gets even stronger when you get older. It’s still something I’m obsessed with. It’s still something I adore. It’s really my friends that have inspired me to write the songs. I know that sounds a bit silly, but it’s true.” Certain friends also helped Traeys focus the project here. Matt Maltese, Willie J Healey, Tom Dinsdale (formerly of Audio Bullys), and Foals’ Yannis Philippakis all mucked in, as did, most significantly, Hugo White—guitarist from fellow 2000s indie icons The Maccabees. “He galvanized the whole thing,” Treays says. “He went off to listen to 100+ songs I’d been working on, and came back looking exhausted. We then decided on the songs to work on, and Hugo went into the studio by himself and took it off my hands for a while. He went into the studio and put extra life into the songs.” Which is for the best, since Treays is an artist who needs someone to come in and grab an album by the scruff of the neck. “It’s always been the case,” he says. “I’m a producer myself, but I’m not good at beefing things up and making them really jam. I was fine making things bigger, but I didn’t want to lose what I had here. He was very good at toeing the line. He told me a story the other day that I don’t actually remember happening. I walked into the studio, did a 10-minute rant, told him what I wanted him to do, and left to not return for a day and a half. I came back in, listened to what he’d worked on, and said, ‘That’s amazing.’ He called me a bleeding lunatic and we were absolutely fine. That was the working relationship.” This union (and the “very healthy, slightly older, slightly less ego-driven community around me”) has sparked some of the best music of Traeys’ career. “90s Cars”—one of the three Tom Dinsdale collaborations—exquisitely retools This Mortal Coil’s version of “Kangaroo” by Big Star for one of 2022’s more impactful (or “weird and wonky” as Treays describes) album openers; indie mosh pits will explode to the supercharged “British Hell,” “A Million & One New Ways to Die,” and “Between the Rocks,” while there’s gold to be found in the record’s quieter moments (“St. George Wharf Tower,” “Thank You,” “Talk Is Cheap,” “50,000 Unmarked Bullets”). “It\'s taken me a long time to learn how to do that kind of stuff,” Treays says of his more vulnerable music. “And I’m not sure if I’ll ever do it any better than I’ve done on this album.” So, will there be another six years before we can enjoy more Jamie T? \"People understand that I will not always be around,” he says. “People will always ask, ‘Where has he gone?’ but I’ve gone nowhere. I’m just hanging out, and rightly so. But you have to wait. To be constantly putting stuff out and in your face would not work with my nerves and my ability to feel real. People have to remember it’s my job. I have no want to be famous. But I do enjoy the music, I enjoy the playing. But being disconnected from everything is a godsend. Luckily, it seems being 36 is old now.”

“I don’t know if anyone else has the kind of ride-or-die support that I have,” Jamie Treays tells Apple Music. “The support can be a double-edged sword, but it’s just wonderful. It’s pretty much set in stone by this stage that it takes me a long time to make an album, so luckily everyone gives me a break on that.” Treays is perhaps being a bit tough on himself. The 13 songs on The Theory of Whatever—the South Londoner’s fifth studio album—were carefully trimmed down from “probably 175, maybe more” across the five or so years since the release of Trick (which came relatively hot on the heels of 2014’s Carry On the Grudge). But thanks to his aversion to social media, some unflinching testimonies on battles with anxiety, and a devout following that becomes even more fervent during his extended absences, we’re conditioned to treat new music from Jamie T as an event—a moment to savor in case there’s another lengthy wait. Fortunately, there’s a lot to savor here. Treays has channeled what he calls “troubled” periods through the pandemic (“like everyone had, I think”) with a “look after your neighbor” spirit to create something both joyfully fan-delighting and relevant. “I want hope and positivity to be the takeaways here,” he says. "That ride-or-die spirit I think gets even stronger when you get older. It’s still something I’m obsessed with. It’s still something I adore. It’s really my friends that have inspired me to write the songs. I know that sounds a bit silly, but it’s true.” Certain friends also helped Traeys focus the project here. Matt Maltese, Willie J Healey, Tom Dinsdale (formerly of Audio Bullys), and Foals’ Yannis Philippakis all mucked in, as did, most significantly, Hugo White—guitarist from fellow 2000s indie icons The Maccabees. “He galvanized the whole thing,” Treays says. “He went off to listen to 100+ songs I’d been working on, and came back looking exhausted. We then decided on the songs to work on, and Hugo went into the studio by himself and took it off my hands for a while. He went into the studio and put extra life into the songs.” Which is for the best, since Treays is an artist who needs someone to come in and grab an album by the scruff of the neck. “It’s always been the case,” he says. “I’m a producer myself, but I’m not good at beefing things up and making them really jam. I was fine making things bigger, but I didn’t want to lose what I had here. He was very good at toeing the line. He told me a story the other day that I don’t actually remember happening. I walked into the studio, did a 10-minute rant, told him what I wanted him to do, and left to not return for a day and a half. I came back in, listened to what he’d worked on, and said, ‘That’s amazing.’ He called me a bleeding lunatic and we were absolutely fine. That was the working relationship.” This union (and the “very healthy, slightly older, slightly less ego-driven community around me”) has sparked some of the best music of Traeys’ career. “90s Cars”—one of the three Tom Dinsdale collaborations—exquisitely retools This Mortal Coil’s version of “Kangaroo” by Big Star for one of 2022’s more impactful (or “weird and wonky” as Treays describes) album openers; indie mosh pits will explode to the supercharged “British Hell,” “A Million & One New Ways to Die,” and “Between the Rocks,” while there’s gold to be found in the record’s quieter moments (“St. George Wharf Tower,” “Thank You,” “Talk Is Cheap,” “50,000 Unmarked Bullets”). “It's taken me a long time to learn how to do that kind of stuff,” Treays says of his more vulnerable music. “And I’m not sure if I’ll ever do it any better than I’ve done on this album.” So, will there be another six years before we can enjoy more Jamie T? "People understand that I will not always be around,” he says. “People will always ask, ‘Where has he gone?’ but I’ve gone nowhere. I’m just hanging out, and rightly so. But you have to wait. To be constantly putting stuff out and in your face would not work with my nerves and my ability to feel real. People have to remember it’s my job. I have no want to be famous. But I do enjoy the music, I enjoy the playing. But being disconnected from everything is a godsend. Luckily, it seems being 36 is old now.”

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.

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.”

This album has been years in the making. It was originally recorded before lockdown at Tom Rees' studio in Cardiff, I suppose between 2019-2020, although it's hard to remember at this point, it seems so long ago. It was recorded for my old band News From Nowhere, so the album is named in tribute to that defunct project and the continuing spirit that it represented. I've made it a solo album, not to take all the credit for myself, but because this is the only way it can be released now and I feel that it's a strong piece of work. The other members contributed massively to the record and it would be very different without their amazing playing. We were a Swansea band, and this is very much a Swansea album. It's full of references to the town, and tries to capture the nature of the place - melancholic, mad, bacchanalian, rainy, surreal. It's a bittersweet love letter. I've carried these songs around for years. Hope you enjoy! "So good - straight into my top 10 songs of the year...when did Tom Verlaine join Belle And Sebastian? Cause that's what that sounds like, I utterly loved that" - Adam Walton BBC Radio Wales "Heart-stoppingly beautiful and original tracks...expressive and evocative voice, soaring melodies and powerful poetic lyrics, all of which promise great things from his debut album" - R.E.P.E.A.T. fanzine "Serenade is a song of love and longing, with Emlyn showing vulnerable emotional flesh. It's not navel gazing misery, though; "I'd like to serenade you, because you are the bomb" is sweetly humorous.' - God Is In The TV zine

Spoon’s tenth album, Lucifer on the Sofa, is the band’s purest rock ’n roll record to date. Texas-made, it is the first set of songs that the quintet has put to tape in its hometown of Austin in more than a decade. Written and recorded over the last two years –both in and out of lockdown –these songs mark a shift toward something louder, wilder, and more full-color.

The long-awaited third solo album from multi-instrumentalist Damian O’Neill (The Undertones, That Petrol Emotion, The Everlasting Yeah) is an exquisitely inventive collection of largely instrumental tracks, mixed by veteran producer Paul Tipler (Stereolab, Placebo, Julian Cope, House Of Love). The title “an crann” is Irish for “The Tree”, a symbol of growth and inspiration. As Damian himself explains…"If someone listened to this record without knowing anything about me, they’d probably never guess that I started life in a punk band. I unashamedly wanted to present instrumental pieces that are emotional, evocative and personal and offer to the listener textures and layers of music that can be melodic, childlike and even melancholic at times. There’s obviously Irish folk traditional influences as well as French, Japanese, American and British. I’m playing virtually all the instruments myself, with added percussion on a couple of songs. It was recorded mainly at home over the last couple of years in the loft of our house on a laptop with an array of instruments such as electric and acoustic guitars, mandolin, bass, organ, vibraphone, toy marimba and glockenspiel, melodica, mouth organ, squeezebox, kalimba, bells and various percussion and human voices.”

For much of 2020 and 2021, Sea Girls should have been enjoying the trappings of life on the road as an ascendant indie-rock band. They were scheduled to be touring a debut album, *Open Up Your Head*, that made the UK Top 5 in August 2020. But with the London four-piece grounded by the pandemic, singer/guitarist Henry Camamile instead retreated to his childhood home in Lincolnshire and began searching for who he was outside of music. “The songs \[I was writing\] were a lot about identity, what I think about life, who am I?” he tells Apple Music. “When I got into a band, I wanted to get away from home, to create my identity. But then, you’re sort of forced to remember what it’s like to be a child.” The songs that emerged explore love, belonging, imperfection, and past behaviors with robust self-awareness. While Camamile reached unshrinkingly into himself, the band added a complementary directness to their sound. “We didn’t want to embellish any of the songs too much,” he says. “The first album, we had a lot of fun in the studio. ‘Let’s put that on it. Let’s put this.’ And this was about being brutal. A lot of these songs, thematically, lyrically, cut a little bit harder. I’m not really singing about, I don’t know, rainbows and dragons. There was a total honesty to writing these songs and a lot of them came quite easily. ” Here, he talks through the album, track by track. **“Hometown”** “Having ‘Hometown’ as the first song is very fitting because that really is the DNA of the album. I was thinking that being homesick means you belong somewhere. I don’t really get homesick, but it’s just that idea. It means there is something and somewhere that is you—that true identity. I thought about being in the Midlands and the villages and towns around here, and it brought out a whole new album from that. I was thinking about who I am a little bit more deeply.” **“Sick”** “It’s just me saying it as it is. I can be a bit harsh on myself, but I also know I’m human. The whole point of doing music is just wanting to be human and wanting to be honest about being human. I don’t think I’m a bad person, but I’ve been careless, or I haven’t respected myself that much sometimes. Songs like ‘Sick’ are very self-critical. I’m asking for forgiveness from people around me and my parents. I was just young—that’s what I’m saying in that song. It felt good to say it. It was quite emotional recording it in the studio.” **“Lonely”** “The first verse was written with just me singing with the guitar. I wrote the second verse walking up the street in Brixton. Again, I knew what I wanted to say, and I knew what I felt. I was thinking back to sitting outside the local shop in my car in the summertime, playing The Prodigy and thinking about what could have been with someone from school.” **“Someone’s Daughter Someone’s Son”** “It’s about how after a relationship’s over, we start again. We just become someone’s daughter or someone’s son. It made me think about that basic boy that I had been in the past and what I am now that I’m not with my ex anymore. This song led through to songs like ‘Hometown.’ It embodies why I wanted to write this album—just to be honest and not be scared to write. As long as I’ve got a good heart, I can write a song that means something to me and write about things that really matter.” **“Sleeping With You”** “I was seeing this girl and I didn’t want to write a song to be mean—and it’s not mean—but I was still in love with someone else and it’s about the realities of that. It’s terrible, like, ‘Amazing as you are, I just can’t do this.’ Again, it wasn’t a hard song to write because I just said how I felt. I didn’t worry about too many lyrical acrobatics. You can pretend to be someone else in music, but you can also be incredibly truthful. And that’s always been what I’ve clung to. I think it’s way easier to be truthful.” **“Paracetamol Blues”** “Almost all the love songs in this album are about the breakdown of one relationship, which I thought I was homesick for. It’s about belonging somewhere. It’s belonging in a relationship, belonging in a place, and belonging to a culture or an identity. ‘Paracetamol Blues’ really ties into that. I’m imagining I’m going out with someone who was like me a few years ago, I’m in love with someone who behaves like me. I overheard someone quite close to me saying, ‘Whatever, he’s a wreckhead.’ Or ‘He’s a wasteman.’ It was a joke, but I was like, ‘I’m not a wasteman. I know I’m more than that.’ One of my ex-girlfriends friends from years ago said, ‘Let’s go for a drink,’ and I brought that scenario into it too. I just thought it was exciting.” **“Again Again”** “This song is about thinking that I just have to just get drunk and be wild or whatever. With the sound, we tried to push it, to elevate it, and have the whole thing bigger. It’s definitely inspired by \[Smashing Pumpkins’\] ‘Tonight, Tonight,’ with those strings on it. It’s got a really tight beat under it, which Jacknife \[Lee, coproducer\] elevated, because it was sounding a bit grand, and it doesn’t need to be grand. Jacknife kept that beat there so it feels like it’s got indie-band roots.” **“Lucky”** “My mum found some letters from my great-grandfather from when he was in the Second World War. There’s one from when he was in the Suez Canal and there’s one written just before he went over on D-Day, and it just hit me so much. He was talking about how he wanted to be at home. I just remember a line and it ended, ‘The guns sound terrible now. Kiss Cynthia and Ben for me.’ It hit me quite a lot and it still hits me now. I just thought, ‘Fuck, that’s not my life at all.’ I just thought I should write a song about how lucky I am and be grateful because I’m not grateful a lot in my music. I feel grateful for being in this band and I’m not going to be sad anymore. It’s optimistic.” **“Higher”** “Jacknife is famous for being brutal and making a song cut through. The first couple of songs we sent to him, he called me up and he said, ‘You just sent me a song called “Higher.” What’s it about?’ And I said, ‘If I find out my girlfriend’s cheated on me, I’ll just get high.’ And he was like, ‘Well, I couldn’t tell that from that chorus, so maybe you should say that. When \[your lyrics\] work is when you just say what you think. Be more direct.’ That informed the rest of the album. I think there was a lot of Cars influence on that song musically, which Jacknife brought to the table and made the whole thing bounce. And hopefully, that chorus makes a bit more sense now!” **“Cute Guys”** “I was definitely thinking, ‘Let’s put something in this album that people aren’t necessarily going to think is something Sea Girls would have on their album.’ Oddly, the guitar riff that goes throughout the verses and chorus is something I’d been playing around with for years. I never thought to write a melody over it. It’s pretty raw the way we recorded that song and the vocal. I was seeing a girl in LA and it’s about the breakdown of that relationship. In my head, it was an identity I was homesick for. There’s an American thread throughout the album because I have my head in that world with that girl, and it was fitting that Jacknife was working in Topanga Canyon, not far away.” **“Friends”** “It’s a song that Oli \[Khan, drummer\] wrote, pretty much. It’s about how if there’s anything that is your identity, it’s your friends, it’s the people you hang out with. I think, in a way, we’ve all been homesick for that \[during the pandemic\]—your crowd that can’t get together anymore. It’s feeling that one day we’re going to get together and make the most of it when we do. That was definitely a result of lockdown and everyone being apart and thinking about what’s important.” **“Watch Your Step”** “‘Watch Your Step’ was very popular with the other guys in the band and with a lot of people. ‘Again Again,’ I think, did a better job of what I’m trying to put across here. It works better with what I wanted to do lyrically for the main album. But there’s just something great in it and we thought it’s a good part of the story for a deluxe edition because it informed ‘Again Again.’” **“I Got You”** “I wanted to just write a love song. There’s no edge. There’s no story to it really, other than how I feel about when I really liked someone. It’s about the same girl that I wrote most of the album about. We’re on good terms actually, it’s quite nice. I know she appreciates the fact she’s got a lot written about her. But ‘I Got You’ is just about being in love. It was one of the phrases that we used between each other.”

Tossing down straight acoustic shots with electric guitar back, "Hello, Hi" rides through the valley of yer ol' Canyon legends, finding an isolated place to unspool Ty's copious reserves of nervous energy beneath an open sky. Swarms of harmony vocals caper among the clouds, but there's a rider on the horizon, crossbow trained upon his very heart: the engine driving all the relationships of life, whether down Broadway or over the cliffs at night! Whatever doesn't get killed is getting stronger all the time. A lean, mean deal, baked in saltwater and sunlight, compassion pouring out it's beautiful blue eyes.

Tomberlin, the moniker of indie folk artist Sarah Beth Tomberlin, might’ve titled her second full-length LP *i don’t know who needs to hear this…*, but she knows who did: “I did,” she tells Apple Music. “On this record, there’s a lot of searching for space for myself,” she says. “A lot of my songs are me holding up a point-and-shoot camera that has the focus ability, zooming in and zooming out on these small moments.” Before this album, the Baptist pastor’s daughter wrote songs about faith and self-doubt from the distance of her own loneliness; her first full-length, 2018’s *At Weddings*, was acclaimed for its spareness, the way she could write a sacred moment in a fingerpicked guitar riff. Now she’s developed a new language for relationships, and blows it up to enormous size with orchestral instrumentation: horns and Una Corda (“easy”), pedal steel (“born again runner”) and tenor saxophone (“collect caller”). The record is her exploring “just how to be in the world,” she says. “I just turned 27 and *At Weddings* was when I was 21. This is a different chapter of life, with new circumstances and things to investigate.” Below, Tomberlin walks through her album, track by track. **“easy”** “I wrote this song on acoustic guitar, and it was very simplistic. I wanted it to have a little bit more of a being-at-sea feeling, of rocking out in the ocean, rudderless. I remember telling Philip \[Weinrobe\], who co-produced with me, that I didn\'t want it to be a guitar song. We had already been using the Una Corda, this certain kind of piano, on the record. I loved how it sounded—eerie, but really beautiful as well. We combined those two elements and we kind of built it out from there. We turned all the lights off and had candles lit. It was very witchy. We were all in a circle, in this room, with the mics in front of us—really listening, not being too loud so the instruments didn\'t bleed into each other.” **“born again runner”** “The title is attributed to an Emmylou Harris song, \'Born to Run,\' which my dad always says reminds him of me. It\'s a song for him. It\'s a song about loving my dad and wanting to have a relationship with him, even though we\'re very different people.” **“tap”** “I moved to New York in September 2020. I assimilated by going on really long walks through the city, across the Williamsburg Bridge and into Brooklyn, on the West Side Highway, by the water. I was missing being in the country and the woods. I was trying to find ways to connect myself. The first line I had for the song was ‘I\'m not a tree/I\'m in a forest of buildings.\' It\'s about things that disconnect us. I was thinking of how narrative singers can struggle with wanting to put ourselves in a good light. No one is a perfect person. We also pulled a bunch of twigs and grass and flowers from the garden and were hitting the drums with them, so it has this extra brushy, freaky, witchy thing going on.” **“memory”** “I actually did a session with Danny Harle—he co-produced Caroline Polachek\'s record \[*Pang*\]. He wanted to meet when I lived in LA, so we rented a studio space and he was like, \'It\'s no pressure. Let\'s just hang out and see if something happens.\' We spent maybe three hours working on music, and it was just us meeting really for the first time. I really liked the lyrics that I came up with, and that\'s how I wrote that song, which was wild to me. I was really stressed out about writing something with someone in the room. It\'s like writing a paper when the deadline is the next day and somehow you write something good.” **“unsaid”** “It was February \[2020\], before everything went to shit. I wrote it about LA and trying to figure out how to be planted there, because it\'s not really a city. In my opinion, it\'s just this sprawl. It was really hard for me to know how to feel grounded there. It\'s beautiful and fake. Making that song was like trying to comfort myself.” **“sunstruck”** “This one is definitely about examining a relationship with a person that was sputtering on again, off again. A lot of time had passed, we were still friends, and I got some recent news about some changes in their life, and a desire to work on themselves. It was a magic thing to hear, and that song fell out afterwards. I felt released from that relationship. And often, growth comes from being uncomfortable, some drought and some storms. It is a bit mournful of examination, but it ends in a hopeful way.“ **“collect caller”** “Stuart \[Bogie\], who is in fact a legend of New York, plays saxophone on this song, and wow. He came in for a couple songs. I kept saying, \'I’ve collected all the deep-feeling musicians for this record,\' because some people can play an instrument well, but some people, they\'re so mathematical about playing. We somehow collected the people that just deeply feel the music, and Stuart is one of those people. I love him.” **“stoned”** “‘Stoned’ I wrote when I was feeling a bit exasperated—anger but trying to have compassion. I think the anger that I was feeling was just and right, but I didn’t want to become hardened by it. I wasn\'t a big partier growing up; no one\'s asking the pastor\'s kid to go rage. But I was a young adult at this time, and living in Louisville, and someone invited me to a party. It was like, oh, this is in my John Hughes movie, everyone is jumping in the pool, taking their clothes off. I was walking away from it barefoot, drenched wet, holding my shoes, the sun was coming up, it was probably 5 am. When I started writing this song, I was thinking about that moment a lot, of experiencing this fun thing, but actually being in my head. Walking away from it alone and feeling very alone.” **“happy accident”** “\[Cass McCombs\] invited me to come jam one day. I played him some new stuff and he actually hit up Saddle Creek being like, \'Hey, does Tomberlin need someone to produce? I\'m interested in working with her,\' which blew my mind. He\'s a legend to me. I knew that I wanted to recruit Cass for this song, and he played on \'stoned\' as well. On \'stoned,\' I\'m playing the lead rhythm guitar and he\'s doing all the solo-y stuff.” **“possessed”** “I think it\'s cool to have a really short song. I need to get better at that. It\'s really a private song, almost trying to motivate myself. Writer’s block vibes. I thought it would be a fun intro to the record for a while. It\'s really cinematic to draw it back a bit. Each song is its own world, and I love that about different records, and I wanted it to be this way. But there is a sonic thread that sews it together throughout.” **“idkwnthat”** “I was walking around in Brooklyn and going through my voice memos and clicked ‘new recording 430’ or whatever. I don\'t label them. I\'m sitting by the window playing guitar; I sound really tired. I\'m singing that song to myself. Even though I\'m saying, \'I don\'t know who needs to hear this,\' obviously I did. That was the first song that we recorded in the process of the record. Everyone says it\'s a weird time. I feel like it\'s always a fucking weird time to be alive as a person in the world, but especially right now, I guess. This record does go through a flurry of different feelings and emotions. It\'s good to feel all of them. So it felt like a perfect way to end the record.”

Halloween Special Volume 1 All orders through LST from OCT 31 HALLOWEEN: lst.storenvy.com/products/36219316-ghoulies-halloween-special-vol-1-cs www.instagram.com/loopyscooptapes Tape version comes w/ extra goodies. We will have copies available eventually in Aus.

When Angel Olsen came to craft her sixth album, *Big Time*, the US singer-songwriter had been through, well, a big time. In 2021—just three days after she came out to her parents—her father died; soon after, she lost her mother. Amid it all (and, of course, with the global pandemic as a backdrop), Olsen was falling deep for someone new. *Big Time*, then, is an album that explores the light of new love alongside the dark devastation of loss and grief. Understandably, Olsen—who started work on *Big Time* just three weeks after her mother’s funeral—questioned whether she could make it at all. “It was a heavy time in my life,” she tells Apple Music. “It was the first time I walked into a studio and I had the option of canceling, because of some of the stuff that was going on. But I told my manager, ‘I just wanna try it.’” Working with producer Jonathan Wilson (Father John Misty, Conor Oberst) in a studio in Topanga Canyon, Olsen kept her expectations low and the brief loose. “Essentially, what I told everyone was, ‘I don’t need to turn a pedal steel on its head here, I just want to hear a classic,’” she says. “What would the Neil Young backing band do if they reined it in a little and put the vocals as the main instrument? If you overthink things, you’re really going down into a hole.” The starting point was “All the Good Times,” a song Olsen wrote on tour in 2017/18, and which she envisaged giving to a country singer like Sturgill Simpson. But it had planted a seed. On *Big Time*, she goes all in on country and Americana, inspired by her cherished hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, as well as by artists including Lucinda Williams, Big Star, and Dolly Parton. That sound reaches its peak on the title track, a woozy, waltzing love song that nods to the brighter side of this album’s title: “I’m loving you big time, I’m loving you more,” Olsen sings to her partner Beau Thibodeaux, with whom she wrote the song. In its embrace of simplicity, *Big Time* feels like a deep exhale—and a stark contrast to 2019’s glossy, high-drama *All Mirrors* (though you will find shades of that here, such as on the string- and piano-laden “Through the Fires” or closer “Chasing the Sun”). That undone palette also lays Olsen’s lyrics bare. And if you’ve ever been shattered by the singer-songwriter’s piercing lyricism, you may want to steel yourself. Here, Olsen’s words are more affecting, honest, and raw than ever before, as she navigates not just love and loss but also self-acceptance (“I need to be myself/I won\'t live another lie,” she sings on “Right Now”), our changed world post-pandemic (“Go Home”), and moving forward after the worst has happened. And on the album’s exquisite final track, “Chasing the Sun,” Olsen allows herself to do just that, however tentatively. “Everyone’s wondered where I’ve gone,” she sings. “Having too much fun… Spending the day/Driving away the blues.”

Fresh grief, like fresh love, has a way of sharpening our vision and bringing on painful clarifications. No matter how temporary we know these states to be, the vulnerability and transformation they demand can overpower the strongest among us. Then there are the rare, fertile moments when both occur, when mourning and limerence heighten, complicate and explain each other; the songs that comprise Angel Olsen’s Big Time were forged in such a whiplash. Big Time is an album about the expansive power of new love, but this brightness and optimism is tempered by a profound and layered sense of loss. During Olsen’s process of coming to terms with her queerness and confronting the traumas that had been keeping her from fully accepting herself, she felt it was time to come out to her parents, a hurdle she’d been avoiding for some time. “Finally, at the ripe age of 34, I was free to be me,” she said. Three days later, her father died and shortly after her mother passed away. The shards of this grief—the shortening of her chance to finally be seen more fully by her parents—are scattered throughout the album. Three weeks after her mother’s funeral she was on a plane to Los Angeles to spend a month in Topanga Canyon, recording this incredibly wise and tender new album. Loss has long been a subject of Olsen’s elegiac songs, but few can write elegies with quite the reckless energy as she. If that bursting-at-the-seams, running downhill energy has come to seem intractable to her work, this album proves Olsen is now writing from a more rooted place of clarity. She’s working with an elastic, expansive mastery of her voice—both sonically and artistically. These are songs not just about transformational mourning, but of finding freedom and joy in the privations as they come.

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.

Formed in the heart of London’s DIY punk scene, Big Joanie (featuring guitarist Stephanie Phillips, bassist Estella Adeyeri, and drummer Chardine Taylor-Stone) are a Black feminist punk band whose passionate live shows and moreish blend of nineties riot grrrl and synth-heavy post punk, have seen them steadily rise to become one of the most championed bands of the current era. Big Joanie are back with their sophomore record Back Home. Recorded at Hermitage Works Studios in North London, the album was produced and mixed by Margo Broom (Goat Girl, Fat White Family). Back Home is a dramatic leap forward for the band; the band build on their tightly knit, lo-fi punk formula to bring forth a collage of blazing guitars, down tempo dance punk, and melancholic strings that evoke the full depth of the band’s expansive art punk vision. The album title references a search for a place to call home, whether real or metaphysical. “We were really ruminating on the idea of a home and what it means,” explains Stephanie. “It’s about the different ideas of home, whether that’s here in the UK, back in Africa or the Caribbean, or a place that doesn’t really exist; it’s neither here nor there." The album’s strength lies in the band’s bold and varied new sound. Album opener ‘Cactus Tree’ is an eerie, gothic folk tale that tells the story of a woman waiting for her lover while a wall of euphoric harmonies and screaming feedback roll in the background. Lead single ‘Happier Still’ is a driving, Nirvana-influenced track that grapples with the idea of wanting to push through a depressive episode. Inspired equally by the melodic rock of Hüsker Dü and the mystical sensibilities of Stevie Nicks, closer ‘Sainted’ brings the club-ready sentiment of the 2018 single ‘Fall Asleep’ to its natural conclusion. Despite Big Joanie’s many accomplishments, there is so much more the band want to achieve and Back Home looks set to be the breeding ground for a new era of Big Joanie. With their boundary-breaking approach to punk, radical politics, and an appreciation for earworm melodies, Big Joanie are set to become important voices for a new generation of punks.

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.

“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.’”

“It can be a bit much,” guitarist Jack Summers yells a few minutes into CLAMM’s second album. *Care* is reliably stocked with such bitter yet understated mantras, repeated against a woolly din of garage-punk. But as the Melbourne trio vents about feeling overwhelmed by personal issues (“That Way”) or the pitfalls of overthinking (“I Can Do It”), there’s a reliable degree of vulnerability to their cathartic outbursts. Arriving two years after the band’s 2020 debut, *Beseech Me*, this record features new bassist Maisie Everett, who sings in tandem with Summers on the frantic standout “Monday.” Another frustrated chronicling of post-pandemic life as a twentysomething, it’s CLAMM’s most melodic turn to date. Many of these 15 curt tracks are more layered and obtuse, leaning into Iceage-esque effects and atmosphere. Stormy swathes of sax and synth also contribute to the newfound breadth here, but never at the expense of needling immediacy.

Miranda Lambert hits the road on *Palomino*, her eighth solo album and the follow-up to her 2019 Grammy-winning LP *Wildcard*. Across 15 tracks, Lambert treks all over the United States, spinning colorful yarns of a rambling life out on the road. “We go to 36 different locations in this record and meet all kinds of characters that we made up,” Lambert tells Apple Music. “Or it might have been characters we have all met in our travels, put into these songs. I\'ve never written with that much purpose.” Lambert sets the freewheeling tone with opener “Actin’ Up,” a swampy ode to bad behavior. Tracks like “Scenes” and “Tourist” are some of Lambert’s most image-rich material yet, while “Music City Queen”—a collaboration with pioneering New Wavers The B-52’s—is easily one of her most fun. Some songs, like standout “Geraldene,” previously appeared in demo form on Lambert’s critically acclaimed *The Marfa Tapes*, a 2021 collaborative LP with Jack Ingram and Jon Randall, and take on new life thanks to thoughtful production from Lambert, Randall, and frequent collaborator Luke Dick. Below, Lambert shares insight into a handful of tracks on *Palomino*. **“Geraldene”** “She\'s everyone. I feel like we\'ve all known one or been one at one point or the other. I just had that title because I was watching *Heartworn Highways* like a million times, and in that movie, Townes’ dog is named Geraldine. And Geraldine\'s this German shepherd, and I was like, ‘That\'s a cool name.’” **“Country Money”** “Aaron Raitiere pulls me in on a write one day. He\'s like, ‘Hey, come write with me and Mikey Reaves.’ I had never written with him before, and I was like, ‘Okay, cool, that\'d be different,’ and we wrote ‘Country Money.’ It fit right into the vibe of this road trip we were taking. So it all just happened easily, which makes me a little nervous because I\'m like, ‘Okay, when\'s the other shoe going to drop?’” **“Carousel”** “That is a real feeling. We joined the circus in one way or another, and we\'re so lucky to be part of it. I mean, I\'m like, ‘If I ever lived before, I think I was either best friends with Calamity Jane or riding an elephant somewhere.’ Truly, that\'s what I was doing, because this is as close as I could get to those two things, what I do for a living. I miss so many weddings and funerals and baby showers and important moments of people that are important to me, and of my own, just because I\'m rolling. But I think ‘Carousel’ puts this romantic spin on it where it\'s like, ‘It\'s okay. There\'s this whole other life that can happen, too.’”

On *Small World*, Joseph Mount shrinks his scope. Whereas its predecessor, 2019’s *Metronomy Forever*, was a sprawling 17 tracks, *Small World* consists of just nine. “Often, I want to do the opposite of what I’ve just done,” Mount tells Apple Music. “I wanted to be really musically focused and concise.” This album’s title is, too, a reflection of the shrunken world in which it was made. Written in summer 2020—and recorded between November of that year and early 2021—these songs were crafted in the thick of the pandemic and explore loneliness (the Elliott Smith-meets-Red Hot Chili Peppers “Loneliness on the run”), the optimism we clung to (“Things will be fine”), and the incomprehensible weight of it all (“Life and Death”). This isn’t, however, a record to transport us back to the worst moments of lockdown. “The way I made music during the pandemic was to escape from feeling like I was in a pandemic,” says Mount. “This album is designed to be listened to when you’re free.” The soothing and organic sound of *Small World* might surprise listeners who’ve been with Metronomy since day one—not least because of Mount’s voice, which has dropped a few octaves, sounding at times like Benjamin Biolay’s or Serge Gainsbourg’s. “When I first started writing songs, I imagined I was a producer and that, one day, I would get a female singer to sing them,” says Mount who has, of course, since produced for artists including Robyn and Jessie Ware. “I would always sing in a falsetto voice and really high up. Even though it was never necessarily comfortable, it’s just what I did. This was me trying to be a bit more mature. I want to grow up with Metronomy. You’ve got to develop it and turn it into what you want it to be.” Read on as Mount guides us through his seventh album, one song at a time. **“Life and Death”** “This was the last thing I wrote for the record. I felt like I’d mined the experiences of being locked down for nice songs. And I hadn’t really done anything that acknowledged the actual gravity of the situation, and just how horrible it is and how many people died. This is my song, which is supposed to be a bit despairing about everything. But like all the songs on the record, the music isn’t supposed to make you feel bad or upset. It’s meant to be supportive.” **“Things will be fine”** “The first thing I wrote for the record. It encapsulated everything I wanted it to be, in terms of the sound and the lyrics. I’ve got two children and I was having to say to them, ‘Everything is going to be OK.’ But I had no knowledge that backed that up. It’s also about when you’re young, and for the first time you realize that the world is quite a horrible place. And then you realize you’ve been protected by your parents, which is what they’re there to do.” **“It’s good to be back”** “I was imagining this character, a musician who’s in their late thirties, trying to write a record that connects with young people. I was imagining a fictitious conversation with a record label: ‘Oh, you want to reach the kids? You need to use drum machines and synthesizers.’ And then doing that but putting in an acoustic guitar. Which, to me, is this really fun juxtaposition of ideas. The song was about being back at home, and about when our tours were canceled or postponed. When you come back from being away, it always takes a week or two to lock back into the same routines with one another.” **“Loneliness on the run”** “‘Loneliness on the run’ is a song about being far away from people that you love. And wanting them to try and manage their bad feelings. I wrote something about visualizing your loneliness, or your anger, and then throwing it out the window or chasing it away. So, that was the idea. At the end of this song, I guess the album does shift a gear and it becomes a little less introspective and starts forgetting the bad stuff.” **“Love Factory”** “I liked the idea of industrializing love, making it this thing which is churned out. This factory is operating at astonishing capacity. We are doing incredibly well at creating love here. It’s supposed to be a relentless song to reflect that.” **“I lost my mind”** “It’s about feeling like you are doubting your own sanity. It’s not something that I’ve felt, but during the pandemic, it was something that I was very aware of—how friends of ours in quite different situations were just in apartments, on their own, feeling very isolated and out of touch. I wanted it to feel like it was following that in the music as well. It does wig out, and I decided to put a whistling sound in, which helped push it over the edge.” **“Right on time”** “The other thing about imagining where I want to be in a few years is also this awareness that you can’t keep writing songs about falling for people because it’s happened. It happened a long time ago. Having said that, the next two songs on the album are exactly that. But I think they’re going to be the last songs I write like it. It’s just another mindlessly optimistic song about enjoying the sunshine. I remember the summer of 2020. It was super hot. Everyone suddenly had this realization that, yes, you can be unable to see your family and be suffering with all kinds of stuff, but it’s unbelievably sunny and nice outside. Just finding somewhere where you can have the sun hitting your face makes you feel better.” **“Hold me tonight” (feat. Porridge Radio)** “The first demo I have of the song is just my voice and a guitar. It was a Velvet Underground-style thing I was thinking of: very sparse. Relatively near the end of recording the album, I was listening to this song, and I was like, ‘We should just restart and have someone else singing it.’ I thought it should be a girl’s voice and they should be singing about their side of this story, which is, of course, going to be that you love each other and everything’s great. I sent Dana \[Margolin, of Porridge Radio\] the track and what she sent back was this totally ruined situation where she turned the whole thing on its head. She turned it into something absolutely genuine for her, and it rescued the song for me in a way.” **“I have seen enough”** “I thought I’d try and write a song in French, and the idea for it was about the horror of life—but how you can’t look away. It’s too beautiful at the same time. And in the end, the French wasn’t really good enough, so it’s English! To nutshell it, it’s about just enjoying and appreciating what you have around you. And I guess the way that it would relate to the pandemic is just all of the horrors that were going on and still being able to find pleasurable things. Finding happiness within it all.”

Thrill Jockey is pleased to announce the return of The Soft Pink Truth, the solo electronic project of Drew Daniel, one half of Baltimore-found sound duo Matmos. Asked to explain his new album’s gauntlet-throwing title, Drew Daniel says: “Years ago a friend was DJing in a club and a woman came into the DJ booth and asked ‘is it going to get any deeper than this?’ and the phrase became a kind of mantra for us. What did she really want? This album was created as an attempt to imagine possible musical responses to her question.” Throughout the ten songs of the album, the provocation to go “deeper” prompts promiscuous moves across the genres of disco, minimalism, ambient, and jazz, sliding onto and off of the dancefloor, sweeping higher and lower on the scale of frequencies, engaging both philosophical texts re-set as pop lyrics and wordless glossolalia. Rather than a dryly pursued thesis, the music flows across emotional terrain from upfront peaks to melancholic valleys, often within the same song. This is the case on opening track “Deeper,” which morphs from Brainticket-Esque keyboard loops to a Chic disco groove to a Stars Of The Lid style heavy drone over eleven minutes. Evenly divided between opening lift-off, rhythmic peaks, and extended, spaced-out decrescendos, this is music that flickers and pulses and melts. Though the goal is depth, it also goes sonically wider than any other Soft Pink Truth record in terms of sound source. To craft the album during COVID and social isolation, Daniel assembled a fourteen-piece virtual disco band from friends and allies across the genre spectrum and across the world: Daniel’s romantic and musical partner M.C. Schmidt and friend Koye Berry play piano, Mark Lightcap (Acetone, Dick Slessig Combo) plays acoustic and electric guitar, Jason Willett (Half Japanese) plays bass, Nate Wooley plays trumpet, Brooks Kossover (Drugdealer) plays flute, John Berndt and Andrew Bernstein (Horse Lords) play saxophone, and shakers, shekere, tumba, triangle, and cajon parts are played by Cuban percussionist Ayoze de Alejandro Lopez. There are chamber instruments as well: harpsichord by Tom Boram, harp by Obadias Guerra, Irish harp by Una Monaghan, and on many tracks, lush string arrangements by Turkish arranger Ulas Kurugullu for violin, viola, and cello that recall the Love Unlimited Orchestra found on classic Barry White albums. From Caracas to Istanbul to Dublin, everyone recorded themselves at home playing along to skeletal demos, and then their contributions were assembled in Daniel’s home studio in Baltimore. This virtual experience of action at a distance, and of community coming together and then returning to solitude might explain the song “Moodswing” (which starts with a popping champagne cork and turns to broken glass halfway through); but that dynamic also explains the mood swings of the album as a whole, as joyful collective playing dissolves into tranquil, reflective atmospheres suitable to music made in response to a moment of doubt, complaint and mixed emotions. There are some perverse pop moments. One side, one, “La Joie Devant La Mort” takes a sentence in French by philosopher and erotica author Georges Bataille (“once more our steps lead us / into the forest and into the night / in search / of joy / before death”) and turns it into the lyrics of a gothic disco anthem with vocals courtesy of Jamie Stewart (Xiu Xiu). Intoned over scything disco strings and quantized insect noises, Bataille’s cryptic remarks skips the seminar room for a late-night queer cruising ground. On “Wanna Know”, the album title becomes an airy vocal hook as Jenn Wasner (Wye Oak, Flock of Dimes) harmonizes with herself singing “I just really wanna know/is it gonna get any deeper than this?” on top of rubbery bass guitar riffs and shimmering harpsichords that dissolve into a wall of stretched vocal manipulations and low sub-bass. Throughout, Is It Going To Get Any Deeper Than This? aims for a kind of psychedelic poolside take on disco, using the steady 120 bpm rhythmic chassis of the music as a launchpad for reverie rather than big room EDM bluster. With its coos and whispers and field recordings layered on top of crisp hi-hats and handclaps, “Trocadero” pays homage to the San Francisco discotheque whose DJs pioneered the slow and sensual afterhours Disco subgenre known as “sleaze.” While there are clubby moments, much of the mood is pastoral, more suited to mushroom trips in a forest than a basement rave. With its endless staircases of arpeggiating oscillators, the thirteen-minute “Sunwash” is the most overtly psychedelic piece and evokes the long-form synth-and-guitar workouts of ‘Rubycon’-era Tangerine Dream. The title can also operate as a dirty joke, and there’s a thread of pansexual eroticism that glides across the album, most notably in “Joybreath”, in which Brooklyn techno artist Rose E Kross intones Bataille’s text in French over throbbing low-end sub-bass, processed moans and vapor trails of synthesizer and saxophone. The record is not afraid to just throw down. “Deeper Than This?” delivers an upfront deep house track with a moody bassline that braids three different vocalists together: Angel Deradoorian sings the album title as a provocative question, Daniel Clark coos wordless soulful responses, and improvisational vocalist Id M Theft Able asks the album title question in a deep male voice over tight drum breaks and ghostly dub drop-outs. The album concludes with a cover of Willie Hutch’s “Now That It’s All Over” (which originally appeared on his soundtrack to “The Mack”); simplifying the chords and speeding up the tempo, Hutch’s funereal soul classic accelerates into an ecstatic peak before melting into whispers, harps, strings and a final acoustic guitar coda from Mark Lightcap. It’s a suitably soft landing for an album that reflects decades spent thinking back upon a moment in a DJ booth that passed in seconds. Sidestepping retro kitsch but paying homage to highly personal interpretations of disco such as Arthur Russell, Don Ray, Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band, and Mandré, or the jazz-funk of Creed Taylor and CTI records, its emphasis upon slowly morphing deep house grooves will also appeal to fans of DJ Sprinkles, Moodymann and Theo Parrish. At once catchy and spacey, poppy and perverse, Is It Going To Get Any Deeper Than This? shows a restless musician trying to square the circle of dance music, meditation, repetition, and change. The album was mastered by Heba Kadry and features cover design by Robert Beatty.

PREORDER - OUT SEPTEMBER 9, 2022 High Vis were formed in 2016 from the ashes of some of the UK’s best hardcore bands. Gold-toothed frontman Graham Sayle’s anguished lyrics about life in working class Britain were familiar to fans of Tremors’ full-throttle thrash, but alongside his former bandmate Edward ‘Ski’ Harper and veterans of Dirty Money, DiE and The Smear, High Vis sought to transform that energy and intensity into something entirely new. Like scene-mates Chubby and the Gang did by pulling in unlikely source material from classic doo-wop or Micromoon have by combining everything from psychedelia and metal into their high potency mix, High Vis’ 2019 debut album, No Sense No Feeling showed the band were never going to be constrained by any sense of genre rules or regulations. Its claustrophobic rattle bore traces of Joy Division, Bauhaus, Crisis, The Cure and Gang Of Four lurking in the shadows. 2020’s synth-driven EP, Society Exists, was further evidence of the band’s restless creative MO. High Vis’ second album Blending sees them open their viewfinder wider than ever before. Alongside longstanding favourites such as Fugazi and Echo and The Bunnymen; Ride and even Flock Of Seagulls were shared reference points as the band worked on the album together. From the anthemic sweep of opener “Talk For Hours”, through the title track’s psychedelic swirl and “Fever Dream”’s baggy groove, it sees High Vis’ sound blossoming into something with an unlimited richness. The hazy drift of “Shame” or the melodic jangle of “Trauma Bonds” may take them until uncharted waters, but they still have all the power and bite that made No Sense No Feeling so remarkable. Lyrically, the album represents another leap forward too. Talking frankly about poverty, class politics, and the challenges of everyday life, Sayle’s lyrics have always addressed the downtrodden and discarded communities across Britain slipping below the waterline. This time around, Sayle’s lost not of that social consciousness, but he’s looked at himself and his own emotional landscape, and in the process created something that feels more universal, that reaches a hand-out to people and ultimately gives a message of hope.

Like its title suggests, *Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You* continues Big Thief’s shift away from their tense, early music toward something folkier and more cosmically inviting. They’ve always had an interest in Americana, but their touchpoints are warmer now: A sweetly sawing fiddle (“Spud Infinity”), a front-porch lullaby (“Dried Roses”), the wonder of a walk in the woods (“Promise Is a Pendulum”) or comfort of a kitchen where the radio’s on and food sizzles in the pan (“Red Moon”). Adrianne Lenker’s voice still conveys a natural reticence—she doesn’t want to believe it’s all as beautiful as it is—but she’s also too earnest to deny beauty when she sees it.

Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You is a sprawling double-LP exploring the deepest elements and possibilities of Big Thief. To truly dig into all that the music of Adrianne Lenker, Max Oleartchik, Buck Meek, and James Krivchenia desired in 2020, the band decided to write and record a rambling account of growth as individuals, musicians, and chosen family over 4 distinct recording sessions. In Upstate New York, Topanga Canyon, The Rocky Mountains, and Tucson, Arizona, Big Thief spent 5 months in creation and came out with 45 completed songs. The most resonant of this material was edited down into the 20 tracks that make up DNWMIBIY, a fluid and adventurous listen. The album was produced by drummer James Krivchenia who initially pitched the recording concept for DNWMIBIY back in late 2019 with the goal of encapsulating the many different aspects of Adrianne’s songwriting and the band onto a single record. In an attempt to ease back into life as Big Thief after a long stretch of Covid-19 related isolation, the band met up for their first session in the woods of upstate New York. They started the process at Sam Evian’s Flying Cloud Recordings, recording on an 8-track tape machine with Evian at the knobs. It took a while for the band to realign and for the first week of working in the studio, nothing felt right. After a few un-inspired takes the band decided to take an ice-cold dip in the creek behind the house before running back to record in wet swimsuits. That cool water blessing stayed with Big Thief through the rest of the summer and many more intuitive, recording rituals followed. It was here that the band procured ‘Certainty’ and ‘Sparrow’. For the next session in Topanga Canyon, California, the band intended to explore their bombastic desires and lay down some sonic revelry in the experimental soundscape-friendly hands of engineer Shawn Everett. Several of the songs from this session lyrically explore the areas of Lenker’s thought process that she describes as “unabashedly as psychedelic as I naturally think,” including ‘Little Things’, which came out of this session. The prepared acoustic guitars and huge stomp beat of today’s ‘Time Escaping’ create a matching, otherworldly backdrop for the subconscious dream of timeless, infinite mystery. When her puppy Oso ran into the vocal booth during the final take of the song, Adrianne looked down and spoke “It’s Music!” to explain in the best terms possible the reality of what was going on to the confused dog. “It’s Music Oso!” The third session, high in the Colorado Rockies, was set up to be a more traditional Big Thief recording experience, working with UFOF and Two Hands engineer Dom Monks. Monks' attentiveness to song energies and reverence for the first take has become a huge part of the magic of Thief’s recent output. One afternoon in the castle-like studio, the band was running through a brand new song ‘Change’ for the first time. Right when they thought it might be time to do a take, Monks came out of the booth to let them know that he’d captured the practice and it was perfect as it was.   The final session, in hot-as-heaven Tucson, Arizona, took place in the home studio of Scott McMicken. The several months of recording had caught up to Big Thief at this point so, in order to bring in some new energy, they invited long-time friend Mat Davidson of Twain to join. This was the first time that Big Thief had ever brought in a 5th instrumentalist for such a significant contribution. His fiddle, and vocals weave a heavy presence throughout the Tucson tracks. If the album's main through-line is its free-play, anything-is-possible energy, then this environment was the perfect spot to conclude its creation — filling the messy living room with laughter, letting the fire blaze in the backyard, and ripping spontaneous, extended jams as trains whistled outside.  All 4 of these sessions, in their varied states of fidelity, style, and mood, when viewed together as one album seem to stand for a more honest, zoomed-out picture of lived experience than would be possible on a traditional, 12 song record. This was exactly what the band hoped would be the outcome of this kind of massive experiment. When Max’s mom asked on a phone call what it feels like to be back together with the band playing music for the first time in a year, he described to the best of abilities: “Well it’s like, we’re a band, we talk, we have different dynamics, we do the breaths, and then we go on stage and suddenly it feels like we are now on a dragon. And we can’t really talk because we have to steer this dragon.”  The attempt to capture something deeper, wider, and full of mystery, points to the inherent spirit of Big Thief. Traces of this open-hearted, non-dogmatic faith can be felt through previous albums, but here on Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You lives the strongest testament to its existence. 

“Electro-dance tracks that revive and remix a 1970s era remembered for a lively Iranian pop scene.” – The Guardian The award-winning Israeli-Persian singer returns with "Roya" (fantasy in Farsi) an exhilarating blend of tradi-modern rhythms and retro-Persian sonics. Recorded in secrecy in Istanbul with her band from Tel Aviv and risk-defying Iranian musicians from Tehran. A musical portal to a place of peace, joy and unfettered freedom. Shadow patterns through a decorative screen window. A door opening deep inside a deserted ancient palace. A shimmering blue veil through which kohl-rimmed eyes watch, and widen. Intrigue. Mystery. The past and present, overlapping. Roya. The new third album from award-winning Israeli-Persian singer Liraz is an invitation to dream. Anthems, love ballads, glittery Middle Eastern dance tunes … A collection of 11 tracks that enrich that signature blend of tradi-modern rhythms and retro-Persian sonics, Roya (‘fantasy’ in Farsi) is music as a magic portal, an arched gateway to a place of peace, joy and unfettered, chador-waving freedom. “My fantasy, I wished for peace in the world,” she sings in Farsi, in that golden voice, on the hallucinogenic title track. “I will not lose my hope/You’ll see, our hearts will cross.” Liraz and her Israeli sextet (three women, three men) recorded Roya over ten days in Istanbul, in a basement studio hidden from public view and crackling with creativity. With them, on violin, viola and the tar, the wasp-waisted wooden Iranian lute, were composers and musicians from the Iranian capital, Tehran. The same clutch of anonymous players who previously collaborated with Liraz online, no questions asked, no faces shown, under the radar of Tehran’s secret police, for her feted 2020 album, Zan. Players who’d travelled undercover from Tehran to Istanbul to work with Liraz and producer/multi- instrumentalist Uri Brauner Kinrot in the flesh. Or at least, that is what Liraz imagined. ‘There is a passage connecting our tongue and heart, sustaining the secrets of the world and soul,’ wrote Rumi, the greatest Sufi mystic and poet in the Persian language, whose prose Liraz treasures. ‘As long as our tongue is locked the channel is open/the moment our tongue unlocks the passage will close.’ “Was it just in my mind? Was I really in the same room as these Iranian soul sisters and brothers?” Liraz pauses, waves an elegant hand. “All I remember are fragments: the fear and anxiety I felt when I knew they were on their way. The tears of joy and relief we all cried as we embraced. And the music we made! Such music!” She flashes a smile. “It just poured out of us,” she says. With strings snaking through pulsing electronics and wah-wah-guitars, ‘Azizam’ is a psychedelic wonder, strobing around lyrics that tell of unhinged obsession (“You are the evil killing me/I, who is in love with you”). Featuring music written by bassist Amir Sadot, ‘Doone Doone’ is a rollicking ode to the Tehrani musicians Liraz befriended through computer screens – and who might have been right there, in touching distance, recording with her. ‘Mimiram’ delivers dramatic protestations of love with knowing irreverence; while ‘Omid’ – [which is both a man’s name and the Farsi word for ‘hope’] with lyrics by an anonymous Iranian female musician and music by Zan co-writer Ilan Smilan - tells of a man named Hope and of hope, who is also a man. A slow, lonely song about Iran, the string-and-synth-driven ‘Tanha’ was recorded on the day the Iranians may or may not have arrived in Istanbul. “I am singing about the boundaries that have melted between us,” says Liraz, who wrote the words and co-wrote the music with Smilan and Brauner Kinrot. “I cried a lot between takes.” Her Hebrew accent intact (“This is my story, my culture clash”), her confidence boosted by prestigious awards (she was Songlines Artist of the Year 2021) and widespread international acclaim, Liraz has never sounded so passionate, so strong and defiant. Roya, then, is the next phase of a high-profile career further distinguished by a drive to fight oppression, to champion the right of women everywhere to sing, perform and be heard. “Israel and Iran are not living in peace. Israelis cannot visit Iran, and Iranians cannot visit Israel. If Iranians contact Israelis they will go to jail,” says Liraz, whose parents, Sephardic Jews of Iranian–Jewish descent, left for Israel back when the two countries had close ties – but when, even prior to the 1979 Islamic Revolution, being a Jew in Iran was kept quiet. Her grandmother had wanted a career as a singer, a profession forbidden to women in Iran. “Even aged 85, she is a great singer; the other day I put on a record by an Iranian singer and she got up and sang loudly. My family have to sing,” says Liraz, who grew up dancing to the music of divas such as Ramesh and Googoosh celebrated in Tehran in the ‘60s and ‘70s, the golden age of Persian pop. She also loved female singer-songwriters: Kate Bush, Tori Amos. Lessons in singing, music and acting – and a stint spent clubbing - were followed by three years working in the US as an actress, appearing in the big budget films such as Fair Game and A Late Quartet. In Tehrangeles – the Little Tehran of Los Angeles – she found her people, embraced her inner Persian: “Iran has always seemed like a lover I’ve been longing for. I can sense how it is to be Iranian but I’m not in that bubble inside Iran.” “This paradox made me a dreamer,” Liraz continues, who in a neat art/life twist appeared as a Farsi-speaking Mossad operative in the 2020 Apple TV espionage series Tehran. “What if I was born in Iran and could not sing – would I try and escape? There are always so many stories and visions inside my head. But I know that I need to sing, I must sing, for the muted women of Iran. And I want to sing to Iran about my feelings for Iran.” Her 2018 debut album Naz, a collection of mainly pre-revolutionary pop songs by her favourite female Iranian singers, lit up Iran’s social media. Liraz was sent videos of women dancing inside their homes, their chadors, headscarves and veils cast off, their faces joyous. Iranian musicians began sending her clips, lyrics and melodies via encrypted files, and so the songs for Zan – and her relationships with the anonymous musicians - took shape. With each album, Liraz has grown bolder, more outspoken (ask her about Palestine and she’ll extol Palestinian rights, too). If recording in an underground studio with the musicians from Tehran was a fantasy, it was a palpable one. The scintillating ‘Bishtar Behand’ captures the healing power of laughter and togetherness. ‘Gandomi’, its lyrics and music written anonymously, praises cross-cultural romance and commitment; where ‘Joonyani’ tells of crazy love, of kissing pictures each night, the cinematic ‘Bi Hava’ – string-laden and serene – seems to close the circle of friendship between Liraz, her band and the Tehrani musicians. “I sing that it is not one day we are going to meet. We are already here with each other, in the now. So let us enjoy being together.” On the closing track, a female-led version of the opener ‘Roya’, they do precisely that. “I’d felt so much power from these ladies who arrived from Iran,” says Liraz. “We became like sisters. On the last day, with one hour left before everyone had to go, I asked the Iranian women and the three women in my band to record a very live organic fusion of ‘Roya’.” “We got it in one amazing take. We all cried as we hugged and said goodbye and then just like that, everyone was gone.” Her dark eyes flash. “Like they’d never been there at all.” Somewhere in the past, fluttering towards the future, a blue veil flies, free, in the wind.

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.

Like AC/DC before them, Beach House’s gift lies in managing to make what feels like the same album a hundred different ways. Even the new inflections on *Once Twice Melody*—the string section of “ESP,” the rhythmic nods to hip-hop (“Pink Funeral”) and Italo-disco (“Runaway”)—fit immediately into their plush, neon-lit world. And while specific moments conjure specific eras (“Superstar” the triumph of an ’80s John Hughes movie, “Once Twice Melody” a swirl of ’60s surrealism), the cumulative effect is something like a fairytale rendered in sound: majestic, inviting, but dark enough around the edges to keep you off-balance. And just like that (snap), they do it again.

Once Twice Melody is the 8th studio album by Beach House. It is a double album, featuring 18 songs presented in 4 chapters. Across these songs, many types of style and song structures can be heard. Songs without drums, songs centered around acoustic guitar, mostly electronic songs with no guitar, wandering and repetitive melodies, songs built around the string sections. In addition to new sounds, many of the drum machines, organs, keyboards and tones that listeners may associate with previous Beach House records remain present throughout many of the compositions. Beach House is Victoria Legrand, lead singer and multi-instrumentalist, and Alex Scally, guitarist and multi-instrumentalist. They write all of their songs together. Once Twice Melody is the first album produced entirely by the band. The live drums are by James Barone (same as their 2018 album, 7), and were recorded at Pachyderm studio in Minnesota and United Studio in Los Angeles. For the first time, a live string ensemble was used. Strings were arranged by David Campbell. The writing and recording of Once Twice Melody began in 2018 and was completed in July of 2021. Most of the songs were created during this time, though a few date back over the previous 10 years. Most of the recording was done at Apple Orchard Studio in Baltimore. Once Twice Melody was mixed largely by Alan Moulder but a few tracks were also mixed by Caesar Edmunds, Trevor Spencer, and Dave Fridmann.

Big Stir Records is proud to announce our first major album release of 2022: DARLING PLEASE from celebrated North Carolina singer-songwriter CHRIS CHURCH. Recorded eleven years ago and seeing full-scale release for the first time in a newly remastered version (courtesy of audio maestro NICK BERTLING and adorned with newly tracked backing vocals from LINDSAY MURRAY of GRETCHEN'S WHEEL), the album is out on CD and digital January 21 and features the lead single “Bad Summer”. It's up for preorder at www.bigstirrecords.com, bigstirrecords.bandcamp.com, and on sale everywhere music is sold or streamed on the release date. The new record sees the genre-hopping CHURCH in a raw rock mode, with dominant Crazy Horse-style guitars topped with some of the most immediate and aching vocal performances in Chris's catalog. The emotionally direct and often elegiac tone of DARLING PLEASE derives in large part from its origins: “I made the album in my basement studio,” says Church. “It was and is dedicated with love to my late great brother Mike Church, who'd passed not long prior to my decision to start this project. It was actually the first time I'd played all instruments on an entire album.” The self-produced ethic makes the album a forerunner to last year's acclaimed, home-recorded GAME DIRT, but DARLING is if anything even more visceral. Opening with the rough, ready and stately “History” and diving directly into the “Satisfaction”-beat rocker “We're Going Downtown,” the album pays overt and indirect tribute to Mike Church (who'd played drums on most of Chris's earlier music) on a number of tracks. The Sugar-inflected “Pillar To Post” finds the singer feeling "like a guest and a host, like taking a walk with my own ghost" while Church describes the loping “Never So Far Away” as “my legit attempt to bridge loss and love, the big struggles, mortality, how the same old stuff still surprises us no matter how repetitive.” “We Could Pretend” channels “all of what it takes to cope... the hugeness is empty, and vice versa” over a “Cinnamon Girl” groove, and closing track “Triple Crown” sees Church on the drums, recreating Mike's restrained approach from live performances of the song. Elsewhere, the empathetic backing vocals of Lindsay Murray (who also designed the sleeve art) illuminate the choruses of the single “Bad Summer” and the whole of “Atlantic”. Both tunes are sharp and heartfelt character studies derived from Church's circle of friends at the time. “I Wish I Could Say I Was Sorry” opens with a guitar and piano workout that sets the stage for one of the album's most indelible choruses, again spotlighting Murray. And “Nepenthean” dives into psychedelic sludge to immersive effect. Gripping and emotive, DARLING PLEASE is a belated but essential addition to the CHRIS CHURCH catalog, following on the heels of the 2021 relaunches of his SpyderPop Records albums Backwards Compatible and Limitations of Source Tape. More than a relic, it's a rewardingly rough-hewn gem deserving of inspection and a sincere tribute to a musical and familial brother, and it stands among Church's very best.