God Is In The TV's Albums of the Year 2020

Matmos’ practice of creative constraint has made them one of the most consistently exciting acts in electronic music. The duo of M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel are well known for their long-standing practice of sampling unusual sound sources and experimenting with conceptual restrictions. As a couple in life and music for more than 25 years, Schmidt and Daniel have a particularly democratic approach to music making, each taking it in turns to come up with the framework or starting point for an album. The Consuming Flame: Open Exercises In Group Form was conceived by M.C. Schmidt, who made the decision to orient the record around a deceptively simple commitment. 99 different musicians were asked to contribute to the recording with only one instruction: they could play anything that they wanted, but the tempo of any rhythmic material had to be set at 99 beats per minute. The resulting album is a three-hour long assemblage that travels across a shifting kaleidoscope of genre, mood and density, all synchronized to a constant underlying tempo. The Consuming Flame was composed through the social act of invitation, and the album’s 99 participants are, even for Matmos, wildly eclectic. Some are collaborators that have worked with Matmos for many years (J. Lesser, Jon “Wobbly” Leidecker, Mark Lightcap, Josh Quillen of So Percussion, Vicki Bennett) and some are near total strangers found through open calls on internet forums for contributions at 99 beats per minute. There are players from the conservatory-trained world of “new music” (Kate Soper, Bonnie Lander, Ashot Sarkissjan, Jennifer Walshe) and figures from the extreme music underground (Blake Harrison of Pig Destroyer, Kevin Gan Yuen of Sutekh Hexen, Terence Hannum of Locrian), as well as auteurs from the world of “noise” music (Twig Harper, Moth Cock, Bromp Treb, Id M Theft Able) as well as writers (Douglas Rushkoff, Colin Dickey) and conceptual artists (Heather Kapplow). There are distinguished alumni and contemporary luminaries of electronic music (Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma of Mouse on Mars, Daniel Lopatin, DeForrest Brown Jr., J. G. Thirlwell, Matthew Herbert, Rabit, Robin Stewart and Harry Wright of Giant Swan) and artists associated with indie rock and folk traditions (Ira Kaplan, Georgia Hubley and James McNew of Yo La Tengo, Marisa Anderson). There are undergraduates who took M.C. Schmidt’s “Sound As Music” course during the final year of The San Francisco Art Institute’s existence. In honor of its fiercely independent tradition of outsider creativity, the album is dedicated to the memory of the now closed art school. Submissions from artists were subsequently layered onto each other, prompting later recording sessions which then built upon the first wave of contributions. These discrete zones were then collaged into larger and larger units and more contributors were invited to join until, gradually, the “group form” of three distinct hour-long movements emerged. Part exquisite-corpse and part virtual festival, the results retain Matmos’ distinct and unique voice despite the promiscuously open nature of these collaborations. The Consuming Flame is intended to be heard as one continuous experience, but has been divided into three discs, each of which has digital index points for the convenience of the listener, offering handholds and rest-stops along the journey. The length is not meant to be exhausting or pompous, but instead to shift the listener’s attention repeatedly along a path, and to deliberately refuse to hold in one place, style, mood, genre or level of density for too long, in order to induce a sensation of drift within forward movement. The album moves beyond the confines of established longform genres like drone and ambient as well as traditional song structures. Rather, The Consuming Flame is comparable to a train journey; as Schmidt puts it: “The album is very much like a train ride at an amusement park: the tempo is the train that pulls you through a lot of different fantastic scenes and locations. Sometimes you listen to the sound of the train tracks and sometimes you are immersed in a space.” To assist the listener in crediting individual contributors and in seeing the work as three large-scale movements, the album comes with a fold-out poster that in the manner of an architectural drawing schematically displays the timeline of the full work and the specific locations of all 99 guest musicians. In keeping with this panoramic ambition, the album’s three hour long movements surge and flow across musical terrain, sometimes reaching into entirely new areas, and sometimes gesturing backwards to Matmos’ past recorded output and key influences: passages of banjo and mouth harp evoke the country and folk maneuvers of “The West”, motorik drumming and electric guitar condense into chugging Krautrock riffs, nostalgic pastoral synthesis suggests a slight return to “Supreme Balloon”, while the overall sound-collage-as-composition stratagem recalls Faust circa “The Faust Tapes”, Teo Macero’s collages of electric Miles, and classic Nurse With Wound. There are noisy and disorienting sections and oases of calm; at various points the mix drifts into field recordings gathered across the globe (children playing in a village in the Philippines, a bathroom in Uzbekistan, the drip of rainwater in Belarus, insects in Tokyo, a buzzing street light in Baltimore) as sound insistently relocates the listener’s frame of reference. Though the album was mastered and finalized a few months before the coming of COVID, social distancing and quarantine, in certain odd respects its formal gambit of the remote assemblage of contributions from across distance offers a curiously fitting soundtrack for the “group forms” we now assemble together across platforms and media. Tender, funny, strange and ultimately oddly moving, The Consuming Flame: Open Exercises in Group Form shows Matmos bringing diverse people together around a steady pulse. It’s a relay race across the gaps in genre and experience that divide us.

Moroccan-French power quartet, Bab L’ Bluz, reclaim the blues for North Africa. Fronted by an African-Moroccan woman in a traditionally male role, Bab L’ Bluz are devoted to a revolution in attitude which dovetails with Morocco’s ‘nayda’ youth movement – a new wave of artists and musicians taking their cues from local heritage, singing words of freedom in the Moroccan-Arabic dialect of darija.

German Army is as prolific a project as they get. Heading from California, the enigmatic ensemble have been one of the loudest voices in the international tape scene for the past couple of years. Taking a strong stance against imperialism in all forms and with a hefty focus on documenting the global extinction of language, flora and fauna, German Army's music shows art as a political act. "Hearing Lola Kiepja" showcases an emotive take into the project's noisier heart, bringing forward the anonymous duo's flair for alluring melodies. There is a dark, cosmic quality to the work, with synthetic clusters of lo-fi beauty pushed in a fever-induced fast succession. Hypnotic choirs and synth-driven rhythms drawing you in as droplets on a basin. A thousand lost voices sing around the fire, we follow on the footsteps of the dead. EN13

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

Young Knives release the their fifth album, Barbarians. The album was written, recorded and mixed by Young Knives (brothers Henry Dartnall and The House of Lords) in their studio near Oxford, UK. John Gray’s book Straw Dogs inspired the brothers to dial into the ultra-violent, brutal nature of human beings. Our progresses in science and knowledge have not made us any less barbaric: our entertainment is obsessed with it, our world is full of it. What if cruelty to others is just part of who we are? How do we live with that? Building on a base of loved hits from their early work last decade (Voices of Animals and Men, Superabundance, Ornaments from the Silver Arcade) and the metamorphosis of 2013’s Sick Octave, Barbarians is a leap into sonic experimentation by a band who love to confuse and entertain in equal measure.

A second album of cathartic, infectious R&B/alt-pop.

Damien Jurado pared down his songwriting to its barest of essentials on 2019’s *In the Shape of a Storm*, an all-acoustic set that paid homage to his late friend and frequent collaborator Richard Swift. The Seattle singer-songwriter’s 15th album follows a similarly understated route, touching on themes of guilt, commitment, and acceptance over a broader palette of sounds. Jurado narrates story sketches that feel like part of a larger story on \"Arthur Aware” and “When You Were Few,\" decorating his acoustic arrangements with lush ambient textures over his soft, gravely voice. “Sandra” is just as spare and mysterious, setting up an intimate moment that leaves more questions than answers: “Don’t get up just yet/For I am still changing my mind.” The serene cosmic waltz of “The End of the Road” is gorgeously orchestrated and adventurous, which, just like his five-album stint with Swift (best demonstrated on his sprawling Maraqopa trilogy), shows his willingness to take chances.

Damien Jurado: Guitar, Vocals, Percussion, Mellotron Josh Gordon: Bass, Electric Guitar, Drums, Percussion, Hammond C3, Rhodes, Mellotron, Drum Machines All songs written & performed by Damien Jurado Produced by Damien Jurado Recorded & Mixed by Alex Bush at Sonikwire Studio Mastered by Greg Calbi at Sterling Sound Cover art by Damien Jurado Layout by Scott Paverstone

Chaos Wonderland is the seventh full-length album by Colorama, depending on who you believe (it’s the ninth if you include the ‘mini’ albums). Why Chaos Wonderland? Colorama frontman Carwyn Ellis explains, “well.. I’ve travelled a lot these last few years and I’ve seen a lot of places in total flux, upheaval and yes - chaos. Nowhere more so than at home. But at the same time, I’ve seen much to make me cheerful, not least in the beautiful sights I’ve witnessed, along with the warmth and inherent goodness of the vast majority of people I’ve encountered”. It was recorded at Shawn Lee’s ‘Shop’ Studio in early 2018, during the gaps in between Ellis’ stints touring around the world with the Pretenders. Shawn Lee has had an incredibly productive (30-odd solo albums to date) career, featuring collaborations with a myriad of different artists including Clutchy Hopkins, Tony Joe White, Darondo, Money Mark, Tommy Guerrero, Psapp, Little Barrie and Saint Etienne, with whom he worked on the ‘Home Counties’ album, which is where he and Carwyn Ellis first worked together, on their 2017 single, ‘Dive’. With both musicians being prodigiously talented multi-instrumentalists, the album was recorded surprisingly quickly, and with very little added help, although Lay Low, the brilliant Icelandic singer, added her vocal magic to the funky paean to love, ‘Me & She’. Other highlights include ‘Dusty Road’, about an outcast on the run, the cosmic tiki-flavoured ‘Black Hole’, boombastic opener ‘And’ and the smoothly soulful ‘Reconciliation’, which takes on a whole new meaning in the current environment we’ve found ourselves in. The album was recorded, then Carwyn got inundated with other projects, and time flew by... Fast forward to 2020. In March, everything ground to a halt for most of us in the UK, including Carwyn. This busiest of musicians now found he had time on his hands and... music to release! So, finally, we have Chaos Wonderland, the ‘new’ album by Colorama.

One night in the mid-1970s, Neil Young invited some musician friends to join him at the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood for a small listening party. He had not one but two finished LPs to share: *Homegrown* and *Tonight’s the Night*, which, since it happened to be on the same reel, was simply an added bonus. But in hearing them back to back that evening, Young had a change of heart. Written in the wake of his relationship with actor Carrie Snodgress, *Homegrown* was so personal and intense that it frightened him. He chose to release *Tonight’s the Night* in June 1975 instead, leaving most of *Homegrown* to sit in his vault for nearly five decades, unheard—a lost classic he described to his father as “great songs I can live without.” Released now as part of his ongoing Archives project, *Homegrown* sounds like a troubled extension to the folk and country rock of 1972’s *Harvest*, the best-selling album that year. For a listener, it’s a thrilling juxtaposition: one of the decade’s brightest (and most enigmatic) stars at the height of his powers creatively, while also at his most vulnerable personally. Much of what’s here is previously unreleased—the crunchy title track and “Star of Bethlehem” appeared on side two of 1977’s *American Stars ’N Bars*, “Little Wing” on 1980’s *Hawks & Doves*—but all of it still feels cathartic, alive with regret. The album opens with a goodbye, “Separate Ways” speaking directly to Snodgress and making devastating reference to their son Zeke (“Sharin’ our little boy/Who grew from joy back then”) above a mournful tangle of acoustic guitar, pedal steel, and harmonica. “Vacancy” offers anger and “Try” glimmers of optimism as well as vocal contributions from Emmylou Harris. Recorded as an acoustic duet with The Band’s Robbie Robertson before a CSNY show at Wembley, “White Line” is a highlight that Young would electrify later on with Crazy Horse for 1990’s *Ragged Glory*. “You were my raft and I let you slide,” Young sings, his voice weary. “It seemed like a long, easy ride/I was adrift on a river of pride.”

“This music actually healed me.” That’s the hopeful message Lady Gaga brings with her as she emerges from something of a career detour—having mostly abandoned dance pop in favor of her 2016 album *Joanne*’s more stripped-back sound and the intimate singer-songwriter fare of 2018’s *A Star Is Born*. She returns with *Chromatica*, a concept album about an Oz-like virtual world of colors—produced by BloodPop®, who also worked on *Joanne*—and it’s a return to form for the disco diva. “I’m making a dance record again,” Gaga tells Apple Music, “and this dance floor, it’s mine, and I earned it.” As with many artists, music is a form of therapy for Gaga, helping her exorcise the demons of past family traumas. But it wasn’t until she could embrace her own struggles—with mental health, addiction and recovery, the trauma of sexual assault—that she felt free enough to start dancing again. “All that stuff that I went through, I don’t have to feel pain about it anymore. It can just be a part of me, and I can keep going.” And that’s the freedom she wants her fans to experience—even if it will be a while before most of them can enjoy the new album in a club setting. “I can’t wait to dance with people to this music,” says Gaga. But until then, she hopes they’ll find a little therapy in the music, like she did. “It turns out if you believe in yourself, sometimes you’re good enough. I would love for people that listen to this record to feel and hear that.” Below, Lady Gaga walks us through some of the key tracks on *Chromatica* and explains the stories behind them. **Chromatica I** “The beginning of the album symbolizes for me the beginning of my journey to healing. It goes right into this grave string arrangement, where you feel this pending doom that is what happens if I face all the things that scare me. That string arrangement is setting the stage for a more cinematic experience with this world that is how I make sense of things.” **Alice** “I had some dark conversations with BloodPop® about how I felt about life. ‘I’m in the hole, I’m falling down/So down, down/My name isn’t Alice, but I’ll keep looking for Wonderland.’ So it’s this weird experience where I’m going, ‘I’m not sure I’m going to make it, but I’m going to try.’ And that’s where the album really begins.” **Stupid Love** “In the ‘Stupid Love’ video, red and blue are fighting. It could decidedly be a political commentary. And it’s very divisive. The way that I see the world is that we are divided, and that it creates a tense environment that is very extremist. And it’s part of my vision of Chromatica, which is to say that this is not dystopian, and it’s not utopian. This is just how I make sense of things. And I wish that to be a message that I can translate to other people.” **Rain on Me (With Ariana Grande)** “When we were vocally producing her, I was sitting at the console and I said to her, ‘Everything that you care about while you sing, I want you to forget it and just sing. And by the way, while you’re doing that, I’m going to dance in front of you,’ because we had this huge, big window. And she was like, ‘Oh my god, I can’t. I don’t know.’ And then she started to do things with her voice that were different. And it was the joy of two artists going, ‘I see you.’ Humans do this. We all do things to make ourselves feel safe, and I always challenge artists when I work with them, I go, ‘Make it super fucking unsafe and then do it again.’” **Free Woman** “I was sexually assaulted by a music producer. It’s compounded all of my feelings about life, feelings about the world, feelings about the industry, what I had to compromise and go through to get to where I am. And I had to put it there. And when I was able to finally celebrate it, I said, ‘You know what? I’m not nothing without a steady hand. I’m not nothing unless I know I can. I’m still something if I don’t got a man, I’m a free woman.’ It’s me going, ‘I no longer am going to define myself as a survivor, or a victim of sexual assault. I just am a person that is free, who went through some fucked-up shit.’” **911** “It’s about an antipsychotic that I take. And it’s because I can’t always control things that my brain does. I know that. And I have to take medication to stop the process that occurs. ‘Keep my dolls inside diamond boxes/Save it till I know I’m going to drop this front I’ve built around me/Oasis, paradise is in my hands/Holding on so tight to this status/It’s not real, but I’ll try to grab it/Keep myself in beautiful places, paradise is in my hands.’” **Sine From Above (With Elton John)** “S-I-N-E, because it’s a sound wave. That sound, sine, from above is what healed me to be able to dance my way out of this album. ‘I heard one sine from above/I heard one sine from above/Then the signal split into the sound created stars like me and you/Before there was love, there was silence/I heard one sine and it healed my heart, heard a sine.’ That was later in the recording process that I actually was like, ‘And now let me pay tribute to the very thing that has revived me, and that is music.’”

Drive-By Truckers’ 13th studio album arrives with little notice, announced just a few days before release—but for fans of Patterson Hood’s long-running Southern rock band, the of-the-moment topicality of these nine songs is anything but surprising. DBTs’ second album of 2020 finds the quintet turning their searing, soulful songwriting towards civil unrest and our fractured collective psyche, throwing in a rip-roaring cover of the Ramones’ “The KKK Took My Baby Away” for good measure. Twenty-five years in, Drive-By Truckers have lost none of their Southern-fried bite, continuing to proudly sound like no one except themselves.

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

The Bobby Lees Strike the Punk-Blues Jugular on Jon Spencer-Produced ‘Skin Suit’. The Bobby Lees’ SKIN SUIT is oozing with sex, sweat, and joyful abandon. It’s a raucous ride from beginning to end. Cover to cover, this thing’s got you by the short hairs. – POPMATTERS Fronted by Sam Quartin, whose vocal charisma channels some of the preposterous intensity of the Alan Vega/Cave/Cramps lineage, the band's second album is an explosion of intensity of high-concept, low-budget rock'n'roll. –– UNCUT The band show they’ve got the chops and the weirdness to refresh vintage rock, punk, and blues without the commercialism that has plagued other prominent garage bands of their generation. – CHICAGO READER

The Orielles release their brand new album 'Disco Volador' via Heavenly Recordings on February 28th, 2020. The first pressing is translucent orange vinyl edition with a groovy green splodge is now available & standard CD. All vinyl comes with a download card and code. We also have a limited number of signed editions of this first pressing as well as CDs available. 'Disco Volador' sees the 4-piece push their sonic horizon to its outer limits as astral travellers, hitching a ride on the melodic skyway to evade the space-time continuum through a sharp collection of progressive strato-pop symphonies. Voyaging through cinematic samba, 70s disco, deep funk boogies, danceable grooves and even tripping on 90s acid house, Disco Volador is set to propel The Orielles spinning into a higher zero-gravity orbit. Written and recorded in just 12 months, it captures the warp-speed momentum of their post-Silver Dollar Moment debut album success; an unforgettable summer touring, playing festivals like Green Man and bluedot, Disco Volador’s library catalogue vibes stem from a band lapping up and widening their pool of musical discovery whether nodding to Italian film score maestros Sandro Brugnolini and Piero Umiliani, or the Middle Eastern tones of Khruangbin and Altin Gün. The album features the bands new single ‘Come Down On Jupiter’ and follows the critically acclaimed debut ‘Silver Dollar Moment.’

You don’t need to know that Fiona Apple recorded her fifth album herself in her Los Angeles home in order to recognize its handmade clatter, right down to the dogs barking in the background at the end of the title track. Nor do you need to have spent weeks cooped up in your own home in the middle of a global pandemic in order to more acutely appreciate its distinct banging-on-the-walls energy. But it certainly doesn’t hurt. Made over the course of eight years, *Fetch the Bolt Cutters* could not possibly have anticipated the disjointed, anxious, agoraphobic moment in history in which it was released, but it provides an apt and welcome soundtrack nonetheless. Still present, particularly on opener “I Want You to Love Me,” are Apple’s piano playing and stark (and, in at least one instance, literal) diary-entry lyrics. But where previous albums had lush flourishes, the frenetic, woozy rhythm section is the dominant force and mood-setter here, courtesy of drummer Amy Wood and former Soul Coughing bassist Sebastian Steinberg. The sparse “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” is backed by drumsticks seemingly smacking whatever surface might be in sight. “Relay” (featuring a refrain, “Evil is a relay sport/When the one who’s burned turns to pass the torch,” that Apple claims was excavated from an old journal from written she was 15) is driven almost entirely by drums that are at turns childlike and martial. None of this percussive racket blunts or distracts from Apple’s wit and rage. There are instantly indelible lines (“Kick me under the table all you want/I won’t shut up” and the show-stopping “Good morning, good morning/You raped me in the same bed your daughter was born in”), all in the service of channeling an entire society’s worth of frustration and fluster into a unique, urgent work of art that refuses to sacrifice playfulness for preaching.

angharad davies - violin rhodri davies - electric harp nikos veliotis - cello recorded 20th - 24th of may 2008 by christina clar at Q02, brussels editing & mixing: nikos veliotis mastering: coti k originally released in 2010 on organized music from thessaloniki # 9 / absurd #82 research center for the definition of happiness (istanbul branch).

Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: A celebrated singer-songwriter taps the production expertise of The National’s Aaron Dessner to nudge her out of her comfort zone and create a delicate, ethereal art-pop song cycle that perfectly captures the isolating feeling of life under COVID lockdown. But to be fair, Hannah Georgas was plotting her mesmerizing fourth album with Dessner long before Tay-Tay came a-calling: *All That Emotion* is the culmination of an email correspondence that began back in 2015, and which has since led to Georgas touring with The National as both an opening act and backing vocalist. “Aaron has a way of making things sound really lush and warm,” Georgas raves to Apple Music. “He gives a lot of attention to intricate details, yet he still finds this way of creating a lot of space.” But while Dessner’s sonic fingerprints are all over the record—seamless fusion of percolating electronics, desolate guitar melodies, and heart-swelling ascents—they all serve to enhance *All That Emotion*’s most essential quality: Georgas’ unflinchingly frank lyrics about broken relationships, family dysfunction, and self-doubt. Here, Georgas takes us on a track-by-track rummage through the emotional wreckage. **That Emotion** “I realize that, at times in my life, I\'ve just let emotions build up inside and I just tuck it away and keep going. And then I realize, at other times, I\'ll get triggered by something and feel that build up. So this song is just about suppressing my emotions and being like, ‘I\'m okay,’ but it ends up weighing me down in the end.” **Easy** “I wrote all of these songs in a concentrated period of time in 2017. I had just settled into my new apartment in Toronto after moving from Vancouver, where I had spent 13 years of my life. I was just getting used to the city, and I was going through a lot of changes not only in my personal life, but in my work life. This song was about a breakup that I was going through at the time. I was coming home from a party in the wintertime and I was walking home and having a moment, just feeling like I wanted to show up at this person\'s place. And I did actually go there. I woke up the next morning being like, ‘Thank god I didn\'t run into anybody there.’” **Dreams** “A lot of the time when we tracked the songs, I would play a song on piano and sing it and then Aaron would create really awesome drum loops and create a foundation from there. We had an incredible drummer, Jason Treuting, come in to spend a day with us and just track over everything. He\'s one of the coolest drummers I\'ve ever witnessed—he\'s really out of the box with his approach.” **Pray It Away** “I met up with a good friend of mine who was planning her wedding and she was sending out invitations and got a message back from one of her family members saying that they wouldn\'t attend because they don\'t agree with her getting married to another woman. It just really made me feel awful. I come from a very conservative family, and I\'ve had so many disagreements and arguments with my family on matters, so I really felt her pain. The song is coming from the position of being in her shoes and also taking my personal perspective from my relationship with my family.” **Someone I Don’t Know** “This is like a companion piece to ‘Easy,’ but it\'s definitely past that point of wanting to go back \[to your ex\] and more about feeling like you never really knew the person that you were in a relationship with.” **Punching Bag** “This has happened a lot in my past relationships: I realized that I\'m not supposed to be here, but it\'s just tricky to end. You get this feeling of dependency or \'what would life be like without this?\' But you know life sucks in it. You\'re just in it and you want to try to change that person, but you know deep down inside that just never works.” **Same Mistakes** “This is a bit of self-reflection and trying to understand who I am more, and realizing that a lot of the stuff that happens in my life—and the way I make decisions and react to things—stems from how I was raised. I\'m just really kind of amazed by that and how I\'m still working on things that have affected me from my childhood. So this song is like an inner dialogue with myself, talking about my past…” **Just a Phase** “...and this song is about the same kind of thing! It’s all just a huge therapy session, this record. This one is definitely about getting out of the way of your anxiety and your stresses and the things that hold you back, and when all that is gone, how clear you are and how much you feel like you can accomplish anything.” **Habits** “I\'m in a relationship now, and I feel like I have habits and ways to protect myself, because of me being hurt in the past, whether it\'s from another past relationship or a trauma from adolescence. We just have ways that we react to things so that we don\'t get hurt, and that\'s what I\'m talking about in this song.” **Change** “This is a nice way to kind of wrap things up. It\'s about realizing that change is a powerful thing, and things that feel like a bad ending and that are really hard to go through at the time will have a silver lining in a way that you probably wouldn\'t ever realize it would. I\'ve experienced that a lot in my life.” **Cruel** “This is the only song on the record that\'s really stripped down. Aaron and I recorded this one live off the floor with our engineer Jon Low, and it feels a little bit different than the others. I guess that\'s why I wanted to end it with this one.”

As Jason Isbell inched deeper and deeper into writing what would become *Reunions*, he noticed a theme begin to emerge in its songs. “I looked around and thought, ‘There’s so many ghosts here,’” he tells Apple Music. “To me, ghosts always mean a reunion with somebody you’ve known before, or yourself coming back to tell you something that you might have missed.” It’s possible that the Alabama native had missed more than most: Starting with a promising but fairly turbulent stint as a member of Drive-By Truckers in the 2000s, the first act and decade of the Jason Isbell origin story had been largely defined by his kryptonite-like relationship with alcohol. His fourth LP since becoming sober in 2012, *Reunions* is another set of finely rendered rock and roots music that finds Isbell—now A Great American Songwriter—making peace with the person he used to be. It’s an album whose scenes of love and anger and grief and parenthood are every bit as rich as its sonics. “Up until the last couple of years, I didn’t necessarily feel safe because I thought there was a risk that I might fall back into those old ways,” he says of revisiting his past. “These songs and the way the record sounds reflects something that was my intention 15 or 12 years ago, but I just didn’t have the ability and the focus and the means to get there as a songwriter or a recording artist.” Here, he takes us inside each song on the album. **What’ve I Done to Help** “It seems like this song set the right mood for the record. It\'s a little bit indicting of myself, but I think it\'s also a positive message: Most of what I\'m talking about on this album is trying to be as aware as possible and not just get lost in your own selfish bubble, because sometimes the hardest thing to do is to be honest with yourself. Incidentally, I started singing this song as I was driving around close to my house. \[The chorus\] was just something that I found myself repeating over and over to myself. Of course, all that happened before the virus came through, but I was writing, I think, about preexisting social conditions that really the virus just exacerbated or at least turned a light on. We had a lot of division between the people that have and the people that don\'t, and I think it\'s made pretty obvious now.” **Dreamsicle** “It\'s a sad story about a child who\'s in the middle of a home that\'s breaking apart. But I find that if you can find positive anchors for those kinds of stories, if you can go back to a memory that is positive—and that\'s what the chorus does—then once you\'re there, inside that time period in your life, it makes it a little easier to look around and pay attention to the darker things. This kind of song could have easily been too sad. It\'s sad enough as it is, but there are some very positive moments, the chorus being the most important: You\'re just sitting in a chair having a popsicle on a summer night, which is what kids are supposed to be doing. But then, you see that things are pretty heavy at home.” **Only Children** “My wife Amanda \[Shires\] and I were in Greece, on Hydra, the island Leonard Cohen had lived on and, I think, the first place he ever performed one of his songs for people. We were there with a couple of friends of ours, Will Welch and his wife Heidi \[Smith\]. Will was working on a piece on Ram Dass for his magazine and I was working on this song and Amanda was working on a song and Heidi was working on a book, and we all just sort of sat around and read, sharing what we were working on with each other. And it occurred to me that you don\'t do that as much as you did when you were a kid, just starting to write songs and play music with people. It started off as sort of a love song to that and that particular time, and then from there people started emerging from my past, people who I had spent time with in my formative years as a creative person. There was one friend that I lost a few years ago, and she and I hadn\'t been in touch for a long time, but I didn\'t really realize I was writing about her until after I finished the song and other people heard it and they asked if that was who it was about. I said I guess it was—I didn\'t necessarily do that intentionally, but that\'s what happens if you\'re writing from the heart and from the hip.” **Overseas** “Eric Clapton said in an interview once that he was a good songwriter, but not a great songwriter—he didn’t feel like he would ever be great because he wasn\'t able to write allegorically. I was probably 12 or 13 when I read that, and it stuck with me: To write an entire song that\'s about multiple things at once can be a pretty big challenge, and that’s what I was trying to do with ‘Overseas.’ On one hand, you have an expatriate who had just had enough of the country that they\'re living in and moved on and left a family behind. And the other is more about my own personal story, where I was home with our daughter when my wife was on tour for a few months. I was feeling some of the same emotions and there were some parallels. I think the most important thing to me was getting the song right: I needed it to feel like the person who has left had done it with good reason and that the person\'s reasons had to be clearly understandable. It’s not really a story about somebody being left behind as much as it\'s a story about circumstances.” **Running With Our Eyes Closed** “It\'s a love song, but I try really hard to look at relationships from different angles, because songs about the initial spark of a relationship—that territory has been covered so many times before and so well that I don\'t know that I would have anything new to bring. I try to look at what it’s like years down the road, when you\'re actually having to negotiate your existence on a daily basis with another human being or try to figure out what continues to make the relationship worth the work. And that\'s what this song is about: It\'s about reevaluating and thinking, ‘Okay, what is it about this relationship that makes it worth it for me?’\" **River** “I think that song is about the idea that as a man—and I was raised this way to some extent—you aren\'t supposed to express your emotions freely. It sounds almost like a gospel song, and the character is going to this body of water to cast off his sins. The problem with that is that it doesn\'t actually do him any good and it doesn\'t help him deal with the consequences of his actions and it doesn\'t help him understand why he keeps making these decisions. He\'s really just speaking to nobody. And the song is a cautionary tale against that. I think it\'s me trying to paint a portrait of somebody who is living in a pretty toxic form of being a man. I\'m always trying to take stock of how I\'m doing as a dad and as a husband. And it\'s an interesting challenge, because to support my wife and my daughter without exerting my will as a man over the household is something that takes work, and it\'s something that I wouldn\'t want to turn away from. There’s a constant evaluation for me: Am I being supportive without being overbearing, and am I doing a good job of leading by example? Because that\'s really honestly all you can do for your kids. If my daughter sees me go to therapy to talk about things that are troubling me and not allow those things to cause me to make bad choices, then she\'s going to feel like it\'s okay to talk about things herself. And if I ever have a boy, I want him to think the same thing.” **Be Afraid** “It\'s a rock song and it\'s uptempo and I love those. But those are hard to write sometimes. It helps when you\'re angry about something, and on ‘Be Afraid,’ I was definitely angry. I felt like I stick my neck out and I think a lot of us recording artists end up sticking our neck out pretty often to talk about what we think is right. And then, you turn around and see a whole community of singers and entertainers who just keep their mouth shut. I mean, it\'s not up to me to tell somebody how to go about their business, but I think if you have a platform and you\'re somebody who is trying to make art, then I think it\'s impossible to do that without speaking your mind. For me, it\'s important to stay mindful of the fact that there are a lot of people in this world that don\'t have any voice at all and nobody is paying any attention to what they\'re complaining about and they have some real valid complaints. I\'m not turning my anger toward the people in the comments, though—I\'m turning my anger toward the people who don\'t realize that as an entertainer who sometimes falls under scrutiny for making these kinds of statements, you still are in a much better position than the regular, everyday American who doesn\'t have any voice at all.” **St. Peter’s Autograph** “When you\'re in a partnership with somebody—whether it\'s a marriage or a friendship—you have to be able to let that person grieve in their own way. I was writing about my perspective on someone else\'s loss, because my wife and I lost a friend and she was much closer to him than I was and had known him for a long time. What I was trying to say in that song was ‘It\'s okay to feel whatever you need to feel, and I\'m not going to let my male-pattern jealousy get in the way of that.’ A lot of the things that I still work on as an adult are being a more mature person, and a lot of it comes from untying all these knots of manhood that I had sort of tied into my brain growing up in Alabama. Something I\'ve had to outgrow has been this idea of possession in a relationship and this jealousy that I think comes from judgment on yourself, from questioning yourself. You wind up thinking, \'Well, do I deserve this person, and if not, what\'s going to happen next?\' And part of it was coming to terms with the fact that it didn\'t matter what I deserved—it’s just what I have. It’s realizing something so simple as your partner is another human being, just like you are. Writing is a really great way for me to explain how I feel to myself and also sometimes to somebody else—this song I was trying to speak to my wife and addressing her pretty directly, saying, ‘I want you to know that I\'m aware of this. I know that I\'m capable of doing this. I\'m going to try my best to stay out of the way.’ And that\'s about the best you can do sometimes.” **It Gets Easier** “I was awake until four in the morning, just sort of laying there, not terribly concerned or worried about anything. And there was a time where I thought, ‘Well, if I was just drunk, I could go to sleep.’ But then I also thought, ‘Well, yeah, but I would wake up a couple hours later when the liquor wore off.’ I think it\'s important for me to remember how it felt to be handicapped by this disease and how my days actually went. I\'ve finally gotten to the point now where I don\'t really hate that guy anymore, and I think that\'s even helped me because I can go back and actually revisit emotions and memories from those times without having to wear a suit of armor. For a many years, it was like, ‘Okay, if you\'re going to go back there, then you\'re going to have to put this armor on. You\'re going to have to plan your trip. You\'re going to have to get in and get out, like you\'re stealing a fucking diamond or something. Because if you stay there too long or if you wind up romanticizing the way your life was in those days, then there\'s a good chance that you might slip.\' I think the more honest I am with myself, the less likely I am to collapse and go back to who I used to be. It\'s not easy to constantly remind yourself of how much it sucked to be an active alcoholic, but it\'s necessary. I wrote this song for people who would get a lot of the inside references, and definitely for people who have been in recovery for a long period of time. I wrote it for people who have been going through that particular challenge and people who have those conversations with themselves. And really that\'s what it is at its root: a song about people who are trying to keep an open dialogue with themselves and explain, this is how it\'s going to be okay. Because if you stop doing that and then you lose touch with the reasons that you got sober in the first place and you go on cruise control, then you slip up or you just wind up white-knuckling it, miserable for the rest of your life. And I can\'t make either of those a possibility.” **Letting You Go** “Once, when my daughter was really little, my wife said, ‘Every day, they get a little bit farther away from you.’ And that\'s the truth of it: It’s a long letting-go process. This is a simple song, a country song—something that I was trying to write like a Billy Joe Shaver or Willie Nelson song. I think it works emotionally because it’s stuff that a lot of people have felt, but it\'s tough to do in a way that wasn\'t cheesy, so I started with when we first met her and then tried to leave on a note of ‘Eventually, I know these things are going to happen. You’re going to have to leave.’ And that\'s the whole point. Some people think, ‘Well, my life is insignificant, none of this matters.’ And that makes them really depressed. But then some people, like me, think, ‘Man, my life is insignificant. None of this matters. This is fucking awesome.’ I think that might be why I wound up being such a drunk, but it helps now, still, for me to say, ‘I can\'t really fuck this up too bad. So I might as well enjoy it.’”

The songs comprising Keeley Forsyth’s debut are, she states simply, “like blocks of metal that drop from the sky.” With its minimal arrangements placing her recollections and dissections of sometimes harrowing experiences front and centre, Debris showcases her elemental voice and an outpouring of candid, haunting lyrics detailing the seismic ruptures which take place behind closed doors. “There was a lot going on in my life that was heavy and hard,” she adds. “Songs were made under that moment.” Born and raised in Oldham, Forsyth first made her name as an actor, and while the creation of music has been a constant feature in her life, she’s taken the long road to its release. A deeply intuitive and singular musician, she began writing several years ago, accompanying herself on harmonium and accordion. “I came up with lots of songs in a very short space of time,” Forsyth recalls. “Most songs were written in the time it took to sing them. But I held them close, and often thought I needed to do something with them. It never felt right to go out and look for it. I felt like I needed to wait and move when I felt inspired.” That inspiration struck one evening while listening to the radio, where she first encountered pianist and composer Matthew Bourne’s work. “I heard his music and suddenly I could hear them both together,” she says of her songs and his compositions. “I felt compelled to write to him. He got straight back and said he loved what I was doing.” What followed were quick and instinctive collaborations with Bourne and producer and musician Sam Hobbs, with the initial burst of momentum Forsyth felt when writing carried through into the studio, preserving the intricacies and accidents that make an album human.

As a kid in the late ’60s, Wayne Coyne lived in fear of losing his oldest brother to drugs. “A lot of times, when he left the house on his motorcycle, I just thought, ‘He’s going to crack,’” the Flaming Lips frontman tells Apple Music. “If he didn\'t come home ’til 4:00, I would literally be up in my bed, scared that he was dead somewhere. That’s a real thing.” The Lips’ 16th studio LP is a haunting exploration of how we see the world as children and adults, high and sober, innocent and experienced—and its cover is a photo of Coyne’s brother in 1968. Featuring guest vocals from Kacey Musgraves, it’s also—by Flaming Lips standards—a song-oriented reimagining of American classic rock that’s inspired, in part, by a passage in the late Tom Petty’s biography about Petty and his band Mudcrutch stopping to record in Coyne’s native Oklahoma in 1974, as they traveled cross-country to make a go of it in LA. “There\'s never been anybody who’s ever uncovered it or ever noticed it or anything,” Coyne says of the Tulsa session. “But in that little gap, I wondered what that music would have been. So \[multi-instrumentalist\] Steven \[Drozd\] and I just took it further. Like, ‘What if Tom Petty and his band would have run into my older brother, if my brother went up there and they all got addicted to drugs and they got caught up in all this violence and they never became Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, but they made this very sad, fucked-up, beautiful record in Tulsa?’ And then we said, ‘Let\'s make that record.’ Here, Coyne tells the story of every song therein. **Will You Return / When You Come Down** “A lot of music is trying to tell you, ‘Dude, go blow your mind.’ And ‘Being insane is great.’ Steven and I\'ve always been like, ‘Dude, I think I\'m insane anyway.’ And I think we\'re glad to finally be embarrassed enough or old enough or whatever it is to say, ‘Yeah, we\'re singing about drugs.’ Part of it is our friends that have died from crashing their car. Part of it is our friends that have died from drug overdoses. And a part of the song is survivor’s guilt, while part of me was glad that I wasn\'t the one who died. But now as you look at yourself later, you’re like, ‘I wish was there with you.’ I think when you\'re a teenager and your friends die in a car accident, part of you has this fantasy you\'ll see them in heaven. Or if we live a thousand lives, you’ll be something else and I\'ll meet you again. And all of these are just fantasies, so you really have to face the horrible truth that you\'re never going to see that person again. The song’s you singing to these ghosts and hoping that they understand how you feel about it.” **Watching the Lightbugs Glow** “We like to always leave room for instrumentals. We like that it just floats along. You don\'t have to listen to it so intensely. Once we convinced Kacey Musgraves to sing on one track \[‘God and the Policeman’\], I thought, ‘Well, while we\'re there, why don\'t we try to do two songs?’ So we came up with another song, and then we end up coming up with a third song \[‘Flowers of Neptune 6’\], and she ended up liking all the things that we presented. I asked her about the song \[2018’s\] ‘Mother.’ She talked about this idea of light bugs, and they were floating around in her yard and she got one with a leaf and she put it in the house and she played some music for it and they danced together. All of this was on a very pleasant acid trip, but she did say that not all of her acid trips were pleasant—she understood sometimes they go horribly bad. While we were coming with this thing, I thought, well, let\'s just have her do kind of a wordless melodic thing, and we would let it be about that story. We could relate to it and she could relate to it and it would be real. And it would be true. I think that\'s why we put it second. Like, ‘Let\'s just not be in such a hurry to say more stuff, just let it just float along with the mood.’ But I wouldn\'t have done it without her. We would have never done it as one of us singing. It was made for her.” **Flowers of Neptune 6** “‘Flowers of Neptune’ came from an insanely great demo that Steven made, but it was long enough that we could envision it being a bigger, more epic song. As we started to make it, we were like, ‘I don\'t think it\'s as good if it keeps going too long, because it\'s got such a crescendo of emotion. Let’s just make it two songs.’ One, ‘Lightbugs,’ could be a little bit more fun and kind of floaty and melancholy—but optimistic. The other, ‘Flowers of Neptune,’ could be more powerful and personal. There is some connection to that idea that our older brothers and their friends, they were these characters that we didn\'t relate to. They were crazy and they were going to go to jail. They were going to go off to war, they were going to get in a fight, they were going to get in a motorcycle accident and we weren’t. And then at some point we realized their life and ours is the same. I am me because of them. You can\'t really express it, but in a song you can, because it\'s big and it\'s crescendos and it\'s emotional and you find somehow you\'re able to express this thing that we would never, ever consider saying to our real brothers, in real life. You\'d just be too embarrassed. But music wants you to go all the way.” **Dinosaurs on the Mountain** “I remember being in the back of the station wagon with my family as we were traveling down a highway, in the middle of the night, on our way to Pittsburgh. And seeing these giant trees, pretending that they were dinosaurs, falling over and killing each other. And also remembering that this is like the last time that I felt that I could just see fantasy and not worry that we\'re driving down a highway, my father might be falling asleep, and we could crash the car and die—all these things you start to think about when you\'re becoming an adult. The times we went back after, I didn\'t see the dinosaurs in the trees. They were just trees. You can\'t get that back. It’s trying to make that into a song that an adult can relate to instead of being like a children\'s storybook or a Disney movie.” **At the Movies on Quaaludes** “I only did quaaludes once, and I have to say, I didn\'t feel anything. There\'s a line at the very beginning of the novel *The Outsiders*—which when you live in Oklahoma, you read in junior high and high school because it\'s set in Tulsa—about coming out of a movie theater. You were so immersed in the movie that you forgot, ‘Oh yeah, this is real life out here.’ My brothers and their friends, they would go to movies all the time in the middle of the day and they would just be so completely fucked up. There was hardly any moments that they weren\'t on some drugs. And I just remembered for myself sometimes, the shock of being in a movie theater, so immersed in that, and you walk outside and you\'re back in real life, whereas I think sometimes they never came back to real life. It\'s just one big, long movie. So there\'s something wonderful about that. It\'s like a dream that you know is never going to come true, but the better to dream it and know it isn\'t going to come true. Or is it worse to not dream it at all?” **Mother I’ve Taken LSD** “This one is devastating for me. It has to be 1968, 1969—there’s a lot of talk about LSD. It’s in the news every day, and when we would be at school, dudes in suits would come with a briefcase full of drugs and say, ‘Don\'t take drugs. And especially don\'t take LSD, because it\'ll make you think that you can fly, and you\'ll go to the top of a bridge and jump off and you\'ll die.’ So all this is in our minds and I\'m only seven or eight years old. It’s like, ‘Fuck. The Beatles think it\'s cool, but the police think it\'s horrible. What do I do here?’ So my brother and my mother are sitting on the porch and they’re having a conversation. I remember my brother saying, ‘Well, mother, I\'ve taken LSD.’ I just couldn\'t believe it. My own brother is doing the things that the police are coming to school to tell me about and he’s going to go insane. I\'m singing about it like it\'s sad for her, but really, it was just sad for me. It’s stayed with me my whole life because it was such a blow.” **Brother Eye** “Steven was like, ‘Why don\'t you just write down some words and I\'ll make up a song around your words?’ Which we never do. Usually, he\'s got a melody and I\'ll put lyrics to it, or I\'ll have lyrics and stuff and he\'ll help me with melodies. I think I wrote out, \'Mother, I don\'t want you to die.’ And then he was like, ‘Well, you have too many songs about mothers. Let\'s do one about brothers.’ His older brothers and his younger brother, all of them, his whole family is dead. When his oldest brother died, I know it devastated him, and we really don\'t sing about it. But in this way of me presenting words to him, I know that he put it in a way of saying we\'re just doing a song. But both of us knew somewhere in there, we\'re singing about this heavy thing. When it came time to be like, ‘Well, are you going to sing it or am I going to sing it?’ I just told him, ‘I think you’ve got to sing that.’ And he was just like, ‘Oh shit.’” **You n Me Sellin’ Weed** “When I was 16 and 17, I started selling pot because everybody around me was selling pot and some were making better money than they were working in a restaurant like I was. But I didn\'t want to do it for very long, because I did fear that I\'d get put in jail or something worse. The second verse is about that. It sounds pretty gentle, but it\'s really about a friend of ours who was involved in a murder. He owed the drug dealer a lot of money and the drug dealer was threatening to kill his little girl. So he went over to his house and he stabbed \[the dealer\] to death. He was put in jail for murder and he was sentenced to spend the rest of his life there. And a year or two later, he committed suicide in jail. It\'s a blissful story about a state of mind for just a moment, before the violence and all these things rush in and kill you. I was very lucky that my experience stayed an adventure. That time could have been where everything went badly and our family destroyed itself. Because we saw it happen and because we knew them and they were just like us, I think it changed us to say, ‘Let\'s not let that happen.’” **Mother Please Don’t Be Sad** “When I was 17, there was a robbery happening in the restaurant that I was working in. The guys came in and I thought for sure that I was going to be killed. This song is what I was saying to myself while I laid on the floor, waiting to be shot in the head. I was going to stop at my mother\'s house after I got off work that night and leave my dirty work uniform there, and talk to her for a little bit. I\'m laying on the floor and I know that I\'m going to die. And I\'m thinking, ‘Mother is going to wonder where I\'m at because I\'m going to be late, and she\'s going to start to worry. Then the cops are going to show up like they do in all these horrible movies, and they\'re going to tell her that I died in the robbery.’ And that line, ‘Mother, please don\'t be sad’: I said that laying on the floor there because I just knew it was going to be horrible. It was me that was going to die, but I just thought I\'ll be dead in a second, and it\'s going to be horrible for her. I wanted her to know that I wasn\'t doing something dangerous, I wasn\'t doing something fucked up. I was just at work and this happened, so don\'t worry about it. This was just the chaos of the world. Sometimes there\'s nothing you can do. You\'re just in the wrong place at the wrong time.” **When We Die When We’re High** “That beat that Steve plays—in the hands of a lot of drummers, it would be flashy and it would be pompous, but he\'s doing these things that are just so effortless that you don\'t realize what an insane beat it is. And man, that one note with that beat, that\'s got a good menacing joy about it. And then to put that title to it. A friend of ours was killed in a car accident, and everybody in the car was completely zonked out. The car hits a telephone pole and part of his head is just completely taken off and he\'s just dead right there at the scene. This is real stuff. And part of you, what you do to get around just how brutal and how horrible this is, is you do music. Well, he was so high when he died that he wouldn\'t know he was dead. He\'s going to wake up later in the afterlife, everything will be cool. We\'re saying, ‘If you\'re high when you die, do you really die?’ It\'s ridiculous, but it\'s fun to sing.” **Assassins of Youth** “I think in the beginning, it was intended to be on that Deap Lips collaboration that we did with the girls from Deap Vally, and it just never really went anywhere. Something about it reminded us of ABBA. And what I liked about ABBA is that they\'re singing about something that sounds rebellious and revolutionary, but it\'s very sweet-sounding at the same time. And because English too wasn\'t their first language, I always felt like they didn\'t quite know what they were talking about, which was better. So we took this ridiculously overused line, ‘assassins of youth,’ and we pretended that we were like ABBA—we’re not quite sure what it means in English, but we know what it means in Swedish or whatever. It\'s just great, triumphant classic-rock stuff. It presents itself like it\'s an important message. And then when you dissect it, you’re like, ‘I\'m not sure what you\'re saying.’ That, to me, is wonderful.” **God and the Policeman (feat. Kacey Musgraves)** “When Kacey heard it, she came back to me and was like, ‘Now, this is the one. This is the one I want to be on, for sure.’ I kept looking at it like Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton. I thought it would be perfect for her, a song about a fugitive on the run. On the run from what, I don’t know, but it tied into another drug story, a friend of ours who got caught up in a bad drug deal. It sounds like I\'ve told this one before, but another guy I know, a drug dealer was telling him, ‘Well, if you don\'t pay me, I\'m going to kill you.’ So he went over to \[the dealer’s house\], and the drug dealer, he thought that he was bringing him what he owed him and he just went over there and killed the guy. And he said, ‘See you later. I\'ll never see my friends again. Better than being killed by this biker drug dealer.’ I can\'t talk too much about it, but I feel like enough time has gone by, I really don\'t even know if he\'s alive anymore.” **My Religion Is You** “It still feels like a folk song or religious song or something, but nothing in our life—my life, anyway—was ever so heavy that I had to turn to God. I always had my mother, my father, and plenty of people around to explain the mysteries of pain and all that to me. I remember, when we initially went to school, our first and second grade, we went to a Catholic school. And there\'d be a lot of talk about Jesus sacrificing himself for us. I didn\'t really understand. I would ask my mother, like, ‘Well, what do they mean? Why is Jesus dying? I don\'t want him to die. Why does he have to die for me?’ And she\'d say, ‘Well, these aren\'t things that most people have to deal with. It\'s for people who don\'t really have families and brothers. People don\'t love them, so Jesus loves them. They don\'t have anybody that will listen to them. So they need God to listen to them.’ And I said, ‘Well, my religion is you.’ She\'s like, ‘Yeah, I know.’”

The fusing of Dorcha’s own unique concoction of experimental pop-noise with the offerings of the infamous Invada (owned by Geoff Barrow of Portishead/Beak) and its delicious collection of old school synths and analogue effects has born a beast of sound in the shape of the new album - Honey Badger. Not only this, the band have embarked on a multi-dimensional collaboration with a host of visual artists to curate a feature-length film which will be presented around the full vinyl and digital release on Box Records on November 6th. The album sees the journey of an introverted brain being churned through a psychedelic party and the constant battle between the bitter-sweet Jekyll & Hyde creature lurking within; the Honey Badger. It is a voyage into the unknown, an attempt at losing yourself in order to find yourself. The lyrical beginning sets up the question, ‘I’ve been thinking about what to come as?’ as we pre-empt being thrown into the social maelstrom with anxious anticipation. Who will you find? Who will you be? As we navigate ‘Honey Badger’, we go in search of resonators; personalities we can connect with, we encounter Lizards, Bruisers, Horses, beguiling tales of prophetic nature and total and utter nonsense. Reflecting Dorcha’s own nature as a group of unusual introverts with an aversion to sitting still, the tumultuous turns of the album represent the breadth of the human condition as our worlds unpredictably collide on macro and micro levels. Psychedelic prog beginnings give way to a synth-disco-party at the centre, with momentary dips into darker grunge, and the final third floating into an ethereal fantasia of synths and strings with the likes of ‘Hose’ and ‘Horses’. And mind you don’t miss the dark under-current of a presence named ‘Le Loyon’. Wherever you’re drawn to within the 5D world of the Honey Badger, who’s ‘sharp teeth glisten’, the band sincerely hopes you don’t fall into the jaws, and instead manage to shed some skin, a little light, and perhaps even find what you’re looking for.

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

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

For some electronic musicians, sound is primarily a formal or aesthetic concern; for Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, it’s spiritual. The music she makes with her Buchla modular synthesizer is an extension of her yoga practice: a means of self-knowledge, a way of finding balance between mind, body, and the world around her. The Bolinas, California, musician calls the album “my expression of love and appreciation for electricity”—that is, an attempt to channel vibrations into a shape both resonant and meaningful. She composed the album as part of a daily practice of physical movement, and it shows: Unlike drone-based ambient, which puts its focus on static tones, *The Mosaic of Transformation* is awash in waves of motion, as layer upon layer of arpeggios and pads roll and crest and shift. It amounts to the most expressive and lyrical work of Smith’s career so far, and the most surprising, too. A short, burbling introduction gives way to gentle chants and string-quartet echoes in “Remembering”; the pointillist “Understanding Body Messages” leads to buoyant, mantra-like vocals and even actual drum beats in “The Steady Heart.” It all builds to an ecstatic finish in the form of “Expanding Electricity,” which weaves together ideas from across the spectrum: minimalism, contemporary classical, new age, even folk. “How can I help to serve you so you can do what you do?” she asks, sounding benevolent and beatific. It might be the voice of electricity itself, a current ready to carry us to another world.

West coast composer, artist, and producer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith has chartered a pioneering career with multiple critically-acclaimed albums since 2015. Following the release of The Kid in 2017, Smith focused her energy in several directions. She founded Touchtheplants, a multidisciplinary creative environment for projects including the first volumes in her instrumental Electronic Series and pocket-sized poetry books on the practice of listening within. She's continued to explore the endless possibilities of electronic instruments as well as the shapes, movements, and expressions found in the physical body's relationship to sound and color. It is this life-guiding interest that forms the foundational frequencies of her latest full-length, The Mosaic of Transformation, a bright, sensorial glide through unbound wave phenomena and the radiant power discovered within oneself. "I guess in one sentence, this album is my expression of love and appreciation for electricity," says Smith. While writing and recording, she embraced a daily practice of physical movement, passing electricity through her body and into motion, in ways reflecting her audio practice, which sends currents through modular synthesizers and into the air through speakers. Not a dancer by any traditional definition, she taught herself improvisatory movement realizing flexibility, strength, and unexpectedly, what Smith calls “a visual language” (the term was introduced to her by filmmaker Sean Hellfritsch) stemming from the human body and comprised of vibrational shapes. Understood as cymatics, as she says, "as a reference for how frequencies can be visualized," much like a mosaic. Smith describes her first encounters with this mosaic; "the inspiration came to me in a sudden bubble of joy. It was accompanied by a multitude of shapes that were moving seamlessly from one into the other...My movement practice has been a constant transformation piece by piece. I made this album in the same way. Every day I would transform what I did yesterday...into something else. This album has gone through about 12 different versions of itself." As it has arrived, in a completed state, The Mosaic of Transformation is a holistic manifestation of embodied motions. Smith's signature textural curiosity that fans have grown to adore pivots naturally into a proprioceptive study of melody and timbre. Airy organ and voice interweave with burbling Buchla-spawned harmonic bubbles. "The Steady Heart" quivers to life, peppering blasts of wooden organ between winding vocal affirmations. As with a body, moving one portion requires a balance and counterbalance; here, subtle tonal twitchy signals fire in conjunction with coiling arias to create a mesmeric core. When the beat arrives at the midway mark, a swooping and jittery waltz, a sense of stasis in motion, a flow state, is sonically achieved. As soon as it syncs, it disappears back into the swirling ebbs of electric force. Other tracks stray into more ruminative physical realms. "Carrying Gravity" is built around string-like pads that expand and contract like a solar plexus, becoming taught and then loose. As the breath interacts and is focused upon, suddenly, the nervous system engages, delicate arpeggios cascade, akin to becoming aware of the transmission of energy happening between muscles and the mind. If the record could be summarized in a single movement, it is the 10-minute closing suite, a rapturous collage called "Expanding Electricity." Symphonic phrases establish the piece before washes of glittering electric peals and synthesized vibraphone helix into focus. Soon, Smith's voice grounds it all with an intuitive vocal hook, harmonized and augmented by concentric spirals of harp-and-horn-like sounds. Smith's music doesn't capture a specific emotion as much as it captures the joys of possessing a body, and the ability to, with devotion and a steady open heart, maneuver that vessel in space by way of electricity to euphoric degrees.

Atlanta underground rock provocateurs Black Lips have announced that their new LP The Black Lips Sing In A World That’s Falling Apart is set for release January 24th on Fire Records/Vice. Boasting an unapologetic southern-fried twang, the twelve-track collection marks the quintet’s most pronounced dalliance with country music yet, with a clang and harmony that is unmistakably the inimitable sound and feel of the Black Lips. While the songcraft and playing is more sophisticated, Black Lips were determined to return to the raw sound roots that marked their early efforts. Recorded and co-produced with Nic Jodoin at Laurel Canyon’s legendary, newly reopened Valentine Recording Studios (which played host to Beach Boys and Bing Crosby before shuttering in 1979) without Pro-Tools and other contemporary technology, the band banged the album out directly to tape quickly and cheaply, resulting in their grimiest, most dangerous, and best collection of songs since the aughts. Like The Byrds, who flirted with pastoral aesthetics before going all-out with the radical departure that was Sweetheart of The Rodeo, the Black Lips have been skirting the edges of country since “Sweet Kin” and “Make It” from their eponymous debut. But eschewing Graham Parson’s earnestness, Black Lips are careful not to hint at authenticity, wisely treading into their unfeigned rustic romance with the winking self-awareness of Bob Dylan’s “You Ain’t Goin Nowhere,” Rolling Stones “Dear Doctor,” or The Velvet Underground’s “Lonesome Cowboy Bill.” The band’s stylistic evolution and matured approach to musicianship and writing is, in part, due to the seismic lineup shifts they have undergone over the last half-decade. Worn down after a decade of prolific touring and recording, longtime guitarist Ian St Pé left the group in 2014, followed shortly thereafter by original drummer Joe Bradley. Jeweler/actress (and now Gucci muse) Zumi Rosow, whose sax skronk, flamboyant style, and wild stage presence had augmented the team before the duo’s departure, assumed a bigger writing and performance role in their absence. Soon drummer Oakley Munson from The Witnesses brought a new backbeat and unique backing vocal harmony into the fold. Last year the quintet was rounded out by guitarist Jeff Clarke of Demon’s Claws. The newly forged partnership, all of whom collaborate as songwriters, vocalists, and instrumentalists, has breathed new life into their sound. The result is akin to the radiance of the impulsive, wild nights where you find yourself two-stepping into the unknown.

In an era of uncertainty and introspection, frustrations will inevitably arise. Yet there may also be the potential for change. It’s possible that the warping of time and the journey into one’s own headspace that come with altered circumstances allow a moment to render the inner voice in the service of something transformative and pure. Indeed, Lorena Quintanilla - better known up until this point as one half of Mexican duo ‘Lorelle Meets The Obsolete’ - has undergone just this kind of trajectory in her solo reinvention as J. Zunz ‘Hibiscus’, her second under this name after 2017’s ‘Silente’, is the result of a metamorphic process whereby the minimal is rendered maximal and the personal fused with the political. “It is hard to describe any record as they keep unfolding to me in time” says Lorena. “Now it is almost a year since I recorded it. What I know is that I wrote the album during a personal crisis inside and a political crisis outside. After being profoundly hurt by a person I trusted but also by the structures outside of me. I wrote it during sleepless nights filled with overwhelming thoughts and feelings.” The initial vision for the J. Zunz project was for Lorena to strip her approach down to the basics - “I remember I was reading a biography of John Cage and that book detonated something in me. The author was referring to the influence of Buddhism and meditation, and modern artists like Sonia Delaunay, Lucio Fontana, Julio Le Parc, Duchamp, futirism. I was very charged with ideas.” “Lorelle is a collaboration, so every individual idea is transformed into something else. And I love that, but somehow I felt that I needed another outlet. I just needed simplicity.” Yet the strikingly confident and singular ‘Hibiscus’ marks a move on sonically from earlier comfort zones in her work, into minimal electronics, hypnotic repetition and compelling trance states, arriving at a soundworld in which cyclical synth patterns, eerie ambient textures and cathartic vocal exhortations coalesce into a beguiling atmosphere of otherworldly intensity. Although some might hear echoes amongst these songs of the like of Angelo Badalementi’s ghostly raptures, the bleak epiphanies of Nico’s ‘Marble Index’ or Fifty Foot Hose’s spare sci-fi psychedelia, both the approach and the resulting tapestry here are Lorena’s and hers alone. Yet ‘Hibscus’ more than anything else is a process of alchemy - turning a less-is-more approach into a formidable psychic assault, and undergoing an artistic transmutation that renders compelling and uplifting work from trying times. “I didn’t want these songs to sound vulnerable.” Lorena reflects.”I wanted the songs to be everything I wasn’t at that moment: strong and fearless.”

The harmonies that Chloe and Halle Bailey conjure sound like heaven. It\'s what got them tens of millions of views on YouTube; it\'s what eventually attracted Beyoncé\'s attention; and it\'s what continues to make them a force on their second album, *Ungodly Hour*. The duo experiments with a multitude of sounds and textures—many of their own making—while keeping their voices centered and striking as ever. Where their 2018 debut *The Kids Are Alright* played up an almost angelism that connected that moment to their origins as child stars, this new project is about maturation—both musically and otherwise. “I feel like we were more sure of ourselves, more sure of our messaging and what we wanted to get across in just showing that it\'s okay to have flaws and insecurities and show all the layers of what makes you beautiful,” Halle tells Apple Music. “I feel like we\'ve come a long way and in our growth as young women, and you\'d definitely be able to hear that in the music.” This time around, they\'re owning their sexuality and, along with it, the messiness that comes with being an adult and trying to figure out your place. On its face, *Ungodly Hour* is an uplifting album, but it doesn\'t shy away from the darker feelings that come along the way. “A lot of the world sees us as like little perfect angels, and we want to show the different layers of us,” Chloe says. “We\'re not perfect. We\'re growing into grown women, and we wanted to show all of that.” Here the sisters break down each song on their second album. **Intro** Halle: “This intro was made after we had finished making ‘Forgive Me.’ We thought about how we wanted to open this album, because our musicianship and musical integrity is always super-duper important to us, and we never want to lose the essence of who we are in trying to also make some songs that are a bit more mainstream. It felt like us being us completely and just drowning everyone in harmonies like we love to and just playing around. That was our time to play and to open the album with something that will make people\'s ears perk up as well as allow us to have so much fun creatively.” Chloe: “And the reason why we wanted to say the phrase ‘Don\'t ask for permission, ask for forgiveness’ is because that was a statement that wrapped and concluded the whole album. We should never have to apologize for being ourselves. You should never apologize for who you are or any of your imperfections, and you don\'t need to get permission from the world to be yourself.” **Forgive Me** Chloe: “I love it because it\'s so badass, and it\'s taking your power back and not feeling like your self-worth is in the trash. I remember we were all in the studio with \[songwriter\] Nija \[Charles\] and \[producer\] Sounwave, and for me personally, I was going through a situation where I was dealing with a guy and he picked someone else over me, and it really bothered me because I felt like it wasn\'t done in the most honest light. I like to be told things up front. And so when we were all in the session, this had just happened to me. I went in the booth and laid down some melodies, and some of the words came in, and then Halle went in and she sang ‘forgive me,’ and I thought that was so strong and powerful, and Nija laid down some melodies. We kind of constructed it as a puzzle in a way. It felt so good—it felt like we were taking our power back, like, ‘Forgive me for not caring and giving you that energy to control me and make me sad.’” **Baby Girl** Halle: “‘Baby Girl’ is a girl empowerment song, but our perspective when we were writing the song, personally, for me, it was a message that I needed to remind myself of. I remember we wrote this song in Malibu. We decided for the day after Christmas, we wanted to rent an Airbnb, and we wanted to just go out there with no parents and be by the beach and bring our gear and just create. And I remember at that time I was just feeling a little bit down, and I just needed that pick-me-up. So I started writing these lyrics about how I was feeling, how everybody makes it looks so easy and how everything that you see—it seems real, but is it really? So that was definitely an encouraging, empowering song that we wanted other girls to relate to and play when they needed that messaging—when you\'re feeling overwhelmed and insecure and you\'re just like, \'Okay, what\'s next?\' Like, nope, snap out of it. You\'re amazing.” **Do It** Chloe: “We just love the energy of that record. It feels so lighthearted and fun but simple and complex at the same time. We worked with Victoria Monét and Scott Storch on this one, and when we were creating it, we were just vibing out and feeling good. Our intention whenever we create is never to make that hit song or that single, because whenever you kind of go into that mindset, that\'s when you kind of stifle your creativity, and there\'s really nowhere to go. So we were just all having fun and vibing out, and we were just going to throw whatever to the wall and see what sticks. After we created the song, about two weeks later, we were listening to it and we were like, \'Uh-oh, we\'re really kind of feeling this. It feels really, really good.\' And we decided that that would be one that we would shoot a video to, and it just kind of made a life of its own. I\'m always happy when our music is well received, and it just makes us happy also seeing people online dancing to it and doing the dance we did in the music video. It\'s really exceeding all of our expectations.” **Tipsy** Halle: “‘Tipsy’ was such a fun record to write. My beautiful sister did this amazing production that just brought it to a whole nother level. I remember when we were first starting out the song, I was playing like these sort of country-sounding guitar chords that kind of had a little cool swing to it, and then we just started writing. We were thinking about when we\'re so in love, how our hearts are just open and how the other person in the relationship really has the power to break your heart. They have that power, and you\'re open and you\'re hoping nothing goes wrong. It\'s kind of like a warning to them: If you break my heart, if you don\'t do what you\'re supposed to do, yes, I will go after you, and yes, this will happen. Of course it\'s an exaggeration—we would never actually kill somebody over that. But we just wanted to voice how it\'s very important to take care of our hearts and that when we give a piece of ourselves, we want them to give a piece of themselves as well. It\'s a playful song, so we think a lot of people will have fun with that one.” **Ungodly Hour** Chloe: “I believe it was Christmas of 2018, and we knew that we wanted to start on this album. With anything, we\'re very visual, so we got a bunch of magazines, and we got like three posters we duct-taped together, and we made our mood board. There was a phrase that we found in a magazine that said \'the trouble with angels\' that really stuck out with us. We put that on the board, and we put a lot of women on there who didn\'t really have many clothes on because we wanted this album to express our sexuality. Halle\'s 20, I\'m 22. We just wanted to show that we can own our sexuality in a beautiful way as young women and it\'s okay to own that. So fast-forward a few months, and we were in the session with Disclosure. Whenever my sister and I create lyrics, sometimes we\'re inspired randomly on the day and we\'ll hear a phrase or something. I forgot what I was doing or what I was watching, but I heard the phrase \'ungodly hour\' and I wrote it in my notes really quick. So when we were all in a session together, we were putting our minds together, like, what can we say with that? And we came up with the phrase \'Love me at the ungodly hour.\' Love me at my worst. Love me when I\'m not the best version of myself. And the song kind of wrote itself really fast. It\'s about being in a situationship with someone who isn\'t ready to fully commit or settle down with you, but the connection is there, the chemistry is there, it\'s so electric. But being the woman, you know your self-worth and you know what you won\'t accept. So it\'s like, if you want all of me, then you need to come correct. And I love how simple and groovy the beat feels, and how the vocals kind of just rock on top of it. It feels so vibey.” **Busy Boy** Halle: “So ‘Busy Boy’ is another very playful love song. The inspiration for it basically came from our experiences, kiki-ing with our girls, when we have those moments where we\'re all gossiping and talking about what\'s going on in our lives. This one dude comes up, and we all know him because he is so fine and he\'s tried to holler at all of us. It was such a fun story to ride off of, because we have had those moments where—\'cause we\'re friends with a lot of beautiful black girls, and we\'re all doing our thing, and the same guy who is really successful or cute will hop around trying to get at each of us. So that was really funny to talk about, and also to talk about the bonding of sisterhood, of just saying all this stuff about this guy to make ourselves feel better. I mean, because at the end of the day, we have to remind ourselves that even though you may be cute, even though you may be trying to get my attention, I know that you\'re just a busy boy, and I\'m going to keep it moving.” **Overwhelmed** Chloe: “Halle and I really wanted to have interludes on this album, and we were kind of going through all of the projects and files that were on my hard drive listening on our speakers in our studio. This came up and we were like, wow. The lyrics really resonated with us, and we forgot we even wrote it. We went and reopened the project and laid down so many more harmonies on top of it. We just wanted it to kind of feel like that breath in the album, because there\'s so many times when you feel overwhelmed and sometimes you\'re even scared to admit it because you don\'t want to come off as weak or seeming like you can\'t do something, but we\'re all human. There have been so many times when Halle and I feel overwhelmed, and I\'ll play this song and feel so much better. It\'s okay to just lay in that and not feel pressured to know what\'s next and just kind of accept, and once you accept it, then you could start moving forward and planning ahead. But we all have those moments where we kind of just need to admit it and just live in it.” **Lonely** Halle: “This song is so very important to us. We did this with Scott Storch, and it ended up just kind of writing itself. I think one friend that we had in particular was kind of going through something in their life, and sometimes, a lot of the situations that we\'re around we take inspiration from to write about. We were also feeling just stuck in a way, and we wanted to write something that would uplift whoever it was out there who felt the same way we did, whether it was just being lonely and knowing that it\'s okay to be alone. And when you are alone, owning how beautiful you are and knowing that it\'s okay to be by yourself. We kind of just wrote the story that way, thinking about us alone in our apartment and what we do, what we think when we\'re in our room, and what they think when they go home. I mean, what is everybody thinking about in all of this? When people are waiting by the phone, waiting for somebody to call them, and the call never comes—you don\'t have to let that discourage you. At the end of the day, you are a beautiful soul inside and out, and as long as you\'re okay with loving yourself wholeheartedly, then you can be whoever you want to be, and you can thrive.” **Don\'t Make It Harder on Me** Chloe: “We wrote this with our good friend Nasri and this amazing producer Gitty, and we were all in the studio, and I believe Halle really inspired this song. She was going through a situation where she was involved with someone, and there was also someone else trying to get her attention, and we kind of just painted that story through the lyrics: You\'re in this wonderful relationship, but there\'s this guy who just keeps getting your attention, and you don\'t want to be tempted, you want to be faithful. And it\'s like, \'Look, you had your chance with me. Don\'t come around now that I\'m taken. Don\'t make it harder on me.\' I love it because it feels so old-school. We wanted the background to feel so nostalgic. Afterwards, we added actual strings on the record. It just feels so good—every time I listen to it, I just feel really light and free and happy.” **Wonder What She Thinks of Me** Halle: “I was really inspired for this song because of a story that was kind of happening in my life. I mean, the themes of \'Don\'t Make It Harder on Me\' and this song as well are kind of hand in hand. There was this amazing guy who\'s so sweet, and it just talks about this bond that you have with somebody and how this person came out of nowhere. And then all of a sudden, you kind of find yourself wanting that person, but they\'re in a situation and you\'re in a situation, and you don\'t want to seem like you\'re trying to take this girl\'s man. We spun it into this story of being the other woman—even though, just so you know, Chloe and I were never that. So we pushed that story so far, and it was really fun and exciting to talk about, because I don\'t think we had ever experienced or heard another song that was talking about the perspective of the other woman—the woman who is on the side or the girl who wishes so badly that she could be with him and is always there for him. So we flipped it into this drama-filled song, which we really feel like it\'s so exciting and so adventurous. The melodies and the lyrics and the beautiful production my sister did, it just really turned out amazing.” **ROYL** Chloe: “I love \'Rest of Your Life\' because it kind of feels like an ode to our debut album, *The Kids Are Alright*, with the anthemic backgrounds and feeling so youthful and grungy. With this song, we just wanted to wrap this album up by saying, \'It doesn\'t matter what mistakes you make, just live your life, go for it, have fun. You don\'t know when your time to leave this earth is, so just live out for the rest of your life.\' And even though we are in the ungodly hour right now, and we\'re learning ourselves through our mistakes and our imperfections, so what? That\'s what makes us who we are. Live it out.”

Songs of Yearning is the fourth RAIJ album and perhaps their most coherent single body of work to date. An enticing combination of eastern religious sounds and iconography, acoustic and electric instrumentation, and lilting, meditative vocals, Songs of Yearning features pieces in no fewer than six different languages: Greek, French, English, Latin, a Finnish dialect of Swedish, and Russian. IMPORTANT: If you order the 2xLP or 2xCD physical edition you're entitled to a Bandcamp code for the extra album "Nocturnes", please drop us a line at [email protected], from the e-mail address you used to buy (or giving other proof of purchase) and we'll send you one. Given the situation at the moment, we're currently shipping orders at least once a week, sometimes two or even three times. Thank you.

The French artist weaves a fiery and mesmerising second record.

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

Country Westerns is a three-piece rock band from Nashville that sounds nothing like its name. Drummer Brian Kotzur (Trash Humpers, Silver Jews) and singer-songwriter-guitarist Joseph Plunket (The Weight, Gentleman Jesse) began working on songs together in 2016, after bonding over the shared desire to be in a band in a town full of solo artists and guns-for-hire. Following a couple of years writing and playing shows with varying lineups, Sabrina Rush (State Champion) joined the band as bassist. The now complete Country Westerns recorded their debut album in New York and Nashville, encouraged by friend and producer Matt Sweeney. Plunket’s raspy bravado and subtle twang, his insistent 12-string guitar riffs, Kotzur’s dynamic and metronomic drumming, and Rush’s harmonic bass playing create hyper catchy rock songs, with lyrics that bend towards poetry and punk rock sneer in equal measure. This album was released June 26, 2020.

No map is a match for Kate NV. On her third album, the Moscow electronic musician shreds conventional geographical boundaries, leaving border fences splintered in the rearview. Her music is, very roughly speaking, a mixture of Japanese city pop and the sort of avant-disco that used to soundtrack downtown New York spots like the Mudd Club. The synths and marimba are straight out of ’80s Tokyo; the sumptuous production and dubbed-out vocals suggest ZE Records artists like Cristina; the layered horns might as well be those of session players from Arthur Russell’s orbit. We haven’t even touched upon her singing, which flits between French, English, and Russian as she juggles experimental vocal techniques with the breathy sighs of dream pop. For all their idiosyncrasies, these songs have a way of sinking into your psyche. “Not Not Not” smooths its staccato phrasing into a form lilting and hypnotic; “Sayonara” smears slap bass, streaks of synth, and hiccupping sighs into a splotchy pointillism that’s both abstract and intuitive. On their own, any one of these tracks might be mistaken for an artifact from an alternate-universe ’80s; taken together, they amount to a triumph of world-building. Kate NV has said that she wrote these songs during an emotionally difficult period, but you’d never know it: Every one quivers with the thrill of unlimited possibility.

Having uprooted herself from her NYC home after 16 years, ambient composer Julianna Barwick relocated to Los Angeles in search of a fresh start and a new creative path for her first album in four years. She made some changes to her usual recording setup, working for the first time with a pair of studio monitors gifted by Sigur Rós frontman Jónsi to work alongside her vocal looping technique. On “Oh, Memory,” she offsets strikingly beautiful soundscapes and the plucking strings of classical harpist Mary Lattimore. Barwick and Jónsi trade harmonies on “In Light,” letting their beatific vocals drift over pounding drum machines and sweeping synths. The guest features are new for Barwick, but her approach is just as minimal and never feels slight, applying a curative touch with her gentle, meditative songs that explore—as the title suggests—both emotional and physical healing.

Four years on from the release of her last, critically acclaimed LP, Julianna Barwick returns with “Healing Is A Miracle”, to be released on July 10th on new home, Ninja Tune. A distinctive meditation on sound, reverb and the voice, “Healing Is A Miracle” is a record built on improvisation and a close affinity to a couple of trusted items of gear, from which she spins engrossing, expansive universes. Additionally, Barwick draws on the input of three collaborators with whom she has nurtured deep friendships with over the years: Jónsi (Sigur Rós), Nosaj Thing and Mary Lattimore; who each gently nudge out at the edges of her organically-evolved sound. Recorded in the wake of a seismic shift in her life following a move from New York—where she had lived for 16 years—to Los Angeles where she is now based, the title of the record came to her after thinking about how the human body heals itself, of the miraculous processes we pay little attention to: “You cut your hand, it looks pretty bad, and two weeks later it looks like it never happened… That’s kind of amazing, you know?” It’s a sentiment that feels particularly apt for the moment. From there, she conceived of the record’s simple statement title, ran it past a couple of friends, and it was settled. Like with the record itself, and all of her work, it’s about following her gut, and seeing where it takes her. “Healing Is A Miracle” began life in spring of last year, when Barwick sat down with her vocal looping set-up and began sketching out some ideas for new solo material. “It had been so long since I had done that,” she recalls, “making something for myself, just for the love of it… it was emotional, because I was recording music that was just from the heart, that wasn't for an 'assignment' or project… it brought me to tears a little”. Part of the joy also came from a small but significant switch up to her recording process: the addition of some studio monitors—a birthday gift from Jónsi and Alex (Somers)—having previously recorded all of her music on headphones. “The first song I remember making with those was the first song on the album, Inspirit.” she explains, “When I added the bass I really felt it in my body, you know, in a way you just wouldn’t with headphones… it was kind of euphoric and fun. I got really excited about making the record in that moment, and I think that really had an impact on the sounds I ended up making.” Excitement too came from the chance to work with three dream collaborators. Her connection to Jónsi began via producer Alex Somers, when Barwick flew to Reykjavík to record some sessions with him for her 2013 record “Nepenthe”, a trip which would begin a long-standing affinity with Iceland and the people she connected with there. “I think he has the best voice in the world,” she says, “and hearing my voice with Jonsi's is one of the joys of my life.” Nosaj Thing—the highly respected electronic producer and stalwart of the LA scene who has worked with the likes of Kendric Lamar—had gotten in touch to express his affection for her 2011 album “The Magic Place”, and they’d since been trying to find a way to work together. Barwick and Lattimore had struck up a friendship over many years performing live together, and had moved to LA around the same time. Finding herself in the same city as all three for the first time, it felt natural to include them in her process, and added to the feeling of newness, support and friendship she had while producing the record. Beyond her records, Barwick’s impressive live shows have gained incredible praise over the years from the likes of The Guardian—who described her performance as “exquisite in its eloquence, reflection and compassion” in their 5* review—The New York Times, NPR, and more. She has also supported and performed with an amazing array of artists including Bon Iver, Grouper, Explosions in the Sky, Sigur Rós, Sharon Van Etten, Angel Olsen, Perfume Genius, Mas Ysa, and Nat Baldwin. Barwick has additionally been involved in some head-turning collaborations over the years. In 2015 she took part in The Flaming Lips’s Carnegie Hall show, performing music from their reimagining of “Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band”, alongside Phillip Glass, Debbie Harry, Laurie Anderson and Pattie Smith. That same year she was invited to play two shows with Yoko Ono, one at MoMA (“my favorite thing ever”) and one in Central Park. In 2012 she released a collaborative album with Helado Negro as OMBRE, and has also released a collaborative single with Rafael Anton Isarri, on the super-limited Thesis label, and most recently, the “Command Synthesis” EP, on RVNG Intl. sub-label Commend There, which employed AI to build five tracks that responded to the airborne environment outside a hotel room. In 2019 she teamed up with Doug Aitken on his nomadic art project, and created stunning performances in the Massachusett wilderness. The album’s artwork was shot in Iceland by Joel Kazuo Knoernschild and is taken from a series of aerial films shot by drone above the country’s breathtaking coastline, which also make up the video for ‘Inspirit’.

*The Long Goodbye* is a turbulent exploration of identity and belonging, and serves as a painstaking yet necessary passage for British rapper and actor Riz Ahmed. It’s the first music released under his full name, and alongside Swet Shop Boys compadre Redinho—who handles production—he weaves a rich tapestry of formative influences, turning a romantic relationship into a detailed extended metaphor for life in post-Brexit Britain. “It’s a breakup album, but with your country,” he explains. Taking cues from Sufi devotional music and poetry, the result is an urgent, chaotic piece that holds up a mirror to the rising tide of division in the land he calls home. “I wanted to make something that lets people into the feeling of this heartbreak, the anger, the denial, the acceptance, the realization, self-esteem and self-love,” he says. Further contextualized through feature skits, the album stars an extended support cast that includes the artist’s mother, Oscar winner Mahershala Ali, activist Yara Shahidi, and *People Just Do Nothing* actor Asim Chaudhry (playing the glorious Chabuddy G). Here, Ahmed talks us through each of the album’s tracks. **The Break Up (Shikwa)** “‘Shikwa’ is an epic poem by Muhammad Iqbal. It’s Iqbal complaining to God saying, ‘Yo, you abandoned us. Look at us. We\'re being killed in the streets. We\'re homeless, we\'re unloved, we\'re unwashed, we\'re uneducated, we\'ve lost our way. God, where are you?\' With Sufi poetry, they use this metaphor of being separated from your beloved as a way of talking about feeling distant from God. It\'s a way of saying, \'I want to feel spirituality back in my life.\' I had written a lot of the tracks that take you through this journey, and then I realized how many haven\'t been answered in the backstory, and I need to explain how we get to this point where one day I come home and she\'s changed the locks. Let me give you the full story, the messy truth of this relationship.” **Toba Tek Singh** “Toba Tek Singh is a place in Pakistan and it\'s also the name of a short story by this satirical writer \[Saadat Hasan\] Manto, who was often jailed for his writing. It\'s about a character who refuses to choose between India and Pakistan, who refuses to pick a side and makes their home in no man’s land instead—in a space between the two countries. We\'re living in a world that\'s increasingly polarized and it\'s being painted in terms of \'us versus them.\' But there are a lot of us who neither belong to \'us\' nor \'them\'—we are culturally hybrid and we have complex identities. And to me I always think that we\'re in this ‘no man\'s land’ but actually there\'s so many of us there, it\'s not ‘no man\'s land,’ it\'s *our* land.” **Mindy: Take Half** “This is really setting up the concept for the next track, \'Fast Lava,’ which is, ‘How did Britain become Great Britain? How did America become the richest country in the world? On whose backs was that built? If there is going to be a separation, then there needs to be some reparations.’” **Fast Lava** “‘I’ll spit my truth and it\'s Brown.’ I think that means actually no longer apologizing for your identity or having to edit your identity. It\'s about saying, ‘You know what, I\'ve been told to hide who I am. I\'ve been told to kind of tailor who I am to your tastes, for your acceptance. But actually, if you\'re going to try and kick me out, then if you\'re going to stop playing rough with me, then why should I hide who I am anymore?’” **Ammi: Come Home** “That\'s \[Ammi\] my mum, and what she\'s saying in Urdu is, \'Look, I told you, she\'ll be no good for you. There\'s no common ground between you culturally. When are you going to listen to me? Now what can we do? What we are going to do is pray? You know what, just leave with your head held high and come back home if you have to.’ I just say, ‘Mummy, can you leave me a voicemail?’ and she does it. It’s probably the reason I\'m an actor, \'cause she\'s just got such a big personality. She\'s such a natural performer.” **Any Day (feat. Jay Sean)** “This is me taking my mum’s advice: ‘You know what, just leave it, man. Just let it go. Let go of the idea that she\'s ever going to accept you.’ It\'s that moment of looking back at the relationship with all of the nostalgia and feeling a bit of heartache. I was so happy Jay Sean could jump on it, too—an absolute pioneer and also a West Londoner.” **Mahershala: Don’t Do Anything Stupid** “So Mahershala is someone I\'ve got to know, just as we were both gaining some momentum in our careers. He\'s just a real dude with a massive heart, and he\'s just been so supportive. We\'re at the point of the story now where I\'ve taken my mum’s advice, ended the relationship, but now I\'m really depressed. Now I\'m feeling really isolated and rejected, and that\'s what Mahershala talks to, leading into the next track.” **Can I Live** “This is about how rejection, hatred, and prejudice affects our mental health. It makes us hate ourselves, it makes us question ourselves. And over the course of the track, what you have is, I question my place in this relationship, in this world, in this country. I also question what the fuck I\'m doing as an artist. I\'m like, ‘What good is it doing\'? I say \'East and West are clashing but cash is the only outcome.’ By me kind of performing my trauma and performing my pain, is it kind of minstrels-y? What is it? Am I putting my foot down or am I tap-dancing to the man?” **Yara: Look Inside** “Yara is such a young woman but such an inspirational leader, an amazing young voice. She comes in with real wisdom at this point to say, ‘You know what? Just because you\'re not accepted in a relationship doesn\'t mean you can\'t still have acceptance in your life. It doesn\'t mean you can\'t have love in your life.\'” **Where You From** “I guess this is a question that is so common, and to some of us can be annoying. But it\'s also a question we all ask ourselves sometimes: Where are you really from? And a lot of us have quite complex identities. Maybe I\'m not from this place or that place. Maybe I\'m from this \'no man\'s land\' in between, and if I am from this ‘no man\'s land,\' it doesn\'t mean we can\'t plant a flag there and make it habitable. Let\'s still find some dignity.” **Mogambo** “This is an anthem of resilience. You may kind of feel like your position is sometimes under threat, or feel sometimes like you’re on the back foot, but they can\'t take us all out, mate. It\'s like a middle finger.” **Chabuddy: Go Southall** “Chabuddy comes in with the voicemail. It gives it the old ‘You know what? Connect. Connect with other people in this no man’s land with you.’ Let’s go Southall. There are people with you on this journey. Not ‘let\'s get on a plane and go to India, or LA\'—nah, let\'s go Southall: No Man\'s Land HQ.” **Deal With It** “‘Slap two pagans saying that’s too Asian.’ It’s about being your unapologetic self. It’s saying, ‘I don’t need your acceptance, Britney. I don’t need you to love me, I accept myself.’” **Hasan: You Came Out on Top** “Hasan \[Minhaj\] comes on and lets you know that by going on this journey, reconnecting with self-love, you’ve come out resilient. You’ve come out on top.” **Karma** “It’s like a victory lap, I guess. It’s saying we’ve all been through some crazy shit and we’re still here. We’re not going anywhere, because the people that are pushed to the periphery of a society are often the people that make that society special.”

For 3 decades now Boyracer have tireless trawled the international indie-pop underworld, embracing and promoting the essential essence of DIY-punk ethics with an armful of fuzzboxes, a cast of thousands and a continued sense of playful urgency. “On A Promise”, Boyracers is 13th Full Length, (but hey, who’s counting?),that finds Stewart’s songwriting flourish with welcome addition of Christina Riley, (Artsick, Burnt Palms), who effortlessly adds dazzle and elan to the classic fuzz-pop blueprint. The LP features 16 track that are chock full of passion and purpose. Having honed their sound, Boyracer are now at their most comfortable and confident. “On A Promise” was recorded over a 2 year period, in such exotic locations as Flagstaff Arizona, Sydney Australia, Berlin Germany, and Scarborough UK. Typical of Anderson's approach to his music over the past decade, “On A Promise” features many guest players old and new, building on the bands reputation and past positivity, whilst continuing to move forward. Sarah Records-Era member Simon Guild makes a return to Boyracer after a 27 year absence , as does Laura Bridge (Kicker, Hood etc), who also returns to the fold after 29 years to make her Boyracer vinyl debut on 2 of the tracks! Also featured are Mary Wyer and Anita Rayner (Even As We Speak), Snowy (Ocean Party), Penny McBride (Cannanes), and longtime well known Boyracer members Matty Green, Jen Turrell, Ged McGurn and Ara Hacopian.

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