On their second LP, Greta Van Fleet continues to bow at the altar of classic rock with a heavy dose of blues-soaked riffs and transcendent imagery. “Life’s the story of ascending to the stars as one,” vocalist Josh Kiszka sings with his gravelly tenor on “Heat Above,” an optimistic call-to-arms that soars high with flourishes of acoustic guitar and Hammond organ. But when they’re not pleading for divine unity, the Kiszka brothers—alongside drummer Danny Wagner—embrace stomping, self-empowering anthems (“My Way, Soon”), majestic hard rock with medieval motifs (“Age of Machine”), and pompous power ballads (“Tears of Rain”). Less urgent and more ambitious than 2018’s *Anthem of the Peaceful Army*, it’s an album that pushes ahead with technical prowess and lots of attitude. On the epic nine-minute closer “The Weight of Dreams,” the band ascends to the pearly gates as they proudly worship the almighty Zep: “Heaven sent us here to meet the hallowed shore/To claim the wealth that we had sold.”
“I didn’t know if we were going to be able to recreate the magic,” Tunng’s Mike Lindsay tells Apple Music of returning to LUMP, his collaboration with Laura Marling, following 2018’s acclaimed, eponymous debut. “I was petrified.” It’s not too hard to see why. *LUMP*—on which Marling layered, as she puts it, “essentially free-form nonsense poetry” atop atmospheric electronic folk soundscapes crafted by Lindsay—presented a strangely wonderful meeting of musical minds that few could have predicted. Fortunately, *Animal* proves that it was no one-off. Here, bolstered by their experience of touring together, LUMP takes their sound to bigger, bolder, and more hedonistic places, as the duo explores—like they did on their debut—a space somewhere between sweetness and menace, darkness and light. “That’s what makes it work for me,” says Lindsay. “There’s this creepiness versus cuteness. It needs to grate up against each other to keep it surprising.” And there are plenty of surprises, from gloriously danceable moments (“Animal”) to off-kilter indie pop (“Climb Every Wall,” “We Cannot Resist”) and one thrilling, truly unexpected guitar solo (“Paradise”). Marling—who drew from her study of psychoanalysis and her own dreams for this album’s lyrics—says *Animal* is about “desire and the under-conscious things that are driving us,” as well as our attention deficit, validation, fame (including her own), and cultural shifts. (If any of that sounds impenetrable, it somehow isn’t once you press play.) There is, too, a sense of freedom and playfulness throughout. And for Marling in particular—who worked on *Animal* alongside 2020’s *Song for Our Daughter*—that has always been the beauty of LUMP. “When I was working on *Song for Our Daughter*, I was having problems with my throat. I was struggling to sustain my voice or catch my breath. But in the studio with Mike, I wasn’t experiencing those problems. I think that obviously says a lot about what LUMP was to me at that time, which is just a huge relief. Laura Marling is this very private, stressful experience, whereas LUMP is an energetic force to draw on. There are no bad ideas.” Read on as Marling and Lindsay guide us through their second musical adventure, one track at a time. **“Bloom at Night”** Mike Lindsay: “With the ambient beginning, I feel this song has an element of similarity to the opening track on *LUMP*. But when those beats click in, it’s a shock. It just felt the perfect way to draw you in and then make you wonder, ‘What\'s going to happen on this record? ’Cause I don\'t really know what this is anymore.’” Laura Marling: “The first lyric that I came up with was ‘It took one God seven days to go insane.’ I guess I was trying to describe the feeling of what people have been reduced to in the attention age. The indecency of being reduced, at times, to get your piece of attention in the world, which none of us is above—particularly artists and musicians.” **“Gamma Ray”** ML: “We had the chorus first, but it took a long time to figure out the verse part. Laura went to the kitchen and came back with this amazing set of lyrics—really menacing, covered in attitude. They slotted in perfectly around the stupid timing this song is in (it’s in 7/4). When we layered up that verse at the end of the last chorus, it was like black magic or something. When you hear the words ‘Excuse me, I don’t think we’ve been introduced,’ for me that’s the voice of Lump \[the duo’s yeti-like mascot, who appeared on the cover of their debut\].” **“Animal”** LM: “This was the easiest to decipher from the music Mike had made. And again, lyrically following the theme of desire, and sort of the gross accoutrements of desire.” ML: “We had that riff, and it felt like a kind of ’90s, slowed-down rave riff or something. The first lyrics Laura started singing—‘Dance, dance, this is your last chance’—were a joke, with that overly British voice, just for fun. But for me, it was kind of a eureka moment. And in the breakdown, she started doing this kind of gospel or party animal moment and it blew my mind. What Laura is singing in the middle collapse of the song is the word ‘animal.’ And that\'s why it became the title of the album. I think it\'s such a strong, very simple word that meant a lot to the LUMP project.” **“Climb Every Wall”** ML: “For me, this song is all about the bassline. There was a kind of melancholy and drunkenness at the same time. It felt like a brilliant piece of pop music, which I hadn’t really done in LUMP before. But Laura totally twisted it into something I wasn’t really expecting. It’s dark, foreboding, with almost a Nico-esque voice.” **“Red Snakes”** LM: “This song is similar to stuff I’ve done before, but with LUMP’s slightly wonky imagery. I have a recurring dream of my mother being in a pool of water at night, like a pond, and not being able reach her. In one of the dreams I reached into the water to see what was in there and a huge red snake came and bit my arm and I couldn\'t get it off. That’s obviously a very stark image and a very strong feeling, so it came together quickly. The intimacy of the piano also dictated that.” **“Paradise”** ML: “I wasn’t sure about this track. Partly because it’s in a slightly different key to the other tracks, so I was like, ‘It’s going to ruin my journey, man!’ But I was wrong. It’s one of those tunes that is very creepy mixed with this pure joy. I worried it was just too far beyond what we’ve done before, but I think that was why Laura wanted it on the record. And for me, all that really matters about this song is the badass guitar solo.” LM: “The ‘paradise’ in the context of the song is either that moment near death or the moment near waking when you have a sort of ecstatic experience. The whole fool\'s journey is that we\'re getting back to that state, total bliss, just unachievable. It\'s a fantasy. And then, that was intertwined with me having a dream in which my therapist approached me on the top deck of a London bus, offered me a cucumber sandwich, then asked me out on a date. And that was a disturbing image, as I\'m sure you\'d agree.” **“Hair on the Pillow”** ML: “This whole album is supposed to be one kind of journey. And I think after we’ve had the massive moment of ‘Paradise,’ we needed some time to reflect. What is this world you’ve been put in sonically? It’s also a chance to reflect on some of Laura’s imagery. The words ‘hair on your pillow’ is sampled form ‘Animal’ through a heavily pitched-down vocoder. It’s another example of the voice of Lump the character.” **“We Cannot Resist”** LM: “This song is a pretty well-trodden story: kids on the run, first love, biggest heartbreak, and so on. Then there’s all this quite strange libidinal language about profanity. Desire is quite often something that\'s either really tightly strung or has gone slack. I was just messing around with that and it ended up making it a not straightforward pop song.” ML: “There’s a magic moment at the end of this song when it just dissipates into whispers, which then continues into the flutes of the next song, ‘Oberon,’ which are actually the same flutes from ‘Bloom at Night.’ The whole record has these kinds of in-between tracks, which give a different flavor to the song you just heard. This song is kind of a broken pop song that doesn’t quite know what it’s supposed to be.” **“Oberon”** LM: “Mike had this piece of music and we didn’t have very long to work on it—he was in Margate and I was going home at the end of the day, so we needed to come up with something quickly. I have a continuous run of notebooks—the front is for Laura Marling and the back, flipped around, is for LUMP. I flipped it to the Laura Marling side and found something I had never used. ‘Oberon’ must have been in the mix for *Song for Our Daughter*. We did three takes and I read excerpts of notes that I’d written way back. Then Mike just cut them up and put them in random places, so that their meaning was completely different and obscure. It turned out to be an odd, pleasing listen.” **“Phantom Limb”** LM: “I make a daily habit of underlining things in newspapers and quote some stuff, phrases that I like. This song is just a repository for the funny phrasing I’ve heard in the last few years. Lots of the lyrics are about things that are uncomfortable to think about—slightly disturbing images.” ML: “This song has a rolling time signature that never ends. I could listen to it forever. ‘We have some work to do’ is such a brilliant line to end the whole project on. It can be very open to interpretation as a comment on society. This ending makes me want to go back to the start and retrace my steps, to work out what journey I’ve just listened to.”
I started writing ‘idyll’ with one intention—to create a peaceful, gentle place, much like Southern California's rolling green hills in their fleeting spring. I gathered nature sounds from various meaningful locations (Ojai, LA hiking trails, my bedroom window) and began working them into each song. I most often started with my mid-90's Mexican Strat and sound on sound guitar and vocal loops using Strymon, Empress, and Chase Bliss pedals. All of the songs on idyll were written between late October of 2020-early January of 2021 just after finishing a collaborative album, ’The Other Side of Darkness’ with my project, awakened souls alongside prolific ambient musician 36 (out now on Past Inside the Present). I hope you find your own peaceful place within this collection of songs. -Cynthia
Over the course of her first four albums as The Weather Station, Toronto’s Tamara Lindeman has seen her project gradually blossom from a low-key indie-folk oddity into a robust roots-rock outfit powered by motorik rhythms and cinematic strings. But all that feels like mere baby steps compared to the great leap she takes with *Ignorance*, a record where Lindeman soundly promotes herself from singer-songwriter to art-rock auteur (with a dazzling, Bowie-worthy suit made of tiny mirrors to complete the transformation). It’s a move partly inspired by the bigger rooms she found herself playing in support of her 2017 self-titled release, but also by the creative stasis she was feeling after a decade spent in acoustic-strummer mode. “Whenever I picked up the guitar, I just felt like I was repeating myself,” Lindeman tells Apple Music. “I felt like I was making the same decisions and the same chord changes, and it just felt a little stale. I just really wanted to embrace some of this other music that I like.” To that end, Lindeman built *Ignorance* around a dream-team band, pitting pop-schooled players like keyboardist John Spence (of Tegan and Sara’s live band) and drummer Kieran Adams (of indie electro act DIANA) against veterans of Toronto’s improv-jazz scene, like saxophonist Brodie West and flautist Ryan Driver. The results are as rhythmically vigorous as they are texturally scrambled, with Lindeman’s pristine Christine McVie-like melodies mediating between the two. Throughout the record, Lindeman distills the biggest, most urgent issues of the early 2020s—climate change, social injustice, unchecked capitalism—into intimate yet enigmatic vignettes that convey the heavy mental toll of living in a world that seems to be slowly caving in from all sides. “With a lot of the songs on the record, it could be a personal song or it could be an environmental song,” Lindeman explains. “But I don\'t think it matters if it\'s either, because it\'s all the same feelings.” Here, Lindeman provides us with a track-by-track survey of *Ignorance*’s treacherous psychic terrain. **Robber** “It\'s a very strange thing to be the recipient of something that\'s stolen, which is what it means to be a non-Indigenous Canadian. We\'re all trying to grapple with the question of: What does it mean to even be here at all? We\'re the beneficiaries of this long-ago genocide, essentially. I think Canadians in general and people all over the world are sort of waking up to our history—so to sing \'I never believed in the robber\' sort of feels like how we all were taught not to see certain things. The first page in the history textbook is: ‘People lived here.’ And then the next 265 pages are all about the victors—the takers.” **Atlantic** “I was thinking about the weight of the climate crisis—like, how can you look out the window and love the world when you know that it is so threatened, and how that threat and that grief gets in the way of loving the world and being able to engage with it.” **Tried to Tell You** “Something I thought about a lot when I was making the album was how strange our society is—like, how we’ve built a society on a total lack of regard for biological life, when we are biological. Our value system is so odd—it\'s ahuman in this funny way. We\'re actually very soft, vulnerable creatures—we fall in love easily and our hearts are so big. And yet, so much of the way that we try to be is to turn away from everything that\'s soft and mysterious and instinctual about the way that we actually are. There\'s a distinct lack of humility in the way that we try to be, and it doesn\'t do us any good. So this just started out as a song about a friend who was turning away from someone that they were very clearly deeply in love with, but at the same time, I felt like I was writing about everyone, because everyone is turning away from things that we clearly deeply love.” **Parking Lot** “What\'s beautiful about birds is that they\'re everywhere, and they show up in our big, shitty cities, and they\'re just this constant reminder of the nonhuman perspective—like when you really watch a bird, and you try to imagine how it\'s perceiving the world around it and why it\'s doing what it does. For me, there\'s such a beauty in encountering the nonhuman, but also a sadness, and those two ideas are connected in the song.” **Loss** “This song started with that chord change and that repetition of \'loss is loss is loss is loss.\' So I stitched in a snapshot of a person—I don\'t know who—having this moment where they realize that the pain of trying to avoid the pain is not as bad as the pain itself. The deeper feeling beneath that avoidance is loss and sadness and grief, so when you can actually see it, and acknowledge that loss is loss and that it\'s real, you also acknowledge the importance of things. I took a quote from a friend of mine who was talking about her journey into climate activism, and she said, ‘At some point, you have to live as if the truth is true.’ I just loved that, so I quoted her in the song, and I think about that line a lot.\" **Separated** “With some of these songs, I\'m almost terrified by some of the lyrics that I chose to include—I\'m like, \'What? I said that?\' To be frank, I wrote this song in response to the way that people communicate on social media. There\'s so much commitment: We commit to disagree, we commit to one-upping each other and misunderstanding each other on purpose, and it\'s not dissimilar to a broken relationship. Like, there\'s a genuine choice being made to perpetuate the conflict, and I feel like that\'s not really something we like to talk about.” **Wear** “This one\'s a slightly older song. I think I wrote it when I was still out on the road touring a lot. And it just seemed like the most perfect, deep metaphor: ‘I tried to wear the world like some kind of garment.’ I\'m always really happy when I can hit a metaphor that has many layers to it, and many threads that I can pull out over the course of the song—like, the world is this garment that doesn\'t fit and doesn\'t keep you warm and you can\'t move in. And you just want to be naked, and you want to take it off and you want to connect, and yet you have to wear it. I think it speaks to a desire to understand the world and understand other people—like, \'Is everyone else comfortable in this garment, or is it just me that feels uncomfortable?\'” **Trust** “This song was written in a really short time, and that doesn\'t usually happen to me, because I usually am this very neurotic writer and I usually edit a lot and overthink. It\'s a very heavy song. And it\'s about that thing that\'s so hard to wrap your head around when you\'re an empathetic person: You want to understand why some people actively choose conflict, why they choose to destroy. I wasn\'t actually thinking about a personal relationship when I wrote this song; I was thinking about the world and various things that were happening at the time. I think the song is centered in understanding the softness that it takes to stand up for what matters, even when it\'s not cool.” **Heart** “Along with \'Robber,\' this was one of my favorite recording moments. It had a pretty loose shape, and there\'s this weird thing that I was obsessed with where the one chord is played through the whole song, and everything is constantly tying back to this base. I just loved what the band did and how they took it in so many different directions. This song really freaked me out \[lyrically\]. I was not comfortable with it. But I was talked into keeping it, and all for the better, because obviously, I do believe that the sentiments shared on the song—though they are so, so fucking soft!—are the best things that you can share.” **Subdivisions** “This was one of the first songs written before the record took shape in my mind and before it structurally came together. I think we recorded it in, like, an hour, and everyone\'s performance was just perfect. I like these big, soft, emotional songs, and from a craft perspective, I think it\'s one of my better songs. I\'ve never really written a chorus like that. I don\'t even feel like it\'s my song. I don\'t feel like I wrote it or sang it, but it just feels like falling deeper and deeper into some very soft place—which is, I think, the right way to end the record.”
“There are a lot of things I faced in myself while writing this record, and there are still a lot of things coming out of it for me,” Tori Zietsch tells Apple Music of her deeply personal debut album recorded as Maple Glider. “I know in myself I can struggle to find the space and quiet to really feel things and process pain.” *To Enjoy Is the Only Thing* is bare, emotive, and often painstakingly intimate. The Melbourne-based artist composed much of the album while living in the UK, and later enlisted Tom Iansek (Big Scary, #1 Dads) to produce and record it. The warm sounds and sincere feel that Iansek is known for can be felt throughout. And while it’s filled with stories and experiences specific to Zietsch’s own life, it nevertheless feels like the kind of record that’ll hit deeply for listeners in need. “For the people who are able to connect with this record, I hope it gives you a moment of that quiet space,” she says. Read on for more on each track on Maple Glider’s debut release. **“As Tradition”** “Love was really confusing to me for a long time. It always felt like it came with conditions. I saw this in my family life. My mother was shunned by her community for leaving the religion I was raised in, just as her mother was before her. At times, the ‘love’ I’ve known only seemed to make sense in combination with compliance. I wrote this song about the feeling of vacancy that comes from experiencing love that way.” **“Swimming”** “This was meant to be a love song, but by the time I finished it, it kind of predetermined a breakup. I’d been experiencing some of the most beautiful places I’d ever been in, and falling out of love was very confusing. I was trying to force myself to be happy and in love, but I was far from home, and really lonely. It made sense to record the song after the breakup. I kind of felt like I was able to handle the sincerity of it then.” **“View From This Side”** “My mother gave me a collection of her journals some years ago. She wrote from the time she was with my father to after she left, and covered a period of our relationship where we weren’t in touch because she was trapped in a really horrible situation. It helped me to really get to know her and to connect more deeply to her experience. When I passed the age that she was when she had me, I realized how painful it must have been to bring her first child into the world and at the same time lose her own mother, among all the other chaos in her life at the time. I am so grateful to her that she chose to share with me her experiences of the world in such an intimate way, and that I have been able to learn things from her perspective. The title of the song, ‘View From This Side,’ is taken from a slide of negatives I have of my grandmother on her wedding day.” **“Friend”** “I wrote this song for a friend I’ve known since I was 16. We played music together across the span of close to a decade. We shared a deep creative connection, but as our aspirations began to drift apart, our expectations of one another became really unhealthy. I bottled a lot of resentment over the years until I completely shut down emotionally. I think that was really difficult for him to process. There were a lot of things that happened that weren’t okay, but I think our healing made us better people. He is someone who will always be very dear to my heart, and I am so thankful for what our experiences have taught us.” **“Be Mean, It’s Kinder Than Crying”** “I developed quite an intimate relationship with someone in private. It all felt like it happened really quickly, and was quite intense and emotional. I still don’t fully understand why it was all in secret, though I was about to leave town, and I think that might have made it difficult for the other person. I hurt someone close to me in the process. I made a lot of art about it. It still feels a bit weird all these years later. We couldn’t find the right form for this song for a while. Drums never seemed to feel right, and I kept playing the guitar out of time. The final version of the song is actually shorter than the song I went in to record, but it makes so much more sense to me now.” **“Good Thing”** “This song still breaks my heart a bit. I wrote it as I was experiencing the close of a connection that had quite deeply affected me. I kept this song to myself for quite some time. I still get transported into a different space each time I play it. It holds more meaning to me now than it ever has.” **“Baby Tiger”** “It’s actually pretty weird reflecting upon this time. I’d just moved home to Naarm \[Melbourne\] after being away for two years. I’d come out of a weird relationship and was trying to land back in my skin again. The air was smoky and bushfires seemed to be swallowing everything. I felt a bit distant from everything. I just wanted someone to be there and make things feel better, even temporarily. I’d never really felt this way before. Also, Baby Tiger is our resident door scratcher. Her real name is Coriander.” **“Performer”** “I was in a pretty low space when I wrote ‘Performer.’ It was written in the same time period as ‘Baby Tiger,’ so in my mind they’re kind of twins. I felt like I was faking my own life, everything seemed to consume so much energy. I kept searching for something or someone to make me feel inspired and alive again. I didn’t own a computer at this point, so the kooky backing vocals are ideas I had sang into GarageBand on my phone days before we added the final touches to the album. I wanted them to sound really distant and muffled, which to me made sense in terms of the imagery I had created for the song in my mind.” **“Mama It’s Christmas”** “I don’t really know what to say about this song. Everything I want to say about it is kind of already there. My friend Dan sings backing vocals; we used to play it live together a lot. It was one of the first songs I wrote in a long while that felt completely me. I knew I wanted to keep sharing music like this.”
Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak were already hard at work on what would become *An Evening With Silk Sonic* when the pandemic shut down live music in early 2020, but they weren’t going to let that stop them from delivering a concert experience to their fans. “All of a sudden, my shows get canceled, Andy\'s shows get canceled,” Mars told Ebro Darden during their R&B Now interview. “This fear of ‘we’ll never be able to play live again’ comes into play. And to take that away from guys like us, that\'s all we know. So we\'re thinking, all right, let\'s put an album together that sounds like a show.” It began with the project’s lead single, “Leave the Door Open,” a syrupy-sweet piece of retro soul that Mars considers something of a backbone for the project. After its completion, he and .Paak began building out the nine songs of *An Evening With Silk Sonic*, soliciting help, in the few instances where they needed it, from friends like Bootsy Collins, Thundercat, and even Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds. Their access to HOF-worthy firepower notwithstanding, the pair always understood that their own combined musicality was the real draw. “We just wanted it to feel special,” Mars says. “Instead of trying to get too cute with the concept, it\'s like, what\'s more special than Anderson .Paak behind a drum set singing a song and me having his back when it\'s my turn, you know? And the band moving in the same direction? It was just like a musician\'s dream.” Below, the pair talk through some of the tracks that make *An Evening With Silk Sonic* an experience fans won’t soon forget. **“Leave the Door Open”** Bruno Mars: “Me and Andy come from the school of performing and playing live instruments. We wrote ‘Leave the Door Open’ and it was just one of those songs like, dang, I can’t believe we a part of this, and we don\'t know what it\'s gonna do, we don\'t care that it\'s a ballad or a whatever you wanna call it—to us, this just feels right and it\'s important. So no matter what, if it hit No. 1 or it didn\'t, me and Andy both know that that was the best we could do. And we were cool with that.” **“Fly as Me”** Anderson .Paak: “‘Fly as Me’ is a joint hook \[Mars\] had for a minute. He was trying to figure out some verses for it, trying to figure out the groove, and we spent some time on that.” Mars: “Andy goes behind the drum set one day and says, ‘The groove gotta be like this,’ and starts playing his groove. D’Mile is on the bass, I\'m on the guitar. After all the grooves we tried, I don\'t know what it is, there\'s something about someone in the studio, someone that you trust, saying, \'It\'s gotta be like this.’ And the groove you hear him playing, which is not an easy groove to play, was what he showed me and D. And we just followed suit.” **“After Last Night” (with Thundercat & Bootsy Collins)** Mars: “That one got a lot of Bootsy on it. And my boy Thundercat came in and blessed us. It’s just one of them songs—everything was built to be played live, so that song is one of those we can keep going for 10 minutes.” **“Smokin Out the Window”** Mars: “‘Smokin Out the Window’ was an idea we started four or five years ago on tour. It didn\'t sound nothing like how it does now, but we just had the idea. On \[.Paak’s\] birthday, I called him over. He was hysterical that night. After every take he was like, \'I\'m the king of R&B! I’m the best! Tell me I’m not the hottest in the game!\' We were going back and forth with the lines and who can make who laugh, and we end up finishing that song and he was like, \'I’m out, what we doing tomorrow?\'” **“Put On a Smile”** Mars: “I had a song that I played for Andy and I said, ‘What do you think about this?’ and he said, ‘It sucks.’ I start singing it again and he gets behind the drums and that\'s when the magic happens. So we come up with this hook and these chords and that\'s when we start cooking, when everything starts moving in the studio. The song\'s starting to sound real good now. I don’t wanna mess it up, so I call Babyface. I only call Face to know if I got something good, you know, ’cause he’ll tell me too, \'This is wack.\' For all of us to finish that record together, that was one of my favorite experiences on this album.” **“Skate”** Mars: “It\'s hard to be mad on some rollerskates. So really, that\'s kinda the essence of this album: If me and Andy were to host a party, what would that feel like? Summertime. Outside. Set up the congas and the drums and amplifiers, and what would that sound like? And this is what our best effort was: \'Skate.\'”
As they worked on their third album, Wolf Alice would engage in an exercise. “We liked to play our demos over the top of muted movie trailers or particular scenes from films,” lead singer and guitarist Ellie Rowsell tells Apple Music. “It was to gather a sense of whether we’d captured the right vibe in the music. We threw around the word ‘cinematic’ a lot when trying to describe the sound we wanted to achieve, so it was a fun litmus test for us. And it’s kinda funny, too. Especially if you’re doing it over the top of *Skins*.” Halfway through *Blue Weekend*’s opening track, “The Beach,” Wolf Alice has checked off cinematic, and by its (suitably titled) closer, “The Beach II,” they’ve explored several film scores’ worth of emotion, moods, and sonic invention. It’s a triumphant guitar record, at once fan-pleasing and experimental, defiantly loud and beautifully quiet and the sound of a band hitting its stride. “We’ve distilled the purest form of Wolf Alice,” drummer Joel Amey says. *Blue Weekend* succeeds a Mercury Prize-winning second album (2017’s restless, bombastic *Visions of a Life*), and its genesis came at a decisive time for the North Londoners. “It was an amazing experience to get back in touch with actually writing and creating music as a band,” bassist Theo Ellis says. “We toured *Visions of a Life* for a very long time playing a similar selection of songs, and we did start to become robot versions of ourselves. When we first got back together at the first stage of writing *Blue Weekend*, we went to an Airbnb in Somerset and had a no-judgment creative session and showed each other all our weirdest ideas and it was really, really fun. That was the main thing I’d forgotten: how fun making music with the rest of the band is, and that it’s not just about playing a gig every evening.” The weird ideas evolved during sessions with producer Markus Dravs (Arcade Fire, Coldplay, Björk) in a locked-down Brussels across 2020. “He’s a producer that sees the full picture, and for him, it’s about what you do to make the song translate as well as possible,” guitarist Joff Oddie says. “Our approach is to throw loads of stuff at the recordings, put loads of layers on and play with loads of sound, but I think we met in the middle really nicely.” There’s a Bowie-esque majesty to tracks such as “Delicious Things” and “The Last Man on Earth”; “Smile” and “Play the Greatest Hits” were built for adoring festival crowds, while Rowsell’s songwriting has never revealed more vulnerability than on “Feeling Myself” and the especially gorgeous “No Hard Feelings” (“a song that had many different incarnations before it found its place on the record,” says Oddie. “That’s a testament to the song. I love Ellie’s vocal delivery. It’s really tender; it’s a beautiful piece of songwriting that is succinct, to the point, and moves me”). On an album so confident in its eclecticism, then, is there an overarching theme? “Each song represents its own story,” says Rowsell. “But with hindsight there are some running themes. It’s a lot about relationships with partners, friends, and with oneself, so there are themes of love and anxiety. Each song, though, can be enjoyed in isolation. Just as I find solace in writing and making music, I’d be absolutely chuffed if anyone had a similar experience listening to this. I like that this album has different songs for different moods. They can rage to ‘Play the Greatest Hits,’ or they can feel powerful to ‘Feeling Myself,’ or ‘they can have a good cathartic cry to ‘No Hard Feelings.’ That would be lovely.”
Nearly 20 years after they first played together as teenagers just outside of London, TV Priest began writing their debut album. “It was probably just a way for us to be with each other again in a space that wasn\'t the pub for someone\'s birthday,” frontman Charlie Drinkwater says of reuniting in their thirties, in 2019. “I think some artists get to that honest place quite young. But I think it took us having some life experience—having personal setbacks, having joy—to get to a place where I feel like we had something to say and something to write about.” Recorded before the global pandemic, *Uppers* is a set of alternately heartbreaking and hilarious post-punk, as Drinkwater and his bandmates—guitarist Alex Sprogis, bassist/keyboardist player Nic Bueth, and drummer Ed Kelland—barrel through the beauty and many indignities of modern adulthood with all the urgency of a much younger band. “It\'s a time capsule for me,” Drinkwater says. “Hopefully it speaks to this moment, and to people who feel potentially the same way as I do. Like this weird totem to a really fucking weird time.” Here, Drinkwater guides us through the album track by track. **The Big Curve** “I think it\'s relatively direct in terms of its intention as a song. It\'s got a groove to it. It was one of the songs that we wrote on the record that was like a bit of a breakthrough song for us in terms of just letting it live and breathe and just kind of be a bit sprawling. It\'s about your place in history, this idea that somehow human endeavor and human work corresponds with the progression of time, which, you can see that that isn\'t necessarily the case. It\'s not always up.” **Press Gang** “My granddad has had a very big presence in my life. He had the fucking maddest life that anyone\'s ever had. He left school at 13, was a dirt-poor working-class South Londoner. He got a job as a messenger boy in Fleet Street, would run between the newspaper offices and the photography agencies. At 18, he became a photographer. He did five tours of Vietnam, covering that. He was in the Six-Day War. He was doing the Angolan Civil War, the Biafran War of independence. He took pictures of The Beatles, Brigitte Bardot. He was maybe naive in a lot of ways about how his work would be used, but he was very honest. He really believed that what he was doing was like holding up a mirror to the world, showing truth to power. He believed in the idea of truth, and over the last couple of years, my belief in that was rocked by a lot of events. But I think more than ever, the truth matters. This is not an easy song, because it has to balance the feelings that I have about what he taught me and what I see.” **Leg Room** “‘Leg Room’ refers to the leg room in a cinema, actually. Where I studied in London, my university, used to be right in the middle of Soho and the West End, which is ‘Theatreland.’ It’s a bit abstract, probably a bit more like a paintbrush in terms of it\'s trying to set the scene and tone more than anything else. I remember Black Francis saying that Pixies lyrics have meaning, but more than anything, they have a visualization. That whenever you hear it on the radio, or you hear it on a record, the thing that jumps up first is the weird visuals that it puts in your head. I think that this song was exercising that as well.” **Journal of a Plague Year** “Alex wrote most of those lyrics. He’d read \[Daniel\] Defoe\'s *A Journal of the Plague Year*, which is a sensory account of the plague in London, talking about how London emptied out. It was like, ‘This would be a fun, interesting exercise, to write a song about what would happen if there was a plague again.’ And then six months later you\'re like, ‘Fuck.’ We did actually have a discussion about whether or not we should put it on the record. I think we sat with it for a minute and were like, ‘No. Maybe it\'s good. Maybe it offers a take on it in a different way, rather than just like, ‘We\'re all in our houses.’” **History Week** “The album is supposed to be listened to as an album—probably a really stupid thing to do, now that you\'re just streaming. There\'s a purpose to the fact that the first three songs are very intense punk songs. There\'s a reason why they come at the start, and then the record starts to open up as it progresses. This is a purposeful intermission.” **Decoration** “That first line is an in-joke. It was from a TV show called *Britain\'s Got Talent*, a misremembered quote from Simon Cowell. One year, the winner was literally a dog that can jump over itself: Pudsey the dog. And there\'s this quote—that I can’t find now—where Simon Cowell goes, ‘I\'ve never seen a dog do what that dog does.’ And it became this running joke, something we’d say anytime someone did something that wasn’t particularly impressive. I’d completely fucked the vocal take in the studio, and I think I said that about myself, and Ed was like, ‘That\'s a great opening line.’” **Slideshow** “This is about our relationship to technology. I think anyone can write songs that are just ‘iPhones are bad.’ But I\'m complicit in it all the time. I fucking doomscroll forever. It’s a bit of an uneasy balance. That song is calling myself out, in a way. It really came alive, I think, in the studio. That was a bit of a breakthrough for us in terms of Alex\'s guitar playing. Alex Sprogis by nature is quite a precise person, like an engineer, but he\'s going against his instincts there to play like that, which I think gives it this element of tension.” **Fathers and Sons** “That was written when I was in a B&Q—which is a huge hardware store—buying some wood to fix a fence. I sat in my car and I was like, ‘This is what I did with my dad on so many afternoons, and now I\'m a dad, doing the same thing.’ It’s about a particularly British male sensibility, the way that men talk to each other. If I meet a guy for the first time, the first thing that they’re going to ask me about is football. I think this song was written about me trying to talk to my son in that way as well.” **the ref** “I think that\'s the sound of a pneumatic drill outside our studio. It\'s also got a bit of the tube in there, some traffic. It’s supposed to be very interruptive. It\'s supposed to take you out of the record and put you in a place. A physical place, rather than a sensory place.” **Powers of Ten** “Before we did this, I was working at a big record label as a designer. And this song is about what corporations do to people, including me. It\'s about the pursuit of something that you never even thought you wanted. I think corporations breed a certain competitiveness, and it bred something in me that was not nice. I think something that I struggled with was I was working ostensibly in a place that was supposed to be creative, and it didn\'t engender any form of creativity, at all. To be creative is not to compete with people. I don\'t find that. I find that my proudest moments of creativity is when I\'ve collaborated with someone, and shared an idea, and a space, and a feeling. Those are the things that made me get out of bed in the morning, and made me excited.” **This Island** “It’s about nationalism, and it\'s about being in a country that you don\'t really recognize anymore. I don\'t think that\'s only about the process of Brexit, or the Brexit decision. I think it\'s about the things that it unleashes. In a lots of ways, England has a fucking superiority complex. The war is constant; you cannot escape it. It’s fucking spitfires over Dover and Churchill and D-Day. I got a fucking email from the butchers on Remembrance Sunday, being like, ‘10% off: Remember our troops.’ What? Fucking celebrate the horror of the Somme with a fucking leg of lamb? I\'m proud to be a British person; I\'m proud of many, many things of my history. I\'m proud of the fact that we have a history of multiculturalism. I\'m proud of the fact that we have a history of many, many different things, but what I am not proud of is this belief that we are somehow better than other people.” **Saintless** “It was a hard song to sing. It\'s about my little boy being born, and about my wife. We had a shocker, and my wife was really, really unwell. I was suddenly left in an operating room with a newborn baby, while she was rushed to emergency surgery. It\'s one of the only times in my life I just didn\'t know what to do. I felt completely helpless and confused and overjoyed—but terrified. Terror, sheer terror. It’s about plans changing, about being hopeful for the future as well as being scared for it, about being fallible. The main line of the song is ‘We\'re no saints, but that\'s okay.’ I probably will let my son down at some point, because I\'m a human being, but I\'ll make it up to him. I’ll always be there.”
As with most honest music, this is an album about life. More than taking a village to raise someone, we become not just the sum of our experiences, but the outcomes of our reactions to them. In our expanding and shrinking world, the speed and number of interactions with people is increasing exponentially. While some would say that you need to remove toxic people from your life, what if you can learn from them? - how to achieve without succumbing to their harmful ways, how to repair yourself after being damaged by them, what a genuine friendship looks like? Alongside the overcoming of negatives, the joy and fulfilment to be had from recognising and embracing the positives is explored. Banal, repetitive moments become cherished shared histories with the right attitude and company. Focusing on the ways that nine people can fit seamlessly together, other than all the angles that could clash, what to give, what to take, when to accept, when to refuse. The ongoing learning process of living becomes ever richer if you explore the edges of yourself and others. There will be many people who played a part in raising you, many you wish were denied access to your life - but the wishing won’t help, the learning will.