Good Morning America's 50 Best Albums of 2020

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

Released in June 2020 as American cities were rupturing in response to police brutality, the fourth album by rap duo Run The Jewels uses the righteous indignation of hip-hop\'s past to confront a combustible present. Returning with a meaner boom and pound than ever before, rappers Killer Mike and EL-P speak venom to power, taking aim at killer cops, warmongers, the surveillance state, the prison-industrial complex, and the rungs of modern capitalism. The duo has always been loyal to hip-hop\'s core tenets while forging its noisy cutting edge, but *RTJ4* is especially lithe in a way that should appeal to vintage heads—full of hyperkinetic braggadocio and beats that sound like sci-fi remakes of Public Enemy\'s *Apocalypse 91*. Until the final two tracks there\'s no turn-down, no mercy, and nothing that sounds like any rap being made today. The only guest hook comes from Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Mavis Staples on \"pulling the pin,\" a reflective song that connects the depression prevalent in modern rap to the structural forces that cause it. Until then, it’s all a tires-squealing, middle-fingers-blazing rhymefest. Single \"ooh la la\" flips Nice & Smooth\'s Greg Nice from the 1992 Gang Starr classic \"DWYCK\" into a stomp closed out by a DJ Premier scratch solo. \"out of sight\" rewrites the groove of The D.O.C.\'s 1989 hit \"It\'s Funky Enough\" until it treadmills sideways, and guest 2 Chainz spits like he just went on a Big Daddy Kane bender. A churning sample from lefty post-punks Gang of Four (\"the ground below\") is perfectly on the nose for an album brimming with funk and fury, as is the unexpected team-up between Pharrell and Zack de la Rocha (\"JU$T\"). Most significant, however, is \"walking in the snow,\" where Mike lays out a visceral rumination on police violence: \"And you so numb you watch the cops choke out a man like me/Until my voice goes from a shriek to whisper, \'I can\'t breathe.\'\"

There\'s never been any effective way to prepare for a Childish Gambino project from Donald Glover; over a decade-long discography, they\'ve oscillated between quirky raps, electro-pop, and strands of funk and R&B. This remains true with his new release, *3.15.20*, which he also has released as a single-track opus, which may explain the decision to have most of the individual tracks here titled as timestamps. That mischievous, mercurial nature carries over to the music itself—he explores the darker hues of the outré, playing with genre as much he does disjointed sound effects—atmospheric noise, glitches, distortion, uncanny Auto-Tune. The soulful \"24.19\" and the optimistic closer \"53.49\" tread worn but welcome territory, while the foreboding futurism of \"Time\" and the sensory overload of \"32.22\" don\'t land like songs so much as cinematic collages brimming with ideas. Unsurprisingly, the one familiar track, \"Feels Like Summer\" (titled here as \"42.26\"), which was officially released in July 2018, is also the album\'s most accessible. *3.15.20* is a logical progression from his experimental inclinations of the past that latches onto some of his most eccentric impulses and thrusts them into overdrive. He basks in the spaces between restraint and rebellion, genius and madness, forcing listeners to find the freedom in chaos. The axiom \"expect the unexpected\" doesn\'t quite capture what Gambino has put together here—perhaps, this time, it\'s better not to expect anything at all.

Bully\'s third album came together once Alicia Bognanno began practicing better mental health exercises. *SUGAREGG* captures that energy throughout the record\'s 38-minute runtime. After producing Bully\'s first two records, Bognanno split those duties with Grammy-winning producer John Congleton—together they highlight the vivid harmonies within Bully\'s exhilarating and often untamed brand of alternative rock. From the initial rush of opener \"Add It On\" to the breakneck \"Not Ashamed,\" Bognanno barely takes a breath, her voice burning towards the edge of combustion. When she does slow down, *SUGAREGG* reveals its softer side with the grungy balladry \"Prism,\" while \"Come Down\" conjures up dreamy \'90s alt reminiscent of Blue-era Weezer. Now a solo endeavor, this is the most confident Bognanno has been on a Bully record. Below the Nashville-based singer-songwriter takes us behind *SUGAREGG*\'s 12 tracks. **Add It On** “So ‘Add It On’ was during the writing process of the second record, I found myself catering to censoring my writing from what I was going to be asked in interviews to not write about things that I didn\'t want to explain. Which I thought just very crazy and not the way that I should approach music. So ‘Add It On’ was a song that I just decided I didn\'t want to talk about, but I really wanted to write. And that was a big one for me that I decided while writing it that I was going to draw that line.” **Every Tradition** “‘Every Tradition’ is pretty much just about being okay with how you want to live your life regardless of people’s commentary and expectations of you.” **Where to Start** “This is a product of going back to the drawing board, and it was when I got done with what I thought would be the first record and came back, decided to write more, and ‘Where to Start’ was a product of that. I wrote it on bass and I went to Toronto and recorded it, and then it ended up being the single, which was unexpected. But it addresses the frustration that comes along with love having the ability to fully control your mood and mental state for better or worse. It was therapeutic to funnel some lightheartedness into what can be an otherwise draining state of mind.” **Prism** “‘Prism’ is about the process of letting go and realizing what aspects continue to resonate as time passes, reflecting on that.” **You** “‘You’ is about a dysfunctional relationship, but you\'re still not learning any lessons from it. And it’s highlighted by this line: ‘If it feels right, it doesn\'t matter how bad it sounds/The pleasure\'s all mine, the pain is all mine when you\'re around.’” **Let You** “This was also one of the tracks that was written in the second round of writing and recording at Palace Sound in Toronto. I think ‘Where to Start’ and ‘Let You’ have some similarities, but it\'s basically about insecurity and trust issues that will challenge your ability to maintain a relationship. I think we can all relate to that.” **Like Fire** “‘Like Fire’ is about the ups and downs and ins and outs of all the places that my head goes. This isn\'t a song about faith; I\'m not religious. It was just a way for me to express my frustration with the idea that everything happens for a reason or stuff like someone’s always there saying it\'ll all work out, because it just really doesn\'t seem that way when you\'re stuck in a bad place. You feel like you can\'t get out and feel like you\'re not in control of it. It\'s a very lonely feeling. That one\'s specifically about being type 2 bipolar for sure.” **Stuck in Your Head** “Can I just be honest with you? I\'ve never seen *Lord of the Rings* or *Game of Thrones*. But I feel like the chord to ‘Stuck in Your Head’ sounds like it would be *Lord of the Rings*. But it is just inner dialogue and the back-and-forth between the positive side of your brain and the negative side of your brain. The battle of trying to be fully present and remember what really matters and trying to realize infant things you\'re manifesting on or that are taking control of your life have any real meaning or not.” **Come Down** “This was actually one of the first songs that I wrote for the third record. ‘Come Down’ and ‘Prism’ were the only two from that first draft that ended up being on the record. I wrote 32 demos total, and it\'s really cool to me that that one ended up making it on the record. Originally when I wrote that, I had voicemails playing through the whole thing. And I don\'t know if it was my manager or Tony from Sub Pop were like, \'What\'s happening here?\' And I was like, \'I don\'t know. I\'m going to take them all out.\' But that was actually the first song on *SUGAREGG* that I started experimenting with sound bites and little things that I thought were fun and adding character. And I always put way too much in, and then it\'s just stripping down all the unnecessary ones.” **Not Ashamed** “‘Not Ashamed’ is pretty much just about walking the walk and not just talking the talk: ‘If you never speak up and you never act out, which are half of the reasons you figure it out/You\'re lying to yourself, you\'re not standing for me/If I stay regulated, did you walk away free?’ So that\'s about women, the fight for control over our bodies and not feeling like men take as much responsibility of something that they should. So fight the fight with us and actually go in and vote.” **Hours and Hours** “It was actually never supposed to be on the record. It was pretty much just a side-project song for me, for fun. When I would get done working on the songs, I would open ‘Hours and Hours’ and add little things to it each time, and all my other songs, I have videos of every part that I played so that I don\'t forget when I have to go to record them. And I never kept track of anything. And then of course it ended up being a single. I was like, \'Great. Now I need to learn what I did.\' I have a lot of noise stuff in there, and I did some crazy vocal stuff with amps and pedals. And I think it\'s a pretty good representation of the writing from the third record—just taking a step up a little bit.” **What I Wanted** “‘What I Wanted’ is just about always wanting to have done music and thinking it was so unreachable and just working my whole life to be where I\'m at now. And now that I\'m here, just still fighting to be more, and not being able to really sit and be like, \'Oh yeah, this is great. I can\'t believe what I\'ve done.\' My brain is just like, \'What\'s next? What can I do better?\' And when I say I\'m here now, I\'m very aware I\'m a relatively small independent artist, not saying that I\'m some superstar. But to me, even playing in a band for a living was such a dream. I have a lot of friends from Nashville who move away, and it makes you feel like you\'re behind for some reason. But then you realize you\'re doing exactly what you want and have a reason to be there and they\'re moving because they\'re not quite where they want to be and they\'re still trying to find that. But for some reason, it still leaves you feeling like you\'re missing out on something. And that\'s a very funny thing to me, because I find myself feeling that way often. And then remember I\'m doing exactly what I wanted to do.”

“More often than not, my songs draw from things that remind me of home and things that remind me of peace,” Sophie Allison tells Apple Music. The Nashville guitarist and songwriter’s *color theory* is steeped in feelings of alienation, depression, loneliness, and anxiety, all presented with a confidence belying her 22 years. The album is organized into three sections, with the first, blue, symbolizing depression and sadness. The second, yellow, hones in on physical and mental sickness, centering around Allison’s mother’s battle with a terminal illness. Lastly, the gray section represents darkness, emptiness, and a fear of death. It’s a perfect middle ground between her earlier work and a studio-oriented sound, retaining a lo-fi ethos while sanding down the pointy edges. Here she breaks down the stories behind each song on *color theory*. **bloodstream** “‘bloodstream’ was one of the first ones I wrote. It took a while to finish it because I had to craft it a little bit more rather than just let all this stuff out. I felt I needed to piece together a lot of themes and ideas that I wanted in there, because it’s a song about being in a dark and empty place. I wanted to try to remember a time when it wasn’t that way. I also wanted it to have this contrast of beauty, and use images of flowers and summer. I wanted this natural beauty to be in there mixed with violence―these images of blood, wounds, and visceral stuff.” **circle the drain** “When I started ‘bloodstream,’ I also started ‘circle the drain.’ I was writing both of them on the same tour, and ‘circle the drain’ came together a lot faster, even though it is still a song that\'s pieced together. I just wanted to grab that wallowing feeling. In the song it feels like I\'m drowning a little bit. I wanted it to be a track that felt really bright and hopeful on the outside, even though the lyrics themselves are about someone literally falling apart, and wallowing in the sadness.” **royal screw up** “I wrote this one in about 15 minutes. The lyrics here are me just ragging and telling on myself for all these things that I do. It sucks, but if I\'m being honest, this is the level that it\'s at. It\'s about coming to terms with and being honest about your own flaws and your own reoccurring behavior that may be a little bit self-destructive.” **night swimming** “‘night swimming’ is one I wrote at home. I wrote it pretty early on and when I hadn\'t written a lot of songs. I wasn\'t sure how it was going to fit in, because it felt very different―softer and more gentle than a lot of the stuff I was writing. But as I started to write more songs, it emerged as the end of what is now the blue section. The themes that are in this song are very similar to things that are going on throughout the album. I think at the core of it, this song is about loneliness and about feeling like there\'s always a distance between you and other people.” **crawling in my skin** “This is a big shift out of the blue section. This one is really about hallucinating, having sleep paralysis, and paranoia, of just feeling like there\'s something watching me and there\'s something following me. It’s about the feeling that you\'re constantly running from something. Obviously, it\'s a huge shift in the record, and it comes in with a bang. It\'s immediately more upbeat and the pace of the album starts to pick up. I think about it like getting your heart racing. During the time I wrote it, I was having a lot of trouble with not sleeping very much and just having this constant paranoia of auditory hallucinations. I had the feeling of being completely on edge for a while and feeling like even when it\'s not there, the moment things get quiet, it\'s going to be back. The moment that you\'re at home and people are asleep, it\'s going to be back, it’s going to creep back in.” **yellow is the color of her eyes** “I really like this one. It\'s about sickness and the toll that that can take. It’s about being faced with something that is a little bit visceral even for a short, short time. Anything can happen at any second. You\'re not immortal, your people die, and people get ill. At any time, things can change. Anything can change.” **up the walls** “I wrote this on tour when I was opening for Liz Phair. I wrote it in my hotel room, because I was flying to every show and I was alone because I was playing solo. This one is all about anxiety and paranoia, but also just feeling tired of having to be a certain person, especially for someone you love when you’re in a relationship. It’s about wishing you could just take it easy. It’s about trying to be a calmer person and not falling into that anxiety when it comes to new relationships. I guess it\'s really just about feeling like you wish you could be perfect for someone.” **lucy** “‘lucy’ represents another shift in the album, both literally and sonically. It has an evil overtone, even just in the chords. I use this idea of the devil seducing you to talk about morality, struggling with that and things in the world that seduce you in ways you wish they wouldn\'t. It has this minor overtone all of a sudden, even though it\'s upbeat, catchy, and fun. This is when the album turns into the gray section. I begin to talk more about darkness and evil and things that tear you apart a little bit.” **stain** “I wrote this in my parents’ house. I got this new amp and I was just playing around with it and I ended up writing this song. It still makes me uncomfortable to talk about, just because it\'s about facing a power struggle with someone, and feeling like you lost, and wishing you could redo it over and over again. But it’s also about knowing that you can\'t, and just being unable to take that as the final answer even though it is. It’s a difficult thing to feel like you\'re stained with that interaction, and losing control over a part of your life.” **gray light** “This song reflects on everything I\'ve been talking about the entire album and brings in this new element of darkness, mortality, and fear. It also touches on longing for an end to some of your suffering and some of the things that will never be okay. It’s about being tired of struggling with things. It has this anxiety and it also has this kind of sadness that draws you to wanting to end some of your pain. But it also talks about how it’s important to recognize these feelings and acknowledge them.”

Confronting the ongoing mental health and familial trials that have plagued Allison since pre-pubescence, color theory explores three central themes: blue, representing sadness and depression; yellow, symbolizing physical and emotional illness; and, finally, gray, representing darkness, emptiness and loss. Written mostly while on tour and recorded in Allison’s hometown of Nashville at Alex The Great, color theory was produced by Gabe Wax (who also produced Clean), mixed by Lars Stalfors (Mars Volta, HEALTH, St. Vincent), and features the live Soccer Mommy band on studio recording for the first time, with a live take at the foundation of almost every track. The resulting album is a masterpiece that paints an uncompromisingly honest self-portrait of an artist who, according to 100+ publications, already released one of the Best Albums of 2018 and the 2010s, and is about to release an early favorite of 2020.

“We’d made two very sample-heavy records in a row,” Avalanches founding member Robbie Chater tells Apple Music. “We just felt very liberated to make a left turn and to go anywhere and do anything.” The Melbourne group’s third album is still rich with endless samples—the trademark that made them crate-digging heroes with their 2000 debut *Since I Left You* and 2016’s *Wildflower*—but this time their focus is more on live collaboration. Guest artists abound, including Jamie xx, Karen O, Rivers Cuomo, Perry Farrell, Denzel Curry, Sampa the Great, Leon Bridges, and Johnny Marr. Each was tasked with putting their slant on the big ideas characterizing the album: life, God, spirituality, the human voice, mortality. The Avalanches also took inspiration from the Golden Record, a 1977 collection of music and terrestrial sounds compiled by astronomer-scientist Carl Sagan and writer-producer-director Ann Druyan (whose image is on the cover of this album) to be carried into space as part of the Voyager Interstellar Message Project. “It all came from a personal inward journey that expanded throughout the whole universe,” says keyboardist Tony Di Blasi on the chosen themes. “There’s a saying: ‘So within, so without.’ What is here is also out there. So it all expanded just from our own personal journeys.” For all its grand subject matter, however, *We Will Always Love You* is a warm, gentle listen, and The Avalanches’ most reflective work to date. “It’s a bit of a shining light in dark times,” says Di Blasi. “And that’s the mood we were trying to set, for it to be light.” Below, Di Blasi and Chater talk through 10 of the album’s 25 tracks. **We Will Always Love You (feat. Blood Orange)** Robbie Chater: “That vocal sample by The Roches \[‘Hammond Song’\] is absolutely incredible. With *Since I Left You*, those samples were from junk-store records and were forgotten pieces of flotsam and jetsam that we would turn into something new. But The Roches’ song was already so beautiful. We were exploring different kinds of devotional music, gospel music and Christian music, and although that’s not what The Roches do, it has those massed voices of the sisters singing together. And we were reading about Ann Druyan’s story in compiling the Golden Record, and the way the sound of her heartbeat and brainwaves are the sound of a young woman in love and are captured on that record and are forever floating out there. And then you have these sisters singing ‘we will always love you’ and it’s like, you can build an album around that.” **The Divine Chord (feat. MGMT & Johnny Marr)** RC: “I have a sneaking suspicion it’s about heartbreak from \[MGMT vocalist\] Andrew VanWyngarden’s point of view, although we’ve never spoken about it directly. I think I was just drawn to the very first line when he sings, ‘I still remember you.’ To me that said so much. Because sampling plays with time and remembering voices from the past, and when he sung that line I thought, ‘This is going to work.’ We were lucky enough Johnny Marr wanted to contribute. The Smiths are a huge part of my childhood and my youth. The day Johnny Marr’s guitar part came through with a note saying, ‘Guys, this is a brilliant track,’ it was just like, okay, I can die happy.” **Interstellar Love (feat. Leon Bridges)** RC: “It came about through spending a lot of time in LA. Leon was there, I was there, and then we got to work at Sunset Sound studios in the same room Prince had recorded, so of course Leon and me were both freaking out about that. It was an incredible experience, and I’m just so grateful that people came to this record so open. They’re big themes, and I don’t think just anyone could have walked in and embraced that and tapped into something very personal and sincere in their own lives. It’s pretty incredible that people are prepared to be so intimate. The vocals definitely aren’t just dialed in and plonked on top of the track.” **Oh The Sunn! (feat. Perry Farrell)** Tony Di Blasi: “That was one of those really surreal events where we’re in the taxi on the way to Perry Farrell’s house in Santa Monica and we get a text saying, ‘Do you guys like Indian food and is there anything you don’t eat?’ And we arrive and there’s Perry Farrell and just his look and his voice are so unique. It’s just one of those things where you’re like, ‘Wow, this is actually happening.’ Before we even started, we just sat there for an hour and got to know each other and ate this wonderful food and this amazing ice cream. And then we ended up going down to record the vocals, and he’s just so open and creative. He was making up lines as he was walking around the house and singing them out really loud and I was just sitting there and I looked at Robbie like, ‘That’s Perry Farrell up there making up these melodies to one of our songs, and we’re in his home.’ Moments like that hit you.” **We Go On (feat. Cola Boyy & Mick Jones)** TDB: “It’s a bit of an oddball one. And the cast of characters in it is Karen Carpenter, Cola Boyy, and Mick Jones’ voices all together. It’s wild, but it’s also so beautiful, the way it’s sung. It’s hitting that spot between the happiness and the sadness, which is a beautiful feeling.” RC: “Even though it’s one of the least Avalanchesy-sounding ones, I just love it. It works on different levels. Karen’s voice is so beautiful and her story’s so sad and there’s all that history and meaning, and then there’s Mick Jones and Cola Boyy, who’s one of the most inspiring people I’ve ever met, and a great friend, a true anarchist, but it’s great the way it ties in around Karen’s voice. ‘We go on hurting each other’ says so much, especially the way the world is today. That line makes me quite sad.” **Take Care in Your Dreaming (Denzel Curry, Tricky & Sampa the Great)** RC: “It’s kind of a melancholy song. Sometimes it sounds upbeat to me and sometimes it doesn’t. It was an incredible moment in the studio from Denzel Curry. We spoke quite deeply about my personal journey and what the song meant to me and unfulfilled dreams and a journey from darkness to light. And to see someone around strangers be open and vulnerable and really tell a story from the heart was really moving to watch him do that.” TDB: “And he just wrote that on the spot too. There are these moments where you go, ‘Wow, this guy from nothing has created that.’ And it wasn’t until quite later, when we really listened to the lyrics, that we realized how much he’d opened himself up in that song and talked about all these really personal, horrible things that had happened to him.” **Gold Sky (feat. Kurt Vile)** RC: “Kurt is one in a million. I remember listening to some of his records back in dark times and they sort of got me through. I had a few paragraphs written down in an email about what this record is about, and some people would say, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Maybe we should work together in the future.’ But he was just one of those people who said, ‘I’ve got it,’ and then gave his own slant on it. It’s got this rambling preacher spoken-word vibe. I didn’t expect to get that back from him.” TDB: “I remember going over to Robbie’s place and he said, ‘I’ve got this vocal from Kurt Vile, let me know what you think of it,’ and he played it and I just remember going, ‘This is one of the best things I’ve ever heard.’ It sounded perfect from the get-go. I was so blown away and just said, ‘Play it again.’” **Dial D for Devotion (feat. Karen O)** RC: “That was lovely. That was done remotely. They’re some of \[late Silver Jews frontman\] David Berman’s words. She was kind enough to go out on a limb with words that weren’t her own. It was lovely getting the recording back because it’s almost like I could hear someone doing the dishes in the background and then I could hear a dog barking outside. And not anyone could have done that.” **Running Red Lights (feat. Rivers Cuomo & Pink Siifu)** TDB: “We got a spreadsheet, I think Rivers’ assistant had sent it, with three different lyrical ideas. And we were like, ‘We’d love to hear the melodies that go along with them,’ so he ended up singing all three melodies and was like, ‘Let us know which ones you want.’ And we said, ‘Can we have them all?’ We got to meet Rivers when he was in Australia; Weezer were playing with Foo Fighters. We were googling all these amazing bars to take him to, cool places Melbourne has to offer, and we had a list of things we were going to do with him. It ended up raining, so we just took some umbrellas out of the hotel he was staying in and all he wanted to do was walk around in the rain. And then we went to a Starbucks and drank coffee for an hour and walked back and that was it. And that ended up being heaps cooler than anything we could have planned.” **Wherever You Go (feat. Jamie xx, Neneh Cherry & CLYPSO)** RC: “Our friend Jamie xx worked on that track with us, which was such a wonderful experience. We have a common love of working with samples, so it was a dream come true. I would send him lots and lots of demos for fun, and he used to call that track the banger; he was always like, ‘I love the banger. Send me the banger, I want to work on the banger.’ And he must have heard something in it, because it was quite slow before he got his hands on it. You can hear it speeding up as he’s trying to put some more energy into it. And of course working with CLYPSO from Sydney, it feels like we’ve made a great new friend.” TDB: “And of course there’s Neneh Cherry, who we met maybe six months before she recorded with us. It was backstage after her show, and there’s always lots of people there. We know what it’s like: Everyone’s trying to talk to you, and you can be like, ‘I just want to relax, I just played a show.’ But to everyone she was so welcoming and kind. They’re the type of people we want to work with.”

Surprise-dropping a career-redefining album in the midst of a paralyzing global pandemic is an admirable flex; doing it *again* barely five months later is a display of confidence and concentration so audacious that you’re within your rights to feel personally chastised. Like *folklore*, *evermore* is a team-up with Aaron Dessner, Jack Antonoff, and Justin Vernon, making the most of cozy home-studio vibes for more bare-bones arrangements and bared-soul lyrics, casually intimate and narratively rich. There is an expanded guest roster here—HAIM appears on “no body, no crime,” which seems to place Este Haim in the center of a small-town murder mystery, while Dessner’s bandmates in The National are on “coney island”—but they fit themselves into the mood rather than distract from it. (The percussive “long story short” sounds like it could have been on any National album in the past decade.) Elsewhere, “\'tis the damn season” is the elegaic home-for-the-holidays ballad this busted year didn’t realize it needed. But while so much of *folklore*’s appeal involved marveling at how this setting seemed to have unlocked something in Swift, the only real shock here is the timing of the release itself. Beyond that, it’s an extension and confirmation of its predecessor’s promises and charms, less a novelty driven by unprecedented circumstances and instead simply a thing she happens to do and do well.

”My personal life is a disaster,” Halsey tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, reflecting on the consequence of her meteoric rise from indie outsider to pop superstar. Many of the songs on the 25-year-old’s emotional third album *Manic* were written from the eye of the storm. “I’m impulsive, uncensored, leading with emotion rather than logic, zipping all over the place like, ‘What if this song sounded like The Beach Boys? What if six of them don\'t have any drums?’” The result is a poetic and courageous work that traces heartbreak, health, and personal growth. “This whole album isn’t about Gerald,” she says, anticipating that the public’s attention will inevitably zero in on her breakup with rapper G-Eazy. \"A lot of it is a reconnaissance of things I never got to work through because I was 19 and I was Halsey. I didn\'t have time for self-care because I had to be composed. And I got too composed —that was part of the problem.” Below, she shares the inside story behind some of the album’s most personal songs. **Ashley** “Starting the album with my real name is a comfortable entry point for people, like saying, \'Hey, I\'m still here, but I\'m going to take you down on a different journey right now.\' A lot of this album was written as I became more aware of my mortality. Sometimes I\'m on top of the world and I\'ve never felt better in my life. Other days I\'m like, \'If I keep doing this, I\'m going to die.’ This song is an introduction and a warning: It’s saying, ‘Here\'s this album that I had to cut myself open to make, and will continue to cut myself open to tour, promote, and explain, but I don\'t know how many more of these you\'re going to get.\'” **Forever ... (is a long time)** \"Every album of mine has what we call a trio: three songs smack in the middle that serve as a transition and are meant to be listened to in succession. On *Manic*, it’s \'Forever ... (is a long time),\' \'Dominic\'s Interlude,\' and \'I HATE EVERYBODY.’ On this song, I\'m falling in love. The instrumental is major, all these beautiful twinkling tones, and birds are singing, everything’s sweet, it\'s Cinderella. And then I start getting in my own head. The piano comes in and it\'s this stream-of-consciousness train of thought that modulates from major to minor to show my mood shifting from optimistic to anxious. And now I\'m sabotaging this relationship and feeling paranoid, this is going to be bad. And then \[singer-songwriter\] Dominic \[Fike, on \"Dominic\'s Interlude\"\] tells me I’d better go tell my man he’s got bad news coming.” **I HATE EVERYBODY** “At some point I kind of put my foot down and was like, ‘Here\'s what we\'re not going to do is make all my music about whoever I\'m dating. This album is about me. I should matter enough on my own. I shouldn\'t be desirable because some rock star you think is cool thinks I’m desirable. That\'s not what this is anymore, and it never should have been.\' But when you\'re young, your insecurities get the best of you sometimes, and \'I HATE EVERYBODY’ is about that. It’s thinking, ‘Well, they respect his opinion, so if he likes me, they will too.\' Whoa. Wrong. No-no-no. This should be about me.” **Finally** “I was like, ‘I need a wedding song. I need a first dance song.’ I wrote it at home in my living room at two in the morning when I was dating Dom \[YUNGBLUD\]. I’d been thinking about the night we met—I had told the story so many times and every time it got more romantic—and realized I’d never written a love song before, not one without a punchline. And it’s just a very nice, sweet song. At first, I was kind of like, eh… It wasn’t crazy enough. But I sent it to a couple friends, who said it was the best song I’d ever written. I was like, ‘What? It’s just me and a guitar.’ And they were like, ‘Yeah, that’s the point.’” **Alanis’ Interlude** “A big flex. The biggest flex. I wrote her a letter and she was nine months pregnant, maybe a little less, and I tried to tell her what an irrevocable impact she’d had on my life. I told her I would never have been brave enough to say the things I’ve said if she hadn’t said them first, and that I was making a record about all the important parts of me and I couldn’t imagine making it without her. And she said yes. The interludes represent different relationships in my life: Dom represents brotherly love and Alanis represents sexual and professional empowerment.” **killing boys** “It’s about being so enraged that you’re like, I\'m going to break into his house, go in his room, sit him down, and be like, \'Listen, motherfucker, you\'re going to talk to me right now.\' Like, I\'m going to wear a black hoodie. My friend\'s going to drive. It\'s pseudo based on a real story of when I actually did bust into somebody\'s house looking for answers about something. It was back in a time when I was really manic and would be like, \'No, my only option is to go over there and cause a scene.\' It goes: \'I climb up to the window and I break in the glass/But I stop \'cause I don\'t want to Uma Thurman your ass.\' It’s satirical, but I’m mad.” **More** \"I\'ve been really open about my struggles with reproductive health, about wanting to freeze my eggs and having endometriosis and things like that. For a long time, I didn\'t think that having a family was something I was going to be able to do, and it’s very, very important to me. Then one day my OB-GYN tells me it\'s looking like I maybe can, and I was so moved. It felt like this ascension into a different kind of womanhood. All of a sudden, everything is different. I\'m not going to go tour myself to death because I have nothing else to do and I\'m overcompensating for not being able to have this other thing that I really want. Now, I have a choice. I\'ve never had a choice before. Lido \[the producer Peder Losnegård\] and I built the fading instrumental at the end of the song to sound like a sonogram, like you were hearing the sounds from inside a womb. It\'s one of the most special songs I\'ve ever made.”

A general observation: You don’t go see Rick Rubin at Shangri-La if you’re just going to fuck around. For their sixth LP, The Strokes turn to the Mage of Malibu to produce their most focused collection of songs since 2003’s *Room on Fire*—the very beginning of a period marked by discord, disinterest, and addiction. Only their fourth record since, *The New Abnormal* finds the fivesome sounding fully engaged and totally revitalized, offering glimpses of themselves as we first came to know them at the turn of the millennium—young saviors of rock, if not its last true stars—while also providing the sort of perspective and even grace that comes with age. “Bad Decisions” is at turns riffy and elegiac, Julian Casablancas’ corkscrewing chorus melody a close enough relative to 1981’s “Dancing With Myself” that Billy Idol and Tony James are credited as songwriters. Though not as immediate, “Not the Same Anymore” is equally toothsome, a heart-stopping soul number that manages to capture feelings of both triumph and deep regret, with Casablancas opening himself up and delivering what might be his finest vocal performance to date. “I was afraid,” he sings, amid a weave of cresting guitars. “I fucked up/I couldn’t change/It’s too late.” For a band that forged an entire mythology around appearing as though they couldn’t be bothered, this is an exciting development. It’s cool to care, too.

‘Sun Racket’ is the brand new album from legendary Boston trio Throwing Muses, consisting of Kristin Hersh, David Narcizo and Bernard Georges. The follow up to 2013’s ‘Purgatory/Paradise’ is an outpouring of modal guitars, reverbed shapes, echoey drums and driving bass set behind Kristen Hersh’s well-thumbed notebook of storylines. A ten-song opus of suitably wrought tales set against a wall of sound that’s at once calm and ethereal before building into glorious cacophonous crescendos. When Throwing Muses wrote their last album, they were shattered. Pieces were coming and going, elements repeating and charging the whole. “It sounded beautiful jumping around like that”. Two-minute songs reappearing as twisted instrumentals or another song’s bridge. They mimicked the effect live which kept them on their toes. Whatever was happening was already over in other words. ‘Sun Racket’ is the opposite. It refused to do anything but sit still. It says, “sit here and deal”. “All it asked of us was to comingle two completely disparate sonic vocabularies: one heavy noise, the other delicate music box. Turns out we didn’t have to do much. Sun Racket knew what it was doing and pushed us aside, which is always best. After thirty years of playing together, we trust each other implicitly but we trust the music more” - Kristin Hersh And so, they continue. Business unusual.

Adam Schlesinger was a prodigious and prolific songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist. He died on April 1 at the age of 52 as the result of complications from COVID-19. Not only was Schlesinger in multiple beloved bands—including the power-pop-leaning Fountains of Wayne and sophisticated electro-pop act Ivy—but he also collaborated on songs for movie soundtracks and the TV show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. A wide array of artists touched by Schlesinger's life pay tribute to the many musical projects of which he was a part via the Bandcamp-exclusive benefit compilation, Saving for a Custom Van. The 31-song collection features collaborators, tourmates, friends, and fans putting their own spin on songs spanning his entire career. Saving for a Custom Van, which takes its title from a lyric in Fountains of Wayne's "Utopia Parkway," is co-curated and co-released by Father/Daughter Records and Wax Nine. One-hundred percent of Saving for a Custom Van proceeds will be donated to MusiCares' COVID-19 Relief Fund, which is dedicated to helping music industry and community members affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. www.grammy.com/musicares/get-help/musicares-coronavirus-relief-fund waxninerecords.bandcamp.com fatherdaughterrecords.bandcamp.com Special Thanks Michael Krumper, Chris Collingwood, Jaime Herman, David Shaw, Mariah Czap, Ben Weber, Megan Frestedt, Josh Newman, Matt McGreevey, Darin Harmon, Grant McCallum, Jaime Herman, Briana Aynsley, Henderson Cole, Mike Caulo, Sharon Agnello, Greg Calbi & Steve Fallone at Sterling Sound, Nicole Rifkin, Jon Landman, Joe McGinnis, and Graham Rothenberg at The Syndicate, and Annie Zaleski.

*McCartney III* is obviously not Paul McCartney’s third solo album. (It’s his 18th.) What binds this with its two eponymous forebears, beyond any particular stylistic thread, is its reaction to some sort of major dissolution. *McCartney* followed The Beatles’ sudden and bitter breakup in 1970, *McCartney II* came at the end of Wings’ decade-long run in 1980, and the 2020 edition, performed and recorded by himself at his studio near his home in Sussex, England, of course, results from the breakdown in normal everyday life and society. “It was really good to be able to play music, and make up music, and put your thoughts and your fears and your hopes and your love into the music,” McCartney tells Apple Music. “So it kind of saved me, I must say, for about three or four months it took to make it.” Bookended by acoustic songs about birds—certainly in the man’s wheelhouse—much of the album feels appropriately homespun, unadorned and immediate, taking pride in its lack of fuss as it slides from style to style. “Slidin’” is as heavy and sludgy as “Find My Way” is playful and “The Kiss of Venus” is fragile. And he embraces his formidable past, which helps *III* earn its legacy. “Lavatory Lil” can’t help but feel like a sonic and spiritual cousin to “Polythene Pam,” while “Seize the Day” channels his pre-Wings band in a way that McCartney himself was initially alarmed by. “I wrote that on piano,” he says. “I\'m thinking, \'Yeah, I like this,\' but then you check yourself, you go, \'Is this too Beatle-y? Do I need to kind of stop and get radical here somewhere?\' The chorus, the descending bassline—it\'s very Beatle-y, but you know what? Once you\'re done that little question and said, \'Should I be doing this?\' the answer is, yes, you should. Just embrace this whole thing and have some fun.”

They began by just playing the hits. In 2017, nearly eight years after Doves had last picked up their instruments together, drummer Andy Williams and his twin brother, guitarist Jez, gave bassist/singer Jimi Goodwin a call. Come over to Andy’s studio, they said, and let’s see if we can remember how to play “Black and White Town” and “There Goes the Fear”—just for fun. “It came back really quickly,” Andy tells Apple Music. “We were all laughing and having fun. As a drummer, hearing that bass—*his* bass—instantly felt very familiar, in a good sense. Pretty soon, there was a real enthusiasm and hunger from us to work together.” When they went on hiatus after 2009’s excellent *Kingdom of Rust* album, Doves were fatigued. They’d been together for a quarter of a century, serving up four albums as one of Britain’s best and more adventurous indie-rock trios—plus one before that as house specialists Sub Sub. They were never meant to disappear for a decade, but when you’ve got families and side projects (the Williams brothers as Black Rivers, Goodwin with his 2014 solo album *Odludek*), life gets in the way. “I don’t want to sound boastful, but I think there’s a chemistry between us three that you don’t run into every day,” Andy says. “That time away from each other has helped us appreciate that.” Fizzing with that chemistry, *The Universal Want* sounds like a Doves album precisely because it doesn’t sound like any other Doves album. The exquisitely measured mix of euphoria and sorrow is familiar, but by experimenting with Afrobeat, dub, and keyboards foraged from behind the Iron Curtain, the trio continues to expand their horizons on every song. “We didn’t attempt to resurrect another ‘The Cedar Room’ or ‘There Goes the Fear,’ because it’s a recipe for disaster when you chase your own tail,” says Andy. “It’s really important for us three to be excited and feel like we’re moving forward.” Let him guide you through that evolution, track by track. **Carousels** “Originally, it started life as Black Rivers and we couldn’t get it to work. We put it down for a while, then Jez had a look at it again. He’d bought a Tony Allen breakbeat album and just sampled some breaks. It just clicked—the song came alive. We felt it was a bit of a progression for us, so it felt like a good song to introduce ourselves back to people again. Lyrically, it’s a bit of a nostalgia thing. We all used to go out to funfairs as kids up here in the North West, and every summer we’d go to a place called Harlech in North Wales and there’d be a funfair near there. It’s a nostalgic look back at that era when you used to hear music for the first time, loud, on loudspeakers, and that excitement at the fair—trying to recapture that feeling. The music’s trying to push it forward, but lyrically, it’s looking back, so there’s that juxtaposition.” **I Will Not Hide** “Really fun memories of making this. Jimi loves his sampling, so when he played it to us, it was like, ‘Wow! What’s going on there?’ I couldn’t really fathom out the lyrics. I mean, I put a couple of lines in there myself, but I still don’t fully understand what it’s about. I don’t think Jimi does. But we quite like that place sometimes, where it’s almost a train of thought. Jimi’s demo stopped, I think, at chorus two. We just looked at the chords, me and Jez, and tacked the guitar section onto the end. That’s the nice thing about Doves—when people present ideas to the band, it goes through the filter of all three of us and it can change. That’s when it’s working well between us three, when someone has an initial idea and then the other two run with it.” **Broken Eyes** “Early doors, we found an old hard drive with loads of material on, stuff we hadn’t actually ever managed to finish, and this was one \[from the *Kingdom of Rust* sessions\]. We were like, ‘Oh, that’s got real heart and soul. Let’s tackle that again.’ Last time, we were maybe overcomplicating it, so we stripped it away and kept it simple. It always had a different lyric, right up until the 11th hour, actually. It had a very different vibe. Jimi sounds brilliant on this. When he did the vocal, it was hairs-on-the-back-of-the-neck stuff. That’s when you know you’re on the right path. You just hit a brick wall sometimes with songs. I read a Leonard Cohen book and I think he was talking about ‘Tower of Song,’ that it took him 20 years to finish. Started it, put it down, picked it up again, kept going back to it. If a song’s got strength in it, it will keep knocking on your door. We’ve got other songs which I’m hoping we can look at again at some point. There’s a couple of things where I’ve gone, ‘Do you remember this one?’ And it was, ‘Oh no, I can’t.’ Because we’d absolutely hammered it at the time and not made it work, and no one’s ready to go back to that place.” **For Tomorrow** “Again, we had those chords for the chorus kicking round for a while but we never really had a song. The high string in the verses, we were like, ‘Oh god, look, it’s got that kind of Isaac Hayes classic soul thing we were going for.’ I know it didn’t necessarily end up that way, but that’s what we were going for in our heads. We did it live in the room, and I remember going back in the control room and going, ‘Ah, it’s just coming together.’ I’ve got really fond memories, a couple of moments of like, ‘Yeah.’ It’s a really fun one to play on the drums.” **Cathedrals of the Mind** “Initially it was from a Black Rivers session—another song that, down the line, Jimi heard and really loved and worked on with us. We were booked to go to Anglesey, me and Jez, in 2016. We were due to set off at nine in the morning, but at six o’clock, my wife wakes me up and says, ‘Bowie’s passed.’ I couldn’t take it in—like the whole world, I guess. I remember driving to Anglesey with 6 Music on, they cleared their schedule and were just talking about Bowie. We got to Anglesey and it was like, ‘Fucking hell.’ I’m not saying we wrote this song for him, but I think it was an unconscious thing. Jez had some chords and I tried a couple of different grooves. It didn’t work, and I tried that sort of dub groove, and that was the start of the song. The lyrics, as well—‘In the back room/In the ballroom/I hear them calling your name…/Everywhere I see those eyes.’ I think we were referencing the passing of such a musical icon. He was such a towering figure, cultural figure. Him passing felt like your own mortality, essentially.” **Prisoners** “It’s the love affair with northern soul that we’ve had for years. Very English lyrics. The Jam was one reference when we were doing the lyrics, ‘Town Called Malice.’ It was written way before the situation we’re in \[2020’s lockdown\], but it’s got some sort of resonance. We’ve all been stuck in our houses and we’re only just starting to come out. But it’s also got a sense of hope. The chorus is ‘We’re just prisoners of these times/Although it won’t be for long.’ So there is a sense of hope with that. We let everybody know our struggles, I guess, but it’s good to have a sense of hope in there.” **Cycle of Hurt** “Jez came with that \[robotic voice\] sample and those chords. They’re probably the most direct lyrics \[on the album\]. It’s referencing a relationship really, and just trying to get out of a cycle of hurt—a cycle of thought that you’re trapped in. They’re quite collaborative, these lyrics. A lot of them that are \[about being\] just locked in a cycle of your own thought, really, and trying to break free from that. There’s definite references to trying to keep your own mental health on track. Looking back on it, that’s a subject we’ve definitely returned to on this record. We felt this \[track\] was really good for the album because there weren’t really deep strings on the rest of the record, and it just brings a new sound for your ears to keep your interest up.” **Mother Silverlake** “The end result doesn’t bear any relation to an Afrobeat song, but that’s what we had in our heads—something that felt new to us, we’ve never really attempted that. Jez and Jimi combined \[on the\] vocal—that was really nice to hear those two singing together in the studio, the mix of their two voices. Martin Rebelski’s pianos really uplift the chorus. It’s a feel-good track, but the lyrics are slightly melancholic, almost referencing our mum, who’s still around, thank god. We always try and make music as uplifting as possible, or as joyous as possible. It might be offset with more melancholic lyrics, but overall we always want it to be an uplifting experience.” **Universal Want** “I started it in my studio as a ballad. I never intended it to be like a house workout at the end. I was thinking of just a two-and-a-half-minute song about the universal want—this question of always chasing something, be it consumerism or some aspect of your life where you think you’re going to be happy. But Jez took it away and he obviously saw something else for the end section and thought of welding this house section onto the end. I couldn’t believe it when I heard it, it was just so unpredictable, and I hope that unpredictability carries through to the listener. I guess it’s kind of a reference to our past, our Sub Sub days—a cheeky doff of the cap to that era. It was a very formative era for all of us.” **Forest House** “Again, this had been knocking around for a while and we were never able to master it, didn’t ever find the key to unlock it. It just felt like it was a really intimate way to finish the record—a small way to wind the album down. A simple song, but with Jez’s Russian keyboard in there—this old Russian ’60s monster of an analog keyboard. It’s almost got a dystopian sound. Once that got brought into the song, it was like, ‘Yeah.’”

The most surprising thing about Tricky’s 14th album isn’t how dark it is (Tricky fans are used to the darkness by now), but how to the point. These are short songs, most under three minutes. And while his landmark albums had a dense, phantasmagoric quality, *Fall to Pieces* is clean and stripped down. The moods are still liminal: “Hate This Pain” sounds like someone murmuring through a nightmare, “Running Off” like someone trying to remember a strange old nursery rhyme. (His newest collaborator, vocalist Marta Złakowska, is perfect—eerie and innocent and seductive all at once.) But in the clarity of the sound lies a challenge: He might make the pain pretty (“I’m in the Doorway”) or even danceable (“Fall Please”), but he doesn’t let you settle into it. He’s always been a blues musician at heart, just visionary enough to avoid the blues per se. *Fall to Pieces* is his lonesome motel confession.

In the third installment of Black Thought\'s *Streams of Thought* series, the Roots\' frontman links with producer Sean C for a fiery display of the sharp lyricism that consistently keeps the rapper in conversations about the greats. He\'s joined by a star-studded cast that includes Killer Mike and Pusha T (the charged “Good Morning”) and ScHoolboy Q (the sinister “Steak Um”) and pleasantly surprising cameos from indie rockers Portugal. The Man alongside Portland rapper and singer The Last Artful, Dodgr. *Streams of Thought, Vol. 3* strikes a balance between disparate sounds and modes with ease—whether in political screeds or in personal confessions, soul, hip-hop, and tinges of rock congeal for a collection that feels at once immediate and requiring repeated listening. Black Thought takes aim at systems and institutions as well as mentalities that keep those who look like him in a perpetual state of war and survival, and true to the reputation he\'s earned, no one gets out unscathed.

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

“I just wanted people to see me broken down and to know that I’m not afraid to be broken down,” Angel Olsen tells Apple Music. “In fact, my whole life had broken down.” The singer is discussing why she chose to release *Whole New Mess*—a collection of raw, unvarnished tracks largely made up of demo-like recordings of the songs that would later become souped up and string-laden on 2019’s stunningly ambitious *All Mirrors*. “Originally, I wanted both to come out at the same time,” she explains. “But I wanted to make an honest account—untampered with by anybody. This was just me, the way that I would make demos.” Recorded at a church-turned-studio in Anacortes, Washington (“I couldn’t do it at home; I was still sitting in a lot of the feelings from the songs and I wanted to have a place to cook them”), *Whole New Mess* is a world away from the drama of *All Mirrors*, those galloping melodies and theatrical strings stripped away to leave a lone guitar, the occasional organ, and Olsen’s unmistakable vocals. *Whole New Mess* is, as the singer put it, “ragged,\" at times crackling as though it were an old vinyl LP. “It’s purposefully a mess,” she says, “because that’s how things are. A lot of the time, cleaning it up is the process. And I like to show where things start and how messy they are before they get to a point where they’re digestible for people when they come out.” Still, the record is as haunting as you’d expect, Olsen’s voice taking on an almost celestial quality on songs like “(Summer Song),” “Too Easy (Bigger Than Us),” or “Chance (Forever Love)” as it carries the full weight of the experiences and emotions that fueled these tracks. The dissolution of a relationship may have hit before they were written, but Olsen bristles at the idea that any of them document that alone. “I find it really infantilizing the way people just look at my work as heartbreak,” she says. “All I’m asking is for people to look a little further. That’s all.” Instead, this is an album “inspired by what I’ve been doing, by traveling constantly, by writing constantly for the last seven years and the things that I’ve learned,” she says. “It’s about the hardship that I’ve had to confront with people—not just romantically but just by accidentally \[building\] a business from the ground up and having to learn a lot of things along the way, the hard way.” By drawing the walls of her music in, she hopes people will see another side to her. “When I go out into the music world and I build my platform, I’m putting on wigs and glam dresses and putting on tons of makeup. Normally, when I get home, it’s a different story. It’s a different person. It’s a different life. I wanted to do something that was a little bit closer to who I actually am.” *Whole New Mess* is the first time the singer has delivered an album without a band since 2012’s *Half Way Home*. Doing it this way was, in part, a way of going back to her early songs and rediscovering how to, as she says, “feel strong in myself again outside of relying on so many band members or collaborators.” But it was also a necessary step to emancipate herself from these tracks, in order to let those same people back in to help her create the majesty of *All Mirrors*. And sitting in—and then letting go of—darker times to pave the way for something more beautiful chimes well with Olsen’s world view. “There’s a lot of hatred and anger and frustration happening in the world right now, and there’s a lot of destruction,” she says. “But all of that needs to happen before there can be progress. We really need to reexamine the way that we live, because we want to continue to live in this world and continue to be able to share the things that we enjoy. I really stand by ‘whole new mess’ as a phrase. I want to inspire people to think about what that means, whether it has to do with me personally and what I intended, or whether it inspires them to want to reexamine or look at those things in their own reality. I think there\'s a huge reckoning going on, and I\'ve been really inspired.”

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

Everything changed for The Beths when they released their debut album, Future Me Hates Me, in 2018. The indie rock band had long been nurtured within Auckland, New Zealand’s tight-knit music scene, working full-time during the day and playing music with friends after hours. Full of uptempo pop rock songs with bright, indelible hooks, the LP garnered them critical acclaim from outlets like Pitchfork and Rolling Stone, and they set out for their first string of shows overseas. They quit their jobs, said goodbye to their hometown, and devoted themselves entirely to performing across North America and Europe. They found themselves playing to crowds of devoted fans and opening for acts like Pixies and Death Cab for Cutie. Almost instantly, The Beths turned from a passion project into a full-time career in music. Songwriter and lead vocalist Elizabeth Stokes worked on what would become The Beths’ second LP, Jump Rope Gazers, in between these intense periods of touring. Like the group’s earlier music, the album tackles themes of anxiety and self-doubt with effervescent power pop choruses and rousing backup vocals, zeroing in on the communality and catharsis that can come from sharing stressful situations with some of your best friends. Stokes’s writing on Jump Rope Gazers grapples with the uneasy proposition of leaving everything and everyone you know behind on another continent, chasing your dreams while struggling to stay close with loved ones back home. "If you're at a certain age, all your friends scatter to the four winds,” Stokes says. “We did the same thing. When you're home, you miss everybody, and when you're away, you miss everybody. We were just missing people all the time.” With songs like the rambunctious “Dying To Believe” and the tender, shoegazey “Out of Sight,” The Beths reckon with the distance that life necessarily drives between people over time. People who love each other inevitably fail each other. “I’m sorry for the way that I can’t hold conversations/They’re such a fragile thing to try to support the weight of,” Stokes sings on “Dying to Believe.” The best way to repair that failure, in The Beths’ view, is with abundant and unconditional love, no matter how far it has to travel. On “Out of Sight,” she pledges devotion to a dearly missed friend: “If your world collapses/I’ll be down in the rubble/I’d build you another,” she sings. “It was a rough year in general, and I found myself saying the words, 'wish you were here, wish I was there,’ over and over again,” she says of the time period in which the album was written. Touring far from home, The Beths committed themselves to taking care of each other as they were trying at the same time to take care of friends living thousands of miles away. They encouraged each other to communicate whenever things got hard, and to pay forward acts of kindness whenever they could. That care and attention shines through on Jump Rope Gazers, where the quartet sounds more locked in than ever. Their most emotive and heartfelt work to date, Jump Rope Gazers stares down all the hard parts of living in communion with other people, even at a distance, while celebrating the ferocious joy that makes it all worth it--a sentiment we need now more than ever.

Some years you have to wonder how Public Enemy sustains such righteous indignation. Others—let’s say 2020, just for example—you wonder why everyone isn’t as angry as they are. That they have strong thoughts on the 45th president of the United States isn’t surprising (“State of the Union”), nor is their crusade to uphold old-school values about hip-hop and art in a frictionless digital world (“Public Enemy Number Won,” “Toxic,” the Ice-T-featuring “Smash the Crowd”). The surprise is how vital, engaged, and unflinchingly on message Chuck D and Flavor Flav sound this side of their 60th birthdays, and on their prodigal return to Def Jam. If you think YG’s line “Pull the trigger, kill a negro/He\'s a hero” on the revamp of “Fight the Power” sounds hyperbolic, remember George Zimmerman and welcome to Kyle Rittenhouse. Breonna Taylor is mentioned, but because systemic racism comes in many forms and flavors, so are Craig Hodges and Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf. And if PE\'s politics seem preoccupying, listen to “R.I.P. Blackat”—their feelings about friends are just as strong. Yes, they’ve been confronting us with the same stark reality for more than three decades. But that’s not their fault, it’s the world’s. And that’s the double-truth, Ruth.

Over the last 20 years, a Pearl Jam studio album has come to signal more of something else—more tour dates, more bootlegs, more live films and live albums, more reason for them to come together onstage, that place that’s come to define them most this millennium. But *Gigaton*—the Seattle rock outfit’s first LP since 2013’s *Lightning Bolt*, and a clear response to our current political moment—feels different: Self-recorded and self-produced in tandem with longtime band associate Josh Evans, their 11th full-length merges the sheer power and unpredictability of their live experience with an experimental streak they haven’t embraced so fully since the late ’90s. For every midtempo guitar workout (“Quick Escape” is especially heavy), there’s a sliver of Talking Heads-like post-punk (“Dance of the Clairvoyants,” in which bassist Jeff Ament and guitarist Stone Gossard swap instruments). Where there’s a weathered acoustic ballad (“Comes Then Goes” finds Eddie Vedder at his Who-iest), there’s also a psychedelic lullaby (“Buckle Up,” whose lyrics and kazoo-like backup vocals come via Gossard). It’s an album whose anthemic moments (see: the six-minute epic “Seven O’Clock,” whose cloud-parting coda bears echoes of Duran Duran’s “Ordinary World”) are matched—if not enriched—by its subtleties, namely a welcome attention to texture and arrangement. And with every band member represented in various phases of the songwriting process, it’s arguably their most collaborative studio effort to date, as clear a document of the chemistry they’ve developed over three decades as anything they’ve recorded live. “In the end, when we listened to it, it\'s like we really achieved something,” Gossard tells Apple Music. “It’s really us.”

“These songs are about joy, hope, and resilience,” John Legend tells Apple Music. “The power of the human spirit.” His upbeat seventh album *Bigger Love* was largely recorded in 2019, before a pandemic and mass protests swept the globe, but its message is no less relevant or uplifting: Love wins. Shaped by the same wrecking crew from his blockbuster Christmas album, including Raphael Saadiq as executive producer, the songs here serve as a bridge between vintage and modern Black music; he hat-tips The Flamingos and Marvin Gaye, reimagines trap drums, and flirts with Afro-Caribbean rhythms. Equally exciting are the young hitmakers (Tayla Parx, Cautious Clay, and Anderson .Paak are a few) and clever collaborations (bluesman Gary Clark Jr., rising reggae sensation Koffee) peppered throughout, making these instant classics feel unmistakably now. Read on as Legend tells the story behind each song. **Ooh Laa** “Oak Felder, the lead producer on this track, had this idea to bring doo-wop and trap together, and since a lot of my career has been built on merging the old and new, I think he thought I was the perfect artist to try it with. We wanted to mix the 808 that you’d hear in trap music with the piano and doo-wop vocals of a bygone era, so we recorded our own sample version of ‘I Only Have Eyes for You’ \[a song most often credited to 1950s group The Flamingos\] and pieced everything together in a way that felt subtle. After a while, I started to feel like I knew what the heart of this album sounded like. It was vintage sounds with a modern sensibility. It was big. It was joyful. It was classic but contemporary at the same time.” **Actions** “This sample originally comes from a song called ‘The Edge’ by David McCallum, but of course we know it from ‘The Next Episode’ by Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg. When you hear it, it\'s immediate familiarity, an immediate connection to that era of hip-hop. Lyrically, it tells the story of a bachelor who isn’t ready to commit but writes all these love songs, and writing it took me back to that era—like 2003 or 2004, around *Get Lifted*—where I was writing all these romantic ballads but also being pretty messy and, you know, not living up to them. I guess now, as a happily married man with kids, this is how I relive it. One interesting thing about this song is that even though the ‘la-da-da-da-da’ reminds you of Snoop, it’s also a nod to the way I write songs, because I scat everything before I sort out the lyrics.” **I Do** “This is my kids\' favorite song, probably because the chorus is so easy for them to sing along to and it’s repetitive and fun. We have little dance parties at the house, and this is their favorite song to get down to. I wrote it with Charlie Puth, who is a pretty prolific producer and songwriter, and just full of energy and ideas. It came together really naturally despite the fact that we’re so different—he\'s bouncing off the walls, while I\'m pretty mellow. But we had great chemistry in the studio.” **One Life** “I\'m a huge fan of Anderson .Paak. I\'ve been listening to his albums for years, and he has the best grooves, they’re just so good. I’d wanted to write with him for a while now, and finally we were able to get together. We went up to his studio near Burbank and started jamming. Cautious Clay got on it, and Matt Jones did the strings, and it came together in a day.” **Wild (with Gary Clark Jr.)** “There\'s a UK songwriting company called TMS that wrote Lewis Capaldi’s ‘Someone You Loved,’ and a while back they reached out with a song they thought would be good for me. I changed a couple of the lyrics, but not much, and Raphael suggested we hit up Gary for a guitar solo. Of course, he graced us with his incredible skill and took the song to another level. At some point, I decided I wanted live drums to bring the intensity up a bit, so we brought in a drummer named Garrison Brown from Youngstown, Ohio, which is near where I grew up. We quickly put it together that my mom used to go to his church, and a pianist from his church had been a mentor to me. It’s a small world.” **Bigger Love** “I spent a while on this with Ryan Tedder and Cautious Clay, but it was missing the Afro-Caribbean rhythm that I wanted. I reached out to Di Genius and asked him to doctor it up, and he killed it. Natalie Imani sings on this track, and her part reminds me of those old house music songs with big, elevated gospel vocals. I always thought this would be a good album title—just the way it sounds and the message it sends—but I also think the energy of the album is *big*. It’s big because it has a diverse range of styles of music, it feels expansive and global, but it’s also big in its color and soulfulness and joy. That’s what I wanted, all the way down to the big, bright visuals. This song is about hope and optimism and resilience, the love that can get you through tough times. And that’s what this album is really about.” **U Move, I Move (feat. Jhené Aiko)** “I originally recorded this as a solo, but it felt like the right song to have a male-female duet since it’s about that interplay between two people who are in love and in tune with each other. Jhené had reached out about having me on her album \[*Chilombo*\] and I really loved our voices together, so it was an easy decision. Recording it was trickier. This is one of the songs that came together in quarantine, so I had to sing my idea of what I wanted the duet to be into my phone and send it to her, and wait to see what she sent back. I wasn’t sure how it was going to go, but she sounded incredible on the first take. Necessity is the mother of invention.” **Favorite Place** “It was me, Julia Michaels, and Jamil Chammas, or ‘Digi,’ in a room, and we were just riffing. Julia and I had written ‘What You Do to Me’ and ‘Surefire’ from \[2016’s\] *Darkness and Light*, so I knew she had an amazing sense of hook and melody. Like, she’s gifted. All of the songs she writes are really sexy, they have a certain sensuality to them, and this one came together really quickly.” **Slow Cooker** “Trey \[Campbell\] originally wrote this as a metaphor for someone who takes a while to react to life, who needs to think about things longer than other people. I was fine with that, but I thought it’d be cooler if we made the song sexier and about taking it slow in a more sensual way. I love a good food metaphor because Chrissy and I love to cook, so it felt like a perfect little tweak.” **Focused** “This is one of the older songs on the album, written back in 2017, and has a different vibe than the rest of the record, more acoustic and folksy. It kind of reminds me of an Otis Redding song. I love it. It\'s kind of seductive, and kind of everyman as well.” **Conversations in the Dark** “Gregg Wattenberg wrote this, and I loved the concept—that those small, intimate moments are some of the best parts of your relationship—but I just changed a few of the lyrics to feel more personal to me and my relationship with Chrissy. It’s about the simple things you do together when nobody else is around, like watching movies you’ve already seen and sleeping in on Sundays, and Chrissy and I could really relate to that. When it first came out, she said it was her favorite song since ‘All of Me.’” **Don\'t Walk Away (with Koffee)** “I wrote this with Di Genius, a Jamaican producer whose father is Freddie McGregor, a legendary Jamaican musician. So we were firmly in that place. I was thinking it\'d be cool to bring a Jamaican or African artist in to add to that Afro-Caribbean flavor, and I started doing my research, listening to young dancehall and reggae artists. I decided that Koffee would be great on this and wound up meeting her at the Grammys, and she was into it. I sent her the song not long after that, and she graced us with her presence.” **Remember Us (with Rapsody)** “I also met Rapsody on Grammy weekend. I went to the Roc Nation brunch looking to meet her because my brothers and I had been listening to her album and talking about how good it was, and I thought she’d be perfect for this song because I knew she could tell a great story. It needed soul. She wrote a couple verses and they were so special, full of references that really hit home for me. To be honest, I get emotional every time I hear it, because I think about Kobe and Nipsey and the tragic ways we lost them when they still had so much to bring to the world.” **I\'m Ready (feat. Camper)** “Me, Camper, and Tayla Parx were in the studio, and Camper played us a demo that was honestly kind of weird, like a loop of his voice without much other music, just an 808. But something about it reminded me of Marvin Gaye—his more haunting songs, the ones he did for *Here, My Dear* and his bluer songs about loss—so we wrote the rest along those lines. It’s my Marvin tribute in some ways.” **Always** “This was written for *Love in the Future* back in 2011 or 2012 and didn\'t make the cut. It wasn\'t one of Kanye\'s favorites, and we had other songs we were more excited about. But I played it for Raphael and he was so into it, so we brought it back, added some strings to it, and replayed some of the drums. Otherwise, it\'s pretty much the same song that Ester \[Dean\], Camper, and I wrote back then, and I’m glad we brought it back to life.” **Never Break** “I wrote this song with Mr Hudson, Nasri, and Greg Wells back in early 2019, and who knew how meaningful it would be now, during the pandemic and protests and all these things? It\'s an ode to love and hope and resilience, and the power of the human spirit, and I felt like it was the perfect way to close the album.”

Sadie Dupuis was seeking to combine the pop element from solo project Sad13 with the driving guitar rock of her band Speedy Ortiz into one coherent vision. \"I think on the first Sad13 record, because I was trying to do something different from Speedy, I was a little afraid to really use the guitars, which is clearly my primary instrument,\" the multi-instrumentalist tells Apple Music. \"And on this record, I just wanted to do really big-sounding pop. And if you go back in a lot of the ’80s pop I\'m referring to, I feel like arena-rock guitar solos are just what happened there.\" Sonically, *Haunted Painting* features 11 tracks that could fall anywhere on the vast indie-pop spectrum, whether it\'s the maximal hooks featured on \"Ghost (Of a Good Time)\" and \"Hysterical\" or darker synth-based tracks such as \"Good Grief\" and \"The Crow.\" But underneath the album\'s glossy veneer is Dupuis facing down death, eco-fascism, and her own OCD diagnosis—looking to the late David Berman as an example of how to blend black humor with bleak subjects. \"The brightest-sounding fun country songs would have these really bleak one-liners, and then songs that sounded totally maudlin would be hysterically funny at times,\" she says. \"So I\'m always kind of trying to seek that balance, too.\" Below, Dupuis discusses *Haunted Painting* track by track. **Into the Catacombs** “I really like opening tracks that set a mood that may be using the consistent tone of the record. I always think about the Unwound album *Leaves Turn Inside You*, which is like a several-minute drone. The song has been floating around since 2014, and I knew whenever I used it, it had to be an intro song. So I started working on it for the last Sad13 record and it just didn\'t really fit, so I\'m glad it finally made it onto an album.” **WTD?** “I sent the record to Jason DeMarco, who does just a lot of everything at Adult Swim, but certainly is like the music person. And he\'s sort of the reason that I\'ve been able to play at their festival and do a number of these singles. And so it was kind of a scramble to figure out how can we get one on there in time for it to be like before the record comes out. And I\'m really, I\'m always psyched to get to do stuff with them.” **Hysterical** “I wrote the song sort of in response to a bunch of comedians. I don\'t care for all of them making stupid comments to the press simultaneously about how woke culture has destroyed comedy or how not being racist is somehow destroying comedy. I think it\'s so great that I got to do this music video with the comedians that I really love who absolutely prove that it\'s such an outdated and like simplistic way to feel that not being cruel is not funny.“ **Ghost (Of a Good Time)** “I was thinking of a lot of like indie bands that go poppy for this one: of Montreal, certainly Thao & The Get Down Stay Down record was a big influence, the one that Merrill Garbus produced \[2016’s *A Man Alive*\]. I think, other than the sort of weird time signature breakdown, it\'s a pretty straightforward song. So I had a lot of fun bringing in different layers and removing them and just sort of subtly changing things as it goes along.” **Oops…!** “It\'s like a perfect drum sound that I feel like once you hear it on the first one, you deserve a second drum listen. I\'ve been wanting to work with Sarah Tudzin \[of illuminati hotties\] on a couple of songs.” **Good Grief** “This is another song that I\'ve been working on for a number of years and originally kind of wrote it almost like a country fingerpicking acoustic guitar song. And then when I revisited it for this record, I found this great synth sound for it. So it was like trying to find the balance between weird futuristic very off-sounding synth and then this sort of more traditional country ballad fingerpicking guitar stuff.” **Ruby Wand** “I feel like I just got in there and said what I needed to say. But what\'s really fun about it to me is all these little synth parts. I\'ve been trying to figure out how the heck I\'m going to do any of these for livestreams, if I had to do a radio session. And I was like, all right, there\'s like 15 different synth parts that I did at home. And then probably 20 more I did at the studio. It was this kind of wanting to get a guitar and bass sound that would push against that very rigid synth.” **With Baby** “Someone once asked me, ‘Are we dating? I need to tell my manager and publicist.’ And I thought it was so funny, and I just never forgot that line. Kind of made a song around it as a joke and then came back to it a couple of years later. And obviously I got rid of those lyrics and there\'s sort of nothing about that. And it became more about a public image and the internet. But this is another one that I kind of imagined it being a little bit country and then it wound up really, really \'80s.” **The Crow** “It\'s for sure the first time I\'ve read about the death of someone I didn\'t know personally, but there\'s so many sad and difficult things happening constantly and increasingly, and what a lot of us retreat to is art. So the loss of people who create that art can have a really baffling effect when you\'re sort of relying on them to help you process what\'s difficult. And that was sort of how I felt at the death of David Berman. His writing was so acute and incisive, but also funny, warm, and we really need voices like that. And I\'m thankful we got so much work from him.” **Take Care** “This is another one that I started a few years ago and I thought that I had just like sailed with it. And there were a couple songs like this where I had the session on my computer and I was like, let me just open it up and see what it\'s like. And it was basically all there. I wrote the woodwinds and the strings, and I don\'t have a great sense of how to write for those instruments. I took music theory in college for like a second, enough to write for a string quartet for like a final project. And that\'s the only experience I have. So it was a lot of like looking up how to write for an orchestra, like what ranges can they play? And I was really anxious about it, but it came out amazing.” **Market Hotel** “My rule for myself on this album was to not hit the four-minute point on any song, which is a challenge because all these songs have so many sections. So it would be like, even if the song was four minutes and two seconds long, I\'d be like, okay, we got to make a couple of full measures half measures so I can get under my arbitrary limit. I really believe in like getting in and getting out, but doing as much as possible while you\'re there. I was really thinking about like The Cars, Big Star, a lot of kind of power pop.”

$1 per album sale in 2020 will benefit Prevention Point Philadelphia, a harm reduction organization providing free medical care, syringe exchange, shelter, overdose reversal training, and other vital social services. Learn more about them at ppponline.org. For nearly a decade, Sadie Dupuis has been celebrated for her literary lyrics, accomplished guitar playing, and embodied ethos of empowerment, whether with rock band Speedy Ortiz or the pop-oriented solo project Sad13, which debuted in 2016 with Lizzo co-feature “Basement Queens.” It was followed by the self-produced Slugger, featuring “Get a Yes,” a glitter-bomb of an ode to consent, and other bedroom Top 40 tributes centering feminism and inclusivity. But in the ensuing years, reconciling with a delayed processing of grief, Dupuis felt unable to create new music. At the Frye Gallery in Seattle, a ghost spoke to her—or an approximation of one. It was an early 20th century painting of the dancer Saharet by German expressionist Franz von Stuck, one of many haunted-seeming gold-framed oil paintings in the gallery: washed-out faces, under-eye circles, expressions that told stories. Looking at these portraits, she related. And she started to write. Haunted Painting, Sad13’s second album and first for Dupuis’ label Wax Nine (Melkbelly, Johanna Warren), marks her return to artmaking. “Some of these songs feel like emotions that came from a cloud, and I was trying to translate them,” she says. But the scope of a Sad13 song is rarely only personal. As ever, Sad13 weaves timely societal critiques into rushing hooks and whip-smart wordplay that’s all still a blast: riffer “WTD” is about climate gentrification and billionaires’ consequent desire to colonize the ocean and space. Album opener “Into the Catacombs,” which melds orchestral strings with glitched-out horror sounds, came after a 2016 trip to Buenos Aires’ human rights memorial ESMA with her mother, Diane Dupuis—who also painted the Stuck-inspired cover image of her child as a ghost. Haunted Painting braids the political and the poetic, interests that extend to Dupuis’ recent work with No Music for ICE, the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers, and as editor of the newly-established Wax Nine poetry journal. It all finds Dupuis, already one of the sharpest lyricists of her generation, leveling up as an arranger and producer. Drawing inspiration from 1980s British pop-rock à la Tracy Ullman and Joan Armatrading, as well as the contemporary digital gloss of post-PC Music electronica, she calls Haunted Painting “decidedly non-minimal,” mixing technicolor synth-pop and math-rock dynamism. Accompanied throughout by drummer Zoë Brecher—and, on two songs, by an eight-piece orchestra—Dupuis handles all other instrumentation herself, expanding her palette of guitar, bass, and synth to include organ, lap steel, marimba, glockenspiel, sitar, autoharp, theremin, “toys, trash, and ephemera.” Dupuis tailored her arrangements to the gear lists of six different U.S. studios, scheduling time in between Speedy Ortiz’s festival dates and touring her book Mouthguard. She worked exclusively with women engineers; among those credited are mixer Sarah Tudzin (Weyes Blood, Illuminati Hotties), tracking engineers Erin Tonkon (David Bowie, Esperanza Spalding) and Maryam Qudus (Thao & The Get Down Stay Down, mxmtoon), and Dupuis’ long term collaborator, mastering legend Emily Lazar (Beck, Dolly Parton). The process allowed for a diversity of timbres, as well as guest vocal contributions from Helado Negro’s Roberto Lange, Deerhoof’s Satomi Matsuzaki, Merrill Garbus of tUnE-yArDs, and Pile’s Rick Maguire. Two of Haunted Painting’s stickiest pop songs were tracked at Tiny Telephone in San Francisco: The heart-tugging “Hysterical,” inspired by the convoluted logic of outdated offense comedians, skewers apathy with wit in a dizzying power-pop rush. “Carve a little piece of my heart, then chop the rest for parts,” she sings. “Hysterical, to laugh like it’s not ammunition.” Revisiting her formative DIY years, Dupuis calls “Ghost (of a Good Time)” her “party song about not going out”—an oddball dance anthem for the introverts and anti-nostalgists among us, inspired by a recent Bushwick basement show with a 1 a.m. start-time she would have tolerated a decade ago. In a meaningful turn, Sad13 worked at New Monkey Studio in Van Nuys, California, the studio Elliott Smith built out in the early 2000. “He’s one of my guiding influences in composing and home recording,” Dupuis says. “He was kind of a gear nut, and the equipment there reflects it.” She felt a good energy working on her “haunted album” in Smith’s old space, playing his piano and acoustic guitar on the plaintive “Good Grief,” originally written for her father when he was diagnosed with cancer and rewritten to be about “how normal things look surreal after mourning.” There, she also tracked the syncopated, swaggering “Oops...!” —a heavy reflection on her own “vengeance complex” that can crop up in the face of flagrant abuses of power. (“Portrait of a songster: young hussy crossed with cuddle core, 10,000% out for blood,” goes one verse.) After the New Monkey sessions, Dupuis learned that another hero of hers, the musician and poet David Berman, had suddenly died. She retreated to the bar of Echo Park French restaurant Taix—a favored hangout of beloved L.A. author Eve Babitz—and started work on proggy, 808-and-arp-indebted “The Crow,” thinking of Berman and Babitz both. “The future just confounds me,” she wrote. “Who dares find joy in this terror?” Death leaves her conflicted: “I’ve spent my life working on music, but art can feel inadequate in a world of escalating crisis. Art is not enough to keep your heroes with you. How do we process that?” How else but with art? Haunted Painting honors that eternal, and complex, impulse. That’s a gift of Sad13’s work: You can’t look away from what’s around you, even—especially—when it’s haunting.

Even though it arrives two decades into her career, Norah Jones’ eighth album is her first born from poems. Her friend, the poet Emily Fiskio, inspired Jones to try poetry, and Jones inspired Fiskio to write songs. Eventually, the two combined forces, and several of their collaborations are included here. “It opened me up to a different avenue of writing,” Jones tells Apple Music. “Plus, when you read Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein to your kids every night, weird rhymes float around in your head.” Perhaps that’s why these songs, which trace a difficult period in Jones’ life, as well as the world, still feel somewhat hopeful. Or it could be the fact that they weren’t written to fit an album at all. Instead, Jones allowed herself to record spontaneously, uploading tracks to a playlist whenever they came together—another first. “I was collaborating with different people and just trying to make singles rather than forcing an album,” she says. “It was very freeing.” Here, she shares the inside story behind each song. **How I Weep** “This song began as a poem, and then I sat on it for a few months, unsure what was going to happen. I knew I eventually had to try to turn it into a song, because that\'s what I do, so one night, I waited until the house was quiet, and played and sang until it came together. I always had it first in my little side playlist. It was always the first song. So when I decided to turn those songs into an album, I knew this would be the introduction.” **Flame Twin** “This is another song that came from a poem. I brought it into the studio one day and was like, ‘Well, let\'s see if I could put some music to this real quick and record it.’ And it came together pretty quickly.” **Hurts to Be Alone** “I had a little piano melody and some lyric ideas in notes in my phone, but as usual, I didn’t really know what they were until I started working with them. For me, songs tend to come together in the studio. This one came to life during one of those whirlwind three-day studio sessions where we wound up with seven songs. There were no bad pancakes! Lyrically, you know, sometimes you don’t even realize you’re going through something until you write a song about it. It’s only later that you’re like, ‘Oh man, I was really feeling that.’ It\'s a good way of processing.” **Heartbroken, Day After** “This is one of my favorites. I love how it came out with the pedal steel. It\'s very mournful and heartfelt. And of course it references something specific, but I like that it\'s still open to your own interpretation. It\'s interpretable to the listener. So I\'m not going to tell.” **Say No More** “This is a song written by my friend Sarah Oda. She’s one of my oldest friends, and she’s also my manager, and she’s a really gifted songwriter. When she brought me this, it was basically done. All we had to do was change some of the chords. It\'s got a fun energy; we picked up on it immediately in the studio. For me, I thrive on spontaneity and recording with a live band. I don\'t love laboring over things. If we don\'t have a good take of a song in an hour, then we move on. It’s instinctive. Sometimes, when artists overthink songs, I think you can hear it in the music.” **This Life** “‘This Life’ has turned into one of my favorite songs on the album, and it started out as a real throwaway. It was a little backup idea, a voice memo I had that was just ‘This life as we know it is over.’ I brought that into the studio along with a couple other lines, and we wound up with a pretty good vibe. But it wasn\'t amazing. It was only later when we added in the part where the harmonies come that I really fell in love with it. It felt like something you’d hear in church, those big harmonies. That’s one of my favorite things.” **To Live** “I wrote this song for a session with Mavis Staples. I’d written two songs for our session, but she only wound up singing on one of them, ‘I’ll Be Gone,’ which we released as a single \[in October 2019\]. This was the song we didn’t wind up using, but I couldn’t really part with it. It was intended as a duet, but I liked my demo, and I thought, ‘Well, I\'ll just keep it.’” **I\'m Alive** “This was one of the songs I did with Jeff Tweedy in Chicago. I went out there a year and a half ago to mess around with him for three days and maybe release a single, and we ended up doing four songs. Two of them are on this album, this one and ‘Heaven Above,’ and I think this one has great energy. I\'ve known Jeff for a long time. I met him for the first time doing a TV show that we were both on in London, and ever since then we\'ve been friendly, and I\'ve always been a huge fan. He was one of the first people I thought to call when I wanted to start doing collaboration singles, because I thought it\'d be a great way to connect. They’re just a great way to connect with other musicians without being bound to an album. They’re low commitment and low pressure.” **Were You Watching?** “I wrote this song in March of 2018, and it was the very first session I did for anything that wound up on this album. I knew it needed harmonies and I liked the idea of adding vocals that weren’t me, so I called my friend Ruby Amanfu. She and her husband Sam Ashworth came to New York and did a bunch of harmonies on four or five songs. Then I had this great violinist, Mazz Swift, who I\'ve always wanted to work with, come in and add violin. She did a great job. She sounded like she was on the original live recording. It felt perfectly spontaneous.” **Stumble on My Way** “This song, like a lot of my songs, as you’re probably realizing, came from a spontaneous experiment. A voice note in my phone that blossomed. I always keep scraps of ideas and pick them up years later. I found one from 2015 the other day that’s currently stuck in my head. The ideas and emotions hold—the fear for the state of the world, the anxiety about being human. You think you\'re writing about something very ‘in the now,’ but the truth is that you’re writing about being a human on this planet that is falling apart.” **Heaven Above** “I had this song in my head before I went to Chicago, but I loved the way it came out after working with Jeff. There’s something meditative about it that works as the last song. It\'s a little bit like a benediction, if you go to church. A nice closing moment. You know, the album has a lot of sad stuff on it, so I wanted it to feel hopeful in the end. Because I am hopeful about things. I’m a realist, but I’m hopeful.”

“Everything that I was feeling is in the songs,” Alanis Morissette tells Apple Music of *Such Pretty Forks in the Road*, her ninth LP. It’s a simple idea, but in the eight years since 2012’s *Havoc and Bright Lights*, Morissette has felt and experienced a lot, from multiple miscarriages to the birth of her second and third children, the depths of postpartum depression to the realization that her business manager had been stealing millions from her over the course of nearly a decade. All of that has made for some of her most powerful work since 1995’s *Jagged Little Pill*—a set of deeply candid and largely piano-driven ballads she recorded in Malibu and her new home in the Bay Area whose title is based on a lyric from “Smiling,” a song first heard in the 2018 musical that *Jagged Little Pill* inspired. “Anytime something is that life-changing and hard, I want to chronicle it,” she says. “Some of the more challenging turning points in my life have yielded the greatest evolution in my own consciousness.” Here, she takes us inside every song on the album. **Smiling** “I wrote this for the record, and then it wound up being really appropriate for MJ, the lead character in the musical. She’s grappling with wanting to serve and present well, not fail her family and not fail her community. Writing ‘Smiling,’ I was just losing it. I was losing my relationship with Los Angeles, grieving a home that I\'d had for 20-some-odd years. There were the fires in Malibu, my dog died—everything was happening all at once. Countless therapists have given me feedback that, ‘Alanis, you\'re saying something really, really challenging and hard to hear, and yet you\'re smiling. Tell me about that.’ It’s the idea of presenting one way, and then internally falling apart. And that\'s not an uncommon thing with certain types of people who want to help. I\'ve seen my mom cry maybe three times in my life, and one of them was when I played her this song. There was something that really spoke to her, and after she left, I just scoured the lyrics, really wanted to get to know my mom, thinking, ‘Okay, so this one really got to her. What the heck did I write about?’ It\'s a good way to know your parents: See how they feel about your songs.” **Ablaze** “This one makes me cry if I listen to the lyrics, so I have to think about baseball, baseball, baseball. Heaven forbid, if I were to pass away, this is what I want to make sure that I shared with my children. I have all these journals and books that I\'m like, ‘These are here for you.’ I\'m an attachment mom, and I\'m obsessed with addressing the developmental tasks of attachment and exploration—forming a sense of identity and a sense of competence. But I didn\'t want to write a whole song about those, so I just started talking about dualism, and how being here on Earth there\'s always two. There\'s hot, cold, tall, short. The song was a little longer, actually, and I had to cut one of the verses.” **Reasons I Drink** “My big three are work addiction, love addiction, and food addiction. And then, all my secondaries are all the other lovely ones. I think for a long time the general notion of addiction was so stigma-filled and shaming, like, ‘Shame on you for being an addict. Shame on you for needing to go to rehab. Shame on you for a lack of quote-unquote discipline.’ Which is such bullshit, because you\'re not going to meet more disciplined people oftentimes than addicts. It\'s actually seeing those of us who are addiction-riddled as us seeking relief. It’s trying to assuage a culture that is basically chronically stressed out. It’s cutting myself and cutting other people slack, and also giving a little insight. This isn\'t just someone gratuitously trying to cause chaos. This is someone who needs support and help, and to sit across from a nonjudgmental person in order to heal. Byron Katie once said, ‘Drugs and alcohol, they\'re just doing their job.’” **Diagnosis** “I think as a celebrity, someone in the public eye, I don\'t get a lot of loving, gentle feedback from people. I will either get positive or negative projections, or egregious misperception or misunderstanding of where I was coming from. I\'ve been perceived as wildly sane. I\'ve been perceived as unstable and unpredictable and wild. My dad told me when I was really young that people are going to love what I do, people are going to hate what I do, and some people won\'t give a shit about what I do. And that that won\'t change no matter what I\'m doing, so just keep going. ‘Diagnosis’ is me going, ‘Look, I don\'t care. I don\'t even know how I\'m perceived at this point. But this is what\'s happening. I have postpartum depression; I can\'t think straight.’ My whole life has been relying upon my cognitive function in order to show up. But when I wasn\'t able to rely on that as much, with the postpartum activity, it became, ‘What am I going to rely on? And how am I being perceived?’ In the middle of writing it, there were moments where I just wanted to walk into the ocean and not come back. But then I just thought about my kids, and I\'m like, ‘That\'s not going to happen.’” **Missing the Miracle** “Marriage for me is both people wanting to participate actively in the healing of each other\'s wounds, in theory. But when so much is going on, I just feel like we\'re missing the point and the beauty of it all, and that\'s not uncommon to be just overwhelmed by the day-to-day and triggering each other\'s PTSD. It\'s just a playground of missing the beauty, until it isn\'t. Spending at least ten minutes alone, I can get back into how beautiful it is, and how it is a miracle that any relationship can be sustained with how different we are, and how we\'re such complicated, beautiful human beings. We all have different perspectives—how the frick does any relationship stay together? We\'re animals. But I think the more consciousness I bring to my marriage, the more I can really see, even when it\'s hard, that it\'s this incredible experience. It’s a reminder for me to just pull my head out of the sand sometimes and look around, and just be that gratitude thing.” **Losing the Plot** “Los Angeles was always such an incredible city to be in when I was working. But when I wasn\'t working, and being a mom, it just felt like I wasn\'t in the right city. The line \'I am lying down my cape\' comes from this idea of thinking that I can be the superhero for everybody. Whether it\'s the house, or the dog, or the food, or the travel, or the logistics, or, in our case, education—we’ve been homeschooling for nine years. It’s superwoman-ing and just surrendering, going, ‘I can\'t keep doing the same thing and thinking it\'s going to yield different results.’ I\'m supposed to be making all these wise decisions, but I didn\'t have access to my intuition to the degree that I typically do. Postpartum depression is a ghost that sneaks in and takes a lot of things away. But I\'ve been through it twice now, so I know that there\'s another side, and my guess is it\'ll be shortly after I stop breastfeeding. I’ll report back.” **Reckoning** “I\'ve been writing songs about having been sexually abused for a long time, and songs like \[2002’s\] \'Hands Clean\' just came and went. A lot of times trauma is just stored in our bodies, and we\'ve disassociated. Fight, flight, freeze. Later on, we can melt and come through, when it might feel like a safer choice to make. It\'s quite traumatic to not only relive it, but then to be in the public eye and have it questioned? When I listen to ‘Reckoning,’ there\'s some lyrics—that second verse, ‘Where is everybody? Where are all these protectors around me?’—I can’t not cry when I\'m listening to them. When I\'m asked what would I say to my 19-year-old self, my 46-year-old self would just be like, ‘We’ve got to check and check the people in your immediate vicinity.’ Because a lot of people were not the safest people to be around and didn\'t have my best interests at heart. I love this song because it empathizes with this small little girl in there, as opposed to the grown woman looking back.” **Sandbox Love** “It begs a big question, post-sexual-abuse: What does healthy sex even look like? And what prize should I keep my eye on? There’s this culture—porn culture, acting-out culture, having-a-sidepiece culture. There\'s so much repair that’s needed to be experienced in a relationship, for those of us who\'ve had sexual abuse in our past. ‘Sandbox Love’ is my imagining of what healthy sex would be, what that terrain looks like.” **Her** “Her as me, her as the Divine Feminine, her as feminism. I’ve had so many mentors who were women, who have really represented the maternal. Especially postpartum, there\'s this whole thought of, like, ‘Who\'s going to mother the mother?’ My husband and I are always joking that he gets such a mama energy from me, and I\'m like, ‘Where the fuck is my mama energy? I need a bosom too.’ For me, this song is really about the reaching out for mom, the reaching out for the maternal, for the empathic, the skin-on-skin tenderness. Also, in spirituality, I love attempting to spot the threads of continuity between all these religions—it\'s all pretty patriarchal. I think this is me going, ‘Sorry, but I\'m not going to be praying to the old man in the throne in the sky, as lovely as that fantasy is, but to this femininity that I yearn for so much.’” **Nemesis** “So the theory is that 20% of animals and humans are highly sensitive temperamentally, to the point where they take in 500 pieces of information when they walk into a room and the other 80% of people take in maybe 50 pieces of information. I\'m a sucker for the subtleties, and I think that\'s due to the kind of temperament I have. I think everyone is realizing how adaptable they are right now, but change is hard. I’ve never been good with it, I’m always horrified. Later on, I can see what a great idea it was to make that change, but while I\'m in it, there\'s some profound suffering. It doesn\'t mean I\'m not making changes every day, because in order to evolve our consciousness we have to be willing to say goodbye to the old. That certainly has to do with becoming a mom—it\'s just a complete head-spinner to go from not being a parent to being a parent. But it\'s everything: It\'s leaving Canada; it’s going on tour and saying goodbye to my friends; it\'s coming home and saying goodbye to everyone on the road. I think that\'s the nature of what life is: Life is change. It’s constant. But that doesn\'t mean I won\'t fight it, and resist like a professional resister.” **Pedestal** “I remember I was dating someone and we did some show in front of 40,000 people, and I came backstage all sweaty and glittery and spent, and I turned to the person I was dating and I said, ‘What do you think of the show?’ And he said, ‘What are you talking about? You just heard 40,000 people cheering for you. What’s your problem?’ And I said, ‘Oh, I don\'t know those people.’ It’s growing up in the public eye. It’s writing songs at 16, and then wanting to evolve that into writing songs as a 19-year-old, and people dissuading me from that and not really seeing me as this human being who\'s just evolving and expressing. It’s looking back on all of these relationships, whether it was people that I was dating, or my family when I was younger, or different producers, or so-called guardians who were meant to be taking care of me when I was younger who were being sexually inappropriate. There\'s been a lot of relationships that maybe started off on a note of my thinking that it potentially could be safe or super intimate. And then I found out that there was a lot of opportunism involved, or some blindside, or some betrayal—or some embezzlement, as happens. This song really just takes it down to the lowest common denominator: At the end of the day, I\'m still a human being who has a lot of needs, and is vulnerable, and scared and shaking like a poodle in the corner, like anybody else.”

In 2008, Phantom Planet went on an amicable hiatus to allow themselves to live their separate lives for a change. At first glance, the LA rockers’ fifth studio album—and first in 12 years—doesn’t immediately suggest the most welcoming gathering of old friends by album title alone. But once “BALISONG” kicks off the album with its scuzzy yet melodic sound, it’s evident that the band picked up right where they left off from their last LP, *Raise the Dead*. Take the swaggering “Party Animal,” where singer Alex Greenwald looks for a pick-me-up to take his mind off things—combining Spoon’s offbeat fuzz with a heavy glam-rock riff. Songs like “Dear Dead End” and “Time Moves On” ease into crisp, sunny hooks as he copes with the aftermath of a breakup (the latter inspired by his broken engagement with actor Brie Larson). Greenwald gives in to the euphoria of finding someone, or something, that you love on the optimistic “Only One,” going for a breezy, California pop sound reminiscent of their 2002 single “Lonely Day.”

As The Killers began work on their sixth full-length, Brandon Flowers had a single visual in mind: the album’s eventual cover art, illustrator Thomas Blackshear’s *Dance of the Wind and Storm*. “We wanted to make sure that the songs fit underneath the banner of what that image was saying,” Flowers tells Apple Music of the drawing, which he hung on the wall of the studio. “Blackshear typically does Western landscapes, or he does spiritual art. But on this particular one he combined them, and that\'s exactly what I wanted to capture. Songs that didn\'t fit, they had to get cut. We’d never done anything like that, but it ended up being a real beacon for us.” As intended, *Imploding the Mirage* evokes the scale and natural majesty of the American West, like The E Street Band playing Monument Valley. And at its heart are a series of synth-lined, often Springsteenian tales of love and salvation, inspired by Flowers’ recent move from Las Vegas to Utah—and the effect it had on his wife’s mental health. (“Las Vegas is a tainted and haunted place,” he says. “Talk about a clean slate.”) It’s the band’s first LP without founding guitarist Dave Keuning, whose departure made space for a list of collaborators that includes k.d. lang, Weyes Blood, The War on Drugs’ Adam Granduciel, Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado, and Lindsey Buckingham. It’s also meant to be a companion to 2017’s unabashedly grand *Wonderful Wonderful*. “I\'m very interested in the optimistic side of things,” Flowers says. “I was brought up to have that kind of a perspective, and I think you hear it in the songs: It feels triumphant, like there are angels present.” Here, Flowers details a few of its key tracks. **My Own Soul’s Warning** “It\'s strange to write a song about repentance. It\'s not a typical subject in a pop or a rock song. And I felt like, to be able to go into that territory and write something that was meaningful to myself and that felt like it was going to transcend and resonate with a lot of people in a stadium or inside their headphones—that’s kind of the Holy Grail. It\'s just one of those songs for me.” **Blowback** “The producer of the record, Shawn Everett, he\'s producing the new War on Drugs, and he produced the last one. I think Adam \[Granduciel\] and I share a lot of the same musical landmarks and touchstones—we just follow along through our own experiences, usually Las Vegas. It just kind of happened pretty organically.” **Dying Breed** “Shawn, he’s a wizard in the studio, kind of a mad scientist. And he just will throw things at a song that you were just not envisioning at all. The song was already good, and then Shawn disappeared into a B room for about an hour and came back all excited, and played us that \[Can and Neu!\] loop over the song. And it was like, ‘Yeah.’ It\'s frustrating that it wasn\'t our loop in the beginning, but then we just embraced it and got permission. And when Ronnie \[Vannucci, drummer\] and the full band come in halfway through the song, it just goes to this other level. Now I love that song.” **Caution** “Sometimes they talk. That’s what you hear about, when you hear about great guitar solos—how they speak, how they’re singable. And, man, Lindsey just delivered in a big way, and I love that. I love that you can kind of memorize that solo and sing along.” **Imploding the Mirage** “In \[1977’s\] ‘Solsbury Hill,’ Peter Gabriel talks about walking out of the machinery—and I think he\'s talking about Genesis. It’s kind of like that. It\'s like getting out from underneath the weight of what it is to be in The Killers and what is expected of you, and just doing what you love. That\'s a huge part of it, for sure. I mean, I can\'t pretend like everything\'s just hunky-dory and that we\'re firing on all cylinders. It\'s just not. I\'m obviously using the imagery of Las Vegas—we implode things, we have a casino called The Mirage—and just the idea of this facade that we can put on and how stressful that can be. I think getting rid of it and replacing it with what\'s real can be such a relief and can be something that we could all strive to do.”

“I had a lot to write about,” beabadoobee tells Apple Music of her debut album *Fake It Flowers*. “I’m just a girl with girl problems, and I feel like there are a lot of girls who have the same problems.” Over 12 songs, Beatrice Laus explores those issues in what she calls “diary entries,” written in her bedroom over just a couple of months in late 2019. Here, she shakes off what people think of her (“Further Away,” the hook-laden “Care”), screams out her sadness (“Charlie Brown”), and gives way to the abandon of young love (the woozy, self-aware “Horen Sarrison”). “I made sure that there was a song for every mood and for every Bea that exists,” says the Philippines-born, London-raised singer. “This is a very personal album. It was everything I was supposed to tell someone but couldn’t, or just, like, never did.” The songs here are an unabashed love letter to the \'90s artists—and movies—she was devoted to growing up. (“Everyone glorifies the past,” says Laus of her obsession with a decade that ended a year before her birth.) Only three years after the first song she ever wrote, the hushed, ultra-lo-fi “Coffee,” earmarked beabadoobee as a name to know, the singer wants *Fake It Flowers* to do for other young women what those artists—from The Cardigans to Oasis, via Elliott Smith and Alanis Morissette—did for her. “When I’m really sad, I like to dance in my underpants in front of my mirror,” she says. “I always pick a good album to dance to. And I want *Fake It Flowers* to be that album for someone.” Hairbrushes at the ready: Let beabadoobee take you through her raw debut, track by track. **Care** “As soon as this came to life, I was like, ‘This is the first song.’ It describes the whole sound of *Fake It Flowers*—the big guitars, that nostalgic feeling. And lyrically the song talks about the fact that no one is ever going to get me. But it’s the idea that I\'m going to sing my heart out and not give a fuck if you don\'t like it. I just wanted a really good radio pop song, something that could end \[1999 rom-com\] *10 Things I Hate About You*.” **Worth It** “This song is about the temptations you get when you\'re on tour and when you\'re away—the stupid things you can do when you\'re alone in a hotel room. It was hard to get through it, but I\'m glad I wrote it because it was like an ending of that bit of my life. But sonically, it’s something good out of a bad situation. I wanted to make an album for people to dance to in their bedrooms, despite how depressing the songs are.” **Dye It Red** “This song isn’t actually about me. It\'s stories I\'ve heard from other people, and it’s about stupid boys. I have no filter with the lyrics. It’s also about being comfortable with who you are. At times, I feel like a hypocrite for singing this song, because I always care about what my boyfriend thinks. But I shouldn\'t, right? I wanted ‘Dye It Red’ to fizzle out into a beautiful mess at the end, especially around the lyrics where I\'m like, ‘You\'re not even that cute, that cute.’ I thought it was funny and sassy.” **Back to Mars** “I feel like this is where the album takes a shift into a darker-sounding side. ‘Care’ and ‘Worth It’ are the surface level of my problems. This is where it gets really deep into, like, ‘This is why I\'m fucked up.’ This song pays homage to the space theme of my EP *Space Cadet*, which this song was originally supposed to be for. This was the second take I did—it was just me and my guitar, and then Pete \[Robertson\] put all these amazing atmospheric sounds around it. It was meant to be a really fast-paced track with loads of drums, but it’s a very innocent song.” **Charlie Brown** “This is very heavy! And screaming on this song was probably the funnest moment of recording this album. They asked, ‘Are you sure you can scream?’ But I scream so much in my bedroom when I’m alone, so I was like: ‘I was born ready.’ I wanted to talk about a situation in my life as if I was just taking it out of my system. And what better way to do that than scream? I have a Charlie Brown strip tattooed on my arm—I was obsessed with Snoopy when I was a kid.” **Emo Song** “Originally, this was going to be another heavy one, but Pete suggested making it a super sad and slow one. The songs at this point all bleed into one another. And I did that on purpose, because they were all made together. The song talks about my childhood and how it affected me during my teenage life and what I did to kind of just drag myself of everything that happened to me.” **Sorry** “If my voice sounds vulnerable in this song, it’s because I was half crying while I was singing it. And it was a hard one to sing, because it is just so honest. It speaks about a really sad situation with someone I know and someone I really love. I had a pretty wild teenage life. I think me and my friendship group did what college kids did when we were 15. Anything in excess is bad. And we just did a bit too many drugs, really. And for some, \[it was\] too much—to the point they had to get \[involuntarily hospitalized\]. It\'s just sad to watch someone\'s life kind of wither away, especially knowing that they could have had an amazing life ahead of them. I wish I was more involved. But when something\'s too hard to watch, you just kind of separate yourself from it. Getting all of that off my chest was so relieving. And I said sorry. At least, in my head, I apologized.” **Further Away** “I\'ve always wanted to be a Disney princess. The strings come into play and I wanted to feel like a princess. This is where the positivity comes in the album—there’s a feeling of hope. This song is about all the people who were really mean to me growing up, and I’m just saying how dumb they were. But really, nothing’s real. They were going through the same shit.” **Horen Sarrison** “Literally a six-minute love song of me saying, ‘I\'m in love.’ It\'s supposed to be ridiculous. It\'s supposed to be very outwardly Disney Princess vibes. I was playing it to Pete and I was like, ‘And then the strings go like this,’ humming how I wanted it to sound. And he really brought it to life, and I owe it to him. It definitely is the most grand song on the album. And it’s really fun to play as well, because it just is me talking about how in love I am. I wanted a song for every mood, and this is definitely for that happy mood. And it\'s about Soren Harrison. I thought it was kind of funny to switch the two letters and call it ‘Horen Sarrison.’ It’s just so stupid.” **How Was Your Day?** “I recorded it in my boyfriend’s garden. Lyrically, it talks about my journey and about how hard it was being away from home and missing people. And I feel like it only made sense to go back to my roots on the way I recorded it, on a really shitty four-track, just me and my guitar with a missing string. It was really refreshing. There was always talk about doing a ‘Coffee’ moment on this album. Like, ‘Let\'s strip it back to just you and your guitar.’ And I really wanted it, but we didn\'t know how we were going to do it. Then lockdown happened and I was like, ‘I\'m going to do it, Daniel Johnston style.’” **Together** “This is paying homage to chicks who rock onstage. Like Veruca Salt and Hole. Writing this song made me realize a lot of things—for example, that I have this dependency thing as a person. But ‘Together’ made me realize that sometimes it\'s okay to be by yourself. Togetherness is cool, but being together all the time is kind of unhealthy. Again, I guess it was taking a sad situation and pouring my heart out into a song, and screaming it. And that felt pretty empowering.” **Yoshimi, Forest, Magdalene** “The name of this song is simply the names I want to call my children. I\'m literally saying in the song, ‘You\'ll never leave me because you think I\'m pretty, so we\'ll have lots of babies called Yoshimi, Forest, Magdalene.’ And it\'s supposed to be really stupid and fun to finish the album off on a positive note. I wanted it to be very messy—like so disgustingly distorted that you can\'t even hear a sound. We recorded it live in Wandsworth in a studio. There were two drum kits and we were just bashing the drums. It was fun, and very Flaming Lips-inspired. The last mood of this album is the really strange, weird Bea. And I think that’s my favorite one.”

Much of Grimes’ fifth LP is rooted in darkness, a visceral response to the state of the world and the death of her friend and manager Lauren Valencia. “It’s like someone who\'s very core to the project just disappearing,” she tells Apple Music of the loss. “I\'ve known a lot of people who\'ve died, but cancer just feels so demonic. It’s like someone who wants to live, who\'s a good person, and their life is just being taken away by this thing that can\'t be explained. I don\'t know, it just felt like a literal demon.” *Miss Anthropocene* deals heavily in theological ideas, each song meant to represent a new god in what Grimes loosely envisioned as “a super contemporary pantheon”—“Violence,” for example, is the god of video games, “My Name Is Dark (Art Mix)” the god of political apathy, and “Delete Forever” the god of suicide. The album’s title is that of the most “urgent” and potentially destructive of gods: climate change. “It’s about modernity and technology through a spiritual lens,” she says of the album, itself an iridescent display of her ability as a producer, vocalist, and genre-defying experimentalist. “I’ve also just been feeling so much pressure. Everyone\'s like, ‘You gotta be a good role model,’ and I was kind of thinking like, ‘Man, sometimes you just want to actually give in to your worst impulses.’ A lot of the record is just me actually giving in to those negative feelings, which feels irresponsible as a writer sometimes, but it\'s also just so cathartic.” Here she talks through each of the album\'s tracks. **So Heavy I Fell Through the Earth (Art Mix)** “I think I wanted to make a sort of hard Enya song. I had a vision, a weird dream where I was just sort of falling to the earth, like fighting a Balrog. I woke up and said, ‘I need to make a video for this, or I need to make a song for this.’ It\'s sort of embarrassing, but lyrically, the song is kind of about when you decide to get pregnant or agree to get pregnant. It’s this weird loss of self, or loss of power or something. Because it\'s sort of like a future life in subservience to this new life. It’s about the intense experience deciding to do that, and it\'s a bit of an ego death associated with making that decision.” **Darkseid** “I forget how I met \[Lil\] Uzi \[Vert\]. He probably DMed me or something, just like, ‘Wanna collaborate and hang out and stuff?’ We ended up playing laser tag and I just did terribly. But instrumentally, going into it I was thinking, ‘How do I make like a super kind of goth banger for Uzi?’ When that didn\'t really work out, I hit up my friend Aristophanes, or Pan. Just because I think she\'s fucking great, and I think she\'s a great lyricist and I just love her vocal style, and she kind of sounds good on everything, and it\'s especially dark stuff. Like she would make this song super savage and intense. I should let Pan explain it, but her translation of the lyrics is about a friend of hers who committed suicide.” **Delete Forever** “A lot of people very close to me have been super affected by the opioid crisis, or just addiction to opiates and heroin—it\'s been very present in my life, always. When Lil Peep died, I just got super triggered and just wanted to go make something. It seemed to make sense to keep it super clean sonically and to keep it kind of naked. so it\'s a pretty simple production for me. Normally I just go way harder. The banjo at the end is comped together and Auto-Tuned, but that is my banjo playing. I really felt like Lil Peep was about to make his great work. It\'s hard to see anyone die young, but especially from this, ’cause it hit so close to home.” **Violence** “This sounds sort of bad: In a way it feels like you\'re giving up when you sing on someone else\'s beats. I literally just want to produce a track. But it was sort of nice—there was just so much less pain in that song than I think there usually is. There\'s this freedom to singing on something I\'ve never heard before. I just put the song on for the first time, the demo that \[producer/DJ\] i\_o sent me, and just sang over it. I was like, \'Oh!\' It was just so freeing—I never ever get to do that. Everyone\'s like, ‘What\'s the meaning? What\'s the vibe?’ And honestly, it was just really fucking fun to make. I know that\'s not good, that everyone wants deeper meanings and emotions and things, but sometimes just the joy of music is itself a really beautiful thing.” **4ÆM** “I got really obsessed with this Bollywood movie called *Bajirao Mastani*—it’s about forbidden love. I was like, ‘Man, I feel like the sci-fi version of this movie would just be incredible.’ So I was just sort of making fan art, and I then I really wanted to get kind of crazy and futuristic-sounding. It’s actually the first song I made on the record—I was kind of blocked and not sure of the sonic direction, and then when I made this I was like, ‘Oh, wow, this doesn\'t sound like anything—this will be a cool thing to pursue.’ It gave me a bunch of ideas of how I could make things sound super future. That was how it started.” **New Gods** “I really wish I started the record with this song. I just wanted to write the thesis down: It\'s about how the old gods sucked—well, I don\'t want to say they sucked, but how the old gods have definitely let people down a bit. If you look at old polytheistic religions, they\'re sort of pre-technology. I figured it would be a good creative exercise to try to think like, ‘If we were making these gods now, what would they be like?’ So it\'s sort of about the desire for new gods. And with this one, I was trying to give it a movie soundtrack energy.” **My Name Is Dark (Art Mix)** “It\'s sort of written in character, but I was just in a really cranky mood. Like it\'s just sort of me being a whiny little brat in a lot of ways. But it\'s about political apathy—it’s so easy to be like, ‘Everything sucks. I don\'t care.’ But I think that\'s a very dangerous attitude, a very contagious one. You know, democracy is a gift, and it\'s a thing not many people have. It\'s quite a luxury. It seems like such a modern affliction to take that luxury for granted.” **You’ll miss me when I’m not around** “I got this weird bass that was signed by Derek Jeter in a used music place. I don\'t know why—I was just trying to practice the bass and trying to play more instruments. This one feels sort of basic for me, but I just really fell in love with the lyrics. It’s more like ‘Delete Forever,’ where it feels like it\'s almost too simple for Grimes. But it felt really good—I just liked putting it on. Again, you gotta follow the vibe, and it had a good vibe. Ultimately it\'s sort of about an angel who kills herself and then she wakes up and she still made it to heaven. And she\'s like, \'What the fuck? I thought I could kill myself and get out of heaven.’ It\'s sort of about when you\'re just pissed and everyone\'s being a jerk to you.” **Before the Fever** “I wanted this song to represent literal death. Fevers are just kind of scary, but a fever is also sort of poetically imbued with the idea of passion and stuff too. It\'s like it\'s a weirdly loaded word—scary but compelling and beautiful. I wanted this song to represent this trajectory where like it starts sort of threatening but calm, and then it slowly gets sort of more pleading and like emotional and desperate as it goes along. The actual experience of death is so scary that it\'s kind of hard to keep that aloofness or whatever. I wanted it to sort of be like following someone\'s psychological trajectory if they die. Specifically a kind of villain. I was just thinking of the Joffrey death scene in *Game of Thrones*. And it\'s like, he\'s so shitty and such a prick, but then, when he dies, like, you feel bad for him. I kind of just wanted to express that feeling in the song.” **IDORU** “The bird sounds are from the Squamish birdwatching society—their website has lots of bird sounds. But I think this song is sort of like a pure love song. And it just feels sort of heavenly—I feel very enveloped in it, it kind of has this medieval/futurist thing going on. It\'s like if ‘Before the Fever’ is like the climax of the movie, then ‘IDORU’ is the end title. It\'s such a negative energy to put in the world, but it\'s good to finish with something hopeful so it’s not just like this mean album that doesn\'t offer you anything.”

On April 6, 2020, Charli XCX announced through a Zoom call with fans that work would imminently begin on her fourth album. Thirty-nine days later, *how i’m feeling now* arrived. “I haven’t really caught up with my feelings yet because it just happened so fast,” she tells Apple Music on the eve of the project’s release. “I’ve never opened up to this extent. There’s usually a period where you sit with an album and live with it a bit. Not here.” The album is no lockdown curiosity. Energized by open collaboration with fans and quarantine arrangements at home in Los Angeles, Charli has fast-tracked her most complete body of work. The untamed pop blowouts are present and correct—all jacked up with relatable pent-up ferocity—but it’s the vulnerability that really shows off a pop star weaponizing her full talent. “It’s important for me to write about whatever situation I’m in and what I know,” she says. “Before quarantine, my boyfriend and I were in a different place—physically we were distant because he lived in New York while I was in Los Angeles. But emotionally, we were different, too. There was a point before quarantine where we wondered, would this be the end? And then in this sudden change of world events we were thrown together—he moved into my place. It’s the longest time we’ve spent together in seven years of being in a relationship, and it’s allowed us to blossom. It’s been really interesting recording songs that are so obviously about a person—and that person be literally sat in the next room. It’s quite full-on, let’s say.” Here, Charli talks us through the most intense and unique project of her life, track by track. **pink diamond** “Dua Lipa asked me to do an Apple Music interview for the At Home With series with her, Zane \[Lowe, Rebecca Judd\], and Jennifer Lopez. Which is, of course, truly a quarantine situation. When am I going to ever be on a FaceTime with J. Lo? Anyway, on the call, J. Lo was telling this story about meeting Barbra Streisand, and Barbra talking to her about diamonds. At that time, J. Lo had just been given that iconic pink diamond by Ben Affleck. I instantly thought, ‘Pink Diamond is a very cute name for a song,’ and wrote it down on my phone. I immediately texted Dua afterwards and said, ‘Oh my god, she mentioned the pink diamond!’ A few days later, \[LA-based R&B artist and producer\] Dijon sent me this really hard, aggressive, and quite demonic demo called ‘Makeup On,’ and I felt the two titles had some kind of connection. I always like pairing really silly, sugary imagery with things that sound quite evil. It then became a song about video chatting—this idea that you’re wanting to go out and party and be sexy, but you’re stuck at home on video chat. I wanted it as the first track because I’m into the idea that some people will love it and some people will hate it. I think it’s nice to be antagonistic on track one of an album and really frustrate certain people, but make others really obsessive about what might come next.” **forever** “I’m really, really lucky that I get to create and be in a space where I can do what I love—and times like the coronavirus crisis really show you how fortunate you are. They also band people together and encourage us to help those less fortunate. I was incredibly conscious of this throughout the album process. So it was important for me to give back, whether that be through charity initiatives with all the merch or supporting other creatives who are less able to continue with their normal process, or simply trying to make this album as inclusive as possible so that everybody at home, if they wish, could contribute or feel part of it. So, for example, for this song—having thousands of people send in personal clips so we could make the video is something that makes me feel incredibly emotional. This is actually one of the very few songs where the idea was conceived pre-quarantine. It came from perhaps my third-ever session with \[North Carolina producer and songwriter\] BJ Burton. The song is obviously about my relationship, but it’s about the moments before lockdown. It asks, ‘What if we don’t make it,’ but reinforces that I will always love him—even if we don’t make it.” **claws** “My romantic life has had a full rebirth. As soon as I heard the track—which is by \[St. Louis artist, songwriter, and producer\] Dylan Brady—I knew it needed to be this joyous, carefree honeymoon-period song. When you’re just so fascinated and adoring of someone, everything feels like this huge rush of emotion—almost like you’re in a movie. I think it’s been nice for my boyfriend to see that I can write positive and happy songs about us. Because the majority of the songs in the past have been sad, heartbreaking ones. It’s also really made him understand my level of work addiction and the stress I can put myself under.” **7 years** “This song is just about our journey as a couple, and the turbulence we’ve incurred along the way. It’s also about how I feel so peaceful to be in this space with him now. Quarantine has been the first time that I’ve tried to remain still, physically and mentally. It’s a very new feeling for me. This is also the first song that I’ve recorded at home since I was probably 15 years old, living with my parents. So it feels very nostalgic as it takes back to a process I hadn’t been through in over a decade.” **detonate** “So this was originally a track by \[producer and head of record label PC Music\] A. G. Cook. A couple of weeks before quarantine happened in the US, A. G. and BJ \[Burton\] met for the first and only time and worked on this song. It was originally sped up, and they slowed it down. Three or four days after that session, A. G. drove to Montana to be with his girlfriend and her family. So it’s quite interesting that the three of us have been in constant contact over the five weeks we made this album, and they’ve only met once. I wrote the lyrics on a day where I was experiencing a little bit of confusion and frustration about my situation. I maybe wanted some space. It’s actually quite hard for me to listen to this song because I feel like the rest of the album is so joyous and positive and loving. But it encapsulated how I was feeling, and it’s not uncommon in relationships sometimes.” **enemy** \"A song based around the phrase ‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.’ I kept thinking about how if you can have someone so close to you, does that mean that one day they could become your biggest enemy? They’d have the most ammunition. I don’t actually think my boyfriend is someone who would turn on me if anything went wrong, but I was playing off that idea a little bit. As the song is quite fantasy-based, I thought that the voice memo was something that grounded the song. I had just got off the phone to my therapist—and therapy is still a very new thing for me. I only started a couple of weeks before quarantine, which feels like it has something to do with fate, perhaps. I’ve been recording myself after each session, and it just felt right to include it as some kind of real moment where you have a moment of self-doubt.” **i finally understand** “This one includes the line ‘My therapist said I hate myself real bad.’ She’s getting a lot of shout-outs on this album, isn’t she? I like that this song feels very different from anything I’ve ever explored. I’d always wanted to work with Palmistry \[South London producer and artist Benjy Keating\]—we have loads of mutual friends and collaborators—and I was so excited when my manager got an email from his team with some beats for me. This is a true quarantine collaboration in the sense that we’ve still never met and it purely came into being from him responding to things I’d posted online about this album.” **c2.0** “A. G. sent me this beat at the end of last year called ‘Click 2.0’—which was an updated version of my song ‘Click’ from the *Charli* album. He had put it together for a performance he was doing with \[US artist and former Chairlift member\] Caroline Polachek. I heard the performance online and loved it, and found myself listening to it on repeat while—and I’m sorry, I know this is so cheesy—driving around Indonesia watching all these colors and trees and rainbows go by. It just felt euphoric and beautiful. Towards the end of this recording process, I wanted to do a few more songs and A. G. reminded me of this track. The original ‘Click’ features Tommy Cash and Kim Petras and is a very braggy song about our community of artists. It’s talking about how we’re the shit, basically. But through this, it’s been transformed into this celebratory song about friendship and missing the people that you hang out with the most and the world that existed before.” **party 4 u** “This is the oldest song on the album. For myself and A. G., this song has so much life and story—we had played it live in Tokyo and somehow it got out and became this fan favorite. Every time we get together to make an album or a mixtape, it’s always considered, but it had never felt right before now. As small and silly as it sounds, it’s the time to give something back. Lyrically, it also makes some sense now as it’s about throwing a party for someone who doesn’t come—the yearning to see someone but they’re not there. The song has literally grown—we recorded the first part in maybe 2017, there are crowd samples now in the song from the end of my Brixton Academy show in 2019, and now there are recordings of me at home during this period. It’s gone on a journey. It kept on being requested and requested, which made me hesitant to put it out because I like the mythology around certain songs. It’s fun. It gives these songs more life—maybe even more than if I’d actually released them officially. It continues to build this nonexistent hype, which is quite funny and also definitely part of my narrative as an artist. I’ve suffered a lot of leaks and hacks, so I like playing with that narrative a little bit.” **anthems** “Well, this song is just about wanting to get fucked up, essentially. I had a moment one night during lockdown where I was like, ‘I *just* want to go out.’ I mean, it feels so stupid and dumb to say, and it’s obviously not a priority in the world, but sometimes I just feel like I want to go out, blow off some steam, get fucked up, do a lot of bad things, and wake up feeling terrible. This song is about missing those nights. When I first heard the track—which was produced by Dylan and \[London producer\] Danny L Harle—it immediately made me want to watch \[2012 film\] *Project X*, as that movie is the closest I’m going to feel to having the night that I want to have. So I wrote the song, and co-wrote the second verse with my fans on Instagram—which was very cool and actually quite a quick experience. After finishing it, I really felt like it definitely belongs on the *Project X* soundtrack. I think it captures the hectic energy of a once-in-a-lifetime night out that you’ll never forget.” **visions** “I feel like anything that sounds like it should close an album probably shouldn’t. So initially we were talking about ‘party 4 u’ being the final track, but it felt too traditional with the crowd noises at the end—like an emotional goodbye. So it’s way more fun to me to slam that in the middle of the album and have the rave moment at the end. But in some ways, it feels a little traditional, too, because this is the message I want to leave you with. The song feels like this big lucid dream: It’s about seeing visions of my boyfriend and I together, and it being right and final. But then it spirals off into this very weird world that feels euphoric, but also intense and unknown. And I think that’s a quite a nice note to end this particular album on. The whole situation we’ve found ourselves in is unknown. I personally don’t know what I’m going to do next, but I know this final statement feels right for who I am and the direction I’m going in.”

Gorillaz began making their seventh studio album with the specific intention of not making an album. Instead, the Song Machine project was conceived as a series of monthly stand-alone singles that would be created in the moment, without the constraints or concepts that come with shaping an album. “That’s the definition of contemporary, isn’t it?” Remi Kabaka Jr.—producer, drummer, percussionist, and Gorillaz’s third member alongside Damon Albarn, and Jamie Hewlett—tells Apple Music. “It’s more interesting working in this episodic format because it’s easier to respond to a moment than trying to remember your response to the moment. You are a bulletin—a responder in the moment, not a reporter of the moment.” Songs were forged in intensive bursts, as quickly as ideas and collaborators could be brought together. The series launched with “Momentary Bliss,” a linkup with the insurrectionary voices of slowthai and Slaves, in January 2020 before lockdown changed the cadence of releases to every few weeks. Nevertheless, work continued across all available forms of communication and the music kept coming. “I don’t know if \[lockdown\] changed the process of making songs, I think it changed the subject matter,” says Kabaka. “You like an artist, you play them a track whether it’s online or IRL, if they like it, you’ll work together. Technology is just a music delivery system; it hasn’t radically changed the creative process for Gorillaz. If you can get in touch with someone and you have something to write about, then boom! You just go from there.” The list of collaborators is as rich and as stellar as it’s ever been on a Gorillaz project, with Elton John, The Cure’s Robert Smith, Georgia, 6LACK, and Malian singer-songwriter Fatoumata Diawara all drawn into the band’s orbit. “Song Machine is a universe of sound, and I think there is more university of sound than there ever was,” says Kabaka. “In a way, Song Machine as a whole has become more cellular.” Gorillaz’s magic is to fuse those various cells together into a new, cohesive whole. Collaborators were chosen for the way they could inspire or evolve a song as much as how they might fit ideas that were already brewing. “The music can loudly choose the artist, *or* the artists can choose the idea you hadn’t actually thought of,” he says. “You have to have multiple ideas and options; you can’t be scared of losing an idea. That’s part of being agile and in the moment—you have to go in with as little preconception as possible, and as much possibility as you can. You have to respond to the needs of the artist—they’re the ones with the master plan. Surprise is why we invited them. You have to hope they can surprise you.” The results are still unmistakably Gorillaz: off-kilter pop that’s playful, melancholy, worldly, and tethered to sharp melodies. It eventually became clear that there was a very good album to be pieced together from these free-standing songs. And it’s one that reflects the turbulence and trauma of 2020. On “The Valley of the Pagans,” Beck sends strutting dispatches from a “land of the permanent sun/Where the flowers are melted and the future is fun.” ScHoolboy Q bounds across the spongy funk of “Pac-Man,” asking, “How can I trust truth?” And, with customary edginess, The Cure’s Robert Smith alludes to our “surgical glove world” in the title track—a song that manages to be both a call to the dance floor and the sound of humanity locked in an ominously downward spiral. But there’s plenty of optimism and positive energy too, running from the yearning trilingual pop of “Désolé” to the certain assertion that “We could do so much better than this” on “Momentary Bliss.” “Strange isn’t bad, it’s just weird,” says Kabaka. “We’re intelligent enough to recognize that mutation changes how the world develops, and change is good.” In the 20 years between this album and Gorillaz’s first EP, *Tomorrow Comes Today*, the world has mutated in unimaginable ways. Gorillaz, though, remain a vibrant and inventive bulletin of their times. “The essence \[of Gorillaz\] is the same as it’s always been,” says Kabaka. “It’s still weird and it’s still wonderful. But maybe we have changed.”

When it came to crafting her fourth album, Jessie Ware had one word in mind. “Escapism,” the Londoner tells Apple Music of *What’s Your Pleasure?*, a collection of suitably intoxicating soul- and disco-inspired pop songs to transport you out of your everyday and straight onto a crowded dance floor. “I wanted it to be fun. The premise was: Will this make people want to have sex? And will this make people want to dance? I’ve got a family now, so going out and being naughty and debauched doesn’t happen that much.” And yet the singer (and, in her spare time, wildly popular podcaster) could have never foreseen just how much we would *all* be in need of that release by the time *What’s Your Pleasure?* came to be heard—amid a global pandemic and enforced lockdowns in countless countries. “A lot of shit is going on,” says Ware. “As much as I don’t think I’m going to save the world with this record, I do think it provides a bit of escapism. By my standards, this album is pretty joyful.” Indeed, made over two years with Simian Mobile Disco’s James Ford and producers including Clarence Coffee Jr. (Dua Lipa, Lizzo) and Joseph Mount of Metronomy, *What’s Your Pleasure?* is a world away from the heartfelt balladry once synonymous with Ware. Here, pulsating basslines reign supreme, as do whispered vocals, melodramatic melodies, and winking lyrics. At times, it’s a defiant throwback to the dance scene that first made Ware famous (“I wanted people to think, ‘When is she going to calm this album down?’”); at others, it’s a thrilling window into what might come next (note “Remember Where You Are,” the album’s gorgeous, Minnie Riperton-esque outro). But why the sudden step change? “A low point in music” and \"a shitty time,” says Ware, nodding to a 2018 tour that left her feeling so disillusioned with her day job that her mother suggested she quit singing altogether. “I needed a palate cleanser to shock the system. I needed to test myself. I needed to be reminded that music should be fun.” *What’s Your Pleasure?*, confirms Ware, has more than restored the spring in her step. “I feel like what I can do after this is limitless,” she says. “That’s quite a different situation to how I felt during the last album. Now, I have a newfound drive. I feel incredibly empowered, and it’s an amazing feeling.” Here\_,\_ Let Ware walk you through her joyous fourth record, one song at a time. **Spotlight** “I wrote this in the first writing session. James was playing the piano and we were absolutely crooning. That’s what the first bit of this song is—which really nods to musical theater and jazz. We thought about taking it out, but then I realized that the theatrical aspect is kind of essential. The album had to have that light and shade. It also felt like a perfect entry point because of that intro. It’s like, ‘Come into my world.’ I think it grabs you. It’s also got a bit of the old Jessie in there, with that melancholy. This song felt like a good indicator of where the rest of the album was going to go. That’s why it felt right to start the record with that.” **What’s Your Pleasure?** “We had been writing and writing all day, and nothing was working. We\'d gone for a lunch, and we were like, ‘You know, sometimes this happens.’ Later, we were just messing about, and I was like, ‘I really want to imagine that I\'m in the Berghain and I want to imagine that I\'m dancing with someone and they are so suggestive, and anything goes.’ It\'s sex, it\'s desire, it\'s temptation. We were like, ‘Let’s do this as outrageously as possible.’ So we imagined we were this incredibly confident person who could just say anything. When we wrote it, it just came out—20 minutes and then it was done. James came up with that amazing beat, which almost reminds me of a DJ Shadow song. We were giggling the whole time we were writing it. It\'s quite poppy accidentally, but I think with the darkness of all the synths, it’s just the perfect combination.” **Ooh La La** “This is another very cheeky one. It’s very much innuendo. In my head, there are these prim and proper lovers—it’s all very polite, but actually there’s no politeness about. So it’s quite a naughty number. The song has got an absolute funk to it, but it’s really catchy and it’s still quite quirky. It’s not me letting rip on the vocal. It’s actually quite clipped.” **Soul Control** “I had Janet Jackson in my head in this one. It’s a really energetic number. There is a sense of indulgence in these songs, because I wasn’t trying to play to a radio edit and I was really relishing that. But it’s not self-indulgent, because it’s very much fun. These are the highest tempos I’ve ever done, and I think I surprised myself by doing that. I wanted to keep the energy up—I wanted people to think, ‘When is she going to calm this album down?’” **Save a Kiss** “It’s funny because I was a bit scared of this song. I remember Ed Sheeran telling me, ‘When you get a bit scared by a song, it usually means that there’s something really good in it.’ My fans like emotion from me, so I wanted to do a really emotive dance song. We just wanted it to feel as bare as possible and really feel like the lyrics and the melody could really like sing out on this one. We had loads of other production in it, and it was very much like a case of James and I stripping everything back. It was the hardest one to get right. But I’m very excited about playing it. It has the yearning and the wanting that I feel my fans want, and I just wanted it to feel a bit over the top. I also wanted this song to have a bit of Kate Bush in there and some of the drama of her music.” **Adore You** “I wrote this when I got pregnant. It was my first session with Joseph Mount and I was a bit awkward and he was a bit awkward. When I\'m really nervous I sing really quietly because I don\'t want people to hear anything. But that actually kind of worked. I love this—it shows a vulnerability and a softness. Actually it was me thinking about my unborn child and thinking about, like, I\'m falling for you and this bump and feeling like it\'s going to be a reality soon. I think Joe did such an amazing job on just making it feel hypnotic and still romantic and tender, but with this kind of mad sound. I think it’s a really beautiful song. It was supposed to be an offering before I went away and had a baby, to tell my fans that I’ll be back. They really loved it and I thought, ‘I can\'t not put this on the record, because it\'s like it\'s an important song for the journey of this album.’ I’m really proud of the fact that this is a pure collaboration, and I have such fond memories of it.” **In Your Eyes** “This was the first song that me and James wrote for this whole album. I think you can feel the darkness in it. And that maybe I was feeling the resentment and torturing myself. I think that the whirring arpeggio and the beats in this song very much suggest that it’s a stream of consciousness. There’s a desperation about it. I think that was very much the time and place that I was in. I’m very proud of this song, and it’s actually one of my favorites. Jules Buckley did such an amazing job on the strings—it makes me feel like we\'re in a Bond film or something. But it was very much coming off the back of having quite a low point in music.” **Step Into My Life** “I made this song with \[London artist\] Kindness \[aka Adam Bainbridge\]. I’ve known them for a long time. In my head I wanted that almost R&B delivery with the verse and for it to feel really intimate and kind of predatory, but with this very disco moment in the chorus. I love that Adam’s voice is in there, in the breakdown. It feels like a conversation—the song is pure groove and attitude. You can’t help but nod your head. It feels like one that you can play at the beginning of a party and get people on the dance floor.” **Read My Lips** “James and I did this one on our own, and it’s supposed to be quite bubblegummy. We were giving a nod to \[Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam with Full Force song\] ‘I Wonder If I Take You Home.’ The bassline in this song is so good. We also recorded my vocal slower and lower, so that when you turn it back to normal speed, the vocals sound more cutesy because it sounds brighter and higher. I wanted it to sound slightly squeaky. My voice is naturally quite low and melancholic, so I don’t know how I’m going to sing this one live. I’ll have to pinch my nose or something!” **Mirage (Don’t Stop)** “The bassline here is ridiculous! That’s down to Matt Tavares \[of BADBADNOTGOOD\]. He’s a multi-instrumentalist and is just so talented and enthusiastic, and I also wrote this with \[British DJ and producer\] Benji B and \[US producer\] Clarence Coffee Jr. I think it really signified that I had got my confidence and my mojo back when I went into that session. Usually I\'d be like, ‘Oh, my god, I can\'t do this with new people.’ But it just clicked as sometimes it does. I was unsure about whether the lyric ‘Don\'t stop moving’ felt too obvious. But Benji B was very much like, ‘No, man. You want people to dance. It’s the perfect message.’ And I think of Benji B as like the cool-ometer. So I was like, \'Cool, if Benji B thinks it cool, then I\'m okay with that.’” **The Kill** “There’s an almost hypnotic element to this song. It’s very dark, almost like the end of the night when things are potentially getting too loose. It’s also a difficult one to talk about. It’s about someone feeling like they know you well—maybe too well. There are anxieties in there, and it\'s meant to be cinematic. I wanted that relentlessly driving feeling like you\'d be in a car and you just keep going on, like you’re almost running away from something. Again, Jules Buckley did an amazing job with the strings here—I wanted it to sound almost like it was verging on Primal Scream or Massive Attack. And live, it could just build and build and build. There is, though, a lightness at the end of it, and an optimism—like you’re clawing your way out of this darkness.” **Remember Where You Are** “I’m incredibly proud of this song. I wrote it when Boris Johnson had just got into Downing Street and things were miserable. Everything that could be going wrong was going wrong, which is behind the lyric ‘The heart of the city is on fire.’ And it sounds relatively upbeat, but actually, it\'s about me thinking, ‘Remember where you are. Remember that just a cuddle can be okay. Remember who’s around you.’ Also, it was very much a semi-sign-off and about saying, ‘This is where I’m going and this is the most confident I’ve ever been.’ It was a bold statement. I think it stands up as one of the best songs I\'ve ever written.”

From Lyric: The title Closer Than They Appear serves as a motif inspired by half the fine print warning on the side view mirrors of vehicles: “objects in mirror are closer than they appear”. The symbolism of the phrase weaves a web connecting many things in my life, especially my music career. The title sort of speaks to the questions I’ve feared asking myself as I’ve grown older: Is a viable music career still attainable for me? Did I say all I have to say? Did I do all I was supposed to do? We use those side view mirrors to guide us while driving. They’re vital and important tools, directly in front of us. I see myself as an object in the mirror that may be closer to my career breakthrough and self-actualization than I think (or even others may think). It’s almost as if I’m telling myself to keep going in the album title. It all tied together when I connected with Phonte for this album. He’s one of my favorite artists ever and has been a huge influence throughout my career. Working with him seemed so far-fetched at one point. Meeting Phonte and discovering that he was already a fan of my work and had been interested in working with me boosted my confidence and renewed my fervor for my music career. Making this album, Phonte helped me break free from the “female rapper” box I’ve been trying to break out of for years. My goal was to steer clear of such titles by flexing my range as a songwriter, rapper, vocalist, conceptualist, and diving into genres outside of Hip-Hop.

"The idea for this project came from me noticing the landscape of how fathers are represented in hip hop. Outside of Will Smith’s classic “Just the Two Of Us” and a handful of others, the majority of the records in hip hop that speak on fatherhood have a negative connotation. I wanted to change that narrative, as it’s not the only one that exists. Myself being a father, there are a ton of others like me who are engulfed in hip hop and are also 24 hour a day dads, whose kids mean the world to them. I wanted to showcase that. I started this project in August of 2019 as one song, and it grew into an entire project within a week, and I’ve been sitting on this idea since the summer/fall, waiting for Father’s Day weekend to come around. This is a conceptual EP, where each song is a story that holds hands with the ones before and after it, all about my life as a kid, growing up with my father always in my life, and how that’s now shaped me as a father myself. It’s named “Milestones”, after my son Miles, and also signifying the milestones that us dads reach in life as we grow into fatherhood. This project is solely about growing Up with a dad, being a dad, and the importance of it all. To all the fathers out here who are lovingly and actively doing the work, this one is for us." -Skyzoo

*“It’s beauty meets aggression.” Read an interview with Abe Cunningham about Deftones’ massive ninth album.* “My bags are still packed,” Deftones drummer Abe Cunningham tells Apple Music. The California band was set to embark on a two-year touring cycle when the pandemic hit. “We were eight hours away from flying to New Zealand and Australia,” he says, when they received the news that the festival that was to signal the start of their tour had been canceled. The band had spent nearly two years before that chipping away at their ninth album, *Ohms*, while also planning to celebrate the 20th anniversary of 2000’s *White Pony* with a remix album, *Black Stallion*—which is to say, they had more than a few reasons to take their show on the road. “There was talk of delaying the album,” he says, “but we were like, ‘Shit, if we can help somebody out, if we can get somebody through their doldrums and their day-to-day shit, let’s stick to the plan.” *Ohms* is a triumph that serves the stuck-at-home headphone listener every bit as much as it would, and eventually will, the festival-going headbanger. It reaches into every corner of Deftones’ influential sonic repertoire: chugging grooves, filthy rhythms, extreme vocals, soaring emotions, experimental soundscapes, and intentionally cryptic lyrics, open for each individual listener’s interpretation. “We try to make albums,” Cunningham says. “Sequencing is definitely something that we put a lot of thought and energy into.” Opening track “Genesis” begins with an eerie synth, a slow, wavering riff. And then, with a hint of reverb and Cunningham’s sticks counting it in, there’s an explosion. Guitars and bass pound out an enormous, droning chord as Chino Moreno screeches: “I reject both sides of what I’m being told/I’ve seen right through, now I watch how wild it gets/I finally achieve balance/Approaching a delayed rebirth.” “Ceremony” opens with staccatoed guitar and muffled vocals, followed by a feverish riff. “The Spell of Mathematics” is an epic album highlight that combines doomy basslines, breathy vocals, and screams, before a midsection breakdown of finger snaps that you can easily imagine resonating across a festival field or concert hall. “It’s one of those things that just happened out of nowhere,” Cunningham says. “Our buddy Zach Hill \[Death Grips, Hella, and more\] happened to be in LA when we were tracking everything, so we all walked up to meet him and had one beer, which led to three and four. He came back to the studio with us. The snaps are our little attempt at a barbershop quartet. It just worked out organically, and we have one of the baddest drummers ever just snapping.” The band took time off after touring their 2016 album, *Gore*, allowing them to take things slow. “In the past, it’s been, ‘All right, here’s your two months, you’re off tour, take a break. All right, you’ve got studio coming up, go, be productive!’ And we’re like, ‘Okay, but what if I don’t feel productive today?’ Tensions can come in. So we decided to take that year off.” Each band member lives in a different city, so they’d get together for a week or so once every month to jam and write songs, ultimately creating *Ohms*, in the order it was written. “Each time we would jam, we started making songs and we treated it as a set list,” Cunningham says. “We’d go home, stew on that for the month and see what we had, live with it, then come back and play those songs in order.” Summing up their approach, Cunningham says, “It’s beauty meets aggression. We’re trying to make a lovely mix of things that flow. I think we have more to offer than that, but it’s definitely one of our trademarks. I think our frustration is just trying to fit all these things that we love into one album.”

“I am not the person I was yesterday,” Miley Cyrus tells Apple Music. “Cutting with Stevie Nicks on the phone, that changed me forever. Everything changes me forever. Every night before I go to sleep, I say goodbye to myself, in a way, because that person is done.” The shape-shifting pop icon has worn many hats throughout her action-packed career—Disney idol, pop/rap dynamo, down-home hippie torn between Nashville and Malibu—but there’s something about her rock-star chapter, realized in her glamorous seventh album *Plastic Hearts*, that feels the most like her destiny. It isn’t just that Cyrus has the pipes to carry these pummeling, heavyweight songs, which funnel \'80s glam and punk into anthemic, electric pop—it’s how downright convincing she is in the role. Rock’s leading ladies are on board: After Cyrus turned Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” into a raw, rough-edged revelation, Debbie Harry called her a “force to be reckoned with.” On “Bad Karma,” Joan Jett brings “I don’t give a damn” attitude to a song that raises a glass to bad decisions. And Nicks, clearly a major influence, bellows magnificently on the remix to “Midnight Sky,” a tantalizing riff on “Edge of Seventeen” that feels like a woman set free. Much of the album was shaped by Cyrus’ divorce from actor Liam Hemsworth, which was finalized in early 2020, as well as the loss of her house in a California wildfire and her struggles with addiction. But on *Plastic Hearts*, she channels all that real pain, guilt, and suffering—and occasionally, the jaded frustration of someone who’s been up and down before—into glossy yet vigorous expressions of inner tension and heat. “I have the artist torture thing going on, too, where I’m a little conflict-seeking because it’s creative,” she says. “I like to feel sad sometimes. And I like to feel happy. I really like to *feel*. It’s inspiring to me.”