Good Morning America's 50 Best Albums of 2019

\"Kids in the Dark\" ushers in Bat for Lashes\' fifth album on a wave of cinematic synths that sounds like sunset and open road. It\'s the perfect introduction to a conceptual cycle that finds London-bred singer-songwriter Natasha Khan inhaling a throwback version of her new LA home base. Khan is no stranger to inhabiting complex characters (the widow of 2016\'s *The Bride*) and motifs (the fairy-tale fantasies of her debut, *Fur and Gold*), and likewise, *Lost Girls* hinges on Nikki Pink, whom Khan has described as \"a more Technicolor version\" of herself. In addition to its clear nods to the 1987 film *The Lost Boys*, the record takes cues from the original screenplay Khan was working on upon her relocation, inspired by \'80s kid flicks and vampire films, and blows them out in neon songs, tinged with drama and romance. The saxophone-laden instrumental \"Vampires\" calls to mind retro climactic scenes where imminent peril is blocked out by hope, while the disarmingly bright \"So Good\" embodies the kind of glamorous and carefree existence we often ascribe to the past. \"Why does it hurt so good?\" she begs on the hook, projecting all of the delight and none of the suffering. Khan is a master of conjuring thematic atmosphere, but here, she inhabits her era with particular gusto. In a pop culture landscape that remains obsessed with nostalgia, on *Lost Girls*, Khan transforms the familiar tropes of the past into something that feels fresh and revelatory—we are able to see old things anew, through the eyes of a person she\'s never been in a time and place she\'s never lived.

Michael Kiwanuka never seemed the type to self-title an album. He certainly wasn’t expected to double down on such apparent self-assurance by commissioning a kingly portrait of himself as the cover art. After all, this is the singer-songwriter who was invited to join Kanye West’s *Yeezus* sessions but eventually snuck wordlessly out, suffering impostor syndrome. That sense of self-doubt shadowed him even before his 2012 debut *Home Again* collected a Mercury Prize nomination. “It’s an irrational thought, but I’ve always had it,” he tells Apple Music. “It keeps you on your toes, but it was also frustrating me. I was like, ‘I just want to be able to do this without worrying so much and just be confident in who I am as an artist.’” Notions of identity also got him thinking about how performers create personas—onstage or on social media—that obscure their true selves, inspiring him to call his third album *KIWANUKA* in an act of what he calls “anti-alter-ego.” “It’s almost a statement to myself,” he says. “I want to be able to say, ‘This is me, rain or shine.’ People might like it, people might not, it’s OK. At least people know who I am.” Kiwanuka was already known as a gifted singer and songwriter, but *KIWANUKA* reveals new standards of invention and ambition. With Danger Mouse and UK producer Inflo behind the boards—as they were on *Love & Hate* in 2016—these songs push his barrel-aged blend of soul and folk further into psychedelia, fuzz rock, and chamber pop. Here, he takes us through that journey song by song. **You Ain’t the Problem** “‘You Ain’t the Problem’ is a celebration, me loving humans. We forget how amazing we are. Social media’s part of this—all these filters hiding things that we think people won\'t like, things we think don\'t quite fit in. You start thinking this stuff about you is wrong and that you’ve got a problem being whatever you are and who you were born to be. I wanted to write a song saying, ‘You’re not the problem. You just have to continue being *you* more, go deeper within yourself.’ That’s where the magic comes—as opposed to cutting things away and trying to erode what really makes you.” **Rolling** “‘Rolling with the times, don’t be late.’ Everything’s about being an artist for me, I guess. I was trying to find my place still, but you can do things to make sure that you fit in or are keeping up with everything that’s happening—whether it’s posting stuff online or keeping up with the coolest records, knowing the right things. Or it could just be you’re in your mid-thirties, you haven’t got married or had kids yet, and people are like, ‘What?’ ‘Rolling with the times’ is like, go at your own pace. In my head, there was early Stooges records and French records like Serge Gainsbourg with the fuzz sounds. I wanted to make a song that sounded kind of crazy like that.” **I’ve Been Dazed** “Eddie Hazel from Funkadelic is my favorite guitar player. This has anthemic chords because he would always have really beautiful anthemic chords in the songs that he wrote. It just came out almost hymn-like. Lyrically, because it has this melancholy feel to it, I was singing about waking up from the nightmare of following someone else’s path or putting yourself down, low self-esteem—the things ‘You Ain\'t the Problem’ is defying. The feeling is, ‘Man, I\'ve been in this kind of nightmare, I just want to get out of it, I’m ready to go.’” **Piano Joint (This Kind of Love) \[Intro\]** “As a teenager, I’d just escape \[into some albums\], like I could teleport away from life and into that person’s world. I really wanted to have that feel with this record. It would be so vivid, there was no chance to get out of it, no gap in the songs—make it feel like one long piece. Some songs just flow into each other, but some needed interludes as passageways. This intro came when I was playing some bass and \[Inflo\] was playing some piano and I started singing my idea of a Marvin Gaye soul tune—a deep, dark, melancholic cut from one of his ’70s records. Then Danger Mouse had the idea, ‘Why don’t you pitch some of it down so it sounds different?’” **Piano Joint (This Kind of Love)** “I used to always love melancholy songs; the sadder it is, the happier I’d be afterwards. This was my moment to really exercise that part of me. Originally, it was going to be a piano ballad, and then I was like, ‘Why don’t we try playing some drums?’ Inflo’s a really good drummer, so I went in and played bass with him, and it sounded really good. I was thinking of that ’70s Gil Scott-Heron East Coast soul. Then we worked with this amazing string arranger, Rosie Danvers, who did almost all the strings on the last album. I said to her, ‘It’s my favorite song, just do something super beautiful.’ She just killed it.” **Another Human Being** “We were doing all the interludes and Danger Mouse had found loads of samples. This was a news report \[about the ’60s US civil rights sit-in protests\]. I remember thinking, ‘This sounds amazing, it goes into “Living in Denial” perfectly—it just changes that song.’ And, yeah, again, I’m ’70s-obsessed, but the ’60s and ’70s were so pivotal for young American black men and women, and it just gave a gravitas to the record. It goes to identity and something that resonates with me and my name and who I am. It gives me loads of confidence to continue to be myself.” **Living in Denial** “This is how me, Inflo, and Danger Mouse sound when we’re completely ourselves and properly linked together. No arguments, just let it happen, don’t think about it. I was trying to be a soul group—thinking of The Delfonics, The Isley Brothers, The Temptations, The Chambers Brothers. Again, the lyrics are that thing of seeking acceptance: You don’t need to seek it, just accept yourself and then whoever wants to hang with you will.” **Hero (Intro)** “‘Hero’ was the last song we completed. Once it started to sound good, I was sitting there with my acoustic, playing. We’d done the ‘Piano Joint’ intro and I was like, ‘Oh, we should pitch down this number as well and make it something that we really wouldn’t do with a straight rock ’n’ roll song.’” **Hero** “‘Hero’ was the hardest to come up with lyrics for. We had the music and melody for, like, two years. Any time I tried to touch it, I hated it—I couldn’t come up with anything. Then I was reading about Fred Hampton from the Black Panthers and I started thinking about all these people that get killed—or, like Hendrix, die an accidental death—who have so much to give or do so much in such a small time. I also love the thing where all these legends, Bowie and Bob Dylan, were creating larger-than-life personas that we were obsessed with. You didn’t really know who they were. That really made me sad, because I don’t disagree with it, but I know that’s not me. So, ‘Am I a hero?’ was also asking, ‘If I do that stuff, will I become this big artist that everyone respects?’—that ‘I’m not enough’ thing.” **Hard to Say Goodbye** “This is my love of Isaac Hayes and big orchestrations, lush strings, people like David Axelrod. Flo actually brought in this sample from a Nat King Cole song, just one chord, and we pitched it around, and then we replayed it with a 20-piece string orchestra packed into the studio. We had a double-bass cello, the whole works, and this really good piano player Kadeem \[Clarke\] who plays with Little Simz, and our friend Nathan \[Allen\] playing drums. That was pretty fun.” **Final Days** “At first, I didn’t know where this would fit on the record, like, ‘Man, this is cool, I just don’t *love*it.’ I wrote some lyrics and thought, ‘This is better, but it’s missing something.’ It always felt like space to me, so I said to Kennie \[Takahashi\], the engineer, ‘Are there any samples you can find of people in space?’ We found these astronauts about to crash, which is kind of dark, but it gave it this emotion it was missing. It gave me goosebumps. Later, we found out that it was a fake, some guys messing around in Italy in the ’60s for an art project or something.” **Interlude (Loving the People)** “‘Final Days’ was sounding amazing, but it needed to go somewhere else at the end. I had this melody on the Wurlitzer, and originally it was an instrumental bit that comes in for the end of ‘Final Days’ so that it ends somewhere completely different, like the spaceship’s landing at its destination. But I was like, ‘Let’s stretch it out. Let’s do more.’ Danger Mouse found this \[US congressman and civil rights leader\] John Lewis sample, and it sounded beautiful and moving over these chords, so we put it here.” **Solid Ground** “When everything gets stripped away—all the strings, all the sounds, all the interludes—I’m still just a dude that sits and plays a song on a guitar or piano. I felt like the album needed a glimpse of that. Rosie did a beautiful arrangement and then I finished it off—everyone was out somewhere, so I just played all the instruments, apart from drums and things like that. So, ‘Solid Ground’ is my little piece that I had from another place. Lyrically, it’s about finding the place where you feel comfortable.” **Light** “I just thought ‘Light’ was a nice dreamy piece to end the record with—a bit of light at the end of this massive journey. You end on this peaceful note, something positive. For me, light describes loads of things that are good—whether it’s obvious things like the light at the end of the tunnel or just a light feeling in my heart. The idea that the day’s coming—such a peaceful, exciting thing. We’re just always looking for it.” *All Apple Music subscribers using the latest version of Apple Music on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV can listen to thousands of Dolby Atmos Music tracks using any headphones. When listening with compatible Apple or Beats headphones, Dolby Atmos Music will play back automatically when available for a song. For other headphones, go to Settings > Music > Audio and set the Dolby Atmos switch to “Always On.” You can also hear Dolby Atmos Music using the built-in speakers on compatible iPhones, iPads, MacBook Pros, and HomePods, or by connecting your Apple TV 4K to a compatible TV or AV receiver. Android is coming soon. AirPods, AirPods Pro, AirPods Max, BeatsX, Beats Solo3, Beats Studio3, Powerbeats3, Beats Flex, Powerbeats Pro, and Beats Solo Pro Works with iPhone 7 or later with the latest version of iOS; 12.9-inch iPad Pro (3rd generation or later), 11-inch iPad Pro, iPad (6th generation or later), iPad Air (3rd generation), and iPad mini (5th generation) with the latest version of iPadOS; and MacBook (2018 model and later).*

We could keep agonizing over why TOOL took so long to release *Fear Inoculum*, or to put their catalog onto streaming services, or all the ways the world has changed since the alt/prog-metal band’s last album came out in 2006. But we just spent 13 years doing all that. Instead, put on the best headphones you can find. It’s time to explore the 87 minutes of music we waited thousands of hours to hear. Whether or not this album is the “grand finale… swan song and epilogue” that Maynard James Keenan alludes to in “Descending,” the first thing to say is that *Fear Inoculum* will not disappoint. On their longest-ever album (despite only containing seven songs, broken up by three brief ambient interludes), TOOL refines and expands on their greatest strengths to create a meditative, intensely complex album that may, in terms of sheer musical skill, be their most impressive yet. Danny Carey’s extraordinarily creative and technical approach to rhythm takes center stage, from assaultive double pedaling to atmospheric tablas and electronic tinkering, heard best on “Chocolate Chip Trip,” a five-minute, multidimensional percussion solo. Guitarist Adam Jones unleashes more jams and solos than ever, particularly on the 15-minute opus “7empest,” which begins by sounding like the most traditionally TOOL song of the lot—but it sure doesn’t end that way. (Plus, Jones apparently wrote part of it in 21/16 time.) Justin Chancellor’s bass riffs are hypnotizing and powerful, unique in their ability to be both repetitive, even monotonous, and completely engulfing. Keenan’s lyrics—layered, poetic, often elegiac—are as fun to analyze and interpret as ever. And though the album is easily their most drawn-out and ambient, it’s also immensely heavy. The balance is calculated and sublime. So, what’s *Fear Inoculum* actually about? Keenan deliberately evades explanation, allowing the listener to find their own meaning. But in the most lyrically lucid moments, you’ll find reflections on life, growing up and facing your fear (he’s stated it could mean giving in to *or* becoming immune to it). There’s no pretending that 13 years haven’t passed—on “Invincible,” he sings: “Age old battle, mine/Weapon out and belly in/Tales told, battles won… Once invincible, now the armor’s wearing thin.” Still, there’s no sign of weakness, just acceptance and the kind of wisdom that comes with age. “We’re not buying your dubious state of serenity,” he knowingly roars on “7empest.” “Acting all surprised when you’re caught in the lie/It’s not unlike you… We know your nature.”

With powerhouse pipes, razor-sharp wit, and a tireless commitment to self-love and self-care, Lizzo is the fearless pop star we needed. Born Melissa Jefferson in Detroit, the singer and classically trained flautist discovered an early gift for music (“It chose me,” she tells Apple Music) and began recording in Minneapolis shortly after high school. But her trademark self-confidence came less naturally. “I had to look deep down inside myself to a really dark place to discover it,” she says. Perhaps that’s why her third album, *Cuz I Love You*, sounds so triumphant, with explosive horns (“Cuz I Love You”), club drums (“Tempo” featuring Missy Elliott), and swaggering diva attitude (“No, I\'m not a snack at all/Look, baby, I’m the whole damn meal,” she howls on the instant hit “Juice\"). But her brand is about more than mic-drop zingers and big-budget features. On songs like “Better in Color”—a stomping, woke plea for people of all stripes to get together—she offers an important message: It’s not enough to love ourselves, we also have to love each other. Read on for Lizzo’s thoughts on each of these blockbuster songs. **“Cuz I Love You”** \"I start every project I do with a big, brassy orchestral moment. And I do mean *moment*. It’s my way of saying, ‘Stand the fuck up, y’all, Lizzo’s here!’ This is just one of those songs that gets you amped from the jump. The moment you hear it, you’re like, ‘Okay, it’s on.’ It’s a great fucking way to start an album.\" **“Like a Girl”** \"We wanted take the old cliché and flip it on its head, shaking out all the negative connotations and replacing them with something empowering. Serena Williams plays like a girl and she’s the greatest athlete on the planet, you know? And what if crying was empowering instead of something that makes you weak? When we got to the bridge, I realized there was an important piece missing: What if you identify as female but aren\'t gender-assigned that at birth? Or what if you\'re male but in touch with your feminine side? What about my gay boys? What about my drag queens? So I decided to say, ‘If you feel like a girl/Then you real like a girl,\' and that\'s my favorite lyric on the whole album.\" **“Juice”** \"If you only listen to one song from *Cuz I Love You*, let it be this. It’s a banger, obviously, but it’s also a state of mind. At the end of the day, I want my music to make people feel good, I want it to help people love themselves. This song is about looking in the mirror, loving what you see, and letting everyone know. It was the second to last song that I wrote for the album, right before ‘Soulmate,\' but to me, this is everything I’m about. I wrote it with Ricky Reed, and he is a genius.” **“Soulmate”** \"I have a relationship with loneliness that is not very healthy, so I’ve been going to therapy to work on it. And I don’t mean loneliness in the \'Oh, I don\'t got a man\' type of loneliness, I mean it more on the depressive side, like an actual manic emotion that I struggle with. One day, I was like, \'I need a song to remind me that I\'m not lonely and to describe the type of person I *want* to be.\' I also wanted a New Orleans bounce song, \'cause you know I grew up listening to DJ Jubilee and twerking in the club. The fact that l got to combine both is wild.” **“Jerome”** \"This was my first song with the X Ambassadors, and \[lead singer\] Sam Harris is something else. It was one of those days where you walk into the studio with no expectations and leave glowing because you did the damn thing. The thing that I love about this song is that it’s modern. It’s about fuccboi love. There aren’t enough songs about that. There are so many songs about fairytale love and unrequited love, but there aren’t a lot of songs about fuccboi love. About when you’re in a situationship. That story needed to be told.” **“Cry Baby”** “This is one of the most musical moments on a very musical album, and it’s got that Minneapolis sound. Plus, it’s almost a power ballad, which I love. The lyrics are a direct anecdote from my life: I was sitting in a car with a guy—in a little red Corvette from the ’80s, and no, it wasn\'t Prince—and I was crying. But it wasn’t because I was sad, it was because I loved him. It was a different field of emotion. The song starts with \'Pull this car over, boy/Don\'t pretend like you don\'t know,’ and that really happened. He pulled the car over and I sat there and cried and told him everything I felt.” **“Tempo”** “‘Tempo\' almost didn\'t make the album, because for so long, I didn’t think it fit. The album has so much guitar and big, brassy instrumentation, but ‘Tempo’ was a club record. I kept it off. When the project was finished and we had a listening session with the label, I played the album straight through. Then, at the end, I asked my team if there were any honorable mentions they thought I should play—and mind you, I had my girls there, we were drinking and dancing—and they said, ‘Tempo! Just play it. Just see how people react.’ So I did. No joke, everybody in the room looked at me like, ‘Are you crazy? If you don\'t put this song on the album, you\'re insane.’ Then we got Missy and the rest is history.” **“Exactly How I Feel”** “Way back when I first started writing the song, I had a line that goes, ‘All my feelings is Gucci.’ I just thought it was funny. Months and months later, I played it at Atlantic \[Records\], and when that part came up, I joked, ‘Thanks for the Gucci feature, guys!\' And this executive says, ‘We can get Gucci if you want.\' And I was like, ‘Well, why the fuck not?\' I love Gucci Mane. In my book, he\'s unproblematic, he does a good job, he adds swag to it. It doesn’t go much deeper than that, to be honest. The rest of the song has plenty of meaning: It’s an ode to being proud of your emotions, not feeling like you have to hide them or fake them, all that. But the Gucci feature was just fun.” **“Better in Color”** “This is the nerdiest song I have ever written, for real. But I love it so much. I wanted to talk about love, attraction, and sex *without* talking about the boxes we put those things in—who we feel like we’re allowed to be in love with, you know? It shouldn’t be about that. It shouldn’t be about gender or sexual orientation or skin color or economic background, because who the fuck cares? Spice it up, man. Love *is* better in color. I don’t want to see love in black and white.\" **“Heaven Help Me”** \"When I made the album, I thought: If Aretha made a rap album, what would that sound like? ‘Heaven Help Me’ is the most Aretha to me. That piano? She would\'ve smashed that. The song is about a person who’s confident and does a good job of self-care—a.k.a. me—but who has a moment of being pissed the fuck off and goes back to their defensive ways. It’s a journey through the full spectrum of my romantic emotions. It starts out like, \'I\'m too cute for you, boo, get the fuck away from me,’ to \'What\'s wrong with me? Why do I drive boys away?’ And then, finally, vulnerability, like, \'I\'m crying and I\'ve been thinking about you.’ I always say, if anyone wants to date me, they just gotta listen to this song to know what they’re getting into.\" **“Lingerie”** “I’ve never really written sexy songs before, so this was new for me. The lyrics literally made me blush. I had to just let go and let God. It’s about one of my fantasies, and it has three different chord changes, so let me tell you, it was not easy to sing. It was very ‘Love On Top’ by Beyoncé of me. Plus, you don’t expect the album to end on this note. It leaves you wanting more.”

There’s a reason Taylor Swift sounds so confident and cool on *Lover*, her seventh album and the most free-spirited yet. She’s in *love*—pure, steady, starry-eyed, shout-it-from-the-rooftops love. Arriving 13 years after her eponymous debut album—and following a string of songs that sometimes felt like battle scars from public breakups and celebrity feuds—this project comes off clear-eyed, thick-skinned, and grown-up. It may be a sign that the 29-year-old has entered a new phase of her life: She’s now impressively private (she and her long-term boyfriend are rarely seen together in public), politically fired up (this album finds her fighting for queer and women’s rights), and eager to see the big picture (fans have speculated that the gut-wrenching “Soon You’ll Get Better” is about her mother’s battles with cancer). As a result, she’s never sounded stronger or more in control. She calls out dark-age bigots on the Pride anthem “You Need to Calm Down,” sends up the patriarchy on “The Man,” perfects flippant indifference on “I Forgot That You Existed,” and dares to sing her own praises on “ME!,” a duet with Brendon Urie of Panic! At the Disco. Tonally, these songs couldn’t be more different than 2017’s vengeful and self-conscious *Reputation*. Most of the album is baked in the atmospheric synths and ’80s drums favored by collaborator Jack Antonoff (“The Archer,” “Lover”). And yet some of the best moments are also the most surprising. “It’s Nice to Have a Friend” is daydreamy and delicate, illuminated with laidback strumming, twinkling trumpet, and high-pitched *ooh-ooh*s. And the percussive, playful “I Think He Knows” is a rollercoaster of a song, spiking and dipping from chatty whispers to breathy shout-singing in a matter of seconds.

Beck’s 14th full-length album takes its name from a special feature found in the classic 1979 video game Asteroids. “I remember this point where you’re gonna get killed in the game,” he tells Apple Music, “and \[hitting\] this button would make you disappear and reappear somewhere safe. Just in general, I think we could all use that button.” *Hyperspace* finds the pioneering singer-songwriter joining with Pharrell Williams (who co-wrote and co-produced seven of its 11 tracks) for a set of surrealist synth-pop that feels worlds away from anywhere, let alone the directness of 2017’s *Colors*. Where that record felt like it might burst at the seams, Beck luxuriates in negative space and ambiguity here. “Stratosphere”—which features well-hidden backup vocals from Coldplay frontman Chris Martin—sounds like it was recorded at that exact altitude, its synths coming and going like condensation on glass. The equally haunting “Uneventful Days” feels like a message from the in-between. “I couldn’t quite place what it was,” he says of the song. “It’s like those moments in the aftermath of a period of time. Like a new job in a new town. You’re standing in an empty apartment, staring out the window at a palm tree.”

Where do you go after you’re nominated for a Grammy for what is only your second proper album? If you’re celebrated North Carolina MC Rapsody, you go only wherever your heart desires—for her, that was down a path forged by historic black women before her. “When I think of why I am who I am, it\'s because I\'m inspired by so many dope women,” Rapsody tells Apple Music. “Dope men, too, but mostly dope women.” The MC’s third album *Eve* (named for that biblical mother of humanity) is a series of dedications to these women—some literal, others figurative, and still others simply named for individuals who embody ideals the artist felt compelled to extol. “It was easy once I had a concept,” she says. “All these women have different energies and they represent different things to me. And the bars just connected on their own, to be honest. Once you have the idea, the basis of what you want to write, everything else is just freedom and truth.” Lead single “Ibtihaj” (as in Olympic fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad, the first Muslim American woman to wear a hijab while competing for the United States in the Olympics) features a sample of GZA’s “Liquid Swords” along with guest spots from D’Angelo and The Genius himself. Elsewhere, the voices of rising New York MC Leikeli47, Los Angeles singer K. Roosevelt, and the legendary Queen Latifah ring out to help Rapsody tell the tales of “Oprah,” “Maya,” and “Hatshepsut,” respectively. *Eve* also features fellow generational talent and early Rapsody supporter J. Cole, who, during the sessions for “Sojourner,” helped distill his and Rapsody’s shared purpose as educators. “That whole song came from a two-, three-hour conversation that myself, J. Cole, and Ninth Wonder had in the studio,” Rapsody explains. “We were talking about Ninth’s generation versus me and Cole\'s. Everything is on the internet; they don\'t have to go and talk to each other face to face. In school they don\'t learn about all our black heroes. Some of them don\'t even want to know who Malcolm X is, who Betty Shabazz is. So that turned into: What is our responsibility as artists? We teach through our music. We should have fun, we should vibe out, but we have a responsibility to be reporting and talk about what\'s going on.” What that means for *Eve* is that the MC gets to honor some of her biggest inspirations as she earns a place among them.

“It feels right that our fourth album is not 10, 11 songs,” Vampire Weekend frontman Ezra Koenig explains on his Beats 1 show *Time Crisis*, laying out the reasoning behind the 18-track breadth of his band\'s first album in six years. “It felt like it needed more room.” The double album—which Koenig considers less akin to the stylistic variety of The Beatles\' White Album and closer to the narrative and thematic cohesion of Bruce Springsteen\'s *The River*—also introduces some personnel changes. Founding member Rostam Batmanglij contributes to a couple of tracks but is no longer in the band, while Haim\'s Danielle Haim and The Internet\'s Steve Lacy are among the guests who play on multiple songs here. The result is decidedly looser and more sprawling than previous Vampire Weekend records, which Koenig feels is an apt way to return after a long hiatus. “After six years gone, it\'s a bigger statement.” Here Koenig unpacks some of *Father of the Bride*\'s key tracks. **\"Hold You Now\" (feat. Danielle Haim)** “From pretty early on, I had a feeling that\'d be a good track one. I like that it opens with just acoustic guitar and vocals, which I thought is such a weird way to open a Vampire Weekend record. I always knew that there should be three duets spread out around the album, and I always knew I wanted them to be with the same person. Thank God it ended up being with Danielle. I wouldn\'t really call them country, but clearly they\'re indebted to classic country-duet songwriting.” **\"Rich Man\"** “I actually remember when I first started writing that; it was when we were at the Grammys for \[2013\'s\] *Modern Vampires of the City*. Sometimes you work so hard to come up with ideas, and you\'re down in the mines just trying to come up with stuff. Then other times you\'re just about to leave, you listen to something, you come up with a little idea. On this long album, with songs like this and \'Big Blue,\' they\'re like these short-story songs—they\'re moments. I just thought there\'s something funny about the narrator of the song being like, \'It\'s so hard to find one rich man in town with a satisfied mind. But I am the one.\' It\'s the trippiest song on the album.” **\"Married in a Gold Rush\" (feat. Danielle Haim)** “I played this song for a couple of people, and some were like, \'Oh, that\'s your country song?\' And I swear, we pulled our hair out trying to make sure the song didn\'t sound too country. Once you get past some of the imagery—midnight train, whatever—that\'s not really what it\'s about. The story is underneath it.” **\"Sympathy”** “That\'s the most metal Vampire Weekend\'s ever gotten with the double bass drum pedal.” **\"Sunflower\" (feat. Steve Lacy)** “I\'ve been critical of certain references people throw at this record. But if people want to say this sounds a little like Phish, I\'m with that.” **\"We Belong Together\" (feat. Danielle Haim)** “That\'s kind of two different songs that came together, as is often the case of Vampire Weekend. We had this old demo that started with programmed drums and Rostam having that 12-string. I always wanted to do a song that was insanely simple, that was just listing things that go together. So I\'d sit at the piano and go, \'We go together like pots and pans, surf and sand, bottles and cans.\' Then we mashed them up. It\'s probably the most wholesome Vampire Weekend song.”

Look past its futurist textures and careful obfuscations, and there’s something deeply human about FKA twigs’ 21st-century R&B. On her second full-length, the 31-year-old British singer-songwriter connects our current climate to that of Mary Magdalene, a healer whose close personal relationship with Christ brought her scorn from those who would ultimately write her story: men. “I\'m of a generation that was brought up without options in love,” she tells Apple Music. “I was told that as a woman, I should be looked after. It\'s not whether I choose somebody, but whether somebody chooses me.” Written and produced by twigs, with major contributions from Nicolas Jaar, *MAGDALENE* is a feminist meditation on the ways in which we relate to one another and ourselves—emotionally, sexually, universally—set to sounds that are at once modern and ancient. “Now it’s like, ‘Can you stand up in my holy terrain?’” she says, referencing the titular lyric from her mid-album collaboration with Future. “‘How are we going to be equals in this? Spiritually, am I growing? Do you make me want to be a better person?’ I’m definitely still figuring it out.” Here, she walks us through the album track by track. **thousand eyes** “All the songs I write are autobiographical. Anyone that\'s been in a relationship for a long time, you\'re meshed together. But unmeshing is painful, because you have the same friends or your families know each other. No matter who you are, the idea of leaving is not only a heart trauma, but it\'s also a social trauma, because all of a sudden, you don\'t all go to that pub that you went to together. The line \[\'If I walk out the door/A thousand eyes\'\] is a reference to that. At the time, I was listening to a lot of Gregorian music. I’d started really getting into medieval chords before that, and I\'d found some musicians that play medieval music and done a couple sessions with them. Even on \[2014\'s\] *LP1*, I had ‘Closer,’ which is essentially a hymn. I spent a lot of time in choir as a child and I went to Sunday school, so it’s part of who I am at this stage.” **home with you** “I find things like that interesting in the studio, just to play around and bring together two completely different genres—like Elton John chords and a hip-hop riff. That’s what ‘home with you’ was for me: It’s a ballad and it\'s sad, but then it\'s a bop as well, even though it doesn\'t quite ever give you what you need. It’s about feeling pulled in all directions: as a daughter, or as a friend, or as a girlfriend, or as a lover. Everyone wanting a piece of you, but not expressing it properly, so you feel like you\'re not meeting the mark.” **sad day** “It’s like, ‘Will you take another chance with me? Can we escape the mundane? Can we escape the cyclical motion of life and be in love together and try something that\'s dangerous and exhilarating? Yeah, I know I’ve made you sad before, but will you give me another chance?\' I wrote this song with benny blanco and Koreless. I love to set myself challenges, and it was really exciting to me, the challenge of retaining my sound while working with a really broad group of people. I was lucky working with Benny, in the fact that he creates an environment where, as an artist, you feel really comfortable to be yourself. To me, that\'s almost the old-school definition of a producer: They don\'t have to be all up in your grill, telling you what to do. They just need to lay a really beautiful, fertile soil, so that you can grow to be the best you in the moment.” **holy terrain** “I’m saying that I want to find a man that can stand up next to me, in all of my brilliance, and not feel intimidated. To me, Future’s saying, ‘Hey, I fucked up. I filled you with poison. I’ve done things to make you jealous. Can you heal me? Can you tell me how to be a better man? I need the guidance, of a woman, to show me how to do that.’ I don\'t think that there are many rappers that can go there, and just put their cards on the table like that. I didn\'t know 100%, once I met Future, that it would be right. But we spoke on the phone and I played him the album and I told him what it was about: ‘It’s a very female-positive, femme-positive record.’ And he was just like, ‘Yeah. Say no more. I\'ve got this.’ And he did. He crushed it. To have somebody who\'s got patriarchal energy come through and say that, wanting to stand up and be there for a woman, wanting to have a woman that\'s an equal—that\'s real.” **mary magdalene** “Let’s just imagine for one second: Say Jesus and Mary Magdalene are really close, they\'re together all the time. She\'s his right-hand woman, she’s his confidante, she\'s healing people with him and a mystic in her own right. So, at that point, any man and woman that are spending that much time together, they\'re likely to be what? Lovers. Okay, cool. So, if Mary had Jesus\' children, that basically debunks the whole of history. Now, I\'m not saying that happened. What I\'m saying is that the idea of people thinking that might happen is potentially really dangerous. It’s easier to call her a whore, because as soon as you call a woman a whore, it devalues her. I see her as Jesus Christ\'s equal. She’s a male projection and, I think, the beginning of the patriarchy taking control of the narrative of women. Any woman that\'s done anything can be subject to that; I’ve been subject to that. It felt like an apt time to be talking about it.” **fallen alien** “When you\'re with someone, and they\'re sleeping, and you look at them, and you just think, \'No.\' For me, it’s that line, \[\'When the lights are on, I know you/When you fall asleep, I’ll kick you down/By the way you fell, I know you/Now you’re on your knees\'\]. You\'re just so sick of somebody\'s bullshit, you\'re just taking it all day, and then you\'re in bed next to them, and you\'re just like, ‘I can\'t take this anymore.’” **mirrored heart** “People always say, ‘Whoever you\'re with, they should be a reflection of yourself.’ So, if you\'re looking at someone and you think, ‘You\'re a shitbag,’ then you have to think about why it was that person, at that time, and what\'s connecting you both. What is the reflection? For others that have found a love that is a true reflection of themselves, they just remind me that I don\'t have that, a mirrored heart.” **daybed** “Have you ever forgotten how to spell a really simple word? To me, depression\'s a bit like that: Everything\'s quite abstract, and even slightly dizzy, but not in a happy way. It\'s like a very slow circus. Suddenly the fruit flies seem friendly, everything in the room just starts having a different meaning and you even have a different relationship with the way the sofa cushions smell. \[Masturbation\] is something to raise your endorphins, isn\'t it? It’s either that or try and go to the gym, or try and eat something good. You almost can\'t put it into words, but we\'ve all been there. I sing, \'Active are my fingers/Faux, my cunnilingus\': You\'re imagining someone going down on you, but they\'re actually not. You open your eyes, and you\'re just there, still on your sofa, still watching daytime TV.” **cellophane** “It\'s just raw, isn\'t it? It didn\'t need a thing. The vocal take that\'s on the record is the demo take. I had a Lyft arrive outside the studio and I’d just started playing the piano chords. I was like, ‘Hey, can you just give me like 20, 25 minutes?’ And I recorded it as is. I remember feeling like I wanted to cry, but I just didn\'t feel like it was that suitable to cry at a studio session. I often want everything to be really intricate and gilded, and I want to chip away at everything, and sculpt it, and mold it, and add layers. The thing I\'ve learned on *MAGDALENE* is that you don\'t need to do that all the time, and just because you can do something, it doesn\'t mean you should. That\'s been a real growing experience for me—as a musician, as a producer, as a singer, even as a dancer. Something in its most simple form is beautiful.”

Never let it be said that successful bands have less at stake once they get two decades deep into their career—or at least never say it to Arizona emo pioneers Jimmy Eat World. “The standard that we\'ve set for ourselves now gets higher and higher every album we do,” frontman Jim Adkins tells Apple Music. “You\'re not only making an album, you\'re basically adding to your catalog. So anything we do has to be as good as the best thing we\'ve done so far. Otherwise, why are we doing it?” The simple answer, as evidenced by their 10th album, *Surviving*, is that they are extremely good at it—guitar-driven anthems that feel keenly suited to this moment in Adkins\' life. “It\'s like the time capsule of everything I\'ve been thinking about for the last couple of years,” he says, “which is basically the blocks that we put in our own way that keep us from really experiencing life in as meaningful a way as it can be.” Here he talks through a handful of key tracks that best show how Jimmy Eat World have managed to challenge themselves while still feeling true to everything they\'ve done and meant for over 25 years. **Surviving** “It\'s this tune that doesn\'t have a real discernible chorus to it. It\'s a good example of us being us, but also trying to push ourselves in a way, but also trying to work within some framework of restraint. There\'s usually a basic template or a basic parameter we give ourselves. The lines that we color within are something that feels like a traditional pop song, where sections of the tune are recognizable and it has an arc to it. And then we like to see how much we can get away with while it still resembles that. \'Surviving\' steps a little bit out—it has the arc that I think is interesting to write, but it doesn\'t have any of the interior or outline parts, like a normal pop song would. It\'s more of a crescendo, and it\'s more or less one riff the whole song. How little do you need to really fully communicate what you want to do, what you want to say?” **All the Way (Stay)** “One thing that we were thinking about for that—and for everything, really—the album should have less things doing more. If you listen to a Van Halen album, there\'s not a lot of overdubs—if any. It\'s just four dudes, each of them playing their own role, with the exception of maybe backup vocals. If you put a ton of loud things happening and it\'s just loud, loud, loud, loud, loud, it loses the effectiveness of the loudness. It doesn\'t sound louder anymore. It sounds like synth. When you start taking things away, then things feel heavier. So with \'All the Way (Stay),\' there\'s sections of the song where you\'re just listening to the snare drum decaying in the room. There\'s literally nothing happening for a section of that song—you\'re listening to air. But it makes what\'s happening around it, when that comes back in, a lot more heavy. There\'s a lot of musical devices that are counterintuitive, but when you employ them, it really makes a big effect. And in general, we wanted to take things away as a default position.” **555** “One of the reasons we wanted to work with \[producer\] Justin Meldal-Johnsen is because he just brings such a wide palette of musical influences and information. Way more than what we have. I have a very surface knowledge of MIDI and synth things, so I can explain to him what I want to try to get or I can lay down something that\'s a really rough amateur version of what I want and he just knows exactly what to do. It\'s hard to pin down one exact thing, other than maybe the synth sound in \'555\' would not be nearly as cool without Justin\'s knowledge.” **Criminal Energy** “It\'s just such a heavy guitar song. I mean, that\'s a part of what we do, for sure, but it\'s so borderline metal in a stoner way. I wouldn\'t say it\'s a risk and I wouldn\'t say it\'s totally out of character, but I feel like it\'s pushing our self-perception just enough into that arena of active rock that is not where we live all the time. So I know I\'m on the right track when I feel like, \'I don\'t know if I should do this.\' There\'s definitely a parameter that you need to work within and you need to set for yourself. You can\'t push your self-perception so far that it doesn\'t resemble you anymore.”

Moved by the warm response to 2016’s *You Want It Darker*, released three weeks before his death, Leonard Cohen left his son with instructions to finish those songs they’d started together, using vocal recordings he was leaving behind. In an act of devotion—to his father, to song—Adam wrote and recorded arrangements for each, as he thought Leonard would have wanted to hear them. The result is *Thanks for the Dance*, a posthumous album of unreleased material that’s as loving and respectful as they come. “This was not meant to be about me,” Adam tells Apple Music. “I didn’t make choices that were a reflection of my taste—the exercise was to try to make choices that were a reflection of his. It’s this advantage that I have over much greater and more accomplished producers: They don’t know what he hates. I do.” Here, he tells us the story behind each track and highlights some of his favorite lines. **Happens to the Heart** “Anyone who knew Leonard Cohen at the end of his life knew that there was one song he was obsessively and compulsively writing and trying to perfect, and that was ‘Happens to the Heart.’ He was hell-bent—or heaven-bent—on completing it, and we just were unable to get a musical accompaniment that he was satisfied with. I think it\'s one in a long line of songs that have his essential thesis in life, which is the broken hallelujah: Everything cracks, and this is what happens to the heart. I had this incredible vocal that was so meaningful to him. It was a way to keep him with me, a way to sit with him—there\'s the emotional part, but more important to me than anything was just getting it right. The first task was to parse through all of the verses and assemble a vocal based on his last approved version of what the poem was going to be, and set that to chordal language that would make sense to a Leonard Cohen listener.” **Moving On** “His notion for the song was that he would repeat the same verse over and over and over again almost as a meditation. Every time we tried, it failed by his own estimation. So I had some very compelling vocals from him and the trick was to then go back to the essence, bring back the Eastern sound of the tremolo—in this case a concert mandolin player by the name of Avi Avital—and Javier Mas on his Spanish nylon string guitar, in my backyard in Los Angeles. ‘As if there ever was a you’ is the line that kills me. The whole thing feels like this nostalgic dream. When we were recording the vocal, he had just got news that Marianne \[Ihlen\] had passed away. And in recording the vocals I really did feel like he was channeling and correcting lyrics to have the song be a postscript to ‘So Long, Marianne.’ It\'s something that we had discussed while we were recording and it informed my wanting to exaggerate the Mediterranean romance of the song.” **The Night of Santiago** “‘Night of Santiago’ was always one of my favorite poems that my father had written, which is actually based on a Federico García Lorca poem that he adapted. I\'d heard it under construction for years, on the front lawn or while we were having coffee or dinner, and I\'d always begged him to attempt to write music to it. In a weakened state, he said, ‘Look, I\'ll just recite the poem to a certain tempo and you go ahead and you write the music and try to tell the story.’ And it was really, really fun to work with it. It has such voluptuous language. The song was mostly recorded in Spain, with Sílvia Pérez Cruz from Barcelona and Javier Mas and Carlos de Jacoba, to give it that flamenco twist—we very much tried to capture a kind of whimsy. When we got back to LA, Beck came over to put some Jew’s harp in the verses and laid the guitar down just to give it an extra layer of cinema.” **Thanks for the Dance** “He tried to get a version of it on *Old Ideas* and *Popular Problems*, and on *You Want It Darker*. He’d been even trying to figure out his way of doing that song for years, and I think that he would have been incredibly pleased with this particular version. It was meant to evoke things like \'Dance Me to the End of Love\' and \'Hallelujah.\' It has a certain strain of lightness and cheekiness that some of his work has: \'Stop at the surface, the surface is fine.\' To have that kind of resignation but humor really does encapsulate where his mind was at the end. Jennifer Warnes, his longtime vocal partner, came to my backyard and sang on that. When we completed it, we knew we had the record. There was something about the invocation of that union, between the feminine voice and my father’s low baritone—it just touches a nerve and makes you feel like you\'ve heard the song before. There was this sense that *You Want It Darker* had a kind of gravity and darkness, and this offering has a softer, flower-pushing-up quality and romance to it.” **It’s Torn** “‘Torn’ was started a decade ago with Sharon Robinson—with whom he had written many songs and with whom he toured—but it really took a hold in Berlin with concert pianist and composer Dustin O\'Halloran. It has chord signatures borrowed from my father’s song from decades earlier ‘Avalanche.’ Again, it\'s this incredible thesis of brokenness that he has, this consistent message, this toying with the imperfection of life: ‘It\'s torn where there\'s beauty, it\'s torn where there\'s death/It\'s torn where there\'s mercy, but torn somewhat less,’ he says. ‘It\'s torn in the highest, from kingdom to crown/The messages fly but the network is down/Bruised at the shoulder and cut at the wrist/The sea rushes home to its thimble of mist/The opposites falter, the spirals reverse/And Eve must re-enter the sleep of her birth.’ I mean, this is pseudo-biblical. I’ve never heard that from any other songwriter, not even Dylan. It\'s just so composed. It’s like King David.” **The Goal** “‘The Goal’ might be my favorite piece on the album. The zinger is at the end: ‘No one to follow and nothing to teach/Except that the goal falls short of the reach.’ That\'s an incredible line to ponder, and it very much resembles the condition that he was in at the end, where he\'d sit in his chair, look at life go by, and have and share these incredibly profound and generous thoughts. The music around his reading brings to life the humor and the emotion—the swelling and the sparseness of what I imagined to be his own emotional state. The most stirring thing that people say over and over after listening to these songs is how they feel Leonard Cohen is still among us, he\'s still alive. And this song has that quality in a powerful dose. The reading is almost thespian-like, it is so present. He was speaking from the other side for sure.” **Puppets** “Another poem that we discussed for years—or, at least, for years he heard my disappointment with the fact that it had never been turned into song. He would chuckle and say, ‘Well, write something that makes sense musically around it, and I\'d consider it.’ There is a ferocious boldness to the lyric and to the position of the narrator. And there\'s a kind of steely, church-like quality to the arrangement. The lyric: ‘German puppets burned the Jews/Jewish puppets did not choose.’ To open a song that way is frighteningly bold, so the arrangement needed to be robust. And there\'s this otherworldliness going through the entire thing. We recorded this German choir in Berlin, and then funny enough we ended up going to Montreal, to get the Jewish men\'s choir that played such an important role on *You Want It Darker*. And so there\'s literally a choir of Germans and a choir of Jews on the song blending together. The trick was to create something with as much evocation without going into sentimentality.” **The Hills** “‘Triumphant’ is a wonderful word to describe it, in the narrator’s semi-comical declaration he can\'t make the hills, one of the wonderful paradoxes of all of our existences. There’s a sort of *Secret Life of Walter Mitty* quality to this one, and at the same time it\'s the voyage—it’s what you wanted versus what you got. There\'s something stark and resigned and yet not woeful about it, which allows for this grandiose, classic feeling while at the same time being fresh and modern. Patrick Watson, who\'s one of my favorite recording artists, lent a great deal of work with horns and vocal arrangements. It\'s the only song on the record that\'s co-produced by anybody.” **Listen to the Hummingbird** “The last thing we recorded. We were struggling at the time, because we had an eight-song record and it just felt shy—we knew we needed another one. We were in Berlin and Justin Vernon from Bon Iver was in the studio next door to ours, making these incredible, really emotional, stirring sounds. And there was something about the mood that was so captivating and inspiring that it reminded me of my father’s last press conference. It was the last time he ever spoke in public, a press junket for *You Want It Darker*. Unprompted, he said, ‘Do you want to hear a new poem?’ And he recited it, into this cheap microphone in a conference room. I asked Sony for the audio, recuperated it, set it to be metronomically correct, and composed this piece of music with those atmospheric sounds from Bon Iver coming through our shared wall in Berlin. That\'s how we got it.”

For his seventh album (not including his 2009 collaboration with Scarlett Johansson), Pete Yorn fell into what may be the most fruitful partnership of his nearly 20-year career by hooking up with Day Wave’s Jackson Phillips. The 12 songs that make up *Caretakers* are merely the first of what Yorn says is a couple records’ worth of material produced by Phillips, who grew up a fan of Yorn’s earnest guitar-driven songs. “This just happens to be the first batch that kind of fits together,” Yorn tells Apple Music. “It\'s just me and Jackson playing everything, and it\'s kind of the most—what\'s the word?—homogenous record. I\'ve done records where I\'ve had five different producers and I remember being like, \'This thing\'s all over the place.\' It\'s just me and him pulling from a lot of the same instruments in the same room and it has kind of a consistency in that manner.” But don\'t just take his word for it—listen and follow along with Yorn\'s track-by-track overview. **“Calm Down”** “It\'s a mantra to me. Some people initially were like, \'Are you telling me to calm down?\' I\'m not telling anybody to calm down; I\'m talking to myself. And it\'s this reminder to just step back, not get too bogged down in regrets or worries or thoughts like that, and just take a moment. The last lyrics of the song talk about pain. But then they say I wouldn\'t change a thing.” **“I Wanna Be the One”** “A lot of those words—‘I want to be the one to watch you, I want to be the one that talks you through’—is that wanting from a father’s perspective to be able to be there and to be the one to have a close relationship with a child, and to be worthy of that. I remember before we had a kid, I was all nervous, like, \'Oh my god, am I going to be able to handle it?\' But the ironic thing was as soon as we had her, all that stuff just went *poof* like a cloud and it\'s the polar opposite. I feel less anxiety than ever for some reason, it\'s strange.” **“Can’t Stop You”** “There\'s a number of songs on the record that deal with frustrations over difficult people in your life. And this is one of them, for sure. I\'m a very loyal friend, I\'m a very loyal family member, and there are some people that you\'re just stuck with, that you can\'t cut out of your life, whether you would like to or not. And so then you figure out how to not lose your mind interacting with these people. But ultimately it\'s like you can\'t save people from themselves. They\'re going to do what they\'re going to do, and you can\'t keep banging your head against the wall trying to change that.” **“Idols (We Don’t Ever Have to Say Goodbye)”** “I always say that maybe the worst part of dying is saying goodbye, having to leave the party. And so that lyric in there—‘We don\'t ever have to say goodbye\'—that repeats over and over. For me, that\'s just this kind of fantasy that maybe we\'ll all be partying somewhere in another life. And that was an alternate title for the record, actually.” **“Do You Want to Love Again?”** “That for me feels like a power-pop song from the ’70s that like Triumph would\'ve done or something like that. It\'s a side of me that people who are into my music know that I love. It\'s my Cher, \'Do you believe in life after love?\' Are you ready to get back in a relationship? Are you going to take it for granted again and fuck it all up, or are you going to be there and really try and appreciate what you have?” **“Caretakers”** “I remember when we were recording it, Jackson had done the synths and it sounded like saxophone to me—almost like \[Bruce Springsteen’s\] \'Meeting Across the River.\' It\'s really just about connection and responsibility and sometimes parts of you being frustrated about having any responsibility.” **“Friends”** “That was written during a period when me and the person who—although I didn\'t know it at the time—would become my wife had broken up for like a year. Now knowing that it\'s a happy ending, this French singer named Judith Godrèche put it on one of her records, which was well-known in France but I\'m not sure if it was well-known anywhere else. The lyrics still resonate with me so much, and it was one of the first songs I recorded when I got together with Jackson. It\'s not my story today; it was my story when I wrote it. But it\'s still a story that means a lot to me in that it serves as a reminder that you can move on from pain.” **\"ECT\"** “I have someone very close to me with mental illness. It always feels very without a floor—as soon as something seems right, something else happens. And so, that\'s an attempt for me to kind of make sense of that. You just be there to keep helping and support and guide through and do whatever you can—without losing your own shit over it.” **“POV”** “I liked the scarcity of it—the sparse arrangement throughout the song, it\'s just bass, drums, one guitar. It\'s pretty subtle. Oftentimes your closest friends are people who basically see the world in the similar way that you do. And then there\'s other ones, maybe you don\'t agree on a lot, but something keeps you together. I guess I\'ll just accept that they see the world different than I do and that\'s cool. That\'s okay.” **“Opal”** “That was one of the first ones we did, and I remember when we finished that song I was like, all right, I think we got something interesting going on here. Maybe one of my favorite lines on the record: ‘The color of your hair, you can change it.’ You\'re walking alone, you\'re overthinking everything, but the color of your hair, you can make that change.” **“A Fire in the Sun”** “That was one of the last ones we did, and it came very quickly. We were working up some sounds in the studio and then I got inspired, like, ‘Give me the mic,’ and I sang the whole thing. I think it\'s like one vocal take, and I just loved the way that it made me feel and the production on it. I was toying with it being track one on the record, but I didn\'t have enough of a relationship with it to make that call.” **“Try”** “I remember when I first heard that, it reminded me of Echo & The Bunnymen. Lyrically it was very important to me, because after all is said and done on the record, this is just kind of, ‘Don\'t give up.\' You hit your head up against the wall, you figure out how to get through frustrations that everyone has in life, and you just keep playing, you keep going. Worse than depression or anything else I can think of is where you just don\'t care anymore. We go out on that way.”

“Laying in the grass, we were dragging on loud/Got my hand in your hand and my head in the clouds.” This is the scene, set with acoustic atmospherics and frontman Jade Lilitri’s familiar, layered, honey-sweet-but-burnt-around-the-edges vocals, that flickers to life at the start of oso oso’s new full-length, basking in the glow. The track, simply called “intro,” is just that: an intimate, humble, and hopeful prologue that prefaces a record radically committed to letting the light in—because Lilitri knows the darkness like the back of his hand. The spacious opening proposition of “intro” gives way to “the view,” an electric, invigorating indie rock banger that showcases Lilitri’s slick, effortless melodic excellence and lyrical precision (“I’ll grow, we’ll see/There’s something good in me”). The title track follows, driving home the record’s thesis on a chorus like a roman candle cracking a mid-July night sky: “These days, it feels like all I know is this phase/I hope I’m basking in the glow of something bigger I don’t know.” Lead single “dig” rounds out this first act with rainy-day riffing and hushed, staccato vocal delivery on the verse before its tense, charged chorus: “There’s this hole in my soul/So how far do you wanna go?” Lilitri asks, his voice ethereal and couched in bubblegum harmony. It’s a slow build, twining the best parts of emo around pop punk sensibilities and, eventually, wide-open alt-rock anthemics at the track’s climax before sinking back, in a slow-motion fall, to a deserted shoegaze outro. It’s an ambitious, complex scheme, and one that captures the spirit of the record: clutching tight to the unbridled glee of the short, sunny, major-key moments before they dissolve. basking in the glow is a wrestle, and it is hard work; it is the sound of refusing to capitulate to darkness, every goddamn day. It is a practice, or perhaps a battle plan (“I see my demise, I feel it coming/I got one sick plan to save me from it,” Lilitri sings, his voice and hurried guitar crackling as if they’re coming through a bedroom tape recorder.) It is filled with the delightful, subtle melodic imagination that characterizes the sound Lilitri has perfected with oso oso, but this time out, he’s put this sound to use declaring happiness (“I got a glimpse of this feeling, I’m trying to stay in that lane,” on “impossible game”) and sketching out, with keen, desperate detail, warm memories to hold onto (“‘Oh c’mon Charlie, a little louder’/I say as I hear her singing out from the shower,” on “charlie”). This “one sick plan” and its bright disposition does falter and fade. The darkness does return—it always will—but Lilitri has come to terms with it, armoring himself with the good he’s found. Even as the record ends with a relationship’s demise, Lilitri is clear-eyed, leaving us squarely in the sunlight: “And in the end I think that’s fine/Cause you and I had a very nice time.”

“I think on *California*, we really had an idea of what we wanted that record to sound like and it was going back to the foundation of what blink-182 is all about,” bassist Mark Hoppus tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “\[*NINE*\] is everything that blink-182 should be in 2019.” How one reads “2019” in this particular context is a question of sonics and songwriting just as much as social mores. The world has changed a lot in the three years since the kings of pop-punk reunited—with Alkaline Trio’s Matt Skiba in place of founding guitarist Tom DeLonge—for *California*, a wild, wheelie-popping return to form that, by definition, returned to everything that made them unlikely pop stars at the turn of the century: adolescent nursery rhymes taken to almost diabolical lengths, with lines like “There’s something about you that I can’t quite put my finger in,” as heard on the vintage 30-second outburst “Brohemian Rhapsody.” By design, *NINE* finds the trio not only dispatching with dick jokes entirely, but fully embracing modern electronics and textures—as well as beats that drummer Travis Barker had originally intended for other artists. The result resembles the pop and alt-rock of the current moment more than anything they’ve recorded until now, be it in the titanic guitar swells of “Happy Days,” the skittering rhythm of “Black Rain,” or the saturated tones of “Blame It on My Youth.” On the towering “I Really Wish I Hated You,” Hoppus even makes a subtle attempt at rapping, without any wink or trace of irony. To get to this point creatively, he says it was about letting go, “just trying to write great songs and not worrying about ‘Is this the quintessential blink guitar-heavy distorted sound?’ If you plug your guitar into a computer and it sounds great, then run with it.”

“How people may emotionally connect with music I’ve been involved in is something that part of me is completely mystified by,” Thom Yorke tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “Human beings are really different, so why would it be that what I do connects in that way? I discovered maybe around \[Radiohead\'s album\] *The Bends* that the bit I didn’t want to show, the vulnerable bit… that bit was the bit that mattered.” *ANIMA*, Yorke’s third solo album, further weaponizes that discovery. Obsessed by anxiety and dystopia, it might be the most disarmingly personal music of a career not short of anxiety and dystopia. “Dawn Chorus” feels like the centerpiece: It\'s stop-you-in-your-tracks beautiful with a claustrophobic “stream of consciousness” lyric that feels something like a slowly descending panic attack. And, as Yorke describes, it was the record\'s biggest challenge. “There’s a hit I have to get out of it,” he says. “I was trying to develop how ‘Dawn Chorus’ was going to work, and find the right combinations on the synthesizers I was using. Couldn’t find it, tried it again and again and again. But I knew when I found it I would have my way into the song. Things like that matter to me—they are sort of obsessive, but there is an emotional connection. I was deliberately trying to find something as cold as possible to go with it, like I sing essentially one note all the way through.” Yorke and longtime collaborator Nigel Godrich (“I think most artists, if they\'re honest, are never solo artists,” Yorke says) continue to transfuse raw feeling into the album’s chilling electronica. “Traffic,” with its jagged beats and “I can’t breathe” refrain, feels like a partner track to another memorable Yorke album opener, “Everything in Its Right Place.” The extraordinary “Not the News,” meanwhile, slaloms through bleeps and baleful strings to reach a thunderous final destination. It’s the work of a modern icon still engaged with his unique gift. “My cliché thing I always say is, \'You know you\'re in trouble when people stop listening to sad music,\'” Yorke says. “Because the moment people stop listening to sad music, they don\'t want to know anymore. They\'re turning themselves off.”

If there is an overarching concept behind *uknowhatimsayin¿*, Danny Brown’s fifth full-length, it’s that it simply doesn’t have one. “Half the time, when black people say, ‘You know what I\'m sayin\',’ they’re never saying nothing,” Danny Brown tells Apple Music. “This is just songs. You don\'t have to listen to it backwards. You don\'t have to mix it a certain way. You like it, or you don’t.” Over the last decade, Brown has become one of rap’s most distinct voices—known as much for his hair and high register as for his taste for Adderall and idiosyncratic production. But with *uknowhatimsayin¿*, Brown wants the focus to lie solely on the quality of his music. For help, he reached out to Q-Tip—a personal hero and longtime supporter—to executive produce. “I used to hate it when people were like, ‘I love Danny Brown, but I can\'t understand what he\'s saying half the time,’” Brown says. “Do you know what I\'m saying now? I\'m talking to you. This isn\'t the Danny that parties and jumps around. No, this the one that\'s going to give you some game and teach you and train you. I\'ve been through it so you don\'t have to. I\'m Uncle Danny now.” Here, Uncle Danny tells you the story behind every song on the album. **Change Up** “‘Change Up’ was a song that I recorded while trying to learn how to record. I had just started to build the studio in my basement. I didn\'t know how to use Pro Tools or anything. It was really me just making a song to record. But I played it for Q-Tip and he lost his mind over it. Maybe he heard the potential in it, because now it\'s one of my favorite songs on the album as well. At first, I wasn\'t thinking too crazy about it, but to him, he was like, \'No, you have to jump the album off like this.\' It\'s hard not to trust him. He’s fuckin’ Q-Tip!” **Theme Song** “I made ‘Theme Song’ when I was touring for \[2016’s\] *Atrocity Exhibition*. My homeboy Curt, he’s a barber too, and I took him on tour with me to cut my hair, but he also makes beats. He brought his machine and he was just making beats on the bus. And then one day I just heard that beat and was like, ‘What you got going on?’ In our downtime, I was just writing lyrics to it. I played that for Q-Tip and he really liked that song, but he didn\'t like the hook, he didn\'t like the performance of the vocals. He couldn\'t really explain to me what he wanted. In the three years that we\'ve been working on this album, I think I recorded it over 300 times. I had A$AP Ferg on it from a time he was hanging out at my house when he was on tour. We did a song called \'Deadbeat\' but it wasn\'t too good. I just kept his ad libs and wrote a few lyrics, and then wrote a whole new song, actually.” **Dirty Laundry** “The original song was part of a Samiyam beat. He lives in LA, but every time he visits back home in Michigan he always stops over at my house and hangs out. And he was going through beats and he played me three seconds of that beat, and I guess it was the look on my face. He was like, \'You like that?\' and I was like, \'Yeah!\' I had to reform the way the song was written because the beats were so different from each other. Q-Tip guided me through the entire song: \'Say this line like this…\' or \'Pause right there...\' He pretty much just coached me through the whole thing. Couldn\'t ask for anybody better.” **3 Tearz (feat. Run the Jewels)** “I’m a huge fan of Peggy. We got each other\'s number and then we talked on the phone. I was like, \'Man, you should just come out to Detroit for like a week and let’s hang out and see what we do.\' He left a bunch of beats at my studio, and that was just one. I put a verse on, never even finished it. I was hanging out with EL-P and I was playing him stuff. I played that for him and he lost his mind. El got Mike on it and they laced it. Then Q-Tip heard it and he\'s like, \'Aww, man!\' He kind of resequenced the beat and added the organs. That was tight to see Tip back there jamming out to organs.” **Belly of the Beast (feat. Obongjayar)** “I probably had that beat since \[2011’s\] *XXX*. That actual rap I wrote for \[2013’s\] *Old*, but it was to a different beat. Maybe it was just one of those dry times. I set it to that beat kind of just playing around. Then Steven \[Umoh\] heard that—it was totally unfinished, but he was like, ‘Yo, just give it to me.’ He took it and then he went back to London and he got Obongjayar down there on it. The rest was history.” **Savage Nomad** “Actually, Q-Tip wanted the name of the album to be *Savage Nomad*. Sometimes you just make songs to try to keep your pen sharp, you know? I think I was just rapping for 50 bars straight on that beat, didn\'t have any direction. But Q-Tip resequenced it. I think Tip likes that type of stuff, when you\'re just barring out.” **Best Life** “That was when me and Q-Tip found our flip. We were making songs together, but nothing really stood out yet. I recorded the first verse but I didn\'t have anything else for it, and I sent Tip a video of me playing it and he called me back immediately like, \'What the fuck? You have to come out here this weekend.\' Once we got together, I would say he kind of helped me with writing a little bit, too. I ended up recording another version with him, but then he wanted to use the original version that I did. He said it sounded rawer to him.” **uknowhatimsayin¿ (feat. Obongjayar)** “A lot of time you put so much effort when you try too hard to say cool shit and to be extra lyrical. But that song just made itself one day. I really can\'t take no credit because I feel like it came from a higher power. Literally, I put the beat on and then next thing I know I probably had that song done at five minutes. I loved it so much I had to fight for it. I can\'t just be battle-rapping the entire album. You have to give the listeners a break, man.” **Negro Spiritual (feat. JPEGMAFIA)** “That was when Peggy was at my house in Detroit, that was one of the songs we had recorded together. I played it for Flying Lotus. He’s like, \'Man, you got to use this,\' and I was like, \'Hey, if you can get Q-Tip to like it, then I guess.\' At the end of the day, it\'s really not on me to say what I\'m going to use, what I\'m not going to use. I didn\'t even know it was going to be on the album. When we started mixing the album, and I looked, he had like a mood board with all the songs, and \'Negro Spiritual\' was up there. I was like, \'Are we using that?\'” **Shine (feat. Blood Orange)** “The most down-to-earth one. I made it and I didn\'t have the Blood Orange hook, though. Shout out to Steven again. He went and worked his magic. Again, I was like, \'Hey, you\'re going to have to convince Q-Tip about this song.\' Because before Blood Orange was on it, I don\'t think he was messing with it too much. But then once Blood Orange got on it, he was like, \'All right, I see the vision.\'” **Combat** “Literally my favorite song on the album, almost like an extra lap around a track kind of thing. Q-Tip told me this story of when he was back in the late ’80s: They\'d play this Stetsasonic song in the Latin Quarter and people would just go crazy and get to fighting. He said one time somebody starts cutting this guy, cutting his goose coat with a razor, and \[Tip\] was like, \'You could just see the feathers flying all over the air, people still dancing.\' So we always had this thing like, we have to make some shit that\'s going to make some goose feathers go up in the air. That was the one right there. That was our whole goal for that, and once we made it, we really danced around to that song. We just hyped up to that song for like three days. You couldn\'t stop playing it.”

“Honesty, heartbreak, love, lust, elation: Those concepts are in a lot of music that I love, but it\'s just never been something I\'ve attempted on my own records,” DJ-turned-superproducer Mark Ronson tells Apple Music about the genesis of his fifth album. “When I dip into other people\'s worlds—whether it\'s Queens of the Stone Age or Gaga, whoever—that\'s when I get to work on deep shit, but my own records should just be either record collector-y or for the dance floor.” But on the heels of a breakup, Ronson rallied a typically star-studded cast of collaborators, including Miley Cyrus, Lykke Li, and Alicia Keys, for sessions in New York and Los Angeles that plumbed personal topics previous albums would have danced right past. “It was the first time I couldn\'t really hide behind a concept,” he says. “It was like, \'No, no, you have to put yourself into the music this time.\'” Here Ronson puts himself into telling the stories behind each track on *Late Night Feelings*. **“Late Night Prelude”** “Just for my own sanity, when I start off a record, it has to be a little bit of a statement—something that\'s a little grand and foreshadows the rest of the record. David Campbell, the string arranger, came up with this beautiful, slightly Barry White Love Unlimited Orchestra-inspired arrangement—a little slowed down and psychedelic. Then that kicks off right into...” **“Late Night Feelings” (feat. Lykke Li)** “This was the first song that we came up with that really felt like it was pointing the way for the record. I started working with this writer named Ilsey Juber, who I met through Diplo. She came up with the first verse, this melodic idea. Then, when we were thinking who should sing this, she was like, \'Well, Lykke would be perfect.\' She was just wrapping up Lykke\'s album *So Sad So Sexy*. Actually, Lykke came up with that lyric; I loved it for the name of the album because, instead of calling it *Club Heartbreak* or some of the other things we were throwing around, late-night feelings can be anything really that keeps you up at night. It could be heartbreak, it could be lust, it could be love, it could be Brexit, it could be whatever.” **“Find U Again” (feat. Camila Cabello)** “Two years ago, when I was working with Kevin Parker and we were doing some DJ dates, we were messing around with some ideas, and he had this melodic idea and these chords. When we really didn\'t get to finish our stuff, because he was going back to Perth and starting the Tame Impala record, I asked him, \'Can I finish that song and use it for my record?\' It\'s such a great, strong idea that I\'m not gonna waste it until I really have the perfect person whose voice is just gonna cut through, and it\'s gonna be the right person to write the lyrics—Camila Cabello. She\'s such a huge pop star, I sometimes just think like, \'Oh, those people aren\'t gonna want to fuck with me.\' Then I sent her the track and she loved it. She came in and she wrote it. I was just really in awe of how serious she takes the stuff, each take. A lot of pop music, people sing the chorus once and they just fly it over three times.” **“Pieces of Us”** “King Princess, she\'s on \[Ronson\'s label Zelig\] and she pretty much does everything. I jump in and give my two cents every now and then, but she\'s super self-contained. She has such a special thing that she does: music that\'s slightly moody, dreamy, ethereal, not always super aggressive with the drums and the tempo. I wanted to preserve that; it\'s probably the longest I\'ve ever waited to bring in the drum and bass arrangement on a song. She kept bringing me songs \'cause she\'s very smart and prolific—she can write a good song in like seven minutes. I\'d have to keep being like an annoying dad: \'It\'s not good enough, go back, bring me something else.\' Everything on this record needed to tug at the heartstrings just a little bit, you know?” **“Knock Knock Knock”/“Don\'t Leave Me Lonely”/“When U Went Away”** “These are all YEBBA tunes. In the next two years when everyone discovers her stuff, it\'s gonna be insane. I loved the idea of giving YEBBA her own suite on the album: \'Don\'t Leave Me Lonely,\' which is maybe the emotional core of the record, sandwiched between these two interludes. And it sort of tells a story: \'Knock Knock Knock\' is the hookup song, a little flirty. Then \'Don\'t Leave Me Lonely\' is this \'Don\'t leave me lonely tonight/\'Cause I can\'t forget you\'—it\'s almost like a Whitney/Tina Turner vibe. And then the third part, \'When You Went Away,\' is kinda despondent-but-I\'m-gonna-be-all-right. It\'s the entire relationship process: the hookup, the loneliness, and the healing in this three-song run.” **“Truth”** “Dodgr\'s part was this really great rap, but it was unconventional where it fell on the beat. Sometimes my super pop brain was like, \'Well, I don\'t know. Do we need more stuff? What\'s the verse?\' Diana Gordon just came in and she was like, \'You guys are crazy. This sounds like a fucking movement. Don\'t worry about what\'s what, it just feels good.\' She came up with the melody for part of the chorus, which was great. And then Alicia Keys helped us finish it.” **“Nothing Breaks Like a Heart” (feat. Miley Cyrus)** “Miley was somebody I\'ve wanted to work with for ages. And for maybe four years, I\'d been sending ideas. Occasionally I would hear back, occasionally not. Ilsey had this little seed of this idea. I was like, \'The perfect person for this would really be Miley. I mean, she kind of writes me back 50 percent of the time, let\'s just try one Hail Mary.\' Miley came in and wrote the rest of the song.” **“True Blue” (feat. Angel Olsen)** “Angel Olsen: Her last album, I probably played it to death. I actually heard it through the wall at this Pilates class that I went to, and I had to go next door and ask this dance instructor what that song was. Angel sent me this little voicemail, this melody. It was incredible. She was singing at an organ, I think in her house, and it sounded like it could\'ve been a little aria or some kind of mermaid in the \'30s. I just remember thinking, \'Goddamn, if she lets me put a drum beat behind this, this is gonna be like ABBA on quaaludes or something.\' So she came in the studio and the first day I think she was probably looking at me like, \'Who is this guy, this pop dude, some pretender?\' It kinda is a little bit like ABBA produced by Nick Lowe on quaaludes.” **“Why Hide”** “This was the last thing that we got on the record. Diana Gordon has been part of this whole creative process and is this kind of lovely person. Her voice has just got this wonderful, ethereal, bewitching thing to it—so broken and powerful at the same time. It\'s sort of Aaliyah, Massive Attack, some kind of thing in between those two, sort of downtempo.” **“2 AM”** “This is sort of the counterpoint to \'Late Night Feelings,\' another song with Lykke that we wrote when we were in \[Rick Rubin\'s Los Angeles studio\] Shangri-La. \'I\'m not your lover but we\'re making love/Why are you only calling me at 2 a.m.?\' I don\'t usually put ballads on my records—I\'m a DJ, who wants to hear a fucking ballad? But I wanna hear ballads on records. I never wanna hear if it\'s oppressively fun from start to end. It was good and felt like it belonged.” **“Spinning”** “There\'s certainly a lot of uptempo songs and stuff you can dance to, but heartbreak is really the prevailing theme, and I just thought it would be nice to have something that felt a tiny bit like the light at the end of the tunnel. Lykke sings on it—the end—and she brings back the refrain from the opening song. YEBBA heard it and she was kinda moved, and she was like, \'You gotta let me sing something on this,\' so she does these beautiful choir-type harmonies like she did for Chance the Rapper. It\'s really nice that this last record goes out with Ilsey, Lykke, and YEBBA on it \'cause they\'re all such a big part of the record.”

Little Brother's first album in nine years, saw Phonte and Rapper Big Pooh reunite after a surprise reunion show in late 2018. Boasting production from frequent Little Brother collaborators such as Nottz, Khrysis, and Focus... as well as features from Carlitta Durand, Darien Brockington, and new comer Blakk Soul. Executive produced by Little Brother and released through their respective labels in conjunction with Empire, "May The Lord Watch" became Little Brother's first album to reach a number one by debuting at number one on Apple Music.

A successful child actor turned indie-rock sweetheart with Rilo Kiley, a solo artist beloved by the famed and famous, Jenny Lewis would appear to have led a gilded life. But her truth—and there have been intimations both in song lyrics and occasionally in interviews—is of a far darker inheritance. “I come from working-class showbiz people who ended up in jail, on drugs, both, or worse,” Lewis tells Apple Music. “I grew up in a pretty crazy, unhealthy environment, but I somehow managed to survive.” The death of her mother in 2017 (with whom she had reconnected after a 20-year estrangement) and the end of her 12-year relationship with fellow singer-songwriter Johnathan Rice set the stage for Lewis’ fourth solo album, where she finally reconciles her public and private self. A bountiful pop record about sex, drugs, death, and regret, with references to everyone from Elliott Smith to Meryl Streep, *On the Line* is the Lewis aesthetic writ large: an autobiographical picaresque burnished by her dark sense of humor. Here, Lewis takes us through the album track by track. **“Heads Gonna Roll”** “I’m a big boxing fan, and I basically wanted to write a boxing ballad. There’s a line about ‘the nuns of Harlem\'—that’s for real. I met a priest backstage at a Dead & Company show in a cloud of pot smoke. He was a fan of my music, and we struck up a conversation and a correspondence. I’d just moved to New York at the time and was looking to do some service work. And so this priest hooked me up with the nuns in Harlem. I would go up there and get really stoned and hang out with theses nuns, who were the purest, most lovely people, and help them put together meal packages. The nuns of Harlem really helped me out.” **“Wasted Youth”** “For me, the thing that really brings this song, and the whole record, together is the people playing on it. \[Drummer\] Jim Keltner especially. He’s played on so many incredible records, he’s the heartbeat of rock and roll and you don’t even realize it. Jim and Don Was were there for so much of this record, and they were the ones that brought Ringo Starr into the sessions—playing with him was just surreal. Benmont Tench is someone I’d worked with before—he’s just so good at referencing things from the past but playing something that sounds modern and new at the same time. He created these sounds that were so melodic and weird, using the Hammond organ and a bunch of pedals. We call that ‘the fog’—Benmont adds the fog.” **“Red Bull & Hennessy”** “I was writing this song, almost predicting the breakup with my longtime partner, while he was in the room. I originally wanted to call it ‘Spark,’ ’cause when that spark goes out in a relationship it’s really hard to get it back.” **“Hollywood Lawn”** “I had this for years and recorded three or four different versions; I did a version with three female vocalists a cappella. Then I went to Jamaica with Savannah and Jimmy Buffett—I actually wrote some songs with Jimmy for the *Escape to Margaritaville* musical that didn’t get used. We didn’t use that version, but I really arranged the s\*\*\* out of it there, and some of the lyrics are about that experience.” **“Do Si Do”** “Wrote this for a friend who went off his psych meds abruptly, which is so dangerous—you have to taper off. I asked Beck to produce it for a reason: He gets in there and wants to add and change chords. And whatever he suggests is always right, of course. That’s a good thing to remember in life: Beck is always right.” “Dogwood” “This is my favorite song on the record. I wrote it on the piano even though I don’t think I’m a very good piano player. I probably should learn more, but I’m just using the instrument as a way to get the song out. This was a live vocal, too. When I’m playing and singing at the same time, I’m approaching the material more as a songwriter rather than a singer, and that changes the whole dynamic in a good way.” **“Party Clown”** “I’d have to describe this as a Faustian love song set at South by Southwest. There’s a line in there where I say, ‘Can you be my puzzle piece, baby?/When I cry like Meryl Streep?’ It’s funny, because Meryl actually did a song of mine, ‘Cold One,’ in *Ricki and the Flash*.” **“Little White Dove”** “Toward the end of the record, I would write songs at home and then visit my mom in the hospital when she was sick. I started this on bass, had the chord structure down, and wrote it at the pace it took to walk from the hospital elevator to the end of the hall. I was able to sing my mom the chorus before she passed.” **“Taffy”** “That one started out as a poem I’d written on an airplane, then it turned into a song. It’s a very specific account of a weekend spent in Wisconsin, and there are some deep Wisconsin references in there. I’m not interested in platitudes, either as a writer or especially as a listener. I want to hear details. That’s why I like hip-hop so much. All those details, names that I haven’t heard, words that have meanings that I don’t understand and have to look up later. I’m interested in those kinds of specifics. That’s also what I love about Bob Dylan songs, too—they’re very, very specific. You can paint an incredibly vivid picture or set a scene or really project a feeling that way.” **“On the Line”** “This is an important song for me. If you read the credits on this record, it says, ‘All songs by Jenny Lewis.’ Being in a band like Rilo Kiley was all about surrendering yourself to the group. And then working with Johnathan for so long, I might have lost a little bit of myself in being a collaborator. It’s nice to know I can create something that’s totally my own. I feel like this got me back to that place.” **“Rabbit Hole”** “The record was supposed to end with ‘On the Line’—the dial tone that closes the song was supposed to be the last thing you hear. But I needed to write ‘Rabbit Hole,’ almost as a mantra for myself: ‘I’m not gonna go/Down the rabbit hole with you.’ I figured the song would be for my next project, but I played it for Beck and he insisted that we put it on this record. It almost feels like a perfect postscript to this whole period of my life.”

Close It Quietly is a continual reframing of the known. It’s like giving yourself a haircut or rearranging your room. You know your hair. You know your room. Here’s the same hair, the same room, seen again as something new. Close It Quietly takes the trademark Frankie Cosmos micro-universe and upends it, spilling outwards into a swirl of referentiality that’s a marked departure from earlier releases, imagining and reimagining motifs and sounds throughout the album. FC’s fourth studio release is a manifestation of the band’s collaborative spirit: Greta Kline and longtime bandmates Lauren Martin (synth), Luke Pyenson (drums), and Alex Bailey (bass) luxuriated in studio time with Gabe Wax, who engineered and co-produced the record with the band. Recording close to home— at Brooklyn’s Figure 8 Studios— grounded the band, and their process was enriched by working closely with Wax, whose intuition and attention to detail made the familiar unfamiliar and allowed the band to reshape their own contexts. On opener “Moonsea,” an unaccompanied Greta begins, “The world is crumbling and I don’t have much to say.” Take that as a wink and a metonym for the whole album, as her signature vocals are joined by Alex’s ascending bassline and Lauren’s eddying synths, invoking a loungey take on Broadcast or Stereolab’s space-disco experimental pop. There’s much more than “not much” to say here, and it's augmented and expanded by experimentation with synth patches, textures, and other recording nuances courtesy of Wax. As the lineup has solidified into the most permanent expression of full-band Frankie Cosmos, the bandmates have felt more comfortable deviating from their default instruments and contributing bigger-picture ideas to continue pushing the sound forward. The synergy of its creation is clear upon listening: the multiple hands dipping and re-dipping into each song form a multifaceted whole. The band’s closeness and aesthetic consistency freed its members to take more musically-formal risks, notes Luke: "Everything will sound like Frankie Cosmos because Greta has such a distinct voice (literally and figuratively). We have so much latitude to experiment with the instrumental music, and this time around we really took advantage of that." The album forms its own vortex of reinvention that’s embodied through both the tracks themselves and the recording and arranging processes. “A Joke” curls in on itself, in word and in deed, a series of undercuts defining negative space: “It’s just a joke I wasn’t trying to tell;” “It wasn’t really a game;” “I do not know what I am for/I wasn’t really keeping score.” Inverting technology’s human mimicry, Luke impersonates a drum machine until the song’s end. “A Joke’s” tricks scratch at something bigger, a small song embodying the laughability of attempting to neatly organize or adhere to any particular role. “Rings of a Tree” frees itself from its original context: released earlier this year on Greta’s solo piano album Haunted Items, she didn’t initially anticipate a major deviation; then, Luke says, “Lauren and I had the same arrangement idea without talking about it. Like, ‘let’s make this song funky. Let’s channel Orange Juice.’ We texted Greta and Alex before practice and Alex came in with a new guitar part that perfectly captured what Lauren and I heard in our heads.” “I’m just fucking glad for my bubble/despite how often it is penetrated by evil” Greta sings on “Last Season’s Textures,” taking to task the accusation that young people cloister themselves in complacency: she’s quick to point to, thank, and feel suspicious of that sphere all at once. The song explores the feeling of safety in her realm; reasonable despair re: reality (“the news is excruciating”); and a quick admission that darkness isn’t something a liberal-minded social network can block out. Kline notes how the song is “partly about misogyny and internalized misogyny--moments where I've felt betrayed by what is meant to be a safe space.” Without losing any intimacy of prior albums, Close it Quietly is different, is outer. The album functions as a benign doppelganger, a shadow self of past releases; where other Frankie Cosmos records shine brightest looking inward, Close it Quietly refracts the self into the world, and vice versa, miraculously echoing Thoreau’s assertion that “when I reflect, I find that there is other than me.” Reflection--and refraction--isn’t tidy. “Flowers don’t grow/in an organized way/why should I?” Greta sings on “A Joke.” Growth isn’t linear. Change happens in circles. While recording the album, Alex says, “I closed my eyes a lot.” Stand in the sun, listen to Close it Quietly, and do the same. -Molly Schaeffer

“I want you to make sure you\'re listening to every single thing,” Lil Nas X tells Apple Music\'s Zane Lowe of his debut EP *7*. “You can\'t just listen and be on your phone the whole time, because you might miss something.” Of course, everyone being on their phones the whole time is how he got here: “Old Town Road” exploded from homemade online curio to part of our day-to-day lives so quickly, it would be easy enough to dismiss the culture-engulfing success as a novelty or one-off fluke. But the boundary-bursting Atlanta rapper has bad news about that narrative. Of *7*\'s eight tracks, two of them are indeed “Old Town Road”—the omnipresent remix with Billy Ray Cyrus and the original recipe that famously came together for $30. And one more is called “Rodeo,” complete with exaggerated drawl and a Cardi B verse for good measure. But the other five flee the Old West as fast as they can. Single “Panini” borrows the melody of Nirvana\'s “In Bloom” for its chorus (Kurt Cobain gets a songwriting credit, but Lil Nas X tells Lowe that he hadn\'t heard Nirvana before writing the tune); “Bring U Down” and “F9mily (You & Me)” are rock songs, full stop, thanks in no small part to some help from songwriting powerhouse Ryan Tedder and blink-182\'s Travis Barker. But none of this should be a surprise, given Lil Nas X\'s ambivalence to the industry hand-wringing over the genre classification of his signature hit. And as far as classifying these new songs—a teaser for a forthcoming full-length LP—he tells Lowe he thinks there\'s a common thread. “It\'s all music that you want to bang your head to, I guess.”

If *No Geography* is The Chemical Brothers\' most daring album in 20 years—and it is—that’s partly due to Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons tapping back into the mid-’90s, a time when they were helping to radically redefine the possibilities for UK dance music. To sow that spirit of experimentalism into their ninth album, the pair exhumed the old samplers they used to make their first two albums. “I set up a corner of my studio that was ‘The 1997 Corner,’” Tom tells Apple Music. “It was very rudimentary, the sort of thing that I’d have set up in my bedroom a long time ago. There’s a particular sound in these old samplers, and their limitations spur you being more creative in how you use samples and throw things together.” Another inspiring throwback was to play unfinished music in their live sets, allowing the songs to evolve and change on stage, as they had done while making 1995’s *Exit Planet Dust* and *Dig Your Own Hole* in 1997. The result is uplifting, aggressive, and contemplative, meshing breakbeats, samples, and multiple shades of dance music with a keen understanding of psychedelia and melody. Here, Tom takes us through the album track by track. **“Eve of Destruction”** “I saw \[Norwegian alt-pop singer-songwriter\] Aurora on TV, playing at Glastonbury, and I was blown away by the power of her voice and the raw feel she had. She came to the studio and we had such an inspiring time. She was so open to ideas and so full of ideas. She came up with Eve of Destruction as a character, this goddess of destruction. It starts with a discordant voice, but as the track grows, it turns into celebration. The response to this foreboding, forbidding nature of the lyric is to cut loose, to come together, go out and find a friend and be with other like-minded people.” **“Bango”** “Aurora’s response to playing her bits of music was so unexpected, brilliant, and inspiring. \[For ‘Bango’\] I’d play her something and she’d come back and with angular words and ideas about unbalanced relationship dynamics and gods bringing thunder upon you. That\'s the excitement of collaborating with someone—arriving at something that neither of you could have thought of on your own.” **“No Geography”** “The vocal sample is from a poem by Michael Brownstein, a ’70s New York poet. They did this series called the Dial-A-Poem Poets where you could phone up and have poets read to you. That bit seems to be dealing with the idea that the physical geography between people is not a barrier to their connection. But, yeah, on a bigger scale it’s saying something about people being connected and how we all share something together. It’s recognizing that we are codependent on each other, I suppose.” **“Got to Keep On”** “You’ve got the sparkly drums and the ‘Got to keep on making me high’ sample \[from Peter Brown’s ‘Dance with Me’\] and then it has this strange, off-kilter moment in the middle, which was a late night in the studio making everything as deranged as it can be—everything feeding back and all the machines squealing. It’s too much, basically. And when it’s too much, it’s just enough. And then it kind of resolves out and the bells come in. We love to have these really intense kind of psychedelic moments in our music and then it resolves into a joy—you’ve come through it, almost. It’s something that feels very natural to us.” **“Gravity Drops”** “This is the first breathing moment of the record, really. It’s got heavy beats but the music is moving around, and then you’ve got very full-on *d-d-d-drong* bits. It all comes from setting up the studio to play it live—we set up lots of instruments and processors so we can play it as a kind of jam and then see where we get to. This is definitely made of trying to have those sections where it just freaks us out. And then we go, ‘Yes, it’s freaked us out.’” **“The Universe Sent Me”** “Aurora really made this by coming up with these amazing images. Sonics-wise, there are a lot of ideas and a lot of movement. There are moments where it almost feels that whole thing has gone too far, the way it builds and then you’re back down. It’s a rolling psychedelic journey, for want of a better word.” **“We’ve Got to Try”** “This reminds me of records that we would play at \[legendary London club night\] The Social when we first started. We’d play quite a lot of soul next to mad acid records. When we were making this track, it really reminded me of that—this idea that we were trying to reach for but never really realized in our own music. If this song had arrived in our record bags, we’d have gone, ‘Wow! This is the sound of what we want to play.’” “Free Yourself” “This samples another Dial-A-Poem poet, Diane di Prima. We loved hearing that vocal in a nightclub. It was exciting to build a new context for that song, to have a new meaning. We played it live a lot in 2018, and that really fed into how the final thing turned out. It’s also got that ‘Waaaaaaaaaaaaaah’ kind of noise. We just like instant delirium noises.” **“MAH”** “Once, we would probably have felt this was too big a sample to use \[the line \'I’m mad as hell and I ain’t going to take it no more\' from El Coco’s ‘I’m Mad as Hell’\]. But the excitement of playing it live and the release of the music after the vocal was an amazing moment. Even though we\'re not the kind of artists who will be very explicit in what they\'re feeling, the record was made in a time when, every day, you had constant national discussion and arguments going on. Even though we’re speaking through a sample, another sentiment from another time, when we made the song and put this whole feeling together, it was like, ‘Yeah, that somehow relates to how I\'m feeling today.’” **“Catch Me I’m Falling”** “One of the sampled vocals is by Stephanie Dosen–we worked with her on *Further* and the score for *Hanna*–from a Snowbird track, which is her and Simon Raymonde, who used to be in the Cocteau Twins. The other is from \[Emmanuel Laskey’s\] ‘A Letter from Vietnam,’ this very emotive song from 1968. Stephanie’s singing in a different way—in a different room, in a different time—but the music we\'ve written somehow brings these two disparate things together and makes new sense out of them. But it only makes sense if the thing at the end of it is something you want to listen to, something that moves you.”

What happens when the reigning queen of bubblegum pop goes through a breakup? Exactly what you’d think: She turns around and creates her most romantic, wholehearted, blissed-out work yet. Written with various pop producers in LA (Captain Cuts), New York (Jack Antonoff), and Sweden, as well as on a particularly formative soul-searching trip to the Italian coast, Jepsen’s fourth album *Dedicated* is poptimism at its finest: joyous and glitzy, rhythmic and euphoric, with an extra layer of kitsch. It’s never sad—that just isn’t Jepsen—but the “Call Me Maybe” star *does* get more in her feelings; songs like “No Drug Like Me” and “Right Words Wrong Time” aren\'t about fleeing pain so much as running to it. As Jepsen puts it on the synth ballad “Too Much,” she’d do anything to get the rush of being in love, even if it means risking heartache again and again. “Party for One,” the album’s standout single, is an infectious, shriek-worthy celebration of being alone that also acknowledges just how difficult that can be: “Tried to let it go and say I’m over you/I’m not over you/But I’m trying.”

The first song on *One of the Best Yet*—Gang Starr’s seventh studio album and the group’s first since 2003, and since Guru’s passing in 2010—features a DJ addressing a crowd while cycling through snippets of Gang Starr hits. Of these there are many, and the highlight reel makes a case for the album title as a declaration of the group’s well-earned status in hip-hop. “You know what fuckin’ time it is,” the DJ exclaims at the end of the track. And in case you still didn\'t, *One of the Best Yet* is here to hammer the point home. Guru’s voice—one of the most distinct in hip-hop—is particularly unmistakable coupled with DJ Premier’s mid-1990’s era-defining sample chops and scratching. Whether Guru left room for guests or Premier made some, an extended list of collaborators like Q-Tip, Jeru the Damaja, Big Shug, Freddie Foxxx, and M.O.P. are present, reinforcing the group’s place in the culture. Even MCs a few generations removed like J. Cole (“Family and Loyalty”) and Nitty Scott (“Get Together”) pay respects, relishing the opportunity to kick verses with the man whose name stood for Gifted Unlimited Rhymes Universal. To be clear, the Gang Starr legacy was cemented long before *One of the Best Yet*, but Premier has made it one of his life’s missions to keep the group’s name alive. And if that isn’t reason enough for you, Guru himself offers a posthumous cosign on “Lights Out,” rapping, “I told y’all, this is the one I owe y’all.”

AVAILABLE ON VINYL AT EMOTIONAL RESPONSE - emotional-response-recs.bandcamp.com/album/grass-stains-and-novocaine Seablite spread their infectious pop-chops over 11 surefire winners, with a confident mix of shimmering and weightless female vocal melodies and blissed out guitar pop, providing a mix of UK ‘80’s DIY-indiepop coupled with an updated take on many of the greats of the shoegaze era, such as Lush, Pale Saints, and MBV.

Part of the fun of listening to Lana Del Rey’s ethereal lullabies is the sly sense of humor that brings them back down to earth. Tucked inside her dreamscapes about Hollywood and the Hamptons are reminders—and celebrations—of just how empty these places can be. Here, on her sixth album, she fixes her gaze on another place primed for exploration: the art world. Winking and vivid, *Norman F\*\*\*\*\*g Rockwell!* is a conceptual riff on the rules that govern integrity and authenticity from an artist who has made a career out of breaking them. In a 2018 interview with Apple Music\'s Zane Lowe, Del Rey said working with songwriter Jack Antonoff (who produced the album along with Rick Nowels and Andrew Watt) put her in a lighter mood: “He was so *funny*,” she said. Their partnership—as seen on the title track, a study of inflated egos—allowed her to take her subjects less seriously. \"It\'s about this guy who is such a genius artist, but he thinks he’s the shit and he knows it,” she said. \"So often I end up with these creative types. They just go on and on about themselves and I\'m like, \'Yeah, yeah.\' But there’s merit to it also—they are so good.” This paradox becomes a theme on *Rockwell*, a canvas upon which she paints with sincerity and satire and challenges you to spot the difference. (On “The Next Best American Record,” she sings, “We were so obsessed with writing the next best American record/’Cause we were just that good/It was just that good.”) Whether she’s wistfully nostalgic or jaded and detached is up for interpretation—really, everything is. The album’s finale, “hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have - but I have it,” is packaged like a confessional—first-person, reflective, sung over simple piano chords—but it’s also flamboyantly cinematic, interweaving references to Sylvia Plath and Slim Aarons with anecdotes from Del Rey\'s own life to make us question, again, what\'s real. When she repeats the phrase “a woman like me,” it feels like a taunt; she’s spent the last decade mixing personas—outcast and pop idol, debutante and witch, pinup girl and poet, sinner and saint—ostensibly in an effort to render them all moot. Here, she suggests something even bolder: that the only thing more dangerous than a complicated woman is one who refuses to give up.

In the 1980s, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and Kris Kristofferson came together to record as The Highwaymen, one of the most successful supergroups in country music history. Now, like the Pistol Annies before them, four of the genre’s most powerful women—Brandi Carlile, Maren Morris, Natalie Hemby, and Amanda Shires—grab the torch. Their name is more than a play on words: “\[The men\] were able to stand shoulder to shoulder with each other as equals,” Brandi Carlile tells Apple Music’s Brooke Reese. “This is a difficult time for women to do that because there are so few spaces for us on country radio, and in the industry in general, so we thought, ‘Why can’t we form a straight line? A shoulder-to-shoulder women’s country group?’” Their eponymous debut album puts female stories front and center—mothers, daughters, witches, lesbians, cowgirls, and more—in a celebration of American women who refuse to choose between success and family, power and love. “Making bank/Shaking hands/Driving 80/Trying to get home just to feed the baby,” they sing on lead single “Redesigning Women,” a toast to ambitious ladies “breaking every Jell-O mold.” But underneath those winking lyrics and warm, absorbing harmonies is a serious message aimed directly at Nashville’s old guard: *Hear us*. “I want to get in the door, and I want our band to get played on country radio,” Shires says. “And once we get in the door, I want to hold it open.” The songs here are daringly vulnerable (“Old Soul”), tough (“Don’t Call Me,\" “Loose Change”), and, at their core, unifying. The album standout “Crowded Table” calls for a more inclusive world: “If we want a garden/We’re gonna have to sow the seeds,” they sing in unison. “Plant a little happiness/Let the roots run deep.”

Marika Hackman’s second album, 2017’s *I’m Not Your Man*, gave the English singer-songwriter a lot to reflect on. “Being so open about my sexuality and having a response from young women saying it helped them to realize who they are and come out—that isn’t something that just washes over you,” she tells Apple Music. “I hold that in my heart and it’s very much a driving force.” That momentum can be felt throughout Hackman’s third album as she explores sex between two women (“all night”), inhabiting the mind of her ex to confront a breakup (“send my love”), and masturbation (“hand solo”) with bracing candor and propulsive synths. “Coming to this record I thought, ‘All right. I’ll do it, I\'ll be more open.’” Let Hackman guide you through her darkly comic journey of what it means to be human, track by track. **“wanderlust”** “I wrote this song in a matter of hours, and this is the first recording ever of it. It’s just me at the kitchen table with the mic on a pair of Apple headphones, the old ones. It’s been sitting in my bank for a while; I didn’t want it on the last album because it felt too similar to my first and I wanted to pull away from that. When I wrote ‘the one’ \[the following track\], it felt like this would be the perfect opener to lull the listener into a false sense of security about where I’d gone with my music this time around, like, ‘Oh, it’s the old Marika that I know and love.’” **“the one”** “This is the first song I wrote specifically for this album. It really set the tone and surprised me. I deal with a lot through humor; I think it’s a good way of connecting with people. It invites them in. The track was born out of feeling frustrated: I’ve been doing this for a long time and sometimes I wish I was bigger. It was taking that as a concept and exaggerating the fuck out of it to make this big joke. I don’t like this part of myself—I don’t like being frustrated or jealous—so I wanted to push that feeling as far as I could. I turned it into something external that I can sit back and laugh at.” **“all night”** “The intention with this song was to openly explore sex between two women in a celebratory, honest way. Because that’s my experience of sex, so that’s the only way I can talk about it. The whole ‘kissing, eating, fucking, moaning’ part, that was saved in the notes on my phone for a really long time. I get a lot of ideas when I’m on buses if I’ve been on a night out. I had this idea about describing your mouth as being something just for eating and moaning. Then you flip that and the eating becomes the fucking and kissing and moaning. I like wordplay and to pretend it’s going somewhere then take you somewhere else.” **“blow”** “I wanted every instrument to have a purpose in the part that it was playing, not just be a wash of color or for some atmosphere. On this track there’s funky basslines interlocking with wild drum parts and then a space where the jagged, gnarly guitar lines stick out. I’ve never written like that before, and I think that’s because my confidence in playing guitar has really jumped up in the last couple of years from touring.” **“i’m not where you are”** “One of the fans summed this up perfectly: ‘It’s the anthem for the emotionally detached that we never had before.’ That was exactly what I was aiming to do, but I hadn’t put it in those words. There’s an aloofness that people often attribute to being unavailable that’s kinda sexy and cool. And it’s not at all. It’s horrible to feel like you can’t just let go and throw yourself into something because of fear. You often hear songs about people who are so hard to get; I wanted to write it from the other perspective of someone who’s like, ‘I don’t know how to connect. I don’t feel on the same level as most people I meet.’ That’s very lonely.” **“send my love”** “This is about the end of a relationship with my ex, Amber \[of The Japanese House\], and it’s me inhabiting her. I was using her character as the mouthpiece for me to say how I was feeling about myself when we were breaking up. I can only share my experience by saying, ‘This must be how you feel about me right now because this is how I feel about myself.’ And then she listens to it and thinks the lyrics are really sad, because she was like, ‘That’s not how I view you or ever viewed you.’ The lyrics are pretty brutal. There’re all of those elements of nostalgia and regret—that’s what happens when things come to an end. When I listen to the song, I can feel that streak of self-loathing, self-hatred, and sadness, but it’s just a moment in time. That was how I was feeling then, and things change. We’re like best friends now.” **“hand solo”** “One lyric that will get overlooked because I don’t think many people are gonna understand the reference, but the first half of the song is looking at old wives’ tales about masturbation. One of them I read is that you get hairy hands if you masturbate too much. There’s a line in there that says, ‘Oh, monkey glove’—it’s talking about having hairy hands. It’s quite abstract but it sounds sexual as well. It sounds like something you might call your vagina. And it’s quite gross, that song. ‘Dark meat, skin pleat’—it’s all quite visceral. My favorite lyric is obviously ‘Under patriarchal law, I’m gonna die a virgin.’ That is insane, that is crazy! I feel like people don’t take my sexual experiences as real. The song is also a massive fuck-you, because it’s very funny and empowered with a bit of sass.” **“conventional ride”** “This song is about that classic thing where you feel like a straight girl might think she’s into it, but she’s fulfilling some sort of fantasy. Which is fine—that’s something that should be explored—but it’s about being open and honest about that with whoever you’re sleeping with. This is about me being like, ‘Maybe you just need a conventional ride. You’re not really into this. You started off thinking you were, but you’re pulling me along.’ The song has that feeling of momentum, being pulled along by something when it’s not quite right.” **“come undone”** “I was listening to a lot of Crumb and I thought, ‘They’ve got some funky basslines. I wanna write a funky bassline!’ That’s often how a lot of my creative process starts: ‘I wanna do that too.’ Like a petulant child! I wrote the bassline and I thought there’s not enough room for anything to go over the top of this, but I kept with it and wrote a nice drum beat that locked in with this. It’s pretty simple, letting that bassline sing with a flourish of guitar pulling your attention left and right.” **“hold on”** “This song was written on a little MIDI keyboard. I’d never written a song like that before. I went for something a bit like Massive Attack or Radiohead, and it swept off into this big beast that I didn’t really anticipate. It’s a sad song; I was going through a really severe bout of depression that I hadn’t felt intensely before. Maybe that’s why the lyrics don’t make that much sense. It’s like a big exhale. I think I might explore that style of writing a bit more—that was my first foray, and it would be exciting to see if I can do a bit more electronic.” **“any human friend”** “I knew immediately this was going to be the last song on the record because it has this optimism to it. It’s a moment to just breathe and let it wash over you. There’s a very conscious decision right at the end when the acoustic guitar comes in repeating the riff ’til it floats away to bring it back to how ‘wanderlust’ starts and lands it again back into the real world. On this album there’s quite a lot of psychedelic segues between the songs and there’s not much room to breathe; it’s quite intense. Then it spits you out and there’s this tiny little anchor at the end, pulling you back into the room.”

“hand solo,” “blow,” “conventional ride”—these are just a few of the cheeky offerings off Any Human Friend, the new album from rock provocateur Marika Hackman. “This whole record is me diving into myself and peeling back the skin further and further, exposing myself in quite a big way. It can be quite sexual,” Hackman says. “It’s blunt, but not offensive. It’s mischievous.” There’s also depth to her carnal knowledge: Any Human Friend is ultimately about how, as she puts it, “We all have this lightness and darkness in us.” Hackman lifted the album’s title from a documentary about four-year-olds interacting with dementia patients in senior homes. At one point, two little girls confer about their experience there, with one musing on how it’s great to make “any human friend,” whether old or young. “When she said that it really touched a nerve in me,” says the London-based musician. “It’s that childlike view where we really accept people, are comfortable with their differences.” Such introspection has earned Hackman her name. Her folkie 2015 debut, We Slept at Last, was heralded for being nuanced and atmospheric. She really found her footing with her last release, I’m Not Your Man—which earned raves from The Guardian, Stereogum, and Pitchfork—and its sybaritic, swaggering hit “Boyfriend,” which boasts of seducing away a straight guy’s girlfriend. “Her tactile lyrics keep the songs melodically strong and full of surprises,” remarked Pitchfork. We’ll say! “I’m a hopeless romantic,” she explains. “I search for love and sexual experience, but also I’m terrified by it.” Hackman is a Rid of Me-era PJ Harvey for the inclusive generation: unbounded by musical genre, a preternatural lyricist and tunesmith who isn’t afraid to go there. (Even her cover art, which finds Hackman nearly nude while cradling a baby pig, is a nod to Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra’s unfiltered photos of mothers just after they gave birth.) To that end, “hand solo” extorts the virtues of masturbation and features Hackman’s favorite line, “Under patriarchal law, I’m going to die a virgin.” The song “blow” paints a picture of social excess. And “conventional ride” thumbs its nose at heterosexual sex through “the trope a lot of gay women experience: sleeping with someone, then it becomes apparent you’re kind of an experiment.” With Any Human Friend, boundaries are no longer an issue for her. “I sent ‘all night’ to my parents and they were quite shocked,” she says of the paean to the flesh, dressed as a sweetly harmonic track. “Why does it sound shocking coming out of my mouth? Women have sex with each other, and it seems to me we aren’t as freely allowed to discuss that as men are. But at no point am I disrespecting the women I’m having sex with. It can be fucking sexy without banging people over the head with a frying pan. It’s sexy sex.” Sharing intimacies with her parents sorta makes sense when you consider she wrote “the one”—a portrait of the artist amid identity crisis—and several other songs in her bedroom at their house, where she crashed after a painful break-up with a longtime girlfriend. “‘send my love’ is a proper breakup song,” she says of the levitating, string-laden track. “I actually wrote that in a moment of grief. It’s a strange take on it because I’m imagining myself as my ex-girlfriend.” She penned its companion track, “i’m not where you are,” a melodic earworm about emotional detachment from relationships, roughly six months later. “I think because my life was flipped upside down, it was taking me longer to write,” she says. “This was definitely the hardest process I’ve gone through to make a record.” She wrote the album over a year, recording a few songs at a time with co-producer David Wrench (Frank Ocean, The xx). “I stopped being able to sleep properly,” she says. “I was waking up in the middle of the night to write songs.” But the longer recording process also meant that Hackman had the time to experiment in the studio, especially with electronic songs. She was inspired by Wrench’s vast synth collection, many of which she used throughout Any Human Friend (“the synths give the album a nice shine”), notably on “hold on,” a deep dive into ennui expressed as ethereal R&B. She also switched up drum rhythms and wrote songs on the bass, such as the upbeat, idiosyncratic “come undone” (working name: “Funky Little Thang”). Hackman bookends Any Human Friend with some of her most unexpected musical turns. The first song she wrote, “the one” (technically its second track), is “probably the poppiest song I’ve ever written,” she says. “It’s about that weird feeling of starting the process again from scratch.” To that end, it features a riot grrrl Greek chorus hurling such insults at her as, “You’re such an attention whore!” The title track closes out the album and explores how, “when we’re interacting with people, it’s like holding a mirror up to yourself.” It’s a weightless coda that’s jazz-like in its layering of rhythmic sounds as if you’re leisurely sorting through Hackman’s headspace. “The drive to do all this is all just about trying to work out what the fuck is in my brain,” she says, laughing. The dragon she’s chasing is a rarified peace that materializes after properly tortured herself. “I really did have a good time working on this album,” she says, reassuringly. “It’s just emotionally draining to write music and constantly tap into your psyche. No musician is writing music for themselves to listen to. It’s a dialogue, a conversation, a connection. I’m creating something for people to react to.”

More than a year after her breakout hit “1950,” King Princess delivers *Cheap Queen*, her soulful and reflective debut album. Balancing husky, vintage-sounding vocals with subtle flourishes (a vibraphone here, a chiming synth there), the project loosely traces a young relationship’s hopeful beginning and wounded end. Throughout, we get to see the emerging queer-pop icon, a 20-year-old Brooklyn native named Mikaela Straus, evolve: Meandering mind games (“Useless Phrases”) and self-deprecations (“Cheap Queen”) become earnest observations (\"Watching My Phone\") and confident tell-offs (“You Destroyed My Heart”). The final number—a breathtaking, pensive ballad that unfolds delicately—feels fragile and guarded: “And it might take a sec/My world’s become a mess/I’m second-guessing all the things I used to want to be,” she sings, a bit more measured than she was at the start. But she’s stronger, too, armed with the self-assurance of someone who has had their heart ripped apart and, to their own surprise, survived.

In his second outing under the moniker Jeff Lynne’s ELO, the mastermind of ’70s symphonic rockers Electric Light Orchestra offers another recreation of that band’s glory days. *From Out of Nowhere* follows the format of his last album, 2015’s *Alone in the Universe*, where Lynne himself plays most instruments, sings most vocals (even backing himself up with his trademark falsetto harmonies), and of course writes and produces each track. The sounds are lush but synthetic, recalling the drum machines and synths of the band’s ’80s albums *Time* and *Balance of Power*, but in true ELO style, there are still Beatlesque harmonies (“Down Came the Rain”) and Roy Orbison-worthy ballads (“Losing You”).

Maggie Rogers spent the first three years of her career retracing one chance encounter: In 2016, a video of her singing a song that moved Pharrell to tears during a master class at NYU went viral, earning her a record deal, magazine features, and headlining tours (watch it and you’ll understand). But the Maryland native, then 22, was still figuring out who she was, and this sudden flood of fame was a lot to bear. Determined to take control of her own narrative, she assembled a debut album powerful enough to shift the conversation. Measured, subtle, and wise beyond her years, it feels like the introduction she always wanted to make. Like her 2017 EP, *Now That the Light Is Fading*, *Heard It In A Past Life* is a thoughtfully sewn patchwork of anthemic synth-pop, brooding acoustic folk, and soft-lit electronica, the latter of which was inspired by a year spent dancing through Berlin’s nightclub scene. But here, her vision feels both more daring and more polished. On “Retrograde,” long stretches of propulsive synths are punctuated by high-pitched *hah-hah-hah*s; “Say It” blends R&B with light, breathy indie-pop; and “The Knife” could be a sultry come-on or a daring confession. On the Greg Kurstin-produced “Light On,” Rogers seems to make peace with her surreal story. “And I am findin’ out/There’s just no other way/And I’m still dancin’ at the end of the day,” she sings, a bittersweet hat-tip to the moment that got her here. And to her fans, a promise: “If you leave the light on/Then I’ll leave the light on.”

Homeboy Sandman – Dusty Picasso claimed that the purpose of art is to wash the “dust of daily life off our souls.” Homeboy Sandman asks on Dusty, “Why would I complain when I’m alive making art?” In the course of his Mello Music debut, the Queens virtuoso answers himself with 15 soul-assessing confessionals that sweep the entropy and daily static, the distortion and psychic silt of modern life onto wax. This is sacred dust, alchemical practice to convert anxiety into the highest form of creativity. It is rapping ass-rapping rapped better than your favorite rapper. Let Sandman tell it: the sound is dusty. These bars are his id. He’s not trying to save the world on this record or even save himself. These are the unmasked impulses and desires locked away for a long time -- some of them from before he ditched the legal world for decapitating mediocre MCs. On Dusty, he says “ I unlocked myself and let them out -- dusted them off -- for better or for worse.” Of course, it’s infinitely for the better. This is a therapy session without coming off remotely indulgent. Sandman remains both the master carpenter and architect, writing verses with lapidary precision, inventing new flows and cadences at brilliant angles that no one knew could be found. This is the latest chapter for one of the most storied underground rappers of his generation. A versatile talent who has checked every last box: Unsigned Hype in The Source, Chairman’s Choice in the XXL. Rolling Stone hailed his songs as dense and word-drunk, spilling past the margins, demanding repeat listens as he re-works rap forms and functions into something truly personal.” Pitchfork said that in the all-star game of the new subterranean, “he is the guy with flawless fundamentals, wearing his socks high and his cleats sharp and polished.” His solo catalogue is sterling and over the last two years he’s mastered the group dynamic in tandem with fellow legends Aesop Rock and later, a brilliant psychedelic slab done in union with Edan. It’s all on display on Dusty. Pick almost any track and you’ll hear the synthesized fusion of four elements hip-hop and Jamaican toasting, Nuyorican flavor and an experimental dead bent to expand the parameters of language. When you listen to Sandman, you hear the echoing boom of the South Bronx park jams of Kool Herc, the avant-garde wild style of Rammellzee, the technical perfection of Rakim and Big Daddy Kane, the infectious jazz hymnals of A Tribe Called Quest. Produced entirely by Mono En Stereo (formerly known as El RTNC -- the moniker used when he produced Sandman’s Kool Herc: Fertile Crescent), the beats rumble and snap, the basslines are rubber-thick and funky, the drums rugged as a butcher knife haircut. Sandman boasts the kinetic gift to tailor his flow to each, his voice an instrument in his own right -- able to switch between conversational and wrathful, debauched lothario and philosophically righteous. There’s “Far Out,” where he kicks off the album wondering if he’s better off living in Siberia, then references breakdancing on cardboard, the Never Ending Story, and how the smell of boiled eggs reminds him of the Queens Halloweens of his childhood. “Noteworthy” finds him suffering from insomnia trying to figure out which rules to break and risks to take. He proposes toasts for the spirits and ghosts and flips old MC Lyte lyrics into modern koans. “Yes Iyah” finds Boy Sand boasting about clutching mountains by the peak over a tribal polyrhythmic breakbeat, kicking a pyroclastic flow that would even make Black Thought offer a bow in tribute. There are raunchy sex raps and existential midnight of the soul wanderings alike. It amounts to a clarion statement of purpose, the arena stepped into and all challengers vanquished. Rap containing multitudes and cosmic dust. Exact as a science, loose as an improvised spiritual.

Beginning with the haunting alt-pop smash “Ocean Eyes” in 2016, Billie Eilish made it clear she was a new kind of pop star—an overtly awkward introvert who favors chilling melodies, moody beats, creepy videos, and a teasing crudeness à la Tyler, The Creator. Now 17, the Los Angeles native—who was homeschooled along with her brother and co-writer, Finneas O’Connell—presents her much-anticipated debut album, a melancholy investigation of all the dark and mysterious spaces that linger in the back of our minds. Sinister dance beats unfold into chattering dialogue from *The Office* on “my strange addiction,” and whispering vocals are laid over deliberately blown-out bass on “xanny.” “There are a lot of firsts,” says FINNEAS. “Not firsts like ‘Here’s the first song we made with this kind of beat,’ but firsts like Billie saying, ‘I feel in love for the first time.’ You have a million chances to make an album you\'re proud of, but to write the song about falling in love for the first time? You only get one shot at that.” Billie, who is both beleaguered and fascinated by night terrors and sleep paralysis, has a complicated relationship with her subconscious. “I’m the monster under the bed, I’m my own worst enemy,” she told Beats 1 host Zane Lowe during an interview in Paris. “It’s not that the whole album is a bad dream, it’s just… surreal.” With an endearingly off-kilter mix of teen angst and experimentalism, Billie Eilish is really the perfect star for 2019—and here is where her and FINNEAS\' heads are at as they prepare for the next phase of her plan for pop domination. “This is my child,” she says, “and you get to hold it while it throws up on you.” **Figuring out her dreams:** **Billie:** “Every song on the album is something that happens when you’re asleep—sleep paralysis, night terrors, nightmares, lucid dreams. All things that don\'t have an explanation. Absolutely nobody knows. I\'ve always had really bad night terrors and sleep paralysis, and all my dreams are lucid, so I can control them—I know that I\'m dreaming when I\'m dreaming. Sometimes the thing from my dream happens the next day and it\'s so weird. The album isn’t me saying, \'I dreamed that\'—it’s the feeling.” **Getting out of her own head:** **Billie:** “There\'s a lot of lying on purpose. And it\'s not like how rappers lie in their music because they think it sounds dope. It\'s more like making a character out of yourself. I wrote the song \'8\' from the perspective of somebody who I hurt. When people hear that song, they\'re like, \'Oh, poor baby Billie, she\'s so hurt.\' But really I was just a dickhead for a minute and the only way I could deal with it was to stop and put myself in that person\'s place.” **Being a teen nihilist role model:** **Billie:** “I love meeting these kids, they just don\'t give a fuck. And they say they don\'t give a fuck *because of me*, which is a feeling I can\'t even describe. But it\'s not like they don\'t give a fuck about people or love or taking care of yourself. It\'s that you don\'t have to fit into anything, because we all die, eventually. No one\'s going to remember you one day—it could be hundreds of years or it could be one year, it doesn\'t matter—but anything you do, and anything anyone does to you, won\'t matter one day. So it\'s like, why the fuck try to be something you\'re not?” **Embracing sadness:** **Billie:** “Depression has sort of controlled everything in my life. My whole life I’ve always been a melancholy person. That’s my default.” FINNEAS: “There are moments of profound joy, and Billie and I share a lot of them, but when our motor’s off, it’s like we’re rolling downhill. But I’m so proud that we haven’t shied away from songs about self-loathing, insecurity, and frustration. Because we feel that way, for sure. When you’ve supplied empathy for people, I think you’ve achieved something in music.” **Staying present:** **Billie:** “I have to just sit back and actually look at what\'s going on. Our show in Stockholm was one of the most peak life experiences we\'ve had. I stood onstage and just looked at the crowd—they were just screaming and they didn’t stop—and told them, \'I used to sit in my living room and cry because I wanted to do this.\' I never thought in a thousand years this shit would happen. We’ve really been choking up at every show.” FINNEAS: “Every show feels like the final show. They feel like a farewell tour. And in a weird way it kind of is, because, although it\'s the birth of the album, it’s the end of the episode.”

British music is fortunate to have Charlotte Aitchison. A restless collaborator and denier of pop borders with an unteachable ear for a hook, she’s one of the UK’s proudest exports. Her third studio LP serves as a blueprint for how a modern pop album should sound. Audacious but introspective, it’s straining with potential hits and subtler moments fans will hold close. And then there’s the cast list. If she tires of this pop star business, a sterling career in A&R probably awaits. She talked through some of the album’s standout moments on her Beats 1 show The Candy Shop. **“Next Level Charli”** “I wrote this track for the Angels—my fans. This is the Angel anthem. Everything in this song is about things that I imagine my fans doing: driving to a party, getting ready for a party, playing their music in their Prius, whatever it is. This song is for you guys. Thank you for loving me. Thank you for supporting me.” **“Gone” (with Christine and the Queens)** “This is the bop. The song of the summer, if I don’t say so myself. Me, Christine, dancing on a car, rain: What more do you want? We literally gave you everything.” **“Cross You Out” (feat. Sky Ferreira)** “I’m so happy that we got to make this song together. This was one of the first songs that kind of came to reality for this album. I sent this over to Sky, she felt it and came into this studio in LA with \[co-writer\] Linus Wiklund. She sounds so amazing and I’m so happy because Sky and I have known each other for quite a few years now. We kind of came up together in many ways, and we’ve shared a lot of the same producers. We’ve been on the same magazine covers together, and you know, I feel like we were on Myspace at the same time! I think her voice is really important and what she does is brilliant.” **“2099” (feat. Troye Sivan)** “My favorite dreamboat, my dream boy: Troye Sivan. I’m just in love with him. I just think he’s so brilliant. After we made \[the 2018 single\] ‘1999’, I kind of knew he wanted to get a little bit weirder than we got, as I’d heard him mention that he was into \[Charli’s 2017 mixtape\] *Pop 2*. So after ‘1999’ came out, I hit him up again and said, ‘Should we just go there? Should we just go out of space? Like, let’s do a weird moment.’ And he was like, ‘Yes, let’s do it.’” **“Click” (feat. Kim Petras & Tommy Cash)** “I’m not going to lie—and no shade to any of the other artists on the album— but I kind of think Kim’s verse might be my favorite on the whole album. I remember when I originally sent Kim this song, I did a verse and it was so bad. She sent me her demo back and her verse *killed*, and I was like, ‘Oh my god, I cannot put this song out with the verse I currently have.’ So I had to rerecord my thing, as Tommy had also sent me his and killed it, too. I was the weakest! It was bad! I love this song. It goes so hard. And Kim is still shining so bright on this song.” **“Warm” (feat. HAIM)** “This song is produced by A.G. Cook. He actually wrote a few of the melodies on this song, too. When we were making this song, we were working at \[Australian producer and DJ\] Flume’s studio in LA, and this was at the point where we thought we were still going to do a third mixtape. But then we had this song and a couple of ideas and were like, ‘Let’s just do the album. Now’s the time for the *Charli* album.’ When HAIM came to the studio house that I had rented in LA at the beginning of 2019, I had just had a lot of dental work done, so my whole mouth was super numb. I was dribbling; I couldn’t really speak. They were like, ‘What happened to you!’ It was a funny session, but the three of them came through. I’m so happy with the song.” **“White Mercedes”** “This is one of my favorite songs from the album. I guess it’s my version of a ballad.”

“The whole inspiration for this record was completely and utterly based on going out in Lisbon and trying to make friends,” Madonna tells Apple Music\'s Julie Adenuga. “Portugal is such a melting pot for so many different cultures—there\'s a lot of people from Brazil, Angola, Spain. You can stand out on a balcony and hear some incredible voice carrying through the starlit sky, and it\'s just so magical you can\'t help but be inspired by it.” Fourteen albums in, it may be standard practice for Madonna to immerse herself in new cultures as a way of sparking artistic ideas, but her recent move to Lisbon opened her to incorporating not just different sounds but different languages. As evidence, look no further than “Medellin,” one of two collaborations on the album with Colombian pop star Maluma. “I heard from his manager that he wanted to collaborate with me,” she said. “\[My producer and I\] started listening to his music more closely, thinking, \'Okay, how can we do something slightly different but that still has a connection to the music that he makes?’” This adventurous strategy—as much a cultural bridge as a musical technique—is what makes the sprawling *Madame X* so bold and timely. By fusing some of pop’s trendiest sounds (deep house, disco, and dancehall are a few) with characteristically eccentric imagery and serious subject matter (gun control, narcissism, ageism, and political noise), she doesn’t just acknowledge the current moment, she confronts it. “This is your wake-up call,” she sings on “God Control,” which morphs from spiritual hymn into ironic disco-funk at the sound of disquieting gunshots. “We don’t have to fall/A new democracy.” She seems to find hope in her own perseverance: “Died a thousand times/Managed to survive,” she sings on “I Rise.” “I rise up above it all.”

For those who haven’t experienced it, winter in Montreal is no joke. “It feels like the last thing you should be making is party music in the middle of January here,” Kid Koala, a.k.a. Eric San, tells Apple Music. “It’s minus 40 Celsius outside. The machines in your studio won\'t even turn on.” Instead, the transcendently skilled scratch DJ, producer, visual artist, and Gorillaz collaborator tends to rein it in during those months, switching from propulsive, uptempo beats and quick-fingered turntablism to focus on both listening to and creating what he calls “music to draw to.” “I try to find records that leave some space for your head to wander off and find its own zone,” he says of his favorite songs to play while illustrating graphic novels (he’s got two), cover art (he’s done tons), and characters for his multimedia projects (like the puppet-featuring Nufonia Must Fall live tour). That slate-clearing approach has spawned a series of international events, soundtrack work, and two ambient concept albums: 2017’s space-themed LP *Music to Draw To: Satellite*, and this second installment, inspired by the Greek myth of Io, featuring singer-songwriter Trixie Whitley. Kid Koala tells us, in his own words, about what else influenced the making of *Music to Draw To: Io* apart from the nasty weather. **Shopping with Radiohead** “In 2001, I was invited on tour with Radiohead—a real dream. We were in New York, at a record store called Other Music. Colin Greenwood asked me if I\'d heard this Isan record, *Lucky Cat*. He said, \'You need to hear this,\' and went up to the counter and bought it for me. It became the soundtrack of my travel time on that tour. My waiting-at-the-airport music. It just became *that* record for me, and I started drawing to it. That record is so subtly layered in the way the elements come in and out. It was leaving that space for me to get into a more creative zone. Now, it\'s almost a Pavlovian response where, if you put that record on, I\'ll immediately look for a sketch book.” **Playing music for others to draw to** “In 2009, I was working on my book *Space Cadet*, and I realized I had nine months of just drawing ahead. I said, \'I\'m gonna host an event called Music To Draw To. I\'m just gonna play a four, five-hour set of the records that I love drawing to, and then people can come and they can draw, or code, or write a screenplay, or knit. Let\'s do this on Monday nights in the middle of winter in Montreal!\' By the end of the third Monday, there were 600 people trying to get into this 150-person space. People were coming up to me after and saying, \'I finished an entire sketchbook tonight. I haven\'t done that since high school.\' I would just go rogue and come out of a record and start creating a little ambient piece from scratch using that equipment. And that became the skeletal versions of what ended up on *Satellite*.” **Studying up on space and Greek mythology** “I think every musician at one point will go to a space theme. I went to one in 2009, and part of me has never left. I was reading about the moons of Galileo, Io and Europa. When I studied a little bit more about them, one that jumped out was the Greek myth of Io \[*Zeus’ lover, whom he turns into a cow to protect her from his wife, Hera*\]. I said, \'Hey, let\'s dig into this a bit. We could write from Hera\'s perspective. We can write from Io\'s perspective.\'” **Visiting Calgary’s National Music Centre** “Their keyboard and synthesizer collection is unparalleled, especially because all of it works—calibrated to spec as if it just came off the assembly line. I was literally a kid in an audio candy store. Trixie does such a powerful performance on \'Hera\'s Song\'—it just has this slow burn, she keeps crescendoing—I had to really build it into something monstrous, in terms of layers. That was one of the tracks that really benefited from having access to such a great arsenal of tools.”