Perhaps more so than any other Irish band of their generation, Fontaines D.C.’s first three albums were intrinsically linked to their homeland. Their debut, 2019’s *Dogrel*, was a bolshy, drizzle-soaked love letter to the streets of Dublin, while Brendan Behan-name-checking follow-up *A Hero’s Death* detailed the group’s on-the-road alienation and estrangement from home. And 2022’s *Skinty Fia* viewed Ireland from the complicated perspective of no longer actually being there. On their fourth album, however, Fontaines D.C. have shifted their attention elsewhere. *Romance* finds the five-piece wandering in a futuristic dystopia inspired by Japanese manga classic *Akira*, Paolo Sorrentino’s 2013 film *La Grande Bellezza*, and Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn’s *Pusher* films. “We didn’t set out to make a trilogy of albums but that’s sort of what happened,” drummer Tom Coll tells Apple Music of those first three records. “They were such a tight world, and this time we wanted to step outside of it and change it up. A big inspiration for this record was going to Tokyo for the first time. It’s such a visual, neon-filled, supermodern city. It was so inspiring. It brought in all these new visual references to the creative process for the first time.” Recorded with Arctic Monkeys producer James Ford (their previous three albums were all made with Dan Carey), *Romance* also brings in a whole new palette of sounds and colors to the band’s work. From the clanking apocalyptic dread of the opening title track, hip-hop-inspired first single “Starburster,” and the warped grunge and shoegaze hybrids of “Here’s the Thing” and “Sundowner,” it opens a whole new chapter for Fontaines D.C., while still finding time for classic indie rock anthems such as “Favourite”’s wistful volley of guitars or the Nirvana-like “Death Kink.” “Every album we do feels like a huge step in one direction for us, but *Romance* is probably a little bit more outside of our previous records,” says Coll. “It’s exciting to surprise people.” Read on as he dissects *Romance*, one track at a time. **“Romance”** “This is one that we wrote really late at night in the studio. It just fell out of us. It was one of those real moments of feeling, ‘Right, that’s the first track on the album.’ It’s kind of like a palate cleanser for everything that’s come before. It’s like the opening scene. I feel like every time we’ve done a record there’s been one tune that’s always stuck out like, ‘This is our opening gambit...’” **“Starburster”** “Grian \[Chatten, singer\] wrote most of this tune on his laptop, so there were lots of chopped-up strings and stuff—it was quite a hip-hop creative process. It’s probably the song that is furthest away from the old us on this album. This tune was the first single and we always try and shock people a bit. It’s fun to do that.” **“Here’s the Thing”** “This was written in the last hour of being in the studio. We had maybe 12 or 13 tracks ready to go and just started jamming, and it presented itself in an hour. \[Guitarist Conor\] Curley had this really gnarly, ’90s, piercing tone, and it just went from there.” **“Desire”** “This has been knocking around for ages. It was one of those tunes that took so many goes to get to where it was meant to sit. It started as a band setup and then we went really electronic with it. Then in the studio, we took it all back. It took a while for it to sit properly. Grian did 20 or 30 vocal layers on that, he really arranged it in an amazing way. Carlos \[O’Connell, guitarist\] and Grian were the main string arrangers on this record. This was the first record where we actually got a string quartet in—before, people would just send it over. So being able to sit in the room and watch a string quartet take center stage on a song was amazing.” **“In the Modern World”** “Grian wrote this song when he was in LA. He was really inspired by Lana Del Rey and stuff like that. Hollywood and the glitz and the glamour, but it’s actually this decrepit place. It’s that whole idea of faded glamour.” **“Bug”** “This felt like a really easy song for us to write. That kind of buzzy, all-of-us-in-the-same-room tune. I really fought for this one to be on the record. I feel like, with songs like that, trying to skew them and put a spin on them that they don’t need is overwriting. If it feels right then there’s no point in laboring over it. That song is what it is and it’s great. It’s going to be amazing live.” **“Motorcycle Boy”** “This one is inspired by The Smashing Pumpkins a bit. We actually recorded it six months before the rest of the album. This tune was the real genesis of the record and us finding a path and being like, ‘OK, we can explore down here...’ That was one that really set the wheels in motion for the album. It really informed where we were going.” **“Sundowner”** “On this album, we were probably coming from more singular points than we have before. A lot of the lads brought in tunes that were pretty much there. I was sharing a room with Curley in London, and he was working on this really shoegaze-inspired tune for ages. I think he always thought that Grian would sing it, but when he put down the guide vocals in the studio it sounded great. We were all like, ‘You are singing this now.’” **“Horseness Is the Whatness”** “Carlos sent me a demo of that tune ages and ages ago. It was just him on an acoustic, and it was such a powerful lyric. I think it’s amazing. We had to kind of deconstruct it and build it back up again in terms of making it fit for this record. Carlos had made three or four drum loops for me and it was a really fun experience to try and recreate that. I don’t know how we’re going to play it live but we’ll sort it out!” **“Death Kink”** “Again, this came from one of the jams of us setting up for a studio session. It’s another one of those band-in-a-room-jamming-out kind of tunes. On tour in America, we really honed where everything should sit in the set. This is going to be such a fun tune to play live. We’ve started playing it already and it’s been so sick.” **“Favourite”** “‘Favourite’ was another one we wrote when we were rehearsing. It happened pretty much as it is now. We were kind of nervous about touching it again for the album because that first recording was so good. That’s the song that hung around in our camp for the longest. When we write songs on tour, often we end up getting bored of them over time but ‘Favourite’ really stuck. We had a lot of conversations about the order on this album and I felt it was really important to move from ‘Romance’ to ‘Favourite.’ It feels like a journey from darkness into light, and finishing on ‘Favourite’ leaves it in a good spot.”
It can be dangerous, Nick Cave says, to look back on one’s body of work and seek meaning in the music you’ve made. “Most records, I couldn\'t really tell you by listening what was going on in my life at the time,” he tells Apple Music. “But the last three, they\'re very clear impressions of what life has actually been like. I was in a very strange place.” In the years following the 2015 death of his son Arthur, Cave’s work—in song; in the warm counsel of his newsletter, The Red Hand Files; in the extended conversation-turned-book he wrote with journalist Seán O’Hagan, *Faith, Hope and Carnage*—has been marked by grief, meeting unimaginable loss with more imagination still. It’s made for some of the most remarkable and moving music of his nearly 50-year career, perhaps most notably the feverish minimalism of 2019’s *Ghosteen*, which he intended to act as a kind of communique to his dead son, wherever he might be. Though Cave would lose another son, Jethro, in 2022, *Wild God* finds the 66-year-old singer-songwriter someplace new, marveling at the beauty all around him, reuniting with The Bad Seeds, who—with the exception of multi-instrumentalist songwriting foil Warren Ellis—had slowly receded from view. Once a symbol of post-punk antipathy, he is now open to the world like never before. “Maybe there is a feeling like things don\'t matter in the same way as perhaps they did before,” he says. “These terrible things happened, the world has done its worst. I feel released in some way from those sorts of feelings. *Wild God* is much more playful, joyous, vibrant. Because life is good. Life is better.” It’s an album that feels like an embrace. That much you can hear in the first seconds of “Song of the Lake,” a swirl of ascendant synths and thick, chewy bass (compliments of Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood) upon which Cave tells a tale of brokenness that never quite resolves, as though to fully heal or be put back together again has never really been the point of all this, of being human. The mood is largely improvisational and loose, Cave leaning into moments of catharsis like a man who’d been waiting for them. He offers levity (the colossal, delirious title track) and light (“Frogs,” “Final Rescue Attempt”). On “O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is),” a tribute to the late Anita Lane, his former creative and romantic partner, he conjures a sense of play that would have seemed impossible a few years ago. “I think that it\'s just an immense enjoyment in playing,” he says of the band\'s influence on the album. “I think the songs just have these delirious, ecstatic surges of energy, which was a feeling in the studio when we recorded it. We\'re not taking it too seriously in a way, although it\'s a serious record. We were having a good time. I was having a really good time.” There is no shortage of heartbreak or darkness to be found here. But “Joy,” the album’s finest moment (and original namesake), is a monument to optimism, a radical thought. For six minutes, he sounds suspended in twilight, pulling words out of thin air, synths fluttering and humming and flickering around him, peals of piano and French horn coming and going like comets. “We’ve all had too much sorrow, now is the time for joy,” he sings, quoting a ghost who’s come to his bedside, a “flaming boy” in sneakers. “Joy doesn\'t necessarily mean happiness,” Cave says upon reflection. “Joy in a way is a form of suffering, in the sense that it understands the notion of suffering, and it\'s these momentary ecstatic leaps we are capable of that help us rise out of that suffering for a moment of time. It is sort of an explosion of positive feeling, and I think the record\'s full of that, full of these moments. In fact, the record itself is that.” While that may sound like a complete departure from its most recent predecessors, *Wild God* shares a similar intention, an urge to communicate with his late children, from this world to theirs. That may never fade. “If there\'s one impulse I have, it’s that I would like my kids who are no longer with us to know that we are okay, that \[wife\] Susie and I are okay,” Cave says. “I think that\'s why when I listened to the record back, I just listened to it with a great big smile on my face. Because it\'s just full of life and it\'s full of reasons to be happy. I think this record can definitely improve the condition of my children. All of the things that I create these days are an attempt to do that.” Read on as Cave takes us inside a few highlights from the album: **“Wild God”** “I was actually going to call the record *Joy*, but chose *Wild God* in the end because I thought the word ‘joy’ may be misunderstood in a way. ‘Wild God’ is just two pieces of music chopped together—an edit. That song didn\'t really work quite right. So we thought, ‘Well, let\'s get someone else to mix it.’ And me and Warren thought about that for a while. I personally really loved the sound of \[producer Dave Fridmann’s work with\] MGMT, and The Flaming Lips, stuff—it had this immediacy about it that I really liked. So we went to Buffalo with the recordings and Dave did a song each day, disappeared into the control room and mixed it without inviting us in. It was the strangest thing. And then he emerges from the studio and says, ‘Come in and tell me what you think.’ When we came in it sounded so different. We were shocked. And then after we played it again, we heard that he traded in all the intricacies and stateliness of The Bad Seeds for just pure unambiguous emotion.” **“Frogs”** “Improvising and ad-libbing is still very much the way we go about making music. ‘Frogs’ is essentially a song that I had some words to, but I just walked in and started singing over the top of this piece of music that we\'d constructed without any real understanding of the song itself. There\'s no formal construction—it just keeps going, very randomly. There\'s a sort of freedom and mystery to that stuff that I find really compelling. I sang it as a guide, but listening to it back was like, ‘Wow, I don\'t know how to go and repeat that in any way, but it feels like it\'s talking about something way beyond what the song initially had to offer.’” **“Joy”** “‘Joy’ is a wholly improvised one-take without me having any real understanding of what Warren is doing musically. It’s written in that same questing way of first takes. I\'m just singing stuff over a kind of chord pattern that he\'s got. I sort of intuit it in some way that it’s a blues form to it, so I’m attempting to sing a blues vocal over the top, rhyming in a blues tradition.” **“Final Rescue Attempt”** “That was a song that we weren\'t putting on the record. It was a late addition, just hanging around. And I think Dave Fridmann actually said, ‘Look, I\'ve mixed this song. It doesn\'t seem to be on the record. What the fuck?’ It feels a little different in a way to me. But it\'s a very beautiful song, very beautiful. And I guess it was just so simple in its way, or at least the first verse literally describes the situation that I think is actually in the book, *Faith, Hope and Carnage*, where Susie decided to come back to me after eight months or so, and rode back to my house where I was living, on a bicycle. It’s a depiction of that scene, so maybe I shied away from it for that reason. I don\'t know. But I\'m really glad.” **“O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is)”** “That song is an attempt to encapsulate what Anita Lane was like, and we all loved her very much and were all shocked to the core by her death. In her early days when we were together, she was this bright, shiny, happy, laughing, flaming thing, and we were the dark, drug-addicted men that circled around her. And I wanted to just write a song that had that. She was a laughing creature, and I wanted to work out a way of expressing that. It\'s such a beautifully innocent song in a way.”
It’s no surprise that “PARTYGIRL” is the name Charli xcx adopted for the DJ nights she put on in support of *BRAT*. It’s kind of her brand anyway, but on her sixth studio album, the British pop star is reveling in the trashy, sugary glitz of the club. *BRAT* is a record that brings to life the pleasure of colorful, sticky dance floors and too-sweet alcopops lingering in the back of your mouth, fizzing with volatility, possibility, and strutting vanity (“I’ll always be the one,” she sneers deliciously on the A. G. Cook- and Cirkut-produced opening track “360”). Of course, Charli xcx—real name Charlotte Aitchison—has frequently taken pleasure in delivering both self-adoring bangers and poignant self-reflection. Take her 2022 pop-girl yet often personal concept album *CRASH*, which was preceded by the diaristic approach of her excellent lockdown album *how i’m feeling now*. But here, there’s something especially tantalizing in her directness over the intoxicating fumes of hedonism. Yes, she’s having a raucous time with her cool internet It-girl friends, but a night out also means the introspection that might come to you in the midst of a party, or the insurmountable dread of the morning after. On “So I,” for example, she misses her friend and fellow musician, the brilliant SOPHIE, and lyrically nods to the late artist’s 2017 track “It’s Okay to Cry.” Charli xcx has always been shaped and inspired by SOPHIE, and you can hear the influence of her pioneering sounds in many of the vocals and textures throughout *BRAT*. Elsewhere, she’s trying to figure out if she’s connecting with a new female friend through love or jealousy on the sharp, almost Uffie-esque “Girl, so confusing,” on which Aitchison boldly skewers the inanity of “girl’s girl” feminism. She worries she’s embarrassed herself at a party on “I might say something stupid,” wishes she wasn’t so concerned about image and fame on “Rewind,” and even wonders quite candidly about whether she wants kids on the sweet sparseness of “I think about it all the time.” In short, this is big, swaggering party music, but always with an undercurrent of honesty and heart. For too long, Charli xcx has been framed as some kind of fringe underground artist, in spite of being signed to a major label and delivering a consistent run of albums and singles in the years leading up to this record. In her *BRAT* era, whether she’s exuberant and self-obsessed or sad and introspective, Charli xcx reminds us that she’s in her own lane, thriving. Or, as she puts it on “Von dutch,” “Cult classic, but I still pop.”
“We weren’t really expecting it at such a rate,” The Last Dinner Party’s guitarist and vocalist Lizzie Mayland tells Apple Music of the band’s rise, the story of which is well known by now. After forming in London in 2021, the five-piece’s effervescent live shows garnered an if-you-know-you-know kind of buzz, which went into overdrive when they released their stomping, euphoric debut single “Nothing Matters” in April 2023. All of which might have put a remarkable amount of pressure on them while making their debut record (not least given the band ended 2024 by winning the BRITs Rising Star Award then topped the BBC’s new-talent poll, Sound of 2024, in January). But The Last Dinner Party had written, recorded and finished *Prelude to Ecstasy* three months before anyone had even heard “Nothing Matters.” It meant, says lead singer Abigail Morris, that they “just had a really nice time” making it. “It is a painful record in some ways and it explores dark themes,” she adds, “but making it was just really fun, rewarding, and wholesome.” Produced by James Ford (Arctic Monkeys, Florence + the Machine, Jessie Ware), who Morris calls “the dream producer,” *Prelude to Ecstasy* is rooted in those hype-inducing live shows, its tracklist a reflection of the band’s frequent set list and its songs shaped and grown by playing them on stage. “We wanted to capture the live feels in the songs,” notes Morris. “That’s the whole point.” Featuring towering vocals, thrilling guitar solos, orchestral instrumentation, and a daring, do-it-all spirit, the album sounds like five band members having an intense amount of fun as they explore an intense set of emotions and experiences with unbridled expression and feeling. These songs—which expand and then shrink and then soar—navigate sexuality (“Sinner,” “My Lady of Mercy”), what it must be like to move through the world as a man (“Caesar on a TV Screen,” the standout, celestial “Beautiful Boy”), and craving the gaze of an audience (“Mirror”), as well as loss channeled into art, withering love, and the mother-daughter relationship. And every single one of them feels like a release. “It’s a cathartic, communal kind of freedom,” says Morris. “‘Cathartic’ is definitely the main word that we throw about when we talk about playing live and playing an album.” Read on as Morris and Mayland walk us through their band’s exquisite debut, one song at a time. **“Prelude to Ecstacy”** Abigail Morris: “I was thinking about it like an overture in a musical. Aurora \[Nishevci, keys player and vocalist\] composed it—she’s a fantastic composer, and it has themes from all the songs on the record. I don’t believe in shuffle except for playlists and I always liked the idea of \[an album\] having a start, middle, and end, and there is in this record. It sets the scene.” **“Burn Alive”** AM: “This was the first song that existed in the band—we’ve been opening the set with it the entire time. Lyrically, it always felt like a mission statement. I wrote it just after my father passed away, and it was the idea of, ‘Let me make my grief a commodity’—this kind of slightly sarcastic ‘I’m going to put my heart on the line and all my pain and everything for a buck.’ The idea of being ecstatic by being burned alive—by your pain and by your art and by your inspiration—in a kind of holy-fire way. What we’re here to do is be fully alive and committed to exorcising any demons, pain or joy.” **“Caesar on a TV Screen”** AM: “I wrote the beginning of this song over lockdown. I’d stayed over with my boyfriend at the time and then, to go back home, he lent me a suit. When I met him, I didn’t just find him attractive, I wanted to *be* him—he was also a singer in another band and he had this amazing confidence and charisma in a specifically masculine way. Getting to have his suit, I was like, ‘Now I am a man in a band.’ It’s this very specific sensuality and power you feel when you’re dressing as a man. I sat at the piano and had this character in my head—a Mick Jagger or a Caligula. I thought it would be fun to write a song from the perspective of feeling like a king, but you are only like that because you’re so vulnerable and so desperate to be loved and quite weak and afraid and childlike.” Lizzie Mayland: “There was an ending on the original version that faded away into this lone guitar, which was really beautiful, but we got used to playing it live with it coming back up again. So we put that back in. The song is very live, the way we recorded it.” **“The Feminine Urge”** AM: “The beginning of this song was based on an unreleased Lana Del Rey song called ‘Driving in Cars With Boys’—it slaps. I wanted to write about my mother and the mother wound. It’s about the relationship between mothers and daughters and how those go back over generations, and the shared traumas that come down. I think you get to a certain age as a woman where your mother suddenly becomes another woman, rather than being your mum. You turn 23 and you’re having lunch and it’s like, ‘Oh shit, we’re just two women who are living life together,’ and it’s very beautiful and very sweet and also very confronting. It’s the sudden realization of the mortality and fallibility of your mother that you don’t get when you’re a child. It’s also wondering, ‘If I have a daughter, what kind of mother would I be? Is it ethical to bring a child into a world like this? And what wound would I maybe pass on to her or not?’” **“On Your Side”** LM: “We put this and ‘Beautiful Boy’—the two slow ones—together. Again, that comes from playing live. Taking a slow moment in the set—people are already primed to pay attention rather than dancing.” AM: “The song is about a relationship breaking down and it’s nice to have that represented musically. It’s a very traditional structure, song-verse-chorus, and it’s not challenging or weird. It’s nice that the ending feels like this very beautiful decay. It’s sort of rotting, but it sounds very beautiful, but it is this death and gasping. I really like how that illustrates what the song’s about.” **“Beautiful Boy”** AM: “I come back to this as one that I’m most proud of. I wanted to say something really specific with the lyrics. It’s about a friend of mine, who’s very pretty. He’s a very beautiful boy. He went hitchhiking through Spain on his own and lost his phone and was just relying on the kindness of strangers, going on this beautiful Hemingway-esque trip. I remember being so jealous of him because I was like, ‘Well, I could never do that—as a woman I’d probably get murdered or something horrible.’ He made me think about the very specific doors that open when you are a beautiful man. You have certain privileges that women don’t get. And if you’re a beautiful woman, you have certain privileges that other people don’t get. I don’t resent him—he’s a very dear friend. Also, I think it’s important and interesting to write, as a woman, about your male relationships that aren’t romantic or sexual.” LM: “The flute was a turning point in this track. It’s such a lonely instrument, so vulnerable and so expressive. To me, this song is kind of a daydream. Like, ‘I wish life was like that, but it’s not.’ It feels like there’s a deeper sense of acceptance. It’s sweetly sad.” **“Gjuha”** AM: “We wanted to do an aria as an interlude. At first, we just started writing this thing on piano and guitar and Aurora had a saxophone. At some point, Aurora said it reminded her of an Albanian folk song. We’d been talking about her singing a song in Albanian for the album. She went away and came back with this beautiful, heart-wrenching piece. It’s about her feeling this pain and guilt of coming from a country, and a family who speak Albanian and are from Kosovo, but being raised in London and not speaking that language. She speaks about it so well.” **“Sinner”** LM: “It’s such a fun live moment because it’s kind of a turning point in the set: ‘OK, it’s party time.’ I was quite freaked out about the idea of being like, ‘This is a song about being queer.’ And I thought, ‘Are people going to get that?’ Because it’s not the most metaphorical or difficult lyrics, but it’s also not just like, ‘I like all gendered people.’ But people get it, which has been quite reassuring. It’s about belonging and about finding a safe space in yourself and your own sense of self. And marrying an older version of yourself with a current version of yourself. Playing it live and people singing it back is such a comforting feeling. I know Emily \[Roberts, lead guitarist, who also plays mandolin and flute\] was very inspired by St. Vincent and also LCD Soundsystem.” **“My Lady of Mercy”** AM: “For me, it’s the most overtly sexy song—the most obviously-about-sex song and about sexuality. I feel like it’s a nice companion to ‘Sinner’ because I think they’re about similar things—about queerness in tension with religion and with family and with guilt. I went to Catholic school, which is very informative for a young woman. I’m not a practicing Catholic now, but the imagery is always so pertinent and meaningful to me. I just thought it was really interesting to use religious imagery to talk about liking women and feeling free in your sexuality and reclaiming the guilt. I feel like Nine Inch Nails was a really big inspiration musically. This is testament to how much we trust James \[Ford\] and feel comfortable with him. We did loads of takes of me just moaning into the mic through a distortion. I could sit there and make fake orgasm sounds next to him.” LM: “I remember you saying you wanted to write a song for people to mosh to. Especially the breakdown that was always meant to be played live to a load of people throwing themselves around. It definitely had to be that big.” **“Portrait of a Dead Girl”** AM: “This song took a long time—it went through a lot of different phases. It was one we really evolved with as a band. The ending was inspired by Florence + the Machine’s ‘Dream Girl Evil.’ And Bowie’s a really big influence in general on us, but I think especially on this one. It feels very ’70s and like the Ziggy Stardust album. The portrait was actually a picture I found on Pinterest, as many songs start. It was an older portrait of a woman in a red dress sitting on a bed and then next to her is a massive wolf. At first, I thought that was the original painting, but then I looked at it again and the wolf has been put in. But I really loved that idea of comparing \[it to\] a relationship, a toxic one—feeling like you have this big wolf who’s dangerous but it’s going to protect you, and feeling safe. But you can’t be friends with a wolf. It’s going to turn around and bite you the second it gets a chance.” **”Nothing Matters”** AM: “This wasn’t going to be the first single—we always said it would be ‘Burn Alive.’ We had no idea that it was going to do what it did. We were like, ‘OK, let’s introduce ourselves,’ and then where it went is kind of beyond comprehension.” LM: “I was really freaked out—I spent the first couple of days just in my bed—but also so grateful for all the joy it’s been received with. When we played our first show after it came out, I literally had the phrase, ‘This is the best feeling in the world.’ I’ll never forget that.” AM: “It was originally just a piano-and-voice song that I wrote in my room, and then it evolved as everyone else added their parts. Songs evolve by us playing them on stage and working things out. That’s definitely what happened with this song—especially Emily’s guitar solo. It’s a very honest love song that we wanted to tell cinematically and unbridled, that expression of love without embarrassment or shame or fear, told through a lens of a very visual language—which is the most honest way that I could have written.” **“Mirror”** AM: “Alongside ‘Beautiful Boy,’ this is one of the most precious ones to me. When I first moved to London before the band, I was just playing on my own, dragging my piano around to shitty venues and begging people to listen. I wrote it when I was 17 or 18, and it’s the only one I’ve kept from that time. It’s changed meanings so many times. At first, one of them was an imagined relationship, I hadn’t really been in relationships until then and it was the idea of codependency and the feeling of not existing without this relationship. And losing your identity and having it defined by relationship in a sort of unhealthy way. Then—and I’ve never talked about this—but the ‘she’ in the verses I’m referring to is actually an old friend of mine. After my father died, she became obsessed with me and with him, and she’d do very strange, scary things like go to his grave and call me. Very frightening and stalker-y. I wrote the song being like, ‘I’m dealing with the dissolution of this friendship and this kind of horrible psychosis that she seems to be going through.’ Now this song has become similar to ‘Burn Alive.’ It’s my relationship with an audience and the feeling of always being a performer and needing someone looking at you, needing a crowd, needing someone to hear you. I will never forget the day that Emily first did that guitar solo. Then Aurora’s orchestral bit was so important to have on that record. We wanted it to have light motifs from the album. That ending always makes me really emotional. I think it’s a really touching bit of music and it feels so right for the end of this album. It feels cathartic.”
IDLES’ fifth album is a collection of love songs. For singer Joe Talbot, it couldn’t be anything else. “At the time of writing this album, I was quite lost,” he tells Apple Music. “Not musically, it was a beautiful time for music. But emotionally, my nervous system needed organizing, and I needed to sort my shit out. So I did. That came from me realizing that I needed love in my life, and that I had sometimes lost my narrative in the art, which is that love is all I’ve ever sung about.” From a band wearied by other people’s attempts to pin narrow labels like “punk” or “political” to their expansive, thoughtful music, that’s as concise a summary as you’ll get. It’s also an accurate one. The Bristol five-piece’s music has always viewed the world with an empathetic eye, processing the human effects and impulses around subjects as varied as grief, immigration, kindness, toxic masculinity, and anxiety. And on their fourth album, 2021’s *CRAWLER*, the aggression and sinew of earlier songs gave way to more space and restraint as Talbot turned inward to reckon with his experiences with addiction. For *TANGK*, that experimentation continued while the band’s initial ideas were developed with Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich in London during late 2022, before the record was completed with *CRAWLER* co-producer Kenny Beats joining the team to record in the south of France. They’ve emerged with an album where an Afrobeat rhythm played out on an obscure drum machine (“Grace”) or a gentle piano melody recorded on an iPhone (“A Gospel”) hit with as much impact as a gale-force guitar riff (“Gift Horse”). Exploring the thrills and the scars of love in multiple forms, Talbot leans ever more into singing over firebrand fury. “I’ve got a kid now, and part of my learning is to have empathy when I parent,” he says. “And with that comes delicacy. To use empathy is a delicate and graceful act. And that’s coming out in my art, because I’m also being delicate and graceful with myself, forgiving myself, and giving myself time to learn. I don’t want to lie.” Discover more with Talbot’s track-by-track guide to *TANGK*. **“IDEA 01”** “It was the first thing \[guitarist and co-producer Mark\] Bowen worked on, and Bowen, being the egotistical maniac that he is, called it ‘IDEA 01’ because he forgot that it was actually idea seven. But, bless him, he does like attention. But, yes, it was the first song that was written in Nigel’s studio. Bowen sat at the piano and started playing, and it was beautiful. ‘IDEA 01’ is different vignettes around old friends that I haven’t seen since Devon \[where Talbot grew up\], and the relationships I had with them and their families, and how crazy certain people’s families are. Bowen’s beautiful piano part reminded me of this song we wrote on the last album, ‘Kelechi.’ Kelechi was a good friend of mine who sadly passed away, and I hadn’t seen him since I waved him off to move to Manchester with his family. I just had this feeling I was never going to see him again. Maybe I’m writing that in my head now, but he was a beautiful, beautiful man. I loved him. I think maybe if we were still friends, part of me could have helped him, but that’s, again, fantasy I think.” **“Gift Horse”** “I was trying to get this disco thing going, so I gave Jon \[Beavis, drummer\] a bunch of disco beats to work on. And Dev \[bassist Adam Devonshire\] is bang into The Rapture and !!! and LCD Soundsystem, and he turned out that bassline real quick. I wrote a song around it, and it felt great. It was what my intentions of the album were: to make people dance and not think, because love is a very complex thing that doesn’t need to be thought. It can just be acted, and worked on, and danced with. I just wanted to make people move, and get that physicality of the live experience in people’s bones. I had this concept of a gift horse as a theme of a song, and it sang to me. I like that grotesque phrase, ‘Never look a gift horse in the mouth.’ It’s about my daughter, and I’m very grateful for her, and our relationship, and I wanted to write a beast of a tune around her.” **“POP POP POP”** “I read \[‘freudenfreude’\] online somewhere. It was like, words that don’t exist that should exist. Schadenfreude is such a dark thing, to enjoy other people’s misery, so the idea of someone enjoying someone else’s joy is great. Being a parent, you suddenly are entwined with someone else’s joys and lows. I love seeing her dance, and have a good time, and grow as a person, and learn, so I wanted to write a song about it.” **“Roy”** “It’s an allegorical story that sums up a lot of my behavior towards my partners over a 15-year period where I was in a cycle of absolute worship and then fear, jealousy and assholery. I wanted to dedicate it to my girlfriend, who I call Roy. She’s not called Roy. I wanted it to be about the idea of a man who is in love and then his fears take over, and he starts acting like a prick to push that person away. Then he wakes up in the morning with a horrible hangover, realizing what he’s done, and he apologizes. He is then forgiven in the chorus, and rejoicing ensues.” **“A Gospel”** “It’s a reflection on breakups, which I think are a learning curve. I think all my exes deserve a medal, and they’ve taught me a lot. It’s really a tender moment of a dream I used to have, then \[it\] dances between different tiny memories, tiny vignettes of what happened before, and me just giving a nod to those moments and saying goodbye, which is beautiful. No heartbreak, really. I’ve been through the heartbreak now. It’s just me smiling and being like, ‘Yeah, you were right. Thank you very much.’” **“Dancer” (with LCD Soundsystem)** “The best form of dance is to express yourself freely within a group who are also expressing themselves freely, the true embodiment of communion. The last time I had this sense of euphoria from that was an Oh Sees gig at the \[Sala\] Apolo in Barcelona. I closed my eyes and let the mosh push me from one side of the room to the other and back. I didn’t open my eyes once, I just smiled and was carried by this organism of beautiful rage. Dancing’s a really big part of my personality. I love it. My mum always danced. Even in her most ill days \[Talbot’s mother passed away during the recording of 2017 debut *Brutalism*\], she would always get up and dance, and enjoy herself. I dance with my daughter every day that I have her. I think it’s magic and important.” **“Grace”** “It all came out of nowhere. I had this beat in mind for a while—I was thinking of an aggro Afrobeat kind of track. But it didn’t come out like that. It came out like what happens when Nigel Godrich gets his hands on your Afrobeat stuff. I asked Nigel to make the beat, and he chose the LinnDrum \[’80s drum machine\]. The LinnDrum changes the sound of a beat, the tone of a drum, the cadence of a beat, it changed the beat completely. It’s a very, very delicate thing, a beat. It sounded like a different song to me. It sounded amazing. And that’s where the bassline came from. And then that’s where the vocals came from. It felt a bit uneasy for a long time because it came out of nowhere. Me and Bowen were like, ‘Is this right? Is this complete?’ I think it just has to feel like you, like it is part of you and what you mean at the moment, that’s all. An album’s an episode of where you’re at in the world in that point in time.” **“Hall & Oates”** “I wanted to write a glam-rock pounder about falling in love with your boys. My ex and I used to joke about this thing where you make love to someone for the first time, and then the next day, you’re walking on air, and it feels like Hall & Oates is playing. The birds are singing, you’re bouncing around and everything’s great. I wanted to use that analogy for when you make friends with someone for the first time, and they make you feel good, lighter, stronger, excited to see them again. And that’s what happened in lockdown: I made friends with \[Bristol-based singer-songwriter\] Willie J Healey and my mate Ben, and we went on bike rides whenever we could, getting out and feeling good post-lockdown. It gave me a sense of purpose again. It felt like I was falling in love.” **“Jungle”** “I was trying to write a jungle tune for ages. The guitar line was a jungle bassline that I had but it just never fit what we were writing. And then Bowen started playing the chords on the guitar and it transformed it into something completely different. It completely revitalized what I’d been dragging through the mud for five years. Bowen made it IDLES, made it real, made it believable, made it beautiful. And then it reminded me of getting nicked, so I wrote a song about different times that I’ve been in trouble.” **“Gratitude”** “This was a real struggle. Bowen was really obsessed about doing interesting counts with the beats. I just wanted to make people dance and create infectious beats. We were coming from very different angles, but we loved this song that Bowen had made. I was like, ‘I get it, Bowen. This is insane. I love it, but I can’t get it.’ We hung on to it for ages, and then Nigel really helped us out, he created spaces and bits here and there by turning things down and moving everything slightly. Then Kenny helped me out, and got rid of the stupid counts, I think, and helped me write it on a 4/4 beat. And then they changed it back. I just come in in weird places. Everyone chipped in, because everyone believed in the song.” **“Monolith”** “I was fascinated by films where four or five notes are repeated throughout and create this monolithic motif. There’s a sense of continuity but the mood changes depending on certain things like tone and instruments. I wanted to do that over a song, and we got our friend Colin \[Webster\] from \[London noise rock unit\] Sex Swing to do the sax, we did it on different instruments that Nigel had. Nigel went away and basically put it all through the hollow-body bass. It reminded me of a documentary from a series called *The Blues* that Martin Scorsese curated. *The Soul of a Man* \[directed by Wim Wenders\] is about a song \[Blind Willie Johnson’s ‘Dark Was the Night’\] getting sent into space. If any aliens get this capsule, they’ll hear this song being played from a blues artist. It created a really beautiful and deep picture in my mind. It felt like this monolith drifting in the ether. I started singing a blues riff behind it, a Skip James kind of thing. I think it’s a beautiful way to finish the album—us drifting in the ether.”
There’s a moment on Michael Kiwanuka’s *Small Changes* that sums up the languid brilliance at the heart of the London singer-songwriter’s fourth album. It comes at the beginning of “Lowdown (part i),” its easygoing guitar strums and fluid bass groove stretching into life over what sounds like a spaghetti junction of distant conversations, as if Kiwanuka and his band have set up in the corner of the room and started playing, unprompted. As his warm croon wanders in, the background noise halts and the track gently glides into its soulful sway. It’s a neat summation of *Small Changes*’ unhurried elegance; this is a record that’s not designed to grab you by the collar but stops you in your tracks nonetheless. Kiwanuka won the Mercury Prize for 2019’s self-titled third album, yet nothing about *Small Changes* suggests he felt any pressure to repeat the success. Instead, he sounds like an artist free to follow his muse wherever it takes him. Working again with long-running collaborators Inflo (Little Simz, Sault) and Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton (Gnarls Barkley, Gorillaz, The Black Keys) in studios in London, LA, and Connecticut, he strips away from *KIWANUKA*’s fully-formed psychedelic soul expanse and emerges with another masterpiece. Early in his career, Kiwanuka followed the traditional singer-songwriter route of writing songs at home and taking them into the studio to get down on tape. There’s something looser and more free-spirited at work here—the trio starting from nothing and letting ideas blossom in the sessions. It has resulted in a record that inhabits its own sonic world, its mix of airy ’70s soul, orchestral folk, and minimalist ballads gently luring you in to its mesmerizing flow, everything elevated by Kiwanuka’s lightness of touch and melodic ease. There’s a spellbinding restraint to the way “One and Only” guides you to its string-laden outro, or how the mournful piano patterns of “Rebel Soul” lurk on the edge of the song, never stepping into the spotlight. Then there’s the way “Follow Your Dreams” lets its jubilant chorus drift blissfully by. At times, such as the moment when “Lowdown (part ii)” takes flight and unfurls into a Pink Floyd-esque epic with shimmering guitar flourishes, it sounds utterly timeless. It’s a record that sees Kiwanuka glancing back to his youth, reflecting on doubt-filled teenage years and considering the advice he could give to his young self. But this is also an album that strides hopefully into the future, the sound of an artist in full control of who he wants to be.
“I wanted the album to feel really fun,” Amyl and The Sniffers vocalist Amy Taylor tells Apple Music of *Cartoon Darkness*, the Australian quartet’s third full-length. That goal does, however, come with a caveat: “I wanted it to feel fun without putting up the blinkers and being like, everything’s sweet, all good. Things are really weird and things are pretty bad and there’s a lot of things to be stressed about, but there’s the balance of it. Not to encourage people to ignore the bad, but to try and find more of a balance.” So while *Cartoon Darkness* finds Taylor confronting issues such as body positivity, the ills of social media, the climate crisis, and capitalism’s impact on society and people’s wellbeing, she does so with an unrelenting lust for life and an indefatigable spirit that, on songs such as “Jerkin’” and “Motorbike Song,” adheres to the adage that life is for the living. Recorded with Nick Launay (Midnight Oil, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds) at Dave Grohl’s Studio 606, which boasts the same mixing desk on which Nirvana recorded *Nevermind* and Fleetwood Mac did *Rumours* (“I really didn’t want to spill anything on it,” laughs Taylor), the band approached *Cartoon Darkness* with a specific sonic goal in mind. “Bryce \[Wilson, drums\] and Declan \[Martens, guitar\] were really keen to try and explore different sounds and make it feel a bit more like a studio album,” says Taylor. Adds Martens: “In the past we’ve tried to see how everything would relate to when we perform it live. And even though a lot of these songs will be included in the set, I think we just wanted to make sure the focus was on making the best listening experience at home rather than making the best songs to be taken live.” A typically fiery slice of raw punk rock, albeit one that takes a breather on the gentler “Big Dreams” and “Bailing on Me,” the end result is what Taylor calls “the first album we feel really proud of from the get go.” Here, Taylor and Martens walk Apple Music through *Cartoon Darkness*, track by track. **“Jerkin’”** Amy Taylor: “It’s a tongue-in-cheek poke at keyboard warriors, at the haters in general. It’s just a fuck you to anyone who’s down to accept it.” Declan Martens: “This was conceived earlier than the intense writing period. We came up with it in the early half of 2023. It has a good intensity. Despite this being our attempt at a studio album it does replicate what we do live, which is straightaway energy.” AT: “I really wanted to write a song that big-upped yourself while bringing down the haters. I wanted it to be like, ‘I’m sick, you’re shit.’” **“Chewing Gum”** AT: “So much of life is just a carrot dangled in front of your head, like you’re just around the corner from being able to take a break, or the goodness is always just around the corner. And it’s so much hard work. Under capitalism you’re just constantly working for goals you can never seem to hit. I feel that robs people of themselves and robs people of happiness and joy. Something else that robs people of those things is criticism and judgment. I think with social media, a lot of people are constantly bombarded with how they should be and what they could do and what they might be and how bad they are. I feel that robs people of the joy of making mistakes, and making mistakes is so important for growing up. I want to make the wrong decision sometimes, and I want to have fun and I want to feel love even if that’s a wrong decision, even if that’s a dumb decision, because what else is the point?” **“Tiny Bikini”** AT: “I always try and consciously surround myself with women, but sometimes it doesn’t work out. Even in the studio I was the only lady of maybe eight dudes in the room. So I was just channeling that energy going, ‘Yeah it’s technically my space, but I’m the only one here in a bikini.’ I think a lot of my experience in life is being the only lady, and I feel like, for me, I love expressing myself in slutty ways. The world is a boring place, and to dress up or to be scantily clad or just be interesting is something I value, so that song is going, ‘That’s what I like.’” **“Big Dreams”** DM: “I write a whole scope of heavy and soft songs, and finding the softer songs’ place in Amyl and The Sniffers has always been a challenge; I’ve had a fear of doing it. So I showed it to Amy and she really enjoyed it and encouraged it. I think a lot of the misconception is that it’s experimenting, but I feel like these sorts of songs have always been in us. I prefer to refer to it as exploring rather than experimenting.” AT: “A lot of people in my life have really big dreams and they are really talented, and they are trying to make something of themselves. The world is a harsh place, and even if they’re super talented, it’s really difficult because of the cost of living and the oversaturation of everything. And it’s like we’re all getting older and a lot of people’s dreams may not happen, but that internal energy, it’s still swirling inside you.” **“It’s Mine”** DM: “The guitar \[has\] a really odd tuning that I’d never used before. Me and Nick \[Launay\] had worked to get this really direct, harsh, aggressive guitar sound, and that’s what makes it unique—it makes it sound like you’ve just stuck your head in a bucket of bees swarming.” AT: “Lyrically, it’s a subconscious dump trying to explore lots of different themes—the pressures of bodies to be perfect, and it’s saying it might not be perfect but it’s mine. And dipping into the confusion of consumerism and getting swept up and wanting to buy stuff. It’s a big mix of that.” **“Motorbike Song”** AT: “It’s a yearning for freedom. Life can be so stuffy, especially with screens and technology, so much of it is sitting still and looking at a screen for hours. I just saw a motorbike driving along and I wanted to embody the motorbike. I don’t want to ride it, I want to be the motorbike.” DM: “When we were working it out it felt like a So-Cal, ’80s punk song and it developed into more of a Motörhead-type thing. It’s fun, it’s got my most guitar solos on one song ever.” **“Doing in Me Head”** DM: “I was trying to write a disco song. I wanted it to be like The Gap Band. But I guess when you bring it to some Australian punks it comes out as ‘Doing in Me Head.’” AT: “This song kind of embodies the whole of *Cartoon Darkness*. Like it touches on the fact we all use our phones and social media, and they favor outrage, and subconsciously the system floods us with negative emotions and then it profits off that. It kind of dictates our life, not the other way around. You have to favor the algorithm, it won’t favor you. And talking about how spoon-fed our generation especially is and the lack of critical thinking.” **“Pigs”** AT: “Sometimes people are like, I know more so, therefore, I’m better than you and you’re an idiot. I don’t agree with that, because I’ve been on both sides of knowing stuff and not knowing stuff, and being an idiot and being a legend. So this song is saying, ‘We’re all pigs, you’re not better than me, we’re all just pigs in the mud.’” DM: “I’m really fond of the chorus. It’s a recycled riff that I wrote before our self-titled album that we jammed on but never became a song. Now, with my new knowledge in music, five or six years on, I found a way to make it interesting. I remember seeing that excitement in Amy’s face when I first started playing it differently.” **“Bailing on Me”** AT: “I was really struggling to write lyrics to it and figure out what to say and Declan was like, ‘I think it’s a sexy song, try and make it horny.’ I was trying to do that but was like, ‘I really don’t get that vibe from this song.’ So I ended up making it a heartbreak song.” DM: “I think it’s interesting that my intention was horny and Amy interprets heartbreak. I think that’s a funny way of looking at it.” **“U Should Not Be Doing That”** AT: “So much of my experience in the music world has been people trying to hold me back with their negativity and their limitations. Because they’ve made limitations for themselves that I don’t subscribe to. They might be saying you shouldn’t be doing that and I can’t believe you’re doing that, but I am doing it, and you’re not. I’m over here experiencing this with the choices that I’ve made, and you’re down in Melbourne having a bitch while you’re doing lines at 4am with other 50-year-olds, bitching about a 24-year-old. There are Facebook groups with old rockers being like, ‘I don’t like that band, she’s crap.’ Kiss my arse!” **“Do It Do It”** AT: “For some reason I always imagine some random athlete trying to listen to this to gee up, so that’s what it’s about. Someone being like, ‘Yeah I’ll fuckin’ get up and run.’” DM: “This was the last riff I came up with before moving to the US. The working title for it was ‘Pornhub Awards’ because, the night before, I found a free ticket to the Pornhub Awards. I didn’t win anything.” **“Going Somewhere”** AT: “Anyone can find dirt, but it takes hard work to find gold. It’s the easiest thing in the world to criticize. People are just lazy, and they’re not trying hard enough to find the good in stuff. There’s no perfect world and there’s not going to be utopia, because utopia would be dystopia anyway. It’s just saying I’m going to go somewhere, hopefully you can come there too.” **“Me and The Girls”** DM: “Amy sent me this hip-hop song that had like an Eddie Van Halen sort of guitar sample in it, and I was like, ‘I’ve got a riff that’s super repetitive, almost like a sample, a loop, and I wrote it when I was 21. It’s called ‘Fry Pan Fingers,’ because I used to stick my fingers on the frying pan to callous them before gigs when I was young.’ So I was like, ‘All right, Amy, here’s this repetitive \[riff\], like a hip-hop loop that I’ve got.’” AT: “I needed a lyric for the chorus, so I was like, ‘Declan, now’s your chance, do you want to do a duet?’ I said, ‘Me and the girls are drunk at the airport,’ and he’s like, ‘I can’t believe that it’s an open bar,’ and I loved it, but everyone else was like, this is a bit weird. We’d been listening to a lot of Beastie Boys so we were like, let’s add in the vocoder \[on his voice\] and make it sound like that.”
There’s a sense of optimism that comes through Vampire Weekend’s fifth album that makes it float, a sense of hope—a little worn down, a little roughed up, a little tired and in need of a shave, maybe—but hope nonetheless. “By the time you’re pushing 40, you’ve hit the end of a few roads, and you’re probably looking for something—I don’t know what to say—a little bit deeper,” Ezra Koenig tells Apple Music. “And you’re thinking about these ideas. Maybe they’re corny when you’re younger. Gratitude. Acceptance. All that stuff. And I think that’s infused in the album.” Take something like “Mary Boone,” whose worries and reflections (“We always wanted money, now the money’s not the same”) give way to an old R&B loop (Soul II Soul’s “Back to Life”). Or the way the piano runs on “Connect”—like your friend fumbling through a Gershwin tune on a busted upright in the next room—bring the song’s manic energy back to earth. Musically, they’ve never sounded more sophisticated, but they’ve also never sounded sloppier or more direct (“Prep-School Gangsters”). They’re a tuxedo with ripped Converse or a garage band with a full orchestra (“Ice Cream Piano”). And while you can trainspot the micro-references and little details of their indie-band sound (produced brilliantly by Koenig and longtime collaborator Ariel Rechtshaid), what you remember most is the big picture of their songs, which are as broad and comforting as great pop (“Classical”). “Sometimes I talk about it with the guys,” Koenig says. “We always need to have an amateur quality to really be us. There needs to be a slight awkward quality. There needs to be confidence and awkwardness at the same time.” Next to the sprawl of *Father of the Bride*, *OGWAU* (“og-wow”—try it) feels almost like a summary of the incredible 2007-2013 run that made them who they are. But they’re older now, and you can hear that, too, mostly in how playful and relaxed the album is. Listen to the jazzy bass and prime-time saxophone on “Classical” or the messy drums on “Prep-School Gangsters” (courtesy of Blood Orange’s Dev Hynes), or the way “Hope” keeps repeating itself like a school-assembly sing-along. It’s not cool music, which is of course what makes it so inimitably cool. Not that they seem to worry about that stuff anymore. “I think a huge element for that is time, which is a weird concept,” Koenig says. ”Some people call it a construct. I’ve heard it’s not real. That’s above my pay grade, but I will say, in my experience, time is great because when you’re bashing your head against the wall, trying to figure out how to use your brain to solve a problem, and when you learn how to let go a little bit, time sometimes just does its thing.” For a band that once announced themselves as the preppiest, most ambitious guys in the indie-rock room, letting go is big.
Where the ’60s-ish folk singer Jessica Pratt’s first few albums had the insular feel of music transmitted from deep within someone’s psyche, *Here in the Pitch* is open and ready—cautiously, gently—to be heard. The sounds aren’t any bigger, nor are they jockeying any harder for your attention. (There is no jockeying here, this is a jockey-free space.) But they do take up a little more room, or at least seem more comfortable in their quiet grandeur—whether it’s the lonesome western-movie percussion of “Life Is” or the way the featherlight *sha-la-la*s of “Better Hate” drift like a dazzled girl out for a walk among the bright city lights. This isn’t private-press psychedelia anymore, it’s *Pet Sounds* by The Beach Boys and the rainy-day ballads of Burt Bacharach—music whose restraint and sophistication concealed a sense of yearning rock ’n’ roll couldn’t quite express (“World on a String”). And should you worry that her head is in the clouds, she levels nine blows in a tidy, professional 27 minutes. They don’t make them like they used to—except that she does.
On the strength of two excellent EPs—*Waves* (2021) and 2022’s *Banshee*—NewDad quickly became one of Ireland’s fastest rising acts, earning the four-piece big-gig support slots with Inhaler and Paolo Nutini in 2022. The gauzy textures of those two releases also fastened the “shoegaze” and “dream pop” tags to the Galway-formed band composed of Julie Dawson (vocals/guitar), Cara Joshi (bass), Fiachra Parslow (drums), and Sean O’Dowd (guitar). However, their own vision was always for something more divergent, something more muscular and dynamic—something they’ve forged on a debut album that adds cleaner, steelier edges to their sound while exploring their love of grunge, alt-rock, and electronic music. “It was really rock music that got us all into wanting to play in a band,” Dawson tells Apple Music. “We never really imagined that we’d make a rock record, but that’s what this ended up being. I guess deep down it was always what we wanted to do but we didn’t really have the tools to do it. When we started off, we were still figuring out our sound and then, when we started playing songs live, it was way heavier and we wanted to translate that into the recordings. When we got that guitar sound on ‘Sickly Sweet,’ we were like, ‘Nothing we’ve ever recorded sounded like that. Holy shit, that is what we want!’” The album was recorded with trusted band producer Chris Ryan at Rockfield Studios in Wales. Here, NewDad felt galvanized by the fresh air and the studio’s history—which includes incubating records by Queen, The Stone Roses, Oasis, Manic Street Preachers, Pixies, and Iggy Pop—while a downtime diet of zombie movies might, says Dawson, have added to the album’s sense of menace. As much as the sound of *MADRA*— Irish for “dog”—represents an evolution for NewDad, the lyrics are more concerned with stasis and repetition, particularly in our everyday relationships and behaviors. “It’s those things you can’t escape, or repeating unhealthy patterns,” says Dawson. “It was initially just a working title. It was probably because when we were like, ‘Oh, what will we name it?’ we saw a dog walk past the window or something. But the image of a dog following you does line up nicely with the music. It’s definitely a lot about the relationship between you and whoever—family, friends, partners.” Let Dawson explain further with her track-by-track guide. **“Angel”** “It was during lockdown and it was definitely like I was having a dry spell when it came to writing. \[TV series *Euphoria*\] is so lovely to look at and the plot lines are so crazy that it got my brain going. That whole dynamic between \[show characters\] Rue and Jules—feeling like a burden in a relationship—is something that so many people go through if you have bad mental health. It was one of those moments where I was like, ‘Oh yeah, OK. I have an idea of something I want to write about now.’ That bassline is just such a good hook. It’s just a really strong opening. We’ve always been very bass-led, and it’s a familiar sound, so it’s a nice way to open.” **“Sickly Sweet”** “‘Sickly Sweet’ is that whole thing of repeating unhealthy patterns, maybe going back to something or someone, even though you know that it’s bad news. The line that sums it up the best is: ‘But I’m reliant on the nonsense.’ It’s like when you do things out of pure boredom and it’s completely stupid, but it’s just something you do. I love this one because it feels like a lot of ’90s records that I would’ve listened to. \[We were aiming for\] a Breeders-y kind of thing. That raw vocal is something that we don’t do that often, but was definitely necessary.” **“Where I Go”** “This was a really old one. I had never imagined it being on the album, to be honest. But a lot of other people and the rest the band were like, ‘It really does sound great,’ after we recorded it in Rockfield. I was very against it for a while but when the mix started sounding really cool, I was like, ‘OK, I’m comfortable with this.’ It’s an important song on the album because so much of it is like, ‘Meh, I hate myself,’ and this is like, ‘No, actually, fuck you to anyone who actually made me feel like shit.’ It’s a good moment, a good release of anger.” **“Change My Mind”** “‘Change My Mind,’ again, it’s that unhealthy pattern where you’re not really trying to be better and then that repeats \[something\] bad, whatever it is. The initial inspiration, sonically, was \[2020 single\] ‘Blue.’ We were like, ‘We need to do something that’s kind of like “Blue” because everyone loves “Blue” so much.’ And funnily enough, it is a similar theme, that kind of, ‘I’m bringing my partner down.’ I think it’s a nice, poppy moment on there.” **“In My Head”** “\[May 2023’s single version\] was recorded in Church Studios \[in London\] and we loved how it sounded, so we wanted to put it out, but then we actually ended up doing the album in Rockfield, so we did an album version of it. I love both.” **“Nosebleed”** “This was one that I wrote with Justin Parker \[cowriter of Lana Del Rey’s ‘Video Games’\]. It’s someone having a hold on you, a toxic relationship. It could be between friends, family, whatever. It’s that wanting to stay with that comfort even though it’s not necessarily good. But ‘Nosebleed’ was initially really high and really fast, and it was a really poppy song. I didn’t see it being on the album, but then we were doing preproduction with Chris Ryan and he was like, ‘I love this song so much. I really want to give it a go in Rockfield.’ And we were like, ‘OK, whatever. Let’s try slowing it down and making it lower,’ and then it clicked instantly. It was just like honey, just like a mushy, warm sound. I absolutely love it now.” **“Let Go”** “‘Let Go’ is way more about the instrumental and I guess I didn’t think that the vocal needed to be overly complicated, so there’s not a whole lot going on lyrically. I like that kind of swirling. It feels like you’re really stuck in something in that song. This and ‘White Ribbons’ are my two favorites on the album. I just love the chorus and the bridge and the guitars are so snarly. It’s sick.” **“Dream of Me”** “We wrote this in a session with a guy called Rob Brinkmann. I think we just had the chords. We brought it to Rob and he’s really excellent at structuring songs. The reference was actually ‘Waking Up in Vegas,’ the Katy Perry song. I guess it’s a lighter moment in the album because lyrically, as well, I’m not really saying anything profound. It’s just like, ‘Oh, when you like someone and they don’t really care about you,’ that’s it.” **“Nightmares”** “‘Nightmares’ was another song that I did with Justin and it was such a fun one to do because I went in with chords initially and we were layering it up. Then, when we had those little guitar harmonics, we were actually, ‘Just them by themselves sounds so sick.’ It was reminding me of Massive Attack and I thought that was a cool way to roll with it. So I love the electronic sounds in that song. ‘Nightmares,’ again, is that feeling of not wanting to like someone because you know it won’t work.” **“White Ribbons”** “It was very therapeutic to write and it feels like a more hopeful track on the album. We put our bodies through so much shit and they always fix us, and this is basically just a thank you \[for that\]. I actually don’t even know where it came from—one day I had that guitar line and vocals, and it’s a pretty line. I love the stripped-back moment and all the weird vocoder stuff.” **“Madra”** “‘Madra’ is really old now. It was a chord progression I was playing when we were in the studio in Belfast during *Banshee*. Once we got back from recording, we made the demo pretty quickly. We were sitting on that one for a while and we all loved it so much. The outro just felt so strong. It felt like such a cool ending, like a final scene. And all the bass licks and stuff, they’re just so sick. I feel like it sums up everything that is said in the album—about the highs and the lows and the repeating patterns.”
The LA-by-way-of-Miami duo of Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin pick up where they left things on their debut, 2021’s *Mercurial World*, and make everything just a bit bigger. Opener “She Looked Like Me!” begins innocently enough, with hushed vocals from Tenenbaum backed by twinkling keys and a buzzing bass synth. Before long, though, massive drum hits give the song an unrelenting pulse, blending the energy of a hyperpop anthem with the rise-and-fall restraint of a classic-rock song. “Image” is a disco-inspired cut that dances around synths that speed up and slow down according to their own whimsy, as Tenenbaum’s voice floats effortlessly above the fray. “What\'s the best you’ve got?/I forgot all my common sense/I need all the common sense/Time to start the clock from the top,” she sings, letting the feel-good vibes of the club-ready instrumental imbue her abstract lyrics with visceral meaning. Even when the duo concoct songs that fear the future or suggest wariness at where the world is headed, the jams suggest that the AI apocalypse will still feature plenty of dancing.
In April 2023, Bill Ryder-Jones was playing the second of two acoustic shows in the compact theater space at East London’s Hoxton Hall. Halfway through, he asked the crowd of a couple of hundred if they had any requests. Song titles were volleyed back at him but no one bid for “Daniel,” despite it being one of his most popular songs. From 2016’s *West Kirby County Primary* album, it describes how Ryder-Jones and his family became unmoored by the loss of his older brother, aged just nine, during a family holiday in 1991. Tonight in that intimate room, it felt too invasive to ask for, perhaps, too searing a flame of grief and trauma to stand so close to. Nevertheless, Ryder-Jones played “Daniel” later in the show, his audience listening in damp-eyed stillness. As the song finished and applause erupted, Ryder-Jones gently raised his fist in salute and said thank you. Alongside the new songs he played that night, that moment offered a clue to where the former The Coral guitarist is on this fifth solo album, released nine months later. He’s still contending with difficult times and regrets, creating beautiful music in the gloaming, but he’s also pulling out moments of strength, gratitude, and hope. As a solo artist, Ryder-Jones has proved satisfyingly restless, ricocheting from orchestral instrumentals (2011’s *If…*) and wistful bedroom folk (*A Bad Wind Blows in My Heart*, 2013) to the unkempt alt-rock of *West Kirby…* and the glacially paced sorrow of 2018’s *Yawn*. He’s been softly dismissive of those final two, despite their excellence, stating that he’s always been striving to match *A Bad Wind…*. *Iechyd Da* achieves this and more by returning to that album’s delicacy and melody and decorating them with magnetic layers of sound—including children’s choirs, disco samples, and fellow Scouse singer-songwriter Michael Head reading from *Ulysses*. The songs were written in lockdown, a difficult period for anyone—not least those like Ryder-Jones who live with depression and anxiety. It was also a time in his life when a relatively new relationship grew and then withered, and a prescribed course of Valium slipped into dependency. So there’s understandable vulnerability and self-doubt here. “While I’m too much, I’ll never be enough for you, I know,” he concedes on opener “I Know That It’s Like This (Baby).” Despair reaches its depths on lead single “This Can’t Go On.” Its blend of disoriented fragility and night-sky expanse recalls Mercury Rev’s *Deserter’s Songs* as Ryder-Jones walks his coastal town of West Kirby after dark, listening to Echo & The Bunnymen and yearning for something more, something different, something everyday—kids, companionship, a driving license. In these intimate songs, it’s the little things—biographical details, nuggets of sound—that pull you in. “I keep the good times closer than the bad/Running your baths before *American Dad*,” he tells a departed lover on “Christinha.” A sample of Brazilian tropicália pioneer Gal Costa’s “Baby” floats through “I Know That It’s Like This (Baby)” like a ghost from better times. And it’s flooring to hear Ryder-Jones’ brittle whisper crumble to a sigh at the final syllable of “Oh, how I loved you” on “A Bad Wind Blows in My Heart Pt. 3.” The ambivalence of “There’s something great about life/But there’s something not quite right” (“It’s Today Again”) doesn’t suggest a man who’s found his peace but there’s also stoic acceptance of some things passed. “’Cause I don’t think I could’ve given any more/A sun just sank into some sea” he tells that absent lover on “Christinha.” One of the most difficult memories revisited is on “Thankfully for Anthony,” which recalls the day a bad dose of tranquilizers unfastened Ryder-Jones to the point that the song opens with “I’m thinking this might just be it/I’ve waited a lifetime for this.” Anthony is the friend who drives him to hospital to get checked out, and here in his oldest pal’s car—in his *care*—clarity and purpose arrives. “I felt loved/I’m still lost/But I know love/And I know loss/But I chose love,” sings Ryder-Jones amid a heart-bursting orchestral swell. When the music fades out, you can hear a faint voice from the studio say, “Thought that was pretty good,” before the album ends with “Nos Da.” Named after the Welsh for “goodnight,” it’s 90 seconds of soothing piano and strings—a soft landing, a gently raised salute.
Arooj Aftab’s star-making 2021 album *Vulture Prince* was marked by a distinct and undeniable sadness—a chronicle of grief following the death of Aftab’s younger brother Maher, whom the record was dedicated to. Despite its many contributors, *Vulture Prince* felt nearly monastic in sound and focus, conjuring images of someone processing pain alone and amidst the cosmos, and since its release, the Pakistani American singer and composer has opened up her sonic world to increasingly thrilling effect. *Love in Exile*, released in 2023, found Aftab expanding the jazz side of her sound in collaboration with jazz pianist Vijay Iyer and multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily, and now her fourth solo album *Night Reign* reflects her biggest leap yet. It’s the kind of record that makes you realize that Aftab can, when it comes to songwriting and style, do pretty much anything—from smoldering balladry à la the late Jeff Buckley and Sade’s endless-sounding quiet storm to trip-hop’s shadowy iridescence—without losing an ounce of raw emotion. Similar to *Vulture Prince*, *Night Reign* features a bevy of notable musicians pitching in throughout: Moor Mother delivers raw incantations over the foreboding structure of “Bolo Na,” while Iyer’s keystrokes are deeply felt across the patient tapestry of “Saaqi” and guitarist Kaki King lends her considerable talents to the refracted jazz-folk of “Last Night Reprise.” But it’s Aftab’s voice—rich, resonant, malleable, and instantly recognizable—that provides the true gravitational pull at the center of *Night Reign*’s universe, echoing through the sparse rustling of “Raat Ki Rani” and shimmering on the surface of the devastating closer “Zameen.” In the press materials for *Night Reign*, Aftab expresses a desire to “make music with and for everybody,” and this record is undoubtedly the fullest realization of those aims yet, revealing new contours in her songwriting and further cementing her as a singular talent in popular music.
Billie Eilish has always delighted in subverting expectations, but *HIT ME HARD AND SOFT* still, somehow, lands like a meteor. “This is the most ‘me’ thing I’ve ever made,” she tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “And purely me—not a character.” An especially wide-ranging and transportive project, even for her, it’s brimming with the guts and theatricality of an artist who has the world at her feet—and knows it. In a tight 45 minutes, Eilish does as she promises and hits listeners with a mix of scorching send-ups, trance excursions, and a stomping tribute to queer pleasure, alongside more soft-edged cuts like teary breakup ballads and jaunts into lounge-y jazz. But the project never feels zigzaggy thanks to, well, the Billie Eilish of it all: her glassy vocals, her knowing lyrics, her unique ability to make softness sound so huge. *HIT ME* is Eilish’s third album and, like the two previous ones, was recorded with her brother and longtime creative partner FINNEAS. In conceptualizing it, the award-winning songwriting duo were intent on creating the sort of album that makes listeners feel like they’ve been dropped into an alternate universe. As it happens, this universe has several of the same hallmarks as the one she famously drew up on her history-making debut, 2019’s *WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?*. In many ways, this project feels more like that album’s sequel than 2021’s jazzy *Happier Than Ever*, which Eilish has said was recorded during a confusing, depressive pandemic haze. In the three years since, she has tried to return to herself—to go outside, hang out with friends, and talk more openly about sex and identity, all things that make her feel authentic and, for lack of a better word, normal. “As much as *Happier Than Ever* was coming from this place of, like, \'We\'re so good. This sounds so good,\' it was also not knowing at all who I was,’” she tells Apple Music. FINNEAS agrees, calling it their “identity crisis album.” But *HIT ME HARD AND SOFT* is, she says, the reverse. “The whole time we were making it, we were like, \'I don\'t know if I\'m making anything good, this might be terrible…’ But now I\'m like, \'Yeah, but I\'m comfortable in who I am now.\' I feel like I know who I am now.” As a songwriter, Eilish is still in touch with her vulnerabilities, but at 22, with a garage full of Grammys and Oscars, they aren’t as heavy. These days it’s heartache, not her own insecurities, that keeps her up at night, and the songs are juicier for it. “LUNCH,” a racy, bass-heavy banger that can’t help but hog the spotlight, finds Eilish crushing so hard on a woman that she compares the hook-up to a meal. “I’ve said it all before, but I’ll say it again/I’m interested in more than just being your friend,” she sings. The lyrics are so much more than lewd flirtations. They’re also a way of stepping back into the spotlight—older, wiser, more fully herself. Read below as Eilish and FINNEAS share the inside story behind a few standout songs. **“LUNCH”** BILLIE: “One of the verses was written after a conversation I had with a friend and they were telling me about this complete animal magnetism they were feeling. And I was like, ‘Ooh, I\'m going to pretend to be them for a second and just write...and I’m gonna throw some jokes in there.’ We took ourselves a little too seriously on *Happier Than Ever*. When you start to embrace cringe, you\'re so much happier. You have so much more fun.” **“BIRDS OF A FEATHER”** BILLIE: “This song has that ending where I just keep going—it’s the highest I\'ve ever belted in my life. I was alone in the dark, thinking, ‘You know what? I\'m going to try something.’ And I literally just kept going higher and higher. This is a girl who could not belt until I was literally 18. I couldn\'t physically do it. So I\'m so proud of that. I remember coming home and being like, ‘Mom! Listen!’” **“WILDFLOWER”** BILLIE: “To me, \[the message here is\] I\'m not asking for reassurance. I am 100% confident that you love me. That\'s not the problem. The problem is this thing that I can\'t shake. It’s a girl code song. It\'s about breaking girl code, which is one of the most challenging places. And it isn’t about cheating. It isn’t about anything even bad. It was just something I couldn’t get out of my head. And in some ways, this song helped me understand what I was feeling, like, ‘Oh, maybe this is actually affecting me more than I thought.’ I love this song for so many reasons. It\'s so tortured and overthinky.” **“THE GREATEST”** BILLIE: “To us, this is the heart of the album. It completes the whole thing. Making it was sort of a turning point. Everything went pretty well after that. It kind of woke us back up.” FINNEAS: “When you realize you\'re willing to go somewhere that someone else isn\'t, it\'s so devastating. And everybody has been in some dynamic in their life or their relationship like that. When you realize that you\'d sacrifice and wear yourself out and compromise all these things, but the person you\'re in love with won’t make those sacrifices, or isn’t in that area? To me, that\'s what that song is about. It\'s like, you don\'t even want to know how lonely this is.” **“L’AMOUR DE MA VIE”** FINNEAS: “The album is all about Billie. It\'s not a narrative album about a fictional character. But we have always loved songs within songs within songs. Here, you\'ve just listened to Billie sound so heartbroken in ‘THE GREATEST,’ and then she sings this song that\'s like the antibody to that. It’s like, ‘You know what? Fuck you anyway.’ And then she goes to the club.” **“BLUE”** “The first quarter of ‘BLUE’ is a song Finneas and I made when I was 14 called ‘True Blue.’ We played it at little clubs before I had anything out, and never \[released it\] because we aged out of it. Years went by. Then, for a time, the second album was going to include one additional song called ‘Born Blue.’ It was totally different, and it didn’t make the cut. We never thought about it again. Then, in 2022, I was doing my laundry and found out ‘True Blue’ had been leaked. At first I was like ‘Oh god, they fucking stole my shit again,’ but then I couldn\'t stop listening. I went on YouTube and typed ‘Billie Eilish True Blue’ to find all the rips of it, because I didn\'t even have the original. Then it hit us, like, ‘Ooh, you know what\'d be cool? What if we took both of these old songs, resurrected them, and made them into one?’ The string motif is the melody from the bridge of ‘THE GREATEST,’ which is also in ‘SKINNY,’ which starts the album. So it also ends the album.”
“We’re very lucky to move here and we’ve been loving it,” Confidence Man’s Sugar Bones—Aidan Moore—tells Apple Music, reflecting on the act’s relocation to London. “\[We’re\] figuring it out and just having lots of fun in a new place. And it really rubbed off on this album.” Energetically co-fronted by Moore and fellow vocalist Janet Planet (Grace Stephenson) over dynamic, nostalgic backing from producers Reggie Goodchild and Clarence McGuffie, Confidence Man taps into that fresh thrill of exploring a new place on its third album. From the nocturnal headiness of the title track to the bratty festival fun of “BREAKBEAT”—on which Planet announces that she’s not dropping the pill in her pocket until she hears the titular rhythmic flourish—the record celebrates partying at any hour in any setting. Read on as Moore takes us behind the scenes on five extra-playful tracks in particular. **“WHO KNOWS WHAT YOU’LL FIND?”** “This song took a while to piece together. But once we figured out that we had to smash two songs together, it happened really quick, and we knew we were onto something good. It’s just a really dreamy track. It has a nice float to it—and also that killer riff. The perfect setting for this would be if you’re in bed really, really relaxed, and you’ve got the best set of headphones, and you’re getting a foot rub and watching a movie set in London. Yeah, that’s probably it.” **“I CAN’T LOSE YOU”** “It’s about being out of it and wasted in a strange situation, but managing to find a connection amongst it—and just that human urge to find other people and stick with them. We actually thought this beat was someone else’s: we hit them up to try and get the stems, and then realized that it was actually just one of Reggie’s old beats. So props to Reggie for forgetting such a good beat. Then it came really quickly. It goes off live. It’s just got that big pop energy, and the crowd seems to start bouncing when it starts hitting. We wanted this track to be a big, anthemic, festival pop moment.” **“SICKO”** “We went out to the bush for a couple of days \[near Melbourne\] and set up our studio, and that track came out of nowhere. But it was shelved for a while, until we were back in London six months later. We pulled it off and gave it another run, and it scrubbed up so well. We really just wanted to push that dark, creepy, kind of sexy angle. If you wanted the perfect setting for this, you’d be strutting down an alleyway and there’s thousands of photographers peering out the buildings, taking photos of you from the storeys above, and you are just looking so damn good.” **“JANET”** “‘Janet’ is a bit more light-hearted. We just wanted to capture our weird relationship and put it down on paper. We really wanted something fun and light and summery with this track. It’s actually based off a sample, which the astute dance connoisseur will probably be able to pick up. Can you figure it out?” **“3AM (LA LA LA)”** “This is another late-night venture that’s really just trying to capture that hysteria and energy and sort of angst that you can feel in those early hours, especially when you’ve had a few. We haven’t played this song live yet but it’s a big band favorite, so I know when we do it’s going to be absolutely nuts. We realized with this song that it would be a journey track from the start. It’s just got that deeper vibe to it: a little less pop, but it’s just so moody. You should probably listen to this one not in the sun at all, \[but\] in a deep, dark club somewhere underground. With your friends still but, yeah, no sun for this one.”
“I have to write about how I feel,” Rachel Chinouriri tells Apple Music. “If I don’t feel it or can’t relate to it, I can’t write about it.” Since breaking out in 2022 with viral track “So My Darling,” the South London singer-songwriter has done just that, penning bittersweet indie bops and devastating ballads that have been fueled, most often, by stories of heartache. You’ll find plenty of that on this debut album, but Chinouriri also goes deeper, with songs about self-contempt, loss, grief, and feeling like you don’t belong right when you’re supposed to be killing it (see “The Hills,” her cathartic exhale about a five-week songwriting trip to LA, which left her feeling lonely, under pressure, and creatively stumped). For Chinouriri, *What a Devastating Turn of Events* was shaped by “the journey of being in your early twenties. You finally leave home and then you are kind of becoming an adult, but you don’t really feel like an adult,” she says. “You’re still looking at the grown-ups to give you advice, but you are the grown-up. It is a weird journey of trying to discover yourself. Being able to feel and then turn it into song—it’s a privilege to have that as a gift.” But *What a Devastating Turn of Events* also feels rooted in much more than just a bumpy life transition, and Chinouriri’s lyricism is laced with far more wisdom than most people can apply to those chaotic early-twenties years. Either way, the singer-songwriter wanted her debut to capture what it’s like to be shattered by a sudden event. And so, the record opens with sharp-witted, mostly upbeat indie-pop moments (plus some “wonky” bits, as Chinouriri puts it), before the crushing title track—written after the singer-songwriter’s cousin tragically took her own life—shifts this album, and its creator, on its axis. What follows are some of Chinouriri’s most raw, arresting songs yet. “When death happens, it does turn your entire world upside down,” she says. “It might not even be death, it might just be something that happens. And sometimes you don’t realize how much you have until something major happens. Then you realize, ‘Damn, I’ve wasted so much time bothering about stuff that doesn’t matter.’ Turning points can either make or break people.” This album ends on Chinouriri’s own turning point: “Pocket,” a sweet song about new, better love that Chinouriri promised she’d give to the person who finally allowed her to feel it, followed by her acoustic version of “So My Darling,” the song that started this wild ride in the first place. Here, Chinouriri takes us through her debut, track by track. **“Garden of Eden”** “I wrote this after my big LA trip feeling like, ‘This \[the UK\] is home for me.’ I’m just adamant I want a house in the countryside. Where I grew up in Croydon isn’t that, but it was quiet, and I would always hear birds and see fields and grass. We were in a room \[in a studio in the UK countryside, where Chinouriri went after LA\] and would always have the recording on, and the birds were that loud. I was like, ‘Let’s just maybe make it a soundscape where you’re just falling into this situation.’ It’s setting the scene.” **“The Hills”** “We’ve left the Garden of Eden now and I’m like, ‘Right, I don’t belong here.’ The music video shows \[me\], a Black woman, walking across some flags, and people have said, ‘Oh, she’s talking about how she doesn’t belong in the UK,’ but I’m actually talking about how much I *do* belong. It’s almost seeing those street parties where they’ve got all the flags and being like, ‘I’m as English as you guys, so I belong here and I’ll be staying here whether you like it or not.’ The song is definitely a headbanging, screaming moment—it has a bit of an American-boy-band-in-a-basement, kids-in-a-garage vibe. It felt like a relief to have something after a trip where we didn’t have much, especially after five weeks.” **“Never Need Me”** “After I wrote this, I didn’t even send it to the label. A few days later, I was at a festival and my manager came to me and said, ‘Why didn’t you send us this song? Oli \[Bayston, one of the song’s co-writers\] sent it to us.’ I said, ‘I don’t like it, I think it’s a terrible song.’ I think it was because of its meaning. And in the session, I was just so angry and annoyed and in such an agitated mood. I felt uninspired. But later, I said, ‘If I can do it however I want, I’ll finish the song.’ So I went to \[songwriter\] Glen Roberts and changed all the production—I was thinking Kings of Leon and heavy guitars.” **“My Everything”** “This song is about giving your all to everyone. My project before this album, *Four° in Winter*, was very experimental and wonky. I knew I was hitting some pop territories with this album, but I think there are still wonky elements to me. I really love Ladysmith Black Mambazo and how they use their voice almost as the instruments. I just liked being in the studio and coming up with weird sounds with my voice. I don’t even want to know how many vocal tracks are on that—but it was a lot! I don’t know if people will like it, but I wanted to show all the different parts of who I am.” **“All I Ever Asked”** “Again, I didn’t want it on the album. But now I realize this song is important and a way people discovered me \[it was a single in 2022\]. I think I’m actually quite a dark person because I’m a Scorpio. Whether you believe in star signs or not, I’ve always gravitated towards dark lyrics to a point where I don’t think sad lyrics really hit me anymore. But there’s also a degree of making light of situations. Because as much as \[what inspired this song\] is sad, it’s also like, ‘You’ll live. He was an asshole. There are plenty more people you can meet in this world.’ There’s light that can come to those situations.” **“It Is What It Is”** “When I was doing \[the speak-singing here\], I was like, ‘Maybe I’m going to sound a bit like a loser.’ I’m not really rapping, I’m talking, and then obviously I have this English accent. I don’t want to say I have a boring voice, but when I’m speaking, I think I sound quite monotone. But what I’m saying is, ‘You are a fucking arsehole.’ This one’s for my girls and boys who have definitely felt this multiple times. Mae Muller is on this track. She is that person who will be like, ‘Absolutely not.’ I’ll go out and look at someone slightly questionable and be like, ‘I fancy him.’ She’ll go to the bathroom and be like, ‘Rachel, love you so much. No, no, you’re not doing that.’ And I’ll be like, ‘OK.’” **“Dumb Bitch Juice”** “This was very much Amy Winehouse-inspired—I know it’s not Amy Winehouse at all, but she had this ability to sing in quite a free and melodic way, but you can hear every single thing she says. When I wrote this, I was like, ‘I’m here to insult today.’ Not just insulting someone else—insulting myself too. Because sometimes men are terrible, but there’s also a degree of ‘You have allowed someone to treat you like that.’ Of course I’ve been heartbroken by an absolute idiot because I’m drinking dumb bitch juice!” **“What a Devastating Turn of Events”** “All my siblings were born in Africa, I’m the only one who was born in the UK. There’s a set of relatives who know I exist, but I’ve not met most of them—I have no clue who they are, but my siblings grew up with them. And when she \[Chinouriri’s cousin, the subject of this song\] died, my siblings were devastated. I was sad about someone I didn’t know. I constantly thought about it and wondered how it had happened. I had gone through something similar; being able to write about it has been kind of helpful for me to understand my own situation and stuff that I’ve gone through. Sonically, I never thought we needed a big chorus. It’s a different verse and different chorus every single time. Then there’s just this kind of chanting thing—I think that’s maybe where my African influence is coming, the marching and the pace of the drum and everyone singing as a group. We all sat in the studio with a mic and just screamed, ‘What a devastating turn of events.’ I think there’s a degree of sorrow that comes along, kind of trudging through this very sad story. This is a very important one.” **“My Blood”** “I wanted a song where there’s not necessarily continuation, but which speaks about things which people might do as a cry for help. You should always watch when things like that happen to people. I went through a phase where I was pulling out my own hair—it was a stress thing. It started making me think about when I was younger and there was self-harm things. It was visualizing looking in a mirror and being like, ‘Why am I doing this to myself?’ But it’s also these invisible wounds. The strings here add so much to the song—the cinematic-ness of it is definitely influenced by Daughter. I wanted to get people to feel. It sounds very sad from top to bottom, but I hope people listen to it and think, ‘Wow.’” **“Robbed”** “There was a baby in our family who passed away, and I felt like I was robbed of them. I was a bit more poetic in this song, but it’s almost considering people I’d not met that had such a massive effect on me. You can be robbed of time sometimes, with people or family. When stuff like that happens, the people around you are always like, ‘It’ll be OK. I’m sorry that happened.’ And actually, sometimes it’s OK to just be like, ‘That was fucking shit. That was horrible and this is unfair.’ That was the kind of emotion I wanted to translate in these songs.” **“Cold Call”** “I was really inspired by Coldplay’s ‘Politik.’ It’s just mind-blowing. I’m quite obsessed with Coldplay and I asked my team to show them the song. I know that they liked it—it meant a lot. They are my inspiration for a lot of things. I think it feels like a universal song. It’s kind of like, ‘I’ve had enough of this now, I’m not doing that anymore.’” **“I Hate Myself”** “I like how this ends with me reflecting on the positive. I’ve felt some very negative things, which I’ve been lucky enough to stop in their tracks. I mean, ‘a victim of your mind’ is one of the lyrics here. I wrote this with \[producer and songwriter\] Jonah Summerfield and he was like, ‘Oh, this is pretty deep.’ But sometimes when you put your thoughts on paper, you can read it back and think, ‘That was ridiculous.’ I looked back at this and thought, ‘That was a really stupid thing for me to even put myself through.’ You have to learn to love yourself—and hope that as a society we can really unlearn the treatment of people for being different sizes. Being able to write music has been a combination of me unlearning and learning so much about myself. And I think I can see how my self-esteem really skyrocketed the song in many ways.” **“Pocket”** “When I wrote this, I’d gone through all my phases of being like, ‘Men are trash, men are toxic.’ Then I was kind of like, ‘Well that’s just BS. I was just choosing terrible men. And there are actually nice ones if you allow yourself to be loved. So I’m going to write a song about how I would like to be loved.’ I thought, ‘When I find someone, I’m going to give them this song.’ And when I started dating my boyfriend, I said, ‘There’s this song I have.’” **“So My Darling (Acoustic)”** “The song is like six years old, so it’s a nostalgic way to end the album. You’ve gone through this journey of \[mostly\] new songs, and then you get thrown back into one that everyone knows. I wanted the whole album to sound and feel nostalgic for being a Black Brit, so to end on something nostalgic for the fans was really important. I think the whole album is very nostalgic of maybe my home life, but for the fans, it’s nostalgic for them.”
