After two critically acclaimed albums about loss and mourning and a *New York Times* best-selling memoir, Michelle Zauner—the Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter known as Japanese Breakfast—wanted release. “I felt like I’d done the grief work for years and was ready for something new,” she tells Apple Music. “I was ready to celebrate *feeling*.” Her third album *Jubilee* is unguardedly joyful—neon synths, bubblegum-pop melodies, gusts of horns and strings—and delights in largesse; her arrangements are sweeping and intricate, her subjects complex. Occasionally, as on “Savage Good Boy” and “Kokomo, IN,” she uses fictional characters to illustrate meta-narratives around wealth, corruption, independence, and selfhood. “Album three is your chance to think big,” she says, pointing to Kate Bush and Björk, who released what she considers quintessential third albums: “Theatrical, ambitious, musical, surreal.” Below, Zauner explains how she reconciled her inner pop star with her desire to stay “extremely weird” and walks us through her new album track by track. **“Paprika”** “This song is the perfect thesis statement for the record because it’s a huge, ambitious monster of a song. We actually maxed out the number of tracks on the Pro Tools session because we used everything that could possibly be used on it. It\'s about reveling in the beauty of music.” **“Be Sweet”** “Back in 2018, I decided to try out writing sessions for the first time, and I was having a tough go of it. My publisher had set me up with Jack Tatum of Wild Nothing. What happens is they lie to you and say, ‘Jack loves your music and wants you to help him write his new record!’ And to him they’d say, ‘Michelle *loves* Wild Nothing, she wants to write together!’ Once we got together we were like, ‘I don\'t need help. I\'m not writing a record.’ So we decided we’d just write a pop song to sell and make some money. We didn’t have anyone specific in mind, we just knew it wasn’t going to be for either of us. Of course, once we started putting it together, I realized I really loved it. I think the distance of writing it for ‘someone else’ allowed me to take on this sassy \'80s women-of-the-night persona. To me, it almost feels like a Madonna, Whitney Houston, or Janet Jackson song.” **“Kokomo, IN”** “This is my favorite song off of the album. It’s sung from the perspective of a character I made up who’s this teenage boy in Kokomo, Indiana, and he’s saying goodbye to his high school sweetheart who is leaving. It\'s sort of got this ‘Wouldn\'t It Be Nice’ vibe, which I like, because Kokomo feels like a Beach Boys reference. Even though the song is rooted in classic teenage feelings, it\'s also very mature; he\'s like, ‘You have to go show the world all the parts of you that I fell so hard for.’ It’s about knowing that you\'re too young for this to be *it*, and that people aren’t meant to be kept by you. I was thinking back to how I felt when I was 18, when things were just so all-important. I personally was *not* that wise; I would’ve told someone to stay behind. So I guess this song is what I wish I would’ve said.” **“Slide Tackle”** “‘Slide Tackle’ was such a fussy bitch. I had a really hard time figuring out how to make it work. Eventually it devolved into, of all things, a series of solos, but I really love it. It started with a drumbeat that I\'d made in Ableton and a bassline I was trying to turn into a Future Islands-esque dance song. That sounded too simple, so I sent it to Ryan \[Galloway\] from Crying, who wrote all these crazy, math-y guitar parts. Then I got Adam Schatz, who plays in the band Landlady, to provide an amazing saxophone solo. After that, I stepped away from the song for like a year. When I finally relistened to it, it felt right. It’s about the way those of us who are predisposed to darker thoughts have to sometimes physically wrestle with our minds to feel joy.” **“Posing in Bondage”** “Jack Tatum helped me turn this song into this fraught, delicate ballad. The end of it reminds me of Drake\'s ‘Hold On, We\'re Going Home’; it has this drive-y, chill feeling. This song is about the bondage of controlled desire, and the bondage of monogamy—but in a good way.” **“Sit”** “This song is also about controlled desire, or our ability to lust for people and not act on it. Navigating monogamy and desire is difficult, but it’s also a normal human condition. Those feelings don’t contradict loyalty, you know? The song is shaped around this excellent keyboard line that \[bandmate\] Craig \[Hendrix\] came up with after listening to Tears for Fears. The chorus reminds me of heaven and the verses remind me of hell. After these dark and almost industrial bars, there\'s this angelic light that breaks through.” **“Savage Good Boy”** “This one was co-produced by Alex G, who is one of my favorite musicians of all time, and was inspired by a headline I’d read about billionaires buying bunkers. I wanted to write it from the perspective of a billionaire who’d bought one, and who was coaxing a woman to come live with him as the world burned around them. I wanted to capture what that level of self-validation looks like—that rationalization of hoarding wealth.” **“In Hell”** “This might be the saddest song I\'ve ever written. It\'s a companion song to ‘In Heaven’ off of *Psychopomp*, because it\'s about the same dog. But here, I\'m putting that dog down. It was actually written in the *Soft Sounds* era as a bonus track for the Japanese release, but I never felt like it got its due.” **“Tactics”** “I knew I wanted to make a beautiful, sweet, big ballad, full of strings and groovy percussion, and Craig, who co-produced it, added this feel-good Bill Withers, Randy Newman vibe. I think the combination is really fabulous.” **“Posing for Cars”** “I love a long, six-minute song to show off a little bit. It starts off as an understated acoustic guitar ballad that reminded me of Wilco’s ‘At Least That\'s What You Said,’ which also morphs from this intimate acoustic scene before exploding into a long guitar solo. To me, it always has felt like Jeff Tweedy is saying everything that can\'t be said in that moment through his instrument, and I loved that idea. I wanted to challenge myself to do the same—to write a long, sprawling, emotional solo where I expressed everything that couldn\'t be said with words.”
On *Compliments Please*, her 2019 debut as Self Esteem, Rebecca Taylor reintroduced herself to the world in a way that stunned fans of her previous work as one half of Sheffield indie-folk duo Slow Club. Here was Taylor fully realized as an artist—a millennial Madonna delivering personal polemic within a kaleidoscopic blast of bombastic pop. For this follow-up, Taylor has doubled down on that MO, creating a record that is bigger, better, and even more unapologetically true to herself. “On my first album I didn’t know what Self Esteem was, really,” she tells Apple Music. “Back then we were finding out and, now I know what it is, it’s a much more self-assured way to work. I knew I wanted to make *Compliments Please 2*, essentially. I wanted to do similar production but bigger and bolder. If there’s one violin, I want it to be a quartet. If it’s three-part harmony, I want it to be a choir. I just wanted to build it and make it more massive.” Over 13 frank, funny, and vital tracks, *Prioritise Pleasure* finds Taylor exploring sex and sexuality, misogyny, and toxic relationships. “Lyrically, I’ll always reflect where I’m at in my life,” she adds. “A lot of changes have happened between the first record and the second record.” Above all else though, it’s a record that uses skyscraping pop bangers to deliver a triumphant message of self-acceptance. Here, Taylor talks us through it, track by track. **“I’m Fine”** “With that slow beat opening it, me and my producer were like, ‘This would be an amazing first song…’ I’d wanted to write about something that’s happened to me. I wanted to reclaim my independence and my sexuality and my right to live my life however I want after that had been taken in a traumatic way. It has become this sort of mission statement at the top of the record for the thing I’m singing about. But for anyone who feels like they have to live their life because of the way society is—it’s for you.” **“Fucking Wizardry”** “If I had my time again, I wouldn’t put this on because I feel so overwhelmed singing it back. But it was very much where I was at when I was writing. I was in a relationship. I really, really loved him and we could have had a really good relationship, but his ex didn’t leave him alone during it. I had to get a thicker skin and build myself back up and say, ‘Do you know what? I’m not doing this.’ I did feel really hurt. I succumbed to jealousy and fear and I didn’t feel good enough. I’m embarrassed by my spitefulness, but it’s also very human and it’s important for me to show all the sides of myself on the record.” **“Hobbies 2”** “Kate Bush was someone I was thinking about when I was making this. She was an artist first and foremost and created the work. If it happened to be a hit then cool, but she was never going to deviate from just coming out of her head. This feels like a 2021 \[1985 Bush hit\] ‘Running Up That Hill.’ It’s so funny too. I’m basically saying I’ve got time to have this fuck buddy, but only if I’m not busy. I think that’s a very modern thing to have committed to song.” **“Prioritise Pleasure”** “All of my songs link to each other, because I’m always thinking about sex, sense of self, heartbreak, or defiance. They’re always in there. *Prioritise Pleasure* is sexy and it’s about prioritizing yourself in that way, but also it’s about prioritizing just what you want every day. As a woman, I’ve people-pleased and shapeshifted and sort of begged the world to not be mad with me my whole life. The turnaround and the key to my happiness is to not do that anymore.” **“I Do This All The Time”** “I’d wanted to a song that was like \[Baz Luhrmann’s ‘Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)’\]. And a song that’s like ‘Dirrty’ by Christina Aguilera. I did one take. It’s almost like it possessed me. I had to just make it. There was this moment when I was tracking and recording the string line, I walked home, listened to it and thought, ‘I could just stop now.’ There was this part of me that was like, ‘This is it. This is what I’ve always wanted to do. This is always what I wanted to say.’ I’ve not had that feeling before.” **“Moody”** “I loved the keyboard sound and Johan \[Karlberg, producer\] just smashed a loop out. I had the lyric ‘Sexting you at the mental health talk seems counterproductive’ for ages so I put that in and that set the tone of what I wanted to write about. Spelling-out pop choruses are always L-O-V-E or whatever, I’ve always had this idea of spelling out something that has negative connotations. I thought it would be funny to do a song where I’m saying what I’m saying in the form of very sugary pop. It’s a bit of a piss-take really, me being sarcastic about girly pop music.” **“Still Reigning”** “That’s a sister song to ‘She Reigns’ on the first record. I’m obsessed with acceptance at the minute and letting things just be. I’ve always been someone who wants to strong-arm reality into what I need it to be, rather than just letting it happen. I was a very convincing kid. I remember convincing my dad to get a dog by drawing a pamphlet that I pretended was from the RSPCA, where I listed the benefits of having a dog. That was cute, but I was just being a manipulative little shit. I’ve always been like, ‘I want this, why not?’ That’s how I was approaching a relationship that I wanted to continue and they didn’t. Finally, the penny dropped about letting things go with the flow and about acceptance and love.” **“How Can I Help You”** “‘Black Skinhead’ was something we were going for in mood. Everything comes back to Kanye production every time we’re stuck. It’s a weird song but I’m a punk at my core. I love pop but I cut my teeth playing in a lot of punk bands. It’s a little nod to the tapestry of me and my music. Being a woman is hard enough. Being someone who wants to please everyone is very hard. Then being in the music industry has been really hard. So \[the lyrics are about\] all of it.” **“It’s Been A While”** “Me and Johan both really love trap and I requested a very, very deep, dark trap loop. This one is a bit of another timestamp. I’m addicted to my phone and the sort of weariness from it. I’ll be texting someone I’m seeing. Then I’m on Twitter making some sort of joke. Then I’m reading some news report about something awful. Then I’m on Instagram liking some cute woman’s picture. It’s round and round and round and my eyes are consuming so much all day. Also, I was still going out with that guy that was treating me pretty cheap. Again, it comes back to trying to strong-arm the world into doing what I want. It’s about all those things.” **“The 345”** “It’s me singing to me. It’s very on-the-nose. I just wondered what a love song to myself would be. I sing so many love songs to these people that come in and out of my life. I wondered what would happen if I sang to the person that’s not going to go anywhere, which sounds quite sad.” **“John Elton”** “It’s playing on the idea that these people come into your life and you love them and then they go and then that’s it. I’ve always struggled with that. Someone I loved who I had the joke with, and the joke was a really shit joke, but it still makes me laugh. Then you go to chat about it but everyone’s lives have moved on. People get married and have children and I’m just still out here laughing at the stupid joke we had. It’s an interesting little jolt back to reality and all part of the experience. I end the song by saying it’s all for me. No matter what, all of this is mine and all of these experiences are mine and that’s it.” **“You Forever”** “This is coming from a place of deciding whether or not to get back with someone. At one point in time, I really wanted to and I said that, and the other person said, ‘You need to be braver.’ Also an acceptance is creeping in where I’ve been all right on my own and I will be all right on my own. That’s important to hold on to. Modern dating is as much about not wanting to be alone as it is about trying to meet someone you like. To be all right on your own really does mean if you meet someone and they add something to your life, that’s what it should be about.” **“Just Kids”** “With a lot of my songs, when it’s not just romantic relationships, it’s about the frustration and the desire to be loved by someone who just won’t. Deciding to stop trying is what the song is about. Accept it and leave it with love but move forward in your life. It feels like a good place to try and put that to bed before I write the next album.”
“Sometimes I’ll be in my own space, my own company, and that’s when I\'m really content,” Little Simz tells Apple Music. “It\'s all love, though. There’s nothing against anyone else; that\'s just how I am. I like doing my own thing and making my art.” The lockdowns of 2020, then, proved fruitful for the North London MC, singer, and actor. She wrestled writer’s block, revived her cult *Drop* EP series (explore the razor-sharp and diaristic *Drop 6* immediately), and laid grand plans for her fourth studio album. Songwriter/producer Inflo, co-architect of Simz’s 2019 Mercury-nominated, Ivor Novello Award-winning *GREY Area*, was tapped and the hard work began. “It was straight boot camp,” she says of the *Sometimes I Might Be Introvert* sessions in London and Los Angeles. “We got things done pronto, especially with the pace that me and Flo move at. We’re quite impulsive: When we\'re ready to go, it’s time to go.” Months of final touches followed—and a collision between rap and TV royalty. An interest in *The Crown* led Simz to approach Emma Corrin (who gave an award-winning portrayal of Princess Diana in the drama). She uses her Diana accent to offer breathless, regal addresses that punctuate the 19-track album. “It was a reach,” Simz says of inviting Corrin’s participation. “I’m not sure what I expected, but I enjoyed watching her performance, and wrote most of her words whilst I was watching her.” Corrin’s speeches add to the record’s sense of grandeur. It pairs turbocharged UK rap with Simz at her most vulnerable and ambitious. There are meditations on coming of age in the spotlight (“Standing Ovation”), a reunion with fellow Sault collaborator Cleo Sol on the glorious “Woman,” and, in “Point and Kill,” a cleansing, polyrhythmic jam session with Nigerian artist Obongjayar that confirms the record’s dazzling sonic palette. Here, Simz talks us through *Sometimes I Might Be Introvert*, track by track. **“Introvert”** “This was always going to intro the album from the moment it was made. It feels like a battle cry, a rebirth. And with the title, you wouldn\'t expect this to sound so huge. But I’m finding the power within my introversion to breathe new meaning into the word.” **“Woman” (feat. Cleo Sol)** “This was made to uplift and celebrate women. To my peers, my family, my friends, close women in my life, as well as women all over the world: I want them to know I’ve got their back. Linking up with Cleo is always fun; we have such great musical chemistry, and I can’t imagine anyone else bringing what she did to the song. Her voice is beautiful, but I think it\'s her spirit and her intention that comes through when she sings.” **“Two Worlds Apart”** “Firstly, I love this sample; it’s ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy’ by Smokey Robinson, and Flo’s chopped it up really cool. This is my moment to flex. You had the opener, followed by a nice, smoother vibe, but this is like, ‘Hey, you’re listening to a *rap* album.’” **“I Love You, I Hate You”** “This wasn’t the easiest song for me to write, but I\'m super proud that I did. It’s an opportunity for me to lay bare my feelings on how that \[family\] situation affected me, growing up. And where I\'m at now—at peace with it and moving on.” **“Little Q, Pt. 1 (Interlude)”** “Little Q is my cousin, Qudus, on my dad\'s side. We grew up together, but then there was a stage where we didn\'t really talk for some years. No bad blood, just doing different things, so when we reconnected, we had a real heart-to-heart—and I heard about all he’d been through. It made me feel like, ‘Damn, this is a blood relative, and he almost lost his life.’ I thank God he didn’t, but I thought of others like him. And I felt it was important that his story was heard and shared. So, I’m speaking from his perspective.” **“Little Q, Pt. 2”** “I grew up in North London and \[Little Q\] was raised in South, and as much as we both grew up in endz, his experience was obviously different to mine. Being a product of an environment or system that isn\'t really for you, it’s tough trying to navigate that.” **“Gems (Interlude)”** “This is another turning point, reminding myself to take time: ‘Breathe…you\'re human. Give what you can give, but don\'t burn out for anyone. Put yourself first.’ Just little gems that everyone needs to hear once in a while.” **“Speed”** “This track sends another reminder: ‘This game is a marathon, not a sprint. So pace yourself!’ I know where I\'m headed, and I\'m taking my time, with little breaks here and there. Now I know when to really hit the gas and also when to come off a bit.” **“Standing Ovation”** “I take some time to reflect here, like, ‘Wow, you\'re still here and still going. It’s been a slow burn, but you can afford to give yourself a pat on the back.’ But as well as being in the limelight, let\'s also acknowledge the people on the ground doing real amazing work: our key workers, our healers, teachers, cleaners. If you go to a toilet and it\'s dirty, people go in from 9 to 5 and make sure that shit is spotless for you, so let\'s also say thank you.” **“I See You”** “This is a really beautiful and poetic song on love. Sometimes as artists we tend to draw from traumatic times for great art, we’re hurt or in pain, but it was nice for me to be able to draw from a place of real joy in my life for this song. Even where it sits \[on the album\]: right in the center, the heart.” **“The Rapper That Came to Tea (Interlude)”** “This title is a play on \[Judith Kerr’s\] children\'s book *The Tiger Who Came to Tea*, and this is about me better understanding my introversion. I’m just posing questions to myself—I might not necessarily have answers for them, I think it\'s good to throw them out there and get the brain working a bit.” **“Rollin Stone”** “This cut reminds me somewhat of ’09 Simz, spitting with rapidness and being witty. And I’m also finding new ways to use my voice on the second half here, letting my evil twin have her time.” **“Protect My Energy”** “This is one of the songs I\'m really looking forward to performing live. It’s a stepper, and it got me really wanting to sing, to be honest. I very much enjoy being around good company, but these days I enjoy my personal space and I want to protect that.” **“Never Make Promises (Interlude)”** “This one is self-explanatory—nothing is promised at all. It’s a short intermission to lead to the next one, but at one point it was nearly the album intro.” **“Point and Kill” (feat. Obongjayar)** “This is a big vibe! It feels very much like Nigeria to me, and Obongjayar is one of my favorites at the moment. We recorded this in my living room on a whim—and I\'m very, very grateful that he graced this song. The title comes from a phrase used in Nigeria to pick out fish at the market, or a store. You point, they kill. But also metaphorically, whatever I want, I\'m going to get in the same way, essentially.” **“Fear No Man”** “This track continues the same vibe, even more so. It declares: ‘I\'m here. I\'m unapologetically me and I fear no one here. I\'m not shook of anyone in this rap game.’” **“The Garden (Interlude)”** “This track is just amazing musically. It’s about nurturing the seeds you plant. Nurture those relationships, and everything around you that\'s holding you down.” **“How Did You Get Here”** “I want everyone to know *how* I got here; from the jump, school days, to my rap group, Space Age. We were just figuring it out, being persistent. I cried whilst recording this song; it all hit me, like, ‘I\'m actually recording my fourth album.’ Sometimes I sit and I wonder if this is all really true.” **“Miss Understood”** “This is the perfect closer. I could have ended on the last track, easily, but, I don\'t know, it\'s kind of like doing 99 reps. You\'ve done 99, that\'s amazing, but you can do one more to just make it 100, you can. And for me it was like, ‘I\'m going to get this one in there.’”
On his Red Hand Files website, Nick Cave reflected on a comment he’d made back in 1997 about needing catastrophe, loss, and longing in order for his creativity to flourish. “These words sound somewhat like the indulgent posturing of a man yet to discover the devastating effect true suffering can have on our ability to function, let alone to create,” he wrote. “I am not only talking about personal grief, but also global grief, as the world is plunged deeper into this wretched pandemic.” Whether he needs it or not, the Australian songwriter’s music does very often deal with catastrophe, loss, and longing. The pandemic didn’t inspire *CARNAGE* per se, but the challenges of 2020 clearly permitted both intense, lyric-stirring ideas and, with canceled tours and so on, the time and creativity to flesh them out with longtime collaborator and masterful multi-instrumentalist/songwriter Warren Ellis. The most direct reference to COVID-19 might be “Albuquerque,” a sentimental lamentation on the inability to travel. For the most part, Cave looks beyond the pandemic itself, throwing himself into a philosophical realm of meditations on humanity, isolation, love, and the Earth itself, depicted through observations and, as he is wont to do, taking on the roles of several other characters, sentient and otherwise. The album begins with “Hand of God.” There’s soft piano and lyrics about the search for “that kingdom in the sky,” until Ellis\' dissonant violin strikes away the sweetness and an electronic beat kicks in. “I’m going to the river where the current rushes by/I’m gonna swim to the middle where the water is real high,” he sings, a little manically, as he gives in to the current. “Hand of God coming from the sky/Gonna swim to the middle and stay out there awhile… Let the river cast its spell on me.” That unmitigated strength of nature is central to *CARNAGE*. Motifs of rivers, rain, animals, fields, and sunshine are used to depict not only the beauty and the bedlam he sees in the world, but the ways it changes him. On the sweet, delicate “Lavender Fields,” he sings of “traveling appallingly alone on a singular road into the lavender fields… the lavender has stained my skin and made me strange.” On “Carnage,” he sings of loss (“I always seem to be saying goodbye”), but also of love and hope, later depicting a “reindeer, frozen in the footlights,” who then escapes back into the woods. “It’s only love, with a little bit of rain,” goes the uplifting refrain. With its murky rhythm and snarling spoken-word lyrics, “White Elephant” is one of Cave’s most intense songs in years. It’s also the song that most explicitly references a 2020 event: the murder of George Floyd. “The white hunter sits on his porch with his elephant gun and his tears/He\'ll shoot you for free if you come around here/A protester kneels on the neck of a statue, the statue says, ‘I can’t breathe’/The protester says, ‘Now you know how it feels’ and he kicks it into the sea.” Later, he continues, as the hunter: “I’ve been planning this for years/I’ll shoot you in the f\*\*king face if you think of coming around here/I’ll shoot you just for fun.” It’s one of the only Nick Cave songs to ever address a racially, politically charged event so directly. And it’s a dark, powerful moment on this album. *CARNAGE* ends with a pair of atmospheric ballads—their soundscapes no doubt influenced by Cave and Ellis’ extensive work on film scores. On “Shattered Ground,” the exodus of a girl (a personification of the moon) invokes peaceful, muted pain—“I will be all alone when you are gone… I will not make a single sound, but come softly crashing down”—and “Balcony Man” depicts a man watching the sun and considering how “everything is ordinary, until it’s not,” tweaking an idiom with serene acceptance: “You are languid and lovely and lazy, and what doesn’t kill you just makes you crazier.” There is substantial pain, darkness, and loss on this album, but it doesn’t rip its narrator apart or invoke retaliation. Rather, he takes it all in, allowing himself to be moved and changed even if he can’t effect change himself. That challenging sense of being unable to do anything more than *observe* is synonymous with the pandemic, and more broadly the evolving, sometimes devastating world. Perhaps the lesson here is to learn to exist within its chaos—but to always search for beauty and love in its cracks.
Slow builds, skyscraping climaxes, deep melancholy tempered by European grandeur: You pretty much know what you’re getting when you come to a Mogwai album, but rarely have they given it up with such ease as they do on *As the Love Continues*, their 10th LP. For a band whose central theme has remained almost industrially consistent, they’ve built up plenty of variations on it: the sparkling, New Agey electronics of “Dry Fantasy,” the classic indie rock sound of “Ceiling Granny” and “Ritchie Sacramento,” the ’80s dance rhythms of “Supposedly, We Were Nightmares.” Even when they reach for their signature build-and-release (“Midnight Flit”), you get the sense of a band not just marching toward an inevitable climax but relishing in texture, nuance, and note-to-note intricacies that make that climax feel fresh again. And while they’ve always been beautiful, they’ve also seemed to treat that beauty as an intellectual liability, something to be undermined in the name of staying sharp.
\"I have this idea that if the record was a movie poster there\'d be a tagline that was like, \'Power, Wealth, and Mental Health,\'\" Hold Steady frontman Craig Finn tells Apple Music. \"It felt like a heavy time in 2019 to write all this stuff, and then 2020 came and just kind of like put a bow on it.\" With their eighth studio album, the Brooklyn-based sextet tackles subjects like technology, consumerism, and income inequality over a sonic palette that broadens the band\'s dose of heady alternative rock. *Open Door Policy* is the second release since keyboardist Franz Nicolay rejoined the band, laying the foundation for tracks like the burnt-out \"Heavy Covenant\" and sleek \"Hanover Camera,\" solidifying what Finn calls the best collection of Hold Steady tracks yet. \"I think The Hold Steady 3.0 feels sort of like a Super Steady,\" he says. \"The thing I\'m really psyched about this record is the story of \[guitarist\] Steve \[Selvidge\] and Franz finding space for each other and kind of defining the sound of this version of The Hold Steady. It\'s a huge part of the success of this version of the band.\" Here, Finn and Nicolay guide us through *Open Door Policy*\'s 11 tracks. **The Feelers** Craig Finn: \"I felt like this song\'s kind of an invitation into the story. This could be a dramatic opener in the sense of a drama or a play or a musical or something, something that kind of starts soft and builds up.\'\" Franz Nicolay: \"It announces that this is the kind of record that\'s going to be on this sort of grander scope and dealing with these darker themes.\" **Spices** CF: \"I\'ve got a phone that saves your contacts even when you change phones. And so like if I look through my phone I have so many people in here and each one of them could pop up at any moment, each one I could get a text from. And I was obsessed with that as sort of like your phone is this device that might lead you into a situation or story. There\'s this disembodied connection to it that we didn\'t have with landlines as much.\" **Lanyards** CF: \"This is a song about someone going out to California to follow their dreams. It relays the parallel stories in the choruses when he talks about lanyards and laminates and wristbands. All these things that we use to get access to like the VIP area, or trying to get into the party where the free drinks are or whatever. So it kind of was a meditation on that, of pursuing that kind of access and going and trying to find it and it not working out.\" FN: \"This for me is really the heart of the record. There\'s a real texture, like this sort of carpet of guitars and the keyboards, and it\'s just like all melded together with these amazing lyrics. It\'s not showy, but it\'s got all the parts in their place.\" **Family Farm** CF: \"The lyrics mention the Eddie Van Halen guitar solo in \'Eruption,\' and here we are when the record\'s released and Eddie Van Halen has passed. And I think that the reason I love this and why I bring this up is because a lot of people talk about things like Springsteen or The Replacements when they talk about The Hold Steady. But in some ways, Van Halen was also a big influence. There\'s one guy who\'s kind of talking or yelling, and there\'s another guy playing a lot of guitar solos.\" **Unpleasant Breakfast** CF: \"I think this is a song that we might not have done a few years back. But we just did these shows at the Brooklyn Bowl in December \[2020\] and Franz informed us that we have like 119 songs. So when you have 119 songs, you can kind of be like, \'Well, this one\'s going to have a drum machine.\' It\'s possibly my favorite song on the record because it tells a really good and a really sad story and I love that it\'s unique to our catalog. It may be something that people weren\'t expecting.\" FN: \"I think Craig has said before the thing that he brings to the table is he\'s not really a hard-rock guy. He\'s much more in this sort of midtempo groovy jam-band world, and so he\'s really drawn to a song like this that puts us a little more out of our comfort zone in a productive way.\" **Heavy Covenant** FN: \"When we were down in Nashville for our shows a couple years ago, I stayed in the hotel room and did computer demos. And this came from two of those. Basically the verse and the chorus were one song and the bridge was an entirely different song that Craig and Josh \[Kaufman, producer\] were like, \'What if we just take the beginning of that second demo and plop it right in the middle of the first demo?\' And it worked.\" **The Prior Procedure** CF: \"This track has to do with people who are kind of displaced, wandering the desert, so to speak, and go to a place that a really rich guy owns and is making available to anyone who wants to. So there\'s your open-door policy. But the idea is that this guy\'s really rich. He still has control over it and he still won\'t give up the control, and I think that that\'s a thing we find a lot with like really rich guys having their own charities, et cetera. It still has a thumb on it.\" **Riptown** CF: \"This might have been the last song that came together. And there\'s kind of a fast-talking thing that I just tried to do. But mainly, it just rides that groove and it\'s one of those that I think that benefited from not overthinking or pushing too hard on it.\" FN: \"Every time we were on a break, \[guitarist\] Tad \[Kubler\] would just walk around with an acoustic guitar playing this riff. And eventually we were like, ‘I guess that\'s a song that has some creative energy right now behind it.’ There was an idea about doing it like a Guided By Voices thing with that sort of blown-out acoustic guitar vibe.\" **Me & Magdalena** CF: \"When we got done with this and the record was all turned in, I somehow came across another song called ‘Me & Magdalena’ by The Monkees. And what\'s weirder is it\'s a new record by The Monkees which Adam Schlesinger produced and Ben Gibbard wrote the song. And then I listened to the song and it\'s a great song. And I know I\'ve never heard that song before, because I would have known it because I like it so much. But that said, I must have seen the song title and like subconsciously internalized it, because it seems like too much of a coincidence to come up with the first line of the song and then name the song that. So apologies to everyone, but it\'s a totally different song.\" **Hanover Camera** FN: \"Kind of a creepy song, right? Again, it\'s that expectation of, like, \'Oh, here\'s where the solo\'s going to go in,\' and then it\'s like there\'s this gaping absence where it might be that I think is really evocative.\" **Parade Days (Bonus Track)** CF: \"This is a bonus track rather than an album cut because thematically I think it\'s set aside. It\'s about someone like myself who grew up in Minneapolis, and it\'s about the changes that the city\'s made during their lifetime. If we recorded like eight more, maybe we\'d hold on to them and wait for the bonus edition down the line. But it just felt like we should let people hear the other song recorded, especially with the digital platform these days.\"
In August 2019, New York singer-songwriter Cassandra Jenkins thought she had the rest of her year fully mapped out, starting with a tour of North America as a guitarist in David Berman’s newly launched project Purple Mountains. But when Berman took his own life that month, everything changed. “All of a sudden, I was just unmoored and in shock,” she tells Apple Music. “I really only spent four days with David. But those four days really knocked me off my feet.” For the next few months, she wrote as she reflected, obsessively collecting ideas and lyrics, as well as recordings of conversations with friends and strangers—cab drivers and art museum security guards among them. The result is her sophomore LP, a set of iridescent folk rock that came together almost entirely over the course of one week, with multi-instrumentalist Josh Kaufman in his Brooklyn studio. “I was trying to articulate this feeling of getting comfortable with chaos,” she says. “And learning how to be comfortable with the idea that things are going to fall apart and they\'re going to come back together. I had shed a lot of skin very quickly.” Here, Jenkins tells us the story of each song on the album. **Michelangelo** “I think sequencing the record was an interesting challenge because, to me, the songs feel really different from one another. ‘Michelangelo’ is the only one that I came in with that was written—I had a melody that I wanted to use and I thought, ‘Okay, Josh, let’s make this into a little rock song and take the guitar solo in the middle.’ That was the first song we recorded, so it was just our way of getting into the groove of recording, with what sounds like a familiar version of what I\'ve done in the past.” **New Bikini** “I was worried when I was writing it that it sounded too starry-eyed and a little bit naive, saying, ‘The water cures everything.’ I think it was this tension between that advice—from a lot of people with good intentions—and me being like, ‘Well, it\'s not going to bring this person back from the dead and it\'s not going to change my DNA and it\'s not going to make this person better.’” **Hard Drive** “I just love talking to people, to strangers. The heart of the song is people talking about the nature of things, but often, what they\'re doing is actually talking about themselves and expressing something about themselves. I think that every person that I meet has wisdom to give and it\'s just a matter of turning that key with people. Because when you turn it and you open that door, you can be given so much more than you ever expected. Really listening, being more of a journalist in my own just day-to-day life—rather than trying to influence my surroundings, just letting them hit me.” **Crosshairs** “You could look at this as a kind of role-playing song, which isn\'t explicitly sexual, but that\'s definitely one aspect of it. It’s the idea that when you\'re assuming a different role within yourself, it actually can open up chambers within you that are otherwise not seeing the light of day. I was looking at the parts of me that are more masculine, the parts of me that are explicitly feminine, and seeing where everything is in between, while also trying to do the same for someone else in my life.” **Ambiguous Norway** “The song is titled after one of David\'s cartoons, a drawing of a house with a little pinwheel on the top. It\'s about that moment where I was experiencing this grief of David passing away, where I was really saturated in it. I threw myself onto this island in Norway—Lyngør—thinking I could sort of leave that behind to a certain extent, and just realizing that it really didn\'t matter what corner of the planet I found myself on, I was still interacting with the impression of David\'s death and finding that there was all of these coincidences everywhere I went. I felt like I was in this wide-eyed part of the grieving process where it becomes almost psychedelic, like I was seeing meaning in everything and not able at all to just put it into words because it was too big and too expansive.” **Hailey** “It\'s challenging to write a platonic love song—it doesn\'t have all the ingredients of heartbreak or lust or drama that I think a lot of those songs have. It\'s much more simple than that. I just wanted to celebrate her and also celebrate someone who\'s alive now, who\'s making me feel motivated to keep going when things get tough, and to have confidence in myself, because that\'s a really beautiful thing and it\'s rare to behold. I think a lot of the record is mourning, and this was kind of the opposite.” **The Ramble** “I made these binaural recordings as I walked around and birdwatched in the morning, in April \[2020\], when it was pretty much empty. I was a stone\'s throw away from all the hospitals that were cropping up in Central Park, while simultaneously watching nature flourish in this incredible way. I recorded a guitar part and then I sent that to all of my friends around the country and said, ‘Just write something, send it back to me. Don\'t spend a lot of time on it.’ I wanted to capture the feeling that things change, but it’s nature\'s course to find its way through. Just to go out with my binoculars and be in nature and observe birds is my way of really dissolving and letting go of a lot of my fears and anxieties—and I wanted to give that to other people.”
When UK trio Drug Store Romeos started making music together as teenagers, their sound was indebted to post-punk, heavy and raw. But then Sarah Downie, Charlie Henderson, and Jonny Gilbert started listening to such cosmic trailblazers as Spacemen 3, Galaxie 500, and Broadcast, and their approach transformed, their songs taking on a more dreamy and hypnotic form. On the group’s debut album, *The world within our bedrooms*, they craft a series of indie-pop gems out of the haze, balancing sonic exploration with enchanting hooks and intricate dynamism. Their minimalist approach was forced on them by necessity, but it has opened up exciting new avenues. “I started playing keyboards, which meant I couldn’t play the bass,” Downie tells Apple Music. “We had to pick between guitar or bass, because we only have so many hands, and Charlie started playing bass. It meant our songs had to be stripped-back. Charlie started playing the bass in a more melodic way rather than just trying to fill in the foundation.” Their lean, lo-fi grooves are the perfect soundbed for tales of isolation and reflection, trying to make sense of a chaotic world as their teens became their early twenties. “We came from a very small town,” says Downie. “We were cut off a lot from the world, and I think that introspectiveness, with all the time we had to overanalyze ourselves, wrote itself into the music.” It is, explains Downie, an album that captures a coming-of-age, a record that fills you with hope when you come out the other side. Here, the three-piece take us through their journey, track by track. **“Building Song”** Sarah Downie: “It does what it says on the tin. We gave it that name but kept going, ‘We need to find a good name for this. That’s such a cop-out.’ And it just became that. I think it’s quite fitting.” Charlie Henderson: “It’s got a feeling, an atmosphere, that’s quite central to the world that we were trying to create. Naturally, throughout the song, it layers up over time and everything—it feels like a nice way to introduce the whole sound of the album.” **“Secret Plan”** CH: “This was written at 2 in the morning whilst my housemates were having a drum ’n’ bass party downstairs. I made the synth line and the bass part, and then, for the vocals, I was just improvising while this intense drum ’n’ bass was going on downstairs. It was quite chaotic. If ‘Building Song’ is the establishing shot, this is the first scene that’s in this slightly spooky, surreal suburban town. I hope people can dance to it, but also I imagine people listening to this album alone on headphones.” **“Bow Wow”** SD: “This was written when I got a Casio Casiotone CT 1000P, which has shaped a lot of our music. If you have headphones on and you’re listening carefully enough, you can just about hear my heartbeat in this song. Me and our producer, George Murphy, were in the studio at 2 am and we were pretty knackered, doing vocals over and over again. The lyrics—‘My heart rate increases’—were going through my head and I needed to get more energy in my body, so I started running around the studio. Then I put the microphone on my shirt and we recorded my heartbeat. George quantized it so that it’s going along with the kick.” **“Elevator”** CH: “I did a lot of experimenting, a lot of different things went onto that, but it was quite surprising it worked. They’re quite similar—both emotional and intense. The melody feels like it’s coming from a similar place, and they just locked together.” **“Walking Talking Marathon”** SD: “I wanted a song that didn’t fit into some chorus-verse-chorus, strophic structure. I pieced together from magazines, from things I’d been watching at the time, any little bits and bobs, phrases. The goal is to have as little friction between me and my instruments and what’s coming out of my mouth as possible.” **“Frame of Reference”** CH: “I spent about a year struggling with depression, but I’d still gone to festivals that summer. And so, a couple of times, there were hundreds of people dancing around me, and I was dancing, but I felt really crushed and empty, yet dense at the same time—whilst also being on ecstasy. The strangeness of that feeling, that artificial euphoria with this deep human sadness combining, was such a potent and unique emotion to me.” **“Feedback Loop”** CH: “I was really happy with the lyrics in this song. To me, this is, like, an 11 pm song—as you’re walking home, you don’t particularly want to go home and you’re aimlessly wandering around a little bit. I remember me and Sarah were in my garden and I was so obsessed with Molly Nilsson’s song ‘Hey Moon!’ I smoked a joint and listened to it five times and then came in, and then we wrote the chorus of ‘Feedback Loop.’” **“What’s on Your Mind”** SD: “Half of this was improvised in the studio. I think there was some technical difficulty that George was trying to figure out, and we were just mucking around, and he thought it was quite interesting so he pressed *record* and that was one of those lovely studio moments where a song comes out quite a lot differently than when it came in.” **“No Placing”** Jonny Gilbert: “This was written at a marijuana-and-music evening at Charlie’s house. It wasn’t an organized band writing session—more of an impromptu, just-for-enjoyment session. It was an evening of getting down parts that Charlie then spent more time crafting over the next few weeks, and with the help of Sarah, he brought it into a full song. It’s one of the most uptempo ones we’ve got, but to me, it will always feel nighttime because it was written entirely at nighttime.” **“Vibrate”** CH: “It was quite different to what we really wanted to do, and then our managers said it was pretty much their favorite song we’d ever written. We wanted to make songs that were dreamier and playful, but this one is quite dark and a bit serious. I like it now though.” **“Electric Silence”** SD: “This was around the time I was reading the *The Secret Life of Plants*, which is a book that talks a lot about Cleve Backster and his experiments in the 1960s with a polygraph test and plants. It’s a fun little one. I guess it’s just a cute little song. On my Casio, we had this auto-bass that makes these different rhythms and stuff, and we use one which I’m pretty sure is ABBA. We used that a lot.” JG: “It’s very *bop-bop-boop-boop*.” **“Kites”** SD: “‘Kites’ was written when I was in Winchester with my dad in the first part of lockdown. There was this hill that I would go to most days. It was carved out by the surrounding foothills of Winchester, and when you were on the hill, you could see the city in the foreground and this little hill adjacent from my hill. You could see people having picnics and dogs running up, people running up. I guess I was inspired by the open space, and I kind of wanted to spin up out of my body and be one with the clouds.” **“Put Me on the Finish Line”** SD: “This song was hanging around for ages. I created the keyboard line, but I didn’t really know where to go from there. I had this verse, but I could never, ever get a chorus for it. It means that the person that wrote that song all those years ago feels like a completely different person to who I was finishing it. But, thankfully, those two people seem to get along.” **“Cycle of Life”** SD: “This was written in about 20 minutes. Jonny had been watching this documentary on life cycles, nature, sandstorms, and the movement of currents and diatoms.” JG: “I started writing down what they said in the documentary to try and understand it, and it was on the wall when Sarah was making music. She started to fit it into her lyrics, and we realized it could be a thing.” SD: “It’s our most factual song. It’s a little palate cleanser.” **“Adult Glamour”** SD: “This is our oldest song. It feels like family to me. We spent months mixing it in my dad’s study in Fleet, encasing it in as many layers as we could. It was finished after this very intense acid trip that me and Charlie had where we got extremely into the personalities of sounds, thinking about the tones and what they create, just getting very into the tiny intricacies. It’s about the desensitizing nature of technology. After that acid trip, I got rid of my phone for about a year. It was a naive thing to do but was also quite good for me. As most people are, I was very addicted to my phone and I hated that.”
“Everybody is scared of death or ultimate oblivion, whether you want to admit it or not,” Julien Baker tells Apple Music. “That’s motivated by a fear of uncertainty, of what’s beyond our realm of understanding—whatever it feels like to be dead or before we\'re born, that liminal space. It\'s the root of so much escapism.” On her third full-length, Baker embraces fuller arrangements and a full-band approach, without sacrificing any of the intimacy that galvanized her earlier work. The result is at once a cathartic and unabashedly bleak look at how we distract ourselves from the darkness of voids both large and small, universal and personal. “It was easier to just write for the means of sifting through personal difficulties,” she says. “There were a lot of paradigm shifts in my understanding of the world in 2019 that were really painful. I think one of the easiest ways to overcome your pain is to assign significance to it. But sometimes, things are awful with no explanation, and to intellectualize them kind of invalidates the realness of the suffering. I just let things be sad.” Here, the Tennessee singer-songwriter walks us through the album track by track. **Hardline** “It’s more of a confession booth song, which a lot of these are. I feel like whenever I imagine myself in a pulpit, I don\'t have a lot to say that\'s honest or useful. And when I imagine myself in a position of disclosing, in order to bring me closer to a person, that\'s when I have a lot to say.” **Heatwave** “I wrote it about being stuck in traffic and having a full-on panic attack. But what was causing the delay was just this car that had a factory defect and bomb-style exploded. I was like, ‘Man, someone got incinerated. A family maybe.’ The song feels like a fall, but it\'s born from the second verse where I feel like I\'m just walking around with my knees in gravel or whatever the verse in Isaiah happens to be: the willing submission to suffering and then looking around at all these people\'s suffering, thinking that is a huge obstacle to my faith and my understanding, this insanity and unexplainable hurt that we\'re trying to heal with ideology instead of action.” **Faith Healer** “I have an addictive personality and I understand it\'s easy for me to be an escapist with substances because I literally missed being high. That was a real feeling that I felt and a feeling that felt taboo to say outside of conversations with other people in recovery. The more that I looked at the space that was left by substance or compulsion that I\'ve then just filled with something else, the more I realized that this is a recurring problem in my personality. And so many of the things that I thought about myself that were noble or ultimately just my pursuit of knowing God and the nature of God—that craving and obsession is trying to assuage the same pain that alcohol or any prescription medication is.” **Relative Fiction** “The identity that I have worked so hard to cultivate as a good person or a kind person is all basically just my own homespun mythology about myself that I\'m trying to use to inspire other people to be kinder to each other. Maybe what\'s true about me is true about other people, but this song specifically is a ruthless evaluation of myself and what I thought made me principled. It\'s kind of a fool\'s errand.” **Crying Wolf** “It\'s documenting what it feels like to be in a cyclical relationship, particularly with substances. There was a time in my life, for almost a whole year, where it felt like that. I think that is a very real place that a lot of people who struggle with substance use find themselves in, where the resolution of every day is the same and you just can’t seem to make it stick.” **Bloodshot** “The very first line of the song is talking about two intoxicated people—myself being one of them—looking at each other and me having this out-of-body experience, knowing that we are both bringing to our perception of the other what we need the other person to be. That\'s a really lonely and sad place to be in, the realization that we\'re each just kind of sculpting our own mythologies about the world, crafting our narratives.” **Ringside** “I have a few tics that manifest themselves with my anxiety and OCD, and for a long time, I would just straight-up punch myself in the head—and I would do it onstage. It\'s this extension of physicality from something that\'s fundamentally compulsive that you can\'t control. I can\'t stop myself from doing that, and I feel really embarrassed about it. And for some reason I also can\'t stop myself from doing other kinds of more complicated self-punishment, like getting into codependent relationships and treating each one of those like a lottery ticket. Like, \'Maybe this one will work out.\'” **Favor** “I have a friend whose parents live in Jackson, where my parents live. They’re one of my closest friends and they were around for the super dark part of 2019. I\'ll try to talk to the person who I hurt or I\'ll try to admit the wrongdoing that I\'ve done. I\'ll feel so much guilt about it that I\'ll cry. And then I\'ll hate that I\'ve cried because now it seems manipulative. I\'m self-conscious about looking like I hate myself too much for the wrong things I\'ve done because then I kind of steal the person\'s right to be angry. I don\'t want to cry my way out of shit.” **Song in E** “I would rather you shout at me like an equal and allow me to inhabit this imagined persona I have where I\'m evil. Because then, if I can confirm that you hate me and that I\'m evil and I\'ve failed, then I don\'t any longer have to deal with the responsibility of trying to be good. I don\'t any longer have to be saddled with accountability for hurting you as a friend. It’s something not balancing in the arithmetic of my brain, for sin and retribution, for crime and punishment. And it indebts you to a person and ties you to them to be forgiven.” **Repeat** “I tried so hard for so long not to write a tour song, because that\'s an experience that musicians always write about that\'s kind of inaccessible to people who don\'t tour. We were in Germany and I was thinking: Why did I choose this? Why did I choose to rehash the most emotionally loaded parts of my life on a stage in front of people? But that\'s what rumination is. These are the pains I will continue to experience, on some level, because they\'re familiar.” **Highlight Reel** “I was in the back of a cab in New York City and I started having a panic attack and I had to get out and walk. The highlight reel that I\'m talking about is all of my biggest mistakes, and that part—‘when I die, you can tell me how much is a lie’—is when I retrace things that I have screwed up in my life. I can watch it on an endless loop and I can torture myself that way. Or I can try to extract the lessons, however painful, and just assimilate those into my trying to be better. That sounds kind of corny, but it\'s really just, what other options do you have except to sit there and stare down all your mistakes every night and every day?” **Ziptie** “I was watching people be restrained with zip ties on the news. It\'s just such a visceral image of violence to see people put restraints on another human being—on a demonstrator, on a person who is mentally ill, on a person who is just minding their own business, on a person who is being racially profiled. I had a dark, funny thought that\'s like, what if God could go back and be like, ‘Y\'all aren\'t going to listen.’ Jesus sacrificed himself and everybody in the United States seems to take that as a true fact, and then shoot people in cold blood in the street. I was just like, ‘Why?’ When will you call off the quest to change people that are so horrid to each other?”
Close to a year before Kiwi Jr. recorded their second LP, vocalist/guitarist Jeremy Gaudet had figured out a system to get their songwriting done more efficiently. “I had this big binder, like a Five Star binder that you would have for school, and we called it the LP Two Bible,” Gaudet says. “Any time any of us at practice, or outside of practice even, had an idea, we would say, ‘Oh, yeah. Put it in the bible.’ Then by the end of it, before we go to record, we have this binder full of so many ideas and lyrics that we can just constantly reference.” With that plan in mind, the Toronto indie rockers wanted to return to the studio quickly after the full rollout for 2019\'s twice-released *Football Money*—even if unable to test many of the songs live due to lockdown restrictions. Despite the setbacks, the band carried through with another crafty blend of jangling hooks and effervescent melodies—and even a few guitar solos for good measure—alongside Gaudet’s witty, often humorous and highly specific narratives. “It wasn\'t the easiest environment, but the pandemic did allow us more time because we had to delay the initial sessions,” Gaudet says. “We\'re really trying to create something in the studio that sounds how we hope it will sound whenever we\'re able to play live again.” Here, Gaudet and guitarist Brian Murphy walk us through every song on the album. **Tyler** Jeremy Gaudet: “As soon as I had the demo for it, we all agreed this would be a wicked lead-off track for the second record. There\'s a lot of stuff going on that\'s packed into a two-minute song. I think I had the opening lines first and then I started thinking about writing from a character\'s perspective. I knew that if I was going to use someone\'s name, I wanted it to be a name that I couldn\'t think of any other songs that had that name used before. Tyler just popped out. It\'s one of those funny names like Kyle or something where, really, only in your life, you meet people with those names that were born in the \'80s onward, right? It\'s super limited to our generation, I feel like.” **Undecided Voters** Brian Murphy: “It’s probably the oldest song on *Cooler Returns* that wasn\'t around during *Football Money*. We got chances to play it live a lot, which was good to test it out and see what arrangement ideas were working and what wasn\'t and to see crowd reaction to a song that they\'ve never heard before. If they react well, then that\'s obviously a good sign.” JG: “I knew I wanted to write something set in a school. My friend was talking about how the Glasgow arts school burned down twice, and so I was looking into that and I was thinking how dramatic that is for a small place like Glasgow. Then I started to think this whole idea of school rivals within a school, like rival classmates, and I started to think about that movie *Election*, the Reese Witherspoon one. In this day and age where everyone is super woke, how could you possibly be undecided in 2020? That\'s kind of meant to be leveled as like an insult or something.” **Maid Marian’s Toast** JG: “The song is looking at people working restaurant jobs and half the people wanting to burn the place down. Musically, I was definitely thinking about two things. I specifically remember thinking about the Wallflowers, like *Bringing Down the Horse*-era The Wallflowers, and also there was like an Orange Juice or a Pastels vibe, some of that early-’80s or mid-’80s Scottish rock.” **Highlights of 100** JG: “This is the second song we\'ve had called \'Highlights of 100\' just because I really like the title. There\'s a lot about film in this song. Throughout the whole outro, you\'re getting this story about being on a film set and there being different mini universes everywhere. I was probably influenced by that Tarantino movie that came out \[*Once Upon a Time in Hollywood*\] where they\'re constantly on set and they\'re in Western gear.” **Only Here for a Haircut** JG: “This song is a true story about how I went to a friend\'s house to get a haircut from his girlfriend because she used to cut all of her friends\' and his friends\' hair for free. It was just a fun neighborhood thing that she did. I went over there and my friend, the boyfriend, was not home. I felt something really awkward was happening. The movie *Tomb Raider* was on TV. Then I found out via text, like mid-haircut, that they had broken up and I was just like, \'What am I doing here? This is a terrible feeling.\' That was the initial germ of the idea.” **Cooler Returns** JG: “This is one where we had the instrumental for a long time and I had no idea what I was going to write this song about. The lyrics really came together in piecemeal over a year. It wasn\'t one like \'Maid Marian\'s Toast\' where I just sat down and wrote it, or \'Dodger\' is another one that we\'ll get to where I just write that song. I had to pick at it for a while because the phrasing is a little bit off, because you\'ve got that stop-start-y main riff and rhythm that you have to follow in the verses.” **Guilty Party** BM: “This is one we played for probably over a year live and it always went over well at shows, which is a good sign. Like I was saying, if no one has heard it before and they react to it well, then it\'s usually a good sign. We had the arrangement pretty close. We didn\'t have to fight with it too much. We were really going for an XTC thing on the bridge. I don\'t know if we got it or not.” **Omaha** JG: “This one I wrote the lyrics first. Not all the lyrics, but a very specific idea of what they call the Woodstock of capitalism, this huge shareholders meeting in Omaha that they have in these coliseums or big arenas and people from all over America and Canada go to—and all these business people and investors attend meetings and have lanyards. I was thinking, like, ‘Wouldn\'t it be cool if there was a movie or a story about two people meeting at such a terrible-sounding event and having an affair or something? Almost like an \'80s Michael Douglas/Adrian Lyne kind of thing.” **Domino** JG: “This or ‘Nashville Wedding’ would be two of the oldest Kiwi Jr. songs, period. Nothing\'s changed really except for some of Brian\'s guitar flourishes, and the length of the intro and outro have been shortened a bit. There would probably be some people who have a demo MP3 of this somewhere from 2016, because it used to be on SoundCloud before we had any fans. Then we tracked it for *Football Money* and it just didn\'t quite work. And so we said, \'Okay, we finally have to nail it this time,\' because it\'s been a live fan favorite for a while. The lyric of this one has a little to do with listening to true-crime podcasts and the news and everything trying to scare you and living on a bad corner, which I do, and just the idea of an unknown and just learning to live with it.” **Nashville Wedding** JG: “The lyric is about as straightforward as you\'re going to get from me about just crashing somebody\'s wedding. It had a different title, and then in the studio we decided to call it as such because a) we use a lot of Nashville guitars on it and b) one of our friends got married in Tennessee recently and the chorus references Tennessee. I had to assure her that this song about having a miserable time at a wedding was not about her wedding. I had to write her an email before the album came out. I was like, \'Hey, you\'re going to hear something. It\'s not about you.\'” **Dodger** JG: “This song is not about sports at all, but I thought that somebody who is living in the past and somebody who is moving on to the future or the present could really be represented by somebody who is still wearing a Brooklyn Dodgers hat or waiting for the Dodgers to move back to Brooklyn compared to somebody who is not worried about living on the Pacific West Coast and loving life. It\'s as simple as it gets, really. Lyrically, there was so many sports references all the time. Like we\'re a total jock band. LP three is going to be called *Jock Jams*.” BM: “Hopefully, we get to open for AC/DC someday.” **Norma Jean’s Jacket** JG: “I\'m quite pleased with this one. This is about as throwback rock ’n’ roll, rootsy \'70s rock ’n’ roll as we get. Definitely a lot of Rolling Stones—attempted vibes. There\'s also something about this one that I think is funny. Every chorus starts out with me really over the top, sincerely singing the words \'heartache and sorrow\'—which is so off-brand for our band. Sometimes we try to go for laughs too much and then realize that not everyone is looking to laugh when we put on a record.” **Waiting in Line** BM: “I remember we had a team meeting over the Jesus shirt lyric on this one. There was a few different options for what kind of shirt is this person wearing. I do remember the four of us all huddled and you were like, ‘Okay, what\'s it going to be? We need to decide right now.’ I was picturing it as one of those sort of dumb T-shirts with Jesus giving the thumbs up or whatever that Urban Outfitters used to sell. That\'s how I pictured it.”
“Straight away,” Dry Cleaning drummer Nick Buxton tells Apple Music. “Immediately. Within the first sentence, literally.” That is precisely how long it took for Buxton and the rest of his London post-punk outfit to realize that Florence Shaw should be their frontwoman, as she joined in with them during a casual Sunday night jam in 2018, reading aloud into the mic instead of singing. Though Buxton, guitarist Tom Dowse, and bassist Lewis Maynard had been playing together in various forms for years, Shaw—a friend and colleague who’s also a visual artist and university lecturer—had no musical background or experience. No matter. “I remember making eye contact with everyone and being like, ‘Whoa,’” Buxton says. “It was a big moment.” After a pair of 2019 EPs comes the foursome’s full-length debut, *New Long Leg*, an hypnotic tangle of shape-shifting guitars, mercurial rhythms, and Shaw’s deadpan (and often devastating) spoken-word delivery. Recorded with longtime PJ Harvey producer John Parish at the historic Rockfield Studios in Wales, it’s a study in chemistry, each song eventually blooming from jams as electric as their very first. Read on as Shaw, Buxton, and Dowse guide us through the album track by track. **“Scratchcard Lanyard”** Nick Buxton: “I was quite attracted to the motorik-pedestrian-ness of the verse riffs. I liked how workmanlike that sounded, almost in a stupid way. It felt almost like the obvious choice to open the album, and then for a while we swayed away from that thinking, because we didn\'t want to do this cliché thing—we were going to be different. And then it becomes very clear to you that maybe it\'s the best thing to do for that very reason.” **“Unsmart Lady”** Florence Shaw: “The chorus is a found piece of text, but it suited what I needed it for, and that\'s what I was grasping at. The rest is really thinking about the years where I did lots and lots of jobs all at the same time—often quite knackering work. It’s about the female experience, and I wanted to use language that\'s usually supposed to be insulting, commenting on the grooming or the intelligence of women. I wanted to use it in a song, and, by doing that, slightly reclaim that kind of language. It’s maybe an attempt at making it prideful rather than something that is supposed to make you feel shame.” **“Strong Feelings”** FS: “It was written as a romantic song, and I always thought of it as something that you\'d hear at a high school dance—the slow one where people have to dance together in a scary way.” **“Leafy”** NB: “All of the songs start as jams that we play all together in the rehearsal room to see what happens. We record it on the phone, and 99 percent of the time you take that away and if it\'s something that you feel is good, you\'ll listen to it and then chop it up into bits, make changes and try loads of other stuff out. Most of the jams we do are like 10 minutes long, but ‘Leafy’ was like this perfect little three-minute segment where we were like, ‘Well, we don\'t need to do anything with that. That\'s it.’” **“Her Hippo”** FS: “I\'m a big believer in not waiting for inspiration and just writing what you\'ve got, even if that means you\'re writing about a sense of nothingness. I think it probably comes from there, that sort of feeling.” **“New Long Leg”** NB: “I\'m really proud of the work on the album that\'s not necessarily the stuff that would jump out of your speakers straight away. ‘New Long Leg’ is a really interesting track because it\'s not a single, yet I think it\'s the strongest song on the album. There\'s something about the quality of what\'s happening there: Four people are all bringing something, in quite an unusual way, all the way around. Often, when you hear music like that, it sounds mental. But when you break it down, there\'s a lot of detail there that I really love getting stuck into.” **“John Wick”** FS: “I’m going to quote Lewis, our bass player: The title ‘John Wick’ refers to the film of the same name, but the song has nothing to do with it.” Tom Dowse: “Giving a song a working title is quite an interesting process, because what you\'re trying to do is very quickly have some kind of onomatopoeia to describe what the song is. ‘Leafy’ just sounded leafy. And ‘John Wick’ sounded like some kind of action cop show. Just that riff—it sounded like crime was happening and it painted a picture straight away. I thought it was difficult to divorce it from that name.” **“More Big Birds”** TD: “One of the things you get good at when you\'re a band and you\'re lucky enough to get enough time to be together is, when someone writes a drum part like that, you sit back. It didn\'t need a complicated guitar part, and sometimes it’s nice to have the opportunity to just hit a chord. I love that—I’ll add some texture and let the drums be. They’re almost melodic.” **“A.L.C”** FS: “It\'s the only track where I wrote all the lyrics in lockdown—all the others were written over a much longer period of time. But that\'s definitely the quickest I\'ve ever written. It\'s daydreaming about being in public and I suppose touches on a weird change of priorities that happened when your world just gets really shrunk down to your little patch. I think there\'s a bit of nostalgia in there, just going a bit loopy and turning into a bit of a monster.” **“Every Day Carry”** FS: “It was one of the last ones we recorded and I was feeling exhausted from trying so fucking hard the whole recording session to get everything I wanted down. I had sheets of paper with different chunks that had already been in the song or were from other songs, and I just pieced it together during the take as a bit of a reward. It can be really fun to do that when you don\'t know what you\'re going to do next, if it\'s going to be crap or if it\'s going to be good. That\'s a fun thing—I felt kind of burnt out, so it was nice to just entertain myself a bit by doing a surprise one.”
Since the release of their collaborative 2005 LP *Superwolf*, Matt Sweeney and Will Oldham (aka Bonnie “Prince” Billy) have remained close, to such a degree that writing together again felt almost inevitable. “Honestly,” Sweeney tells Apple Music, “it was just a matter of timing. It was always clear that we were down to make another record. But once we committed, we committed.” That was in 2016, and after they began putting songs together in “fits and spurts,” Oldham says, a recording session with Tuareg guitarist Mdou Moctar for another project saw *Superwolf*’s long-awaited sequel finally begin to take shape. “We were sitting on a powder keg and Mdou gave off sparks,” Oldham adds. “It just kept growing from there.” Recorded alongside personal hero and legendary Nashville studio engineer David Ferguson (Johnny Cash, John Prine, Sturgill Simpson), *Superwolves* proves that the chemistry between the two has only deepened over time. As has been their process, Oldham—moved by the recent birth of his daughter and loss of his mother to Alzheimer’s—would send lyrics to Sweeney, who would respond with his guitar. “Will’s voice can fly,” says Sweeney, who fronted ’90s indie outfits Skunk and Chavez before becoming an in-demand session player. “So it’s a combination of writing melodies but also having these guitar parts that are as interesting as his voice is. Guitar parts that are like, ‘Wow, what the hell just happened? That went down really easily, but I know that I just took in a lot of information.’” Much of its magic can be ascribed to the ways in which they’ve continued to learn to communicate over time, as friends and collaborators. “When me and Will first started playing together, it was kind of thrilling, because I really had no fucking idea what to do,” Sweeney says. “I\'d never really played this kind of music before, and if it was like walking into a dark, exciting room 20 years ago, now it\'s like I could just keep on going, deeper and deeper and deeper. I’m more confident in where things are and where I could go.” Here, Sweeney and Oldham take us inside a few of the album’s key tracks. **“Make Worry for Me”** Will Oldham: “My relationship to a guitar is light years away from Matt\'s, so I\'m more witness: When Matt\'s in there working on a solo, he\'s on the luge and I\'m kind of the track, just keeping him from flying into outer space. I can see when Matt\'s in it. I\'m back in the booth and I can look through the glass and I can see this lost, intense, possessed expression on his face, his hands kind of shaking.” Matt Sweeney: “This is different than all the songs that I\'ve written with Will. I had all these goals that I wanted to fucking have happen in the song. One of them was it has to lead to this solo, and then the solo—because Will says, ‘I\'ve got to blow this horn’—has got to be a really good solo. I had it in my mind that I had to do a solo that was kind of like a horn solo anyway, which is an old Keith Richards trick.” **“Good to My Girls”** WO: “I had just acquired this big photography book that was about the red-light district in Mumbai. Each page is a big picture with a quote from somebody who\'s represented in one of the photographs. There was an image of the matron, the madam of a filthy whorehouse in Mumbai, and in one sentence, she said something that summed up what it took to do her job and to do her job well. I sort of went from there, put myself in the position of a South Asian whorehouse proprietress.” MS: “What\'s neat about words is that you don\'t really have to know exactly what it means at all. The more particular something is, the more universal it can be. It\'s a feeling, like this is what Will has in common with this person.” **“God Is Waiting”** WO: “I oftentimes think of the idea that ‘God’ is really just a word for everything—every action, every dynamic, every aspect of time. A number of years ago—maybe I was stoned or something—I thought, ‘God can suck my dick and does.’ Because anytime my dick is sucked, it is being sucked by God. God is the dick, God is the mouth, God is the ejaculation, God is the lust, God is the shame, God is everything about that. Everything. So it was really rewarding to be able to find a place for that to fit, and when Matt gave it that lift at the end, when we\'re going, ‘Hardcore,’ it feels so wonderful because it\'s not intended to be just a bumper-sticker line.” **“Hall of Death”** MS: “Mdou’s band is from Niger—except for the bass player, who lives down the street from me, this guy Mikey Coltun who I highly recommend. We went over to Mikey\'s and we jammed and Will sat in the corner doing melodies and writing lyrics. We all jumped in and came up with it inside of an hour, with the knowledge that we were going to a studio the next day and that we had to record something. It was really loud, so I could hear Will\'s melody but I didn\'t know what the words were, which was a difficult, unusual situation for how we work, because it usually starts with the words.” **“Shorty’s Ark”** WO: “I’m inordinately fond of list songs or lists within songs. This was just having a blast, talking about animals, laid out in a rhythmic fashion. It’s cool because it reminds me of ‘Rudy Foolish,’ from the first record, which is also animal-centric and has the same *Lawrence of Arabia* thing, camels walking across the desert. But for good reason, people who make music aren\'t given a lot of authority or responsibility, and this is sort of embracing that idea by being like, ‘Well, what would you do if you were president? You know, I\'d play with fucking animals.’” MS: “That\'s what the fuck I\'d do.” **“Watch What Happens”** MS: “‘God Is Waiting’ and ‘Watch What Happens’ I wrote on the same day in Jamaica. I’d never been to Jamaica before, and I\'d never gone to one of these really nice hotels where you don\'t have to leave. But I had a guitar, and I was so aware, like, ‘I am this fucking asshole who brought a guitar to Jamaica to write songs.’ But then I embraced that. I’m sitting on the porch, and I have these lyrics from Will, and I’m like, ‘I\'m going to fucking do this.’ There were some dudes working nearby, and I just remember thinking that I have to really sound good, to work hard and impress these guys who were just going to be ignoring me anyway because I’m a tourist. There was an audience who was stuck with me.’” WO: “It makes you understand why assholes go to Jamaica to write songs.” **“My Blue Suit”** WO: “Matt brought a melody to the table that’s going up, up, up, then down, and then up, up, up, and down, then up, up, up, and down, and it\'s tremendously fun to sing and tremendously rewarding to sing. But it\'s got none of the pomp, because it\'s just the two of us. It\'s definitely my favorite thing that is a love song that I\'ve ever written some or all of, just because of the way that it presents.” **“My Body Is My Own”** MS: “On the *Superwolf* record, there’s an unspoken dude—or maybe a spoken dude—but a sort of a character who is consistently going through some shit. And now it\'s as if that human shows up one more time, comes out of the water like, ‘All right, I\'m still here.’” WO: “Lyrically, this feels like it\'s the only song that\'s coming from that first record in kind of a direct way: There are attitudes and themes and ideas that aren\'t there in any of the other songs on this record. But with most of these songs, there’s a moment when we\'re in the studio working on them where I feel like, ‘You know what? I think this is the best song on the record.’ Not every song, but half of them are that way, and I definitely remember thinking—when I\'m inside of this song, when I\'m listening to this song—‘Yeah, there\'s nothing else this good on this record. I don\'t even know how we did this. I really have no idea.’”
“I don’t like to agonize over things,” Arlo Parks tells Apple Music. “It can tarnish the magic a little. Usually a song will take an hour or less from conception to end. If I listen back and it’s how I pictured it, I move on.” The West London poet-turned-songwriter is right to trust her “gut feeling.” *Collapsed in Sunbeams* is a debut album that crystallizes her talent for chronicling sadness and optimism in universally felt indie-pop confessionals. “I wanted a sense of balance,” she says. “The record had to face the difficult parts of life in a way that was unflinching but without feeling all-consuming and miserable. It also needed to carry that undertone of hope, without feeling naive. It had to reflect the bittersweet quality of being alive.” *Collapsed in Sunbeams* achieves all this, scrapbooking adolescent milestones and Parks’ own sonic evolution to form something quite spectacular. Here, she talks us through her work, track by track. **Collapsed in Sunbeams** “I knew that I wanted poetry in the album, but I wasn\'t quite sure where it was going to sit. This spoken-word piece is actually the last thing that I did for the album, and I recorded it in my bedroom. I liked the idea of speaking to the listener in a way that felt intimate—I wanted to acknowledge the fact that even though the stories in the album are about me, my life and my world, I\'m also embarking on this journey with listeners. I wanted to create an avalanche of imagery. I’ve always gravitated towards very sensory writers—people like Zadie Smith or Eileen Myles who hone in on those little details. I also wanted to explore the idea of healing, growth, and making peace with yourself in a holistic way. Because this album is about those first times where I fell in love, where I felt pain, where I stood up for myself, and where I set boundaries.” **Hurt** “I was coming off the back of writer\'s block and feeling quite paralyzed by the idea of making an album. It felt quite daunting to me. Luca \[Buccellati, Parks’ co-producer and co-writer\] had just come over from LA, and it was January, and we hadn\'t seen each other in a while. I\'d been listening to plenty of Motown and The Supremes, plus a lot of Inflo\'s production and Cleo Sol\'s work. I wanted to create something that felt triumphant, and that you could dance to. The idea was for the song to expose how tough things can be but revolve around the idea of the possibility for joy in the future. There’s a quote by \[Caribbean American poet\] Audre Lorde that I really liked: ‘Pain will either change or end.’ That\'s what the song revolved around for me.” **Too Good** “I did this one with Paul Epworth in one of our first days of sessions. I showed him all the music that I was obsessed with at the time, from ’70s Zambian psychedelic rock to MF DOOM and the hip-hop that I love via Tame Impala and big ’90s throwback pop by TLC. From there, it was a whirlwind. Paul started playing this drumbeat, and then I was just running around for ages singing into mics and going off to do stuff on the guitar. I love some of the little details, like the bump on someone’s wrist and getting to name-drop Thom Yorke. It feels truly me.” **Hope** “This song is about a friend of mine—but also explores that universal idea of being stuck inside, feeling depressed, isolated, and alone, and being ashamed of feeling that way, too. It’s strange how serendipitous a lot of themes have proved as we go through the pandemic. That sense of shame is present in the verses, so I wanted the chorus to be this rallying cry. I imagined a room full of people at a show who maybe had felt alone at some point in their lives singing together as this collective cry so they could look around and realize they’re not alone. I wanted to also have the little spoken-word breakdown, just as a moment to bring me closer to the listener. As if I’m on the other side of a phone call.” **Caroline** “I wrote ‘Caroline’ and ‘For Violet’ on the same, very inspired day. I had my little £8 bottle of Casillero del Diablo. I was taken back to when I first started writing at seven or eight, where I would write these very observant and very character-based short stories. I recalled this argument that I’d seen taken place between a couple on Oxford Street. I only saw about 30 seconds of it, but I found myself wondering all these things. Why was their relationship exploding out in the open like that? What caused it? Did the relationship end right there and then? The idea of witnessing a relationship without context was really interesting to me, and so the lyrics just came out as a stream of consciousness, like I was relaying the story to a friend. The harmonies are also important on this song, and were inspired by this video I found of The Beatles performing ‘This Boy.’ The chorus feels like such an explosion—such a release—and harmonies can accentuate that.” **Black Dog** “A very special song to me. I wrote this about my best friend. I remember writing that song and feeling so confused and helpless trying to understand depression and what she was going through, and using music as a form of personal catharsis to work through things that felt impossible to work through. I recorded the vocals with this lump in my throat because it was so raw. Musically, I was harking back to songs like ‘Nude’ and ‘House of Cards’ on *In Rainbows*, plus music by Nick Drake and tracks from Sufjan Stevens’ *Carrie & Lowell*. I wanted something that felt stripped down.” **Green Eyes** “I was really inspired by Frank Ocean here—particularly ‘Futura Free’ \[from 2016’s *Blonde*\]. I was also listening to *Moon Safari* by Air, Stereolab, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Tirzah, Beach House, and a lot of that dreamy, nostalgic pop music that I love. It was important that the instrumental carry a warmth because the song explores quite painful places in the verses. I wanted to approach this topic of self-acceptance and self-discovery, plus people\'s parents not accepting them and the idea of sexuality. Understanding that you only need to focus on being yourself has been hard-won knowledge for me.” **Just Go** “A lot of the experiences I’ve had with toxic people distilled into one song. I wanted to talk about the idea of getting negative energy out of your life and how refreshed but also sad it leaves you feeling afterwards. That little twinge from missing someone, but knowing that you’re so much better off without them. I was thinking about those moments where you’re trying to solve conflict in a peaceful way, but there are all these explosions of drama. You end up realizing, ‘You haven’t changed, man.’ So I wanted a breakup song that said, simply, ‘No grudges, but please leave my life.’” **For Violet** “I imagined being in space, or being in a desert with everything silent and you’re alone with your thoughts. I was thinking about ‘Roads’ by Portishead, which gives me that similar feeling. It\'s minimal, it\'s dark, it\'s deep, it\'s gritty. The song covers those moments growing up when you realize that the world is a little bit heavier and darker than you first knew. I think everybody has that moment where their innocence is broken down a little bit. It’s a story about those big moments that you have to weather in friendships, and asking how you help somebody without over-challenging yourself. That\'s a balance that I talk about in the record a lot.” **Eugene** “Both ‘Black Dog’ and ‘Eugene’ represent a middle chapter between my earlier EPs and the record. I was pulling from all these different sonic places and trying to create a sound that felt warmer, and I was experimenting with lyrics that felt a little more surreal. I was talking a lot about dreams for the first time, and things that were incredibly personal. It felt like a real step forward in terms of my confidence as a writer, and to receive messages from people saying that the song has helped get them to a place where they’re more comfortable with themselves is incredible.” **Bluish** “I wanted it to feel very close. Very compact and with space in weird places. It needed to mimic the idea of feeling claustrophobic in a friendship. That feeling of being constantly asked to give more than you can and expected to be there in ways that you can’t. I wanted to explore the idea of setting boundaries. The Afrobeat-y beat was actually inspired by Radiohead’s ‘Identikit’ \[from 2016’s *A Moon Shaped Pool*\]. The lyrics are almost overflowing with imagery, which was something I loved about Adrianne Lenker’s *songs* album: She has these moments where she’s talking about all these different moments, and colors and senses, textures and emotions. This song needed to feel like an assault on the senses.” **Portra 400** “I wanted this song to feel like the end credits rolling down on one of those coming-of-age films, like *Dazed and Confused* or *The Breakfast Club*. Euphoric, but capturing the bittersweet sentiment of the record. Making rainbows out of something painful. Paul \[Epworth\] added so much warmth and muscularity that it feels like you’re ending on a high. The song’s partly inspired by *Just Kids* by Patti Smith, and that idea of relationships being dissolved and wrecked by people’s unhealthy coping mechanisms.”
For their second full-length, doom outfit King Woman unfurls a concept album loosely based on John Milton’s *Paradise Lost*, a 17th-century epic about Lucifer’s temptation of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. “I was raised Christian, but I’m not Christian anymore,” vocalist Kris Esfandiari tells Apple Music. “There’s a lot of Christian mythology going on in here—stories about some of the major characters from the Bible, like Christ, Adam and Eve, Lilith and Lucifer.” Before she had the album’s concept, Esfandiari had already written the song “Morning Star” about the fallen angel Lucifer. Then a fan gave her an old copy of *Paradise Lost* at a show. “I’d been working on the record, but that was the missing piece of the puzzle,” she says. “It was like an epiphany. So I just went down that road, and here we are. I hope I did it justice.” Below, she discusses each track on *Celestial Blues*. **“Celestial Blues”** “The poem at the beginning comes from these blackout periods I had when I was younger—I guess they were seizures. I had one in the shower, and I woke up screaming and making these crazy noises. My mom ran into the shower fully clothed and started praying in tongues while water was just pouring on both of us. She was trying to cast the spirit of death out of me. But the song itself is about frustration—gender dysphoria and being stuck on this planet of suffering and pain.” **“Morning Star”** “This is partially about Lucifer. To me, they’re kind of an androgynous, Joker type of character who has been scapegoated—and I wanted Lucifer to tell their side of the story. But it’s also about personal experiences where I felt I was a scapegoat in a situation. And that feeling you’ve lost your mind and gone to hell, basically, and come out on the other side a little deranged or crooked and at the same time magnificent. You don’t recognize yourself, but you’ve become this kind of Joker-esque character because of everything you went through.” **“Boghz”** “There are a few translations for this word, but in Arabic it means ‘hatred.’ I’m Iranian, so in Farsi you could translate it as like the lump in your throat before you’re about to cry—or the feeling of pushing it down, like, ‘I’m not going to cry.’ For me, it’s more of a feeling, so I like that it has a few meanings. The song is about a relationship that I tried to make work, but the other person just kept beating me down and being so sadistic. I never really gave up, but I definitely had to walk away in order to survive. A lot of this record is about that relationship, in a way.” **“Golgotha** “This means ‘the place of the skull,’ and it’s where Christ was crucified. That was almost the album title, actually—I have it tattooed on my arm—but I just felt like *Celestial Blues* was more appropriate. The song is about karmic cycles. There’s a lyric in there that says, ‘The snake eats its tail, we return again to this hell,’ which is about how we repeat the same things over and over again and have a hard time learning our lessons. It’s also about the death and resurrection of myself, so there’s a lot to unpack there.” **“Coil”** “This is a continuation of ‘Golgotha’—it’s about the resurrection. To me, it’s like a hardcore gospel song or something. I’ve dealt with a lot of people in the past few years that really tested my patience and my faith in myself, people who made my life difficult and tried to tell me I couldn’t accomplish my dreams—people who insisted that I give all my magic away to them. All those people have since apologized to me, but the song is my declaration that I’m unstoppable. It’s the song of the warrior.” **“Entwined”** “This is a love song about surrendering to emotional availability and commitment. It’s kind of a confession of undying love. It’s about someone from my past. One of their parents passed away from cancer while we were seeing each other, and they kind of disappeared suddenly from my life because of that. So this is my parting gift to them.” **“Psychic Wound”** “We did a video for this one that’s kind of a vampire orgy. In the intro, it’s like I have this clear reflection of myself and then I get involved with these vampires. They start to approach me, it’s a vampire orgy, and then I have a psychotic break. At the end, I snap out of it and I’m returned to my original reflection. There’s a few meanings, but it’s basically about how we all have these wounds from our past, and sometimes vampiric people can sniff those wounds and take advantage of your pain. It’s also about having sex with the devil, so, you know—side note.” **“Ruse”** “This is a song about getting cheated on and taking your revenge. When you get cheated on, you might want to hurt the person who hurt you and feel like you never really knew who they were. There’s a line that says, ‘I’ll wait up for you tonight, you’ll forfeit our love.’ So it’s just about finding out some information that you’re shocked about, and then taking your revenge.” **“Paradise Lost”** “I relate this one back to the Garden of Eden, Lilith, Lucifer, Adam, Eve, God, forbidden fruit, impossible love and betrayal. I feel like this one is about the complexity of relationships and how sometimes they don’t always work out. But it’s also the story that’s been told since the beginning of time—the Garden of Eden.”
When IDLES released their third album, *Ultra Mono*, in September 2020, singer Joe Talbot told Apple Music that it was focused on being present and, he said, “accepting who you are in that moment.” On the Bristol band’s fourth record, which arrived 14 months later, that perspective turns sharply back to the past as Talbot examines his struggles with addiction. “I started therapy and it was the first time I really started to compartmentalize the last 20 years, starting with my mum’s alcoholism and then learning to take accountability for what I’d done, all the bad decisions I’d made,” he tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “But also where these bad decisions came from—as a forgiveness thing but way more as a responsibility thing. Two years sober, all that stuff, and I came out and it was just fluid, we \[Talbot and guitarist Mark Bowen\] both just wrote it and it was beautiful.” Talbot is unshrinkingly honest in his self-examination. Opener “MTT 420 RR” considers mortality via visceral reflections on a driving incident that the singer was fortunate to escape alive, before his experiences with the consuming cycle of addiction cut through the pneumatic riffs of “The Wheel.” There’s hope here, too. During soul-powered centerpiece “The Beachland Ballroom,” Talbot is as impassioned as ever and newly melodic (“It was a conversation we had, I wanted to start singing”). It’s a song where he’s on his knees but he can discern some light. “The plurality of it is that perspective of *CRAWLER*, the title,” he says. “Recovery isn’t just a beautiful thing, you have to go through a lot of processes that are ugly and you’ve got to look at yourself and go, ‘Yeah, you were not a good person to these people, you did this.’ That’s where the beauty comes from—afterwards you have a wider perspective of where you are. And also from other people’s perspectives, you see these things, you see people recovering or completely enthralled in addiction, and it’s all different angles. We wanted to create a picture of recovery and hope but from ugly and beautiful angles. You’re on your knees, some people are begging, some people are working, praying, whatever it is—you’ve got to get through it.” *CRAWLER* may be IDLES’ most introspective work to date, but their social and political focus remains sharp enough on the tightly coiled “The New Sensation” to skewer Conservative MP Rishi Sunak’s suggestion that some people, including artists and musicians, should abandon their careers and retrain in a post-pandemic world. With its rage and wit, its bleakness and hope, and its diversions from the band’s post-punk foundations into ominous electronica (“MTT 420 RR”), glitchy psych textures (“Progress”), and motorik rhythms butting up against free jazz (“Meds”), *CRAWLER* upholds Talbot’s earliest aims for the band. In 2009, he resolved to create something with substance and impact—an antidote to the bands he’d watched in Bristol and London. “They looked beautiful but bored,” he says. “They were clothes hangers, models. I was so sick of paying money to see bored people. Like, ‘What are you doing? Where’s the love?’ I was at a place where I needed an outlet, and luckily I found four brothers who saved my life. And the rest is IDLES.”
The retro-futuristic duo (Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin) hails from LA by way of the uncanny Valley, churning out trippy DIY videos made from random VHS footage and mailing weird brochures to fans like a secretive cult. But on debut full-length *Mercurial World*, their polished synth-pop demands to be taken seriously, though their playful spirit abides—emulating the effects of a VOCALOID with their mouths, kicking off the album with a track called “The End.” Tenenbaum and Lewin blend the nostalgic with the contemporary, combining Y2K-era bubblegum, the disco grooves of mid-aughts indie-dance crossovers, and the space-age sheen of hyperpop for a 45-minute sugar rush; don’t miss “Chaeri,” 2021’s best pop song about being a bad friend.
www.mercurialworld.com
It’s beneath the surface that we often discover real beauty. Strip away melody, and the underlying sounds and textures become the story. Cellist and composer Peter Gregson brings us up-close to music’s inner truth: the delicate sounds of bow meeting string (“Patina”) and fingers on keyboard (“Sense”); the complex, woody overtones of a solo cello (“Don’t Wake”)—all of which we often ignore. This is an album of textures—human, acoustic, and digital—and almost formless soundscapes that envelop the listener, their imperfections inviting an atmosphere of peace and calm, comfort and reassurance. In “Sequence (Seven),” Gregson blends electronica and strings to mesmerizing effect, while his soaring, close-mic’d cello lends “Over” a gorgeous, raw beauty.
On their endlessly eclectic sophomore album, Bicep considers a musical inquiry most often circled by jazz and jam bands: What if tracks don’t need to be immutable, permanent records, but should instead transform and evolve? Taking inspiration from their first major tour—a two-year trek between festivals and clubs during which they’d regularly rework their tracks from the road—the Northern Irish duo freed themselves from the idea that songs had to be fixed. “Club music has to draw you out,” Matt McBriar tells Apple Music. “Headphone music has to pull you in. More often than not, we’d wind up with six different versions of each song. Eventually it was like, ‘Why do we have to choose?’” As a result, the album versions on *Isles* are simply jumping-off points—the best headphones-inclined versions the pair could cut (dance-floor edits will inevitably materialize when they bring the tracks into clubbier environments). “There’s no straight house or techno on this album; those versions will come later,” Andy Ferguson says. “We wanted to explore home listening to its fullest extent, and then explore the live show to its fullest extent. Rather than try to do both at once, we decided to serve each.” Taking this approach presented an interesting challenge: In order for the songs to be malleable *and* recognizable, they needed to have a strong foundation. “They couldn’t be reliant on a single composition, they had to work in different forms,” McBriar says. “We had to make sure they had strong DNA.” Below, the pair—self-described geeks and gear-heads eager to get technical—take us inside the creative process behind each track. **Atlas** McBriar: “This was the first track we finished after coming back from the tour. We tried to capture the feelings from the peak of the live show, that optimism and euphoria in the room when we performed. It set the tone for the rest of the album in terms of our process. Although we initially recorded several different melodies, the final form came together a few months later in a single afternoon on our modular. This riff was the strongest.” **Cazenove** Ferguson: “This was another early demo, and was sparked by our obsessive interest in ’90s technology—the old MPC controllers that Timbaland and Dilla used. That old equipment doesn’t produce instantly crisp sounds or perfect beats, but that’s where the beauty is. It’s fuzzy and imprecise. We were experimenting with a lot of ’90s lo-fi samplers and bit crushers, and the idea was to build a rhythm by feeding our MPC through a reverse reverb patch on the Lexicon PCM96. From there we just added layer upon layer. We wanted something fast and playful, but with a lot less emphasis on the dance floor.” **Apricots** McBriar: “This actually began as an ambient piece, and the strings sat on our hard drive for a year before we considered some vocals. One day, we picked up an amazing, recently released record called *Beating Heart - Malawi*. The vocals and polyrhythms of ‘Gebede-Gebede Ulendo Wasabwera’ stood out. They were captivating. We pitched snippets of them to our strings before building the rest of the track around them. The second sample is from the 1975 \[Bulgarian folk\] album *Le Mystere Des Voix Bulgares*. We connected with the mysterious chanting, and felt like it had parallels to the Celtic folk we grew up hearing.” **Saku (feat. Clara La San)** McBriar: “This began as a footwork-inspired track with a hang drum melody; we’d been looking into polyrhythms and more interesting drum programming. But when we slowed down the tempo from 150 to 130 BPM, it totally flipped the vibe for us. We experimented with several different vocals samples—including ‘Gebede-Gebede Ulendo Wasabwera’ before it wound up on ‘Apricots’—but ended up sending a stripped-back version to Clara La San, who brought a strong ’90s UKG/R&B vibe. We added some haunting synths at the end to bring contrast and some opposing dark and light elements. It was great to pull so many of our influences into one track.” **Lido** Ferguson: “This track was born from one of our many experiments with granular synthesis. We cut a single piano note from a catalog of 1970s samples and fed it into one of our granular samplers. As we experimented with recording it live, the synthesizer glitches and jumps added all this character and texture. It was pretty disorderly and hard to control, but we loved the madness it produced. There are a ton of layers to this track despite it sounding so simple. And mixing it was a lot of work, trying to get that balance between soothing and subtle chaos.” **X (feat. Clara La San)** McBriar: “This track was built around our Psycox SY-1M Syncussion. We’d been hunting for a Pearl original for years. It has all these uncompromising, metallic fizzes and bleeps that are so difficult to tame, you really need to start with it as the center of the track. Most tracks on the album began on the piano, but not this one. The frantic synth melody was actually improvised one afternoon on our Andromeda A6; it was a single take on a heavily customized and edited patch that we\'ve never been able to replicate. It was just one of those moments when you hit ‘record’ and get it right.” **Rever (feat. Julia Kent)** Ferguson: “We started this track in Bali in 2016. We were on tour and had access to a studio full of local instruments, and knew right away that we wanted to use them. We recorded long sessions of us playing them live, but never ended up using them in one of our finished tracks. Several years later, we were working with Julia Kent, who had recorded the strings for another demo, but it just wasn’t working. She tried some of the Bali instrumentals instead. It sounded really unique. The chopped-up vocal came last, edited and re-pitched to fit, almost like a melody.” **Sundial** McBriar: “One of the simplest tracks on the album, ‘Sundial’ grew from a faulty Jupiter 6 arp recording. Our trigger wasn’t working properly and the arp was randomly skipping notes. This was a small segment taken from a recording of Andy playing around with the arp while we were trying to figure out what was going wrong. We actually loved what it produced and wrote some chords around it, guided by the feeling of that recording.” **Fir** Ferguson: “We have a real soft spot for choral vox synths, and this track was born from an experiment with those. It\'s actually one of the fastest songs we\'ve ever made, and grew purely out of those days in the studio when we just jammed, trying new things. No direction, no preconceived ideas, we just felt it out.” **Hawk (feat. machina)** Ferguson: “The melody on ‘Hawk’ is actually our voices mapped and re-pitched to a granular sampler. We experimented a lot with re-pitching on this album; it brings this unique quality to vocals and melodies. We have a rare-ish Japanese synth, the Kawai SX-240, which creates all those super weird synth noises. Again, this track was the product of lots of experimentation. Machina\'s vocal\'s were actually for another demo which we were struggling on and it just worked perfectly.”
Allison Russell has long been a fixture of the roots scene, crafting melodic roots-pop as part of the duo Birds of Chicago and inventive, socially conscious folk with the acclaimed supergroup Our Native Daughters. The Nashville-based, Montreal-born singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist steps out on her own on her debut album, an expertly rendered and powerfully delivered collection that proves Russell to be just as adept a solo artist as she is a collaborator. (Though, in the spirit of collaboration, Russell invites friends and fellow musicians like Yola, Erin Rae, and the McCrary Sisters to join her.) Thematically, *Outside Child* navigates difficult terrain—such as abuse, neglect, and racism—though it does so with an undercurrent of healing, transformation, and compassion. In an album full of standout moments, it’s hard not to point to “4th Day Prayer,” a brutally frank recollection of Russell’s sexual abuse at the hands of her adoptive father, built atop a soulful, gospel-adjacent arrangement that suggests empowerment rather than victimhood. Russell is one of roots music’s finest musicians in any form, but with *Outside Child*, she stakes her claim as one of its finest visionaries too.
'Flock’ is the record that Jane Weaver always wanted to make, the most genuine version of herself, complete with unpretentious Day-Glo pop sensibilities, wit, kindness, humour and glamour. A consciously positive vision for negative times, a brooding and ethereal creation. The album features an untested new fusion of seemingly unrelated compounds fused into an eco-friendly hum; pop music for post-new-normal times. Created from elements that should never date, its pop music reinvented. Still prevalent are the cosmic sounds, but ‘Flock’ is a natural rebellion to the recent releases which sees her decidedly move away from conceptual roots in favour of writing pop music. Produced on a complicated diet of bygone Lebanese torch songs, 1980's Russian Aerobics records and Australian Punk. Amongst this broadcast of glistening sounds is ‘The Revolution Of Super Visions’, an untelevised Mothership connection, with Prince floating by as he plays scratchy guitar; it also features a funky whack-a-mole bass line and synth worms. It underlines the discordant pop vibe that permeates ‘Flock’ and concludes on ‘Solarised’, a super-catchy, totally infectious apocalypse, a radio-friendly groove for last dance lovers clinging together in an effort to save themselves before the end of the night. The musician’s exposure to an abundance of lost records served as a reminder that you still feel like an outsider in this world and that by overcoming fears you can achieve artistic freedom. Jane Weaver continues to metamorphosise…
As he was writing his second solo album, Hayden Thorpe began organizing what he called “salons,” a series of hybrid shows in which the former Wild Beasts frontman would improvise on piano and vocals, in the midst of a gong bath or breath workshop, his audience on their backs. “That was a really powerful experience to sing and play to people in rhythm to their response, their bodies, and their kind of surrender,” he tells Apple Music. “Everyone’s improvising—the breath practitioners and the people on the floor, too. Everyone’s like, ‘I don’t know where this is going.’ The main message of the record is to give yourself permission, to explore what real can be, to allow for the wonder of this.” It is, “if we’re being old-fashioned about it,” Thorpe says, a foray into “aspects of hippiedom” and the outright mystical. But *Moondust for My Diamond* is also a deep, synth-driven exploration of the ways in which we self-mythologize, crafting the story of who we are through a loose patchwork of ancient and modern signifiers—“a bit of that yoga, a bit of that rock ’n’ roll, a bit of that God-fearing sort of Catholic stuff,” he says. Though it was written mostly pre-pandemic, it was finished in Thorpe’s boyhood home, in the mountains of Northern England’s Lake District. “It’s made up of a lot of the stranger, more experimental aspects of my life over the past couple of years,” he says, “as I was dabbling in unknown practices. I had a rugged Northern upbringing, and for me, bringing in aspects of Eastern mysticism made me realize, ‘You know, maybe I don’t have to tell the story of myself quite in the same way that I thought I had.’ It feels like an adventure.” Here, Thorpe guides us through the entire album, track by track. **“Material World”** “A song that I’m really proud of because it was a grand experiment. I didn’t chase it down. We live under the culture of control where we deem ourselves the architects of whatever we want, and I didn’t want for that song. I went forth in faith that it would turn up for me, and in doing so, the words came. I had to be alert and together enough to allow them to come. One day, I just spat it out, that line: ‘It’s only real if I make it.’” **“The Universe Is Always Right”** “It’s a slogan song, which is kind of interesting because my greatest hero is Leonard Cohen, and he despised slogan songs. He criticized Lennon and ‘Give Peace a Chance’-type songs as being cheap and derivative of marketing music. I thought it was a bit dirty for me, but I was also interested in what a slogan is: a spell. And a spell is a spelling, an arrangement or alignment of letters and words that creates an emotional response. So, it kind of felt like casting a spell, that chord together with those words.” **“No Such Thing”** “The spoken-word aspect, it’s kind of like a pepper-and-salt situation. Clearly, my singing voice is kind of a committed one. And some words you disguise by singing—the singing gives them too much thrust, and actually, the purity and the beauty is in the words themselves rather than the delivery. There’s only so much of myself I can tolerate, and I probably found myself more tolerable in that moment. But a lot of craft, really, as a lifelong pursuit, is really removing all the performance and kind of doing more with less.” **“Parallel Kingdom”** “I think those salon gigs were definitely a prologue to the record. Some of the language is inferred in the record and the line in ‘Parallel Kingdom,’ when I sing, ’Allow for the wonder of this,’ came straight out of that. It’s to say, ‘Just let it come to be.’” **“Golden Ratio”** “A golden ratio is kind of a mathematical phenomenon, like a Fibonacci sequence, a shell, an arrangement of sunflower seeds. It’s a perfect equation where one thing fits within another. It explains the symmetry of the universe, from the smallest subjects to the grandest. My operatic moment here is that science is a grander force that we can live by, that will rescue our souls. Because it has revealed to us the miraculous—the miracle that we are.” **“Metafeeling”** “It’s the feeling you feel about what you’re feeling. I think we live in a society that leaves us stranded within our own emotions, because we’ve become beholden to them. In an individualistic society, you must hold your own emotions to be so crucially important, because all you have is yourself. But really, they’re just kind of passing weather systems. Through various lifelong ways of dissolving that relationship to my own emotions, I kind of realized maybe it wasn’t all that bad or wasn’t that serious. So, it’s a song about surrender, to say, ‘I don’t know what I think, and I don’t know everything anymore. Maybe I don’t have to.’” **“Supersensual”** “I like the line ‘808 upon my chakra.’ That, to me, summed up a lot of the record and came about from watching an interview Letterman did with Kanye, who spoke about the resonance of the 808 kick drum stimulating the sacral chakra—the sex chakra—and the hyper masculinity of hip-hop and R&B kind of hitting your sex organs simultaneously. It was a real enlightening moment for me. I just thought it was absolutely incredible, this meeting of the kind of corporate end of the music business with Eastern mysticism with, in my opinion, a visionary maker. I think that mysticism is entering our daily psyche—and we are more beholden to it than we dare realize or allow ourselves to believe.” **“Hotel November Tango”** “Hotel November Tango is HNT—Hayden Norman Thorpe. It’s a song I wrote to myself about myself. In some respects, incredibly indulgent. But the point being, we’re all alone in ourselves. We were born into this body, and we somehow have to make it work. And we get it wrong until we get it right. It’s a lifelong quest to get out of ourselves, to get out of our heads. That’s maybe a big part of desire and a big part of the miracle of sexuality, which, in ways, is the grand releaser of our own skin. To kind of become another, and for another to become us.” **“Rational Heartache”** “It’s coming from the fact that we medicalize sadness in our society. We deem it to be an un-useful state of being. So, we drug it, we ostracize it, we stigmatize it. And in doing so, we lose its value. That’s not to say that I disagree with forms of therapy and antidepressants. I don’t—I’ve been there, they work. But it’s to say, ‘Hey, maybe I feel like shit and it’s a really rational way to feel.’ We deem sadness as an experience of madness, and maybe it is. But I wanted this to be, in a strange way, a kind of Happy Mondays tune, imagining myself just grabbing the maracas and dancing the shit out of it until I felt better.” **“Spherical Time II”** “I think the record needed a breath—just to allow that last section to happen. It’s a kind of look beneath the hood of the record—it’s accidental music. Because you’re on such a mission when you’re making records, you pass through many spaces that are actually of real value and really beautiful work.” **“Suspended Animation”** “I think it started from that line, ‘Now that I got what I was asking for, I don’t want it so much anymore.’ It’s the lived experience of having won, having lived some dreams, and having achieved certain things—and not getting the transformation that I expected. I think we kind of associate success with virtue now, don’t we? Certainly, success in relationships, success in jobs and careers. But success doesn’t necessarily mean virtue. Success just means, literally, a succession of fortuitous events. I realized that when I didn’t quite go through the kind of awakenings I expected, it’s just like, ‘Oh man, no, that didn’t fix anything. That was just a different time.’” **“Runaway World”** “I would say it was a buzz when ‘LMAO’ came to my lips. That song was the only one that was written in lockdown, as it was the only one that wasn’t finished before the world changed. I guess it was kind of a beautiful moment: The cosmic joke has happened and the end of the world we’d all been preparing for was happening. Those of us who are occupying an inner landscape and make work out of it and kind of have to deal with ourselves a lot in that space were like, ‘Oh yeah, man, I’m ready for this. I’ve got the survival pack. Let’s go.’ But I ended up back in the bedroom that I grew up in as a boy, back in the town I grew up in. We all had various tricks played on us, and that was the one played on me.”
When Low started out in the early ’90s, you could’ve mistaken their slowness for lethargy, when in reality it was a mark of almost supernatural intensity. Like 2018’s *Double Negative*, *Hey What* explores new extremes in their sound, mixing Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker\'s naked harmonies with blocks of noise and distortion that hover in drumless space—tracks such as “Days Like These” and “More” sound more like 18th-century choral music than 21st-century indie rock. Their faith—they’ve been practicing Mormons most of their lives—has never been so evident, not in content so much as purity of conviction: Nearly 30 years after forming, they continue to chase the horizon with a fearlessness that could make anyone a believer.
Poignant musings on loss and rebirth against a Cornish canvas.
Ty Segall’s turn toward synths isn’t as dramatic a renovation as it sounds. If anything, the revelation of *Harmonizer* is that his writing is distinctive enough that you could recognize him in just about any costume: hooky, direct, and psychedelic, but with just enough of a hint of horror-movie eeriness to keep you unsettled. And as different as garage rock might seem from the minimal gleam of the music here (the loose and organic versus the mechanical and impassive), the connection lies in science-fictive questions of what makes us human in the first place: Our freedoms? Our routines? Our wildest impulses, or our ability to control them? The historical touchpoints remain familiar: T. Rex (“Pictures”), early King Crimson (“Whisper,” “Erased”), the queasy soundtracks of Italian giallo movies (“Ride”), mixed with both inspiration and historical precision. And if you miss the shredding, just remember that the hum of the fridge at night is plenty psychedelic if you listen deeply enough.
His first album in forever (two years)! Ty glides smoothly into a wild area with a synthtasm of production redesign, dialing up a wealth of new guitar and keyboard settings. A seething statement of emotional austerity, Harmonizer enraptures the ear, while enabling Ty to cut through dense undergrowth, making groove moves for the body, mind and soul.
“I don\'t think it\'s an incredible, incredible album, but I do think it\'s an honest portrayal of what we were like and what we sounded like when those songs were written,” Black Country, New Road frontman Isaac Wood tells Apple Music of his Cambridge post-punk outfit’s debut LP. “I think that\'s basically all it can be, and that\'s the best it can be.” Intended to capture the spark of their early years—and electrifying early performances—*For the First Time* is an urgent collision of styles and signifiers, a youthful tangling of Slint-ian post-rock and klezmer meltdowns, of lowbrow and high, Kanye and the Fonz, Scott Walker and “the absolute pinnacle of British engineering.” Featuring updates to singles “Sunglasses” and “Athens, France,” it’s also a document of their banding together after the public demise of a previous incarnation of the outfit, when all they wanted to do was be in a room with one another again, playing music. “I felt like I was able to be good with these people,” Wood says of his six bandmates. “These were the people who had taught me and enabled me to be a good musician. Had I played the record back to us then, I would be completely over the moon about it.” Here, Wood walks us through the album start to finish. **Instrumental** “It was the first piece we wrote. So to fit with making an accurate presentation of our sound or our journey as musicians, we thought it made sense to put one of the first things we wrote first.” **Athens, France** “We knew we were going to be rerecording it, so I listened back to the original and I thought about what opportunities I might take to change it up. I just didn\'t do the best job at saying the thing I was wanting to say. And so it was just a small edit, just to try and refine the meaning of the song. It wouldn’t be very fun if I gave that all away, but the simplest—and probably most accurate—way to explain it would be that the person whose perspective was on this song was most certainly supposed to be the butt of a joke, and I think it came across that that wasn\'t the case, and that\'s what made me most uncomfortable.” **Science Fair** “I’m not so vividly within this song; I’m more of an outsider. I have a fair amount of personal experience with science fairs. I come from Cambridge—and most of the band do as well—and there\'s many good science fairs and engineering fairs around there that me and my father would attend quite frequently. It’s a funny thing, something that I did a lot and never thought about until the minute that the idea for the song came into my head. It’s the sort of thing that’s omnipresent, but in the background. It\'s the same with talking about the Cirque du Soleil: Just their plain existence really made me laugh.” **Sunglasses** “It was a genuine realization that I felt slightly more comfortable walking down the street if I had a pair of sunglasses on. It wasn\'t necessarily meditating on that specific idea, but it was jotted down and then expanded and edited, expanded and messed around with, and then became what it was. Sunglasses exist to represent any object, those defense mechanisms that I recognize in myself and find in equal parts effective and kind of pathetic. Sometimes they work and other times they\'re the thing that leads to the most narcissistic, false, and ignorant ways of being. I just broke the pair that my fiancée bought for me, unfortunately. Snapped in half.” **Track X** “I wrote that riff ages and ages ago, around the time I first heard *World of Echo* by Arthur Russell, which is possibly my favorite record of all time. I was playing around with the same sort of delay effects that he was using, trying to play some of his songs on guitar, sort of translate them from the cello. We didn\'t play it for ages and ages, and then just before we recorded this album, we had the idea to resurrect it and put it together with an old story that I had written. It’s a love story—love and loss and all that\'s in between. It just made sense for it to be something quieter, calmer. And because it was arranged most recently, it definitely gives the most glimpse of our new material.” **Opus** “‘Opus’ and ‘Instrumental’ were written on the same day. We were in a room together without any music prepared, for the first time in a few months, and we were all feeling quite down. It was a highly emotional time, and I think the music probably equal parts benefits and suffers from that. It\'s rich with a fair amount of typical teenage angst and frustration, even though we were sort of past our teens by that point. I mean, it felt very strange but very, very good to be playing together again. It took us a little while to realize that we might actually be able to do it. It was just a desire to get going and to make something new for ourselves, to build a new relationship musically with each other and the world, to just get out there and play a show. We didn\'t really have our sights set particularly high—we just really wanted to play live at the pub.”
In early 2020, Celeste was riding high. The LA-born, Brighton-raised singer had just topped the BBC’s Sound of 2020 list, claimed the equally prestigious BRITs Rising Star Award, and announced her debut album. But something didn’t feel right. “Everything was moving quite quickly, and I almost didn’t have time to think about how things made me feel or allow them to settle in,” the singer—full name Celeste Epiphany Waite—tells Apple Music. “The songs people had responded to the most were the ones that I had put the most genuine feeling into. At some stage, bringing out singles and stuff, I think that got lost. I felt weakened.” When the UK was put into its first lockdown back in March 2020, Celeste had a chance to reassess. “Everything slowing down was quite helpful,” she says. “I could take stock of what was really important to me and focus on why I was here in the first place.” All of which led to *Not Your Muse*, a rethought debut on which Celeste explores “conversations and dialogue and bits of stories about the things I’ve experienced.” The songs here are about loss (“Strange”), the thrill of new love (“Tonight Tonight”), political disenfranchisement (“Tell Me Something I Don’t Know”), and finding hope after dark times (the exquisite “Some Goodbyes Come With Hellos”). And across it all, Celeste turns any weakness she might once have felt into strength. She takes her nostalgic yet current blend of soul, pop, and R&B—music that’s prompted breathless Nina Simone, Ella Fitzgerald, and Amy Winehouse comparisons—to even bolder places, with jubilant brass melodies, stomping rhythms, and heart-stopping vocals all decorating a startlingly accomplished debut album. “I felt more and more confident with each leap I took,” she says. “The message I wanted for people to take from this project is the idea of trusting yourself to finally get to where you want to be.” Read on as Celeste walks us through her powerful—and empowered—debut, one track at a time. **Ideal Woman** “\[UK producer\] Josh Crocker played the chords to this song and I loved them straight away. I held the microphone and just started to speak what was on my mind. This song is like a conversation with an old friend. And that’s how I wanted people to feel at the beginning of the record, because the songs on it are conversations and dialogue and bits of stories about things that I\'ve experienced. When I wrote ‘Ideal Woman,’ I was feeling disappointed with some of my romantic experiences with men. With them had come insecurities, which is what the verses are about. But the chorus is me reaching a place that’s like, ‘I’m just myself and it’s okay to be that way.’” **Strange** “To a lot of people, this probably sounds like a breakup song. But for me, it’s encompassing lots of feelings of loss. I wrote it in LA, during the 2018 California wildfires. One day, we passed the hospital where I’d seen my dad for the last time, before he died, and my stomach just dropped—the emotion was as raw as it had been six years earlier. I was also feeling heartbreak about the distance that had come between me and some of the friends I\'d grown up with. And I was scared, too, that I’d lose my voice because of the ash in the sky. All those things came together in the studio. I approached the microphone very gently, because I was worried about my voice. But that also filtered into how I would treat this song, which was respectfully. When we finished it, there was this moment of quiet. I think we all felt proud of what we had done.” **Tonight Tonight** “When I first started hanging out with the man who’s my boyfriend now, we’d both be working during the day, so by the time we got to see each other, it\'d be late. All of this romance would occur in the night. This song was just what I wanted to say at the time. I remember working with \[UK songwriter and producer\] Jamie Hartman and he started to conjure up this imagery of the shadow and the light beneath the door. And in that, I just remembered the moment of laying in my bed and knowing that Sonny \[Hall, Celeste’s partner\] was going to come in. Feeling nervous and feeling excited—all that intrigue about another person.” **Stop This Flame** “This was the first song I wrote with Jamie. I was nervous about working with him, because I really liked the stuff he’d written before. I remember him asking what I liked and, all of a sudden, I couldn’t remember any of it! So the most significant names just came out of my mouth, including Nina Simone. He was immediately like, ‘Oh, I\'ve got this piano thing that\'s a bit like “Sinnerman.”’ I thought it was amazing, but by the time I’d moved on to writing other music, I felt it was too close to the music that’s inspired me. I was quite hesitant for people to hear it. But then, as time went on, I began to evolve in a way, as did the meaning of the song to me. Which is that you don’t let too much dishearten you or get in your way.” **Tell Me Something I Don’t Know** “I wrote this on February 8, 2020. I was in LA, but was thinking about what was going on in England. I was very disappointed that the Conservatives had won the \[December 2019\] election, which came from a place of feeling that, in my opinion, they speak for so few people. I was in the studio and was listening to a lot of Gil Scott-Heron. This song is like, ‘Okay, this is the hand we’ve been dealt. But are we going to get a different answer this time?’ That’s why I wrote the lyric ‘Tell me something I don’t know,’ because I wanted to have some different answers—and different outcomes—from these people.” **Not Your Muse** “I\'d had the title of this song for three years. I always knew what I wanted it to be about, but I probably tried to write it five times without knowing how to get there. And then, I just surrendered to it and realized that there was something I hadn\'t experienced yet, which would reveal how I’d write it. I had become intrigued by the relationship between the artist and the muse, and the muse as this vessel. I would come up against different obstacles, \[such as\] people I was working with having a different expectation of me. They became the artist, where they had their idea of what they wanted me to exude and emit, but it didn\'t really align with the ideas I had within myself. And so that became an underlying thing in my periphery, which I think contributed to eventually being able to finish this song.” **Beloved** “This song is very ’50s—like those old crooned, whimsical, mellow kind of love songs. I’d just got back from playing some shows in Germany, and I was missing being around my friends and being in London. I went to the studio because Jamie was only in England for a day and a half. I wanted to write something, but I also wanted to be out seeing my friends. So it was written with this kind of tired, post-flight feeling. And that’s come across in the delivery of the melodies. It’s quite woozy. Here, I’m the secret admirer and it’s my love letter to the person I admire from afar.” **Love Is Back** “I don’t know how many people experience this as often as I have, but I get a fantasy about people before I really know that much about them. When I wrote this song, I’d probably met someone at a party and been like, ‘Oh my god, they’re the love of my life!’ And then it gets to two weeks later, and I’m just like, ‘I got that so wrong.’ This song started as me being like, ‘Oh, here she goes again, she’s in love again!’ But when I came to finish it, I had actually fallen in love and was in a relationship. That changed my approach. I was feeling more bold, and that’s reflected in the bigger arrangements in the song and those louder horns.” **A Kiss** “This song details the knowledge gained from different romantic interactions, which I assimilated to types of kisses and what they turn into. But I also see this song as my older self talking to my younger self. It’s like, ‘I hate to say it like this, but this is how it’s going to go.’ A kiss is so important. All of these things just sprouted from that one quite literal thing.” **The Promise** “When I heard the chords to this song, I felt like they were going round in a circle. Straight away, it made me think of those people you always go back to. And it reminded me of that moment where it’s 7 am at a house party, and you and that other person are both hanging on for dear life because you both want to go back with each other, but neither of you want to make the last move. The outro to this song goes back to the guitar that starts it, which is a metaphor for that idea of going around again and again.” **A Little Love** “In October 2019, \[department store\] John Lewis approached my team and told us that they wanted to do an original piece of music for that year’s Christmas advert, which was a first. There are certain things you feel quite starstruck by, and I got straight to writing it! The song is very simple. It’s about the idea that if you’re giving and loving to people who surround you, it contributes to the world being a better place. I liked how unpretentious that was. I’m proud that I got to do this and be part of something that had never happened before.” **Some Goodbyes Come With Hellos** “I wanted to say to the people who were listening to this album that this isn’t an end. It’s more ‘Goodbye for now.’ But I also wanted to end it with a sense of optimism. Some of this album talks about the harsh realities of life, and this song is saying that I’m always hopeful. This song has the demo vocal on it. I often try to keep the demo vocal on songs because it retains the emotion that’s the closest to the source. To me, it’s important that that emotion isn’t being performed in a superficial way. Hopefully, that shows in the music.”
