“You say you can\'t hold anything back/It\'s a habit,” Helena Deland sings on the aptly titled “Truth Nugget”—which her first full-length album is full of. The Montreal art-pop experimentalist revels in uncomfortable conversations about relationship dynamics and gender norms, often positioning herself in the crosshairs. On “Dog,” she’s an obedient partner submitting herself to the patriarchy (“I hate to be your dog/But I got everything to gain from your hand on my head/Like I’m about to be trained”), while on “Pale,” she toes the line between ennui and self-loathing, staring at the mirror to declare, “Spending this much time in my naked body is not making it familiar to me.” But on *Someone New*, it’s not just the cutting words that throw you off balance: Deland’s deconstructed dream pop presents a shape-shifting bricolage of bedroom-indie confessionals, jarring drones, and mutant drum-machine beats that vividly reflect the unsettled mindset of someone barely holding it all together.
When the largely anonymous UK collective Sault released *Untitled (Black Is)* in June 2020, it arrived on the heels of global unrest spawned, this time, by the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. That album spoke to the profound grief and rage that so many Black people (and their allies) felt, offering a lifeline and a balm at the perfect moment. *Untitled (Rise)* comes three months later, celebratory in its spirit and poetic in its motion—the fresh air inhaled after a summer of drowning. Soulful disco and buoyant funk inform the album from the outset. “Strong,” complete with regal marching band flourishes, beckons to listeners to get up and move: “We\'re moving forward tonight,” a vocalist commands in the early seconds of the opener. “We won\'t back down tonight.” What follows is a monument to resilience and Black people\'s ability to conjure joy under any circumstances, and the songs keep the freedom of the dance floor (or the square) in their center. “I Just Want to Dance” is an intoxicating collage of percussion, while the loose groove of “Fearless” and the kineticism of “Street Fighter” keep up the energy. Elsewhere, “Son Shine,” with its affecting gospel choral arrangements, connects spiritual history with the present, a reminder that so much of this magic has long been intertwined with the sacred: “Let the son shine through my pain, so we will rise.” Towards the back, the tempo slows into the meditative, strings replace the much of the percussion, and the spaces between lyrics become more prominent leading into “The Black & Gold,” a solemn instrumental that evokes peace or rest. The final track offers one last thematic tie: the pain but also the divinity, a guilty world and the preservation of innocence. At its core, *Untitled (Rise)* is about duality and holding multiple truths in a single heart; it asks and extends levity while ensuring, also, that we do not forget.
for audio stream or download : awal.ffm.to/galore 1 - little one 2 - fall 3 - unearth me 4 - god's chariots 5 - galore 6 - nightime 7 - asturias (ft. Zero) 8 - rosebud 9 - girl on my throne (ft. Casey MQ) 10 - another night 11 - I didn't give up on you
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.”
Just after she’d released her second album, 2016’s *Oh No*, Jessy Lanza’s life was in a bit of an upheaval. She’d broken up with her partner and co-producer, Junior Boys’ Jeremy Greenspan, and moved from her hometown of Hamilton, Ontario, to New York City to start a new relationship. But things didn’t immediately gel. “I had a vision of what that move was going to mean and how I was going to feel,” the songwriter/producer tells Apple Music. “And then when I ended up feeling pretty much how I did before I left, I just started feeling lost and homesick. I think I just underestimated how moving away from my family and from familiarity and all that stuff would affect me.” But as the songs for her third LP, *All the Time*, began to take shape, “it just became this thing I could connect to and engage with that made sense,” she says. “I was a bit of an emotional mess writing this record. I was really depressed and I used the album as a way to claw myself out of this hole that I was in.” Listening to these tracks—by turns woozy and propulsive, ruminative and joyful, taking inspiration from ’80s funk and quiet storm, ’90s house and techno, and 2010s footwork and hip-hop—you wouldn’t necessarily suspect they’re the product of dark times. But it is, at its core, a dance record, meant more for catharsis than self-pity: “It was hard not to write these meaningful, really emotional lyrics,” she says. “It sounds like a cliché thing to say, but I do feel like overthinking the lyrics is my first step in ruining a song.” Despite having established a new working relationship with Greenspan, who helped produce the album, that feeling of upheaval hasn’t entirely gone away. When the pandemic hit, and her NYC lease was up, Lanza hit the road and landed—at least temporarily—in Palo Alto, California, where she told us more about the genesis of *All the Time*. **Anyone Around** \"That was the last song we wrote for the record. I wrote it while we had started mixing, so it was really late to be added to the tracklist, but it\'s one of my favorite songs. It’s about realizing that maybe you\'re the asshole in your life. I was just thinking about the plot, like in a film noir where it\'s at the end and the protagonist realizes they\'re the murderer or whatever. I was just thinking like, at the end of my life, I don\'t want to suddenly realize that actually I was the asshole the whole time. It\'s about pushing people away and not having self-awareness.\" **Lick in Heaven** \"I wrote that after I had a particularly bad fight with my partner. I was in the remorse phase of feeling like I really need to apologize for what I said, and then I started thinking about that moment in a fight when somebody really has the choice to either go back or let their pride or their ego get the better of them, and then they just go full nuclear. And then I thought of the idea of spinning out, and how that would be a fun lyric to write the chorus around.\" **Face** “This was an edit fest of a song; it was a lot of experimenting on new equipment that I just got. I had a bunch of semi-modular stuff that I didn\'t really know how to use, so I would do just really long takes at the BPM that I wanted ‘Face’ to be at, and then just edited stuff together after. I know Jeremy did the same thing; he was experimenting a lot with new modules he added to his Eurorack. It started with that bassline that\'s in the song. For me, the bassline is the hook. In house music, that bassline really is everything, so I was thinking about that a lot in ‘Face’—trying to get a good bassline—but it\'s a lot of editing. That song just became a clusterfuck of a song. The lyrics were the last thing I wrote. I was riding home on the subway in New York and just being a bit creepy and looking at everyone\'s expression and had this thought of \'I wonder what these people are actually thinking about. Are they pissed off?\' I thought it would be fun to write lyrics about that.” **Badly** \"I think ‘Badly’ is my favorite track from the album. I know I already said that maybe about \'Anyone Around,\' but I like ‘Badly’ a lot. The reason I have an affection for it is because it was a lot of happy accidents in that song. The sub line at the beginning of the song was kind of a mistake. I don\'t even know how the sampler in Logic made that...it just happened. I did a lot of modular experimenting in that song too, and then Jeremy added—in the breakdown there\'s this really cheesy Mariah Carey pop-ballad breakdown in the middle that when I first heard it, I was like, \'I don\'t know if I like this.\' But it really grew on me, and I think of that song really fondly.\" **Alexander** \"I was pretty sad when I wrote that one. I was trying to do a cover of the Alexander O\'Neal song \'A Broken Heart Can Mend.\' And then it just wasn\'t going anywhere and it just didn\'t sound very good, so I changed the key. I just started messing around with it over the course of a couple weeks, and it changed from that cover into \'Alexander,\' and I just kept the title.\" **Ice Creamy** \"I think the vocals ended up sounding that way because Jeremy and I passed that one back and forth quite a few times, and I would run it through some of my vocal effects and then Jeremy would have a go at processing it, and it just took on this weird shift. I kind of can\'t tell what key it\'s in. It\'s a weird song. I went on this tour in 2017, all by myself, which was a really bad idea. I was trying to be tough and thinking, \'Oh, I traveled around. I\'ll be fine.\' It just really fucked me up by the end of it. I was taking these pills that I bought over the counter in Mexico to sleep—tramadol. It just makes you not care about anything, and so by the end of that tour, I was taking tramadol to sleep, and it was just not good. It just was a big mistake to do that. It\'s not a problem for me anymore, but \'Ice Creamy\' was about basically taking tramadol and not giving a shit about anything, and how sad that is.\" **Like Fire** \"I kept hearing \'In My Feelings,\' the Drake song, because in 2018, when it came out, I would just hear it everywhere I went. I was just like, \'The drums are really good for this song. I\'m going to try and figure out what\'s going on,\' and so it was just an experiment trying to learn a Drake beat, and then also I was working on a HOMESHAKE remix at the same time, which wasn\'t going anywhere, so it became kind of like a failed HOMESHAKE remix and also me trying to figure out a Drake drum pattern, and then it turned into \'Like Fire.\'\" **Baby Love** \"I wrote it after coming home from the hospital after meeting my niece for the first time. It was just a different feeling than I\'ve ever felt before. I was really just so happy. So that song is dedicated to her.\" **Over and Over** \"I was really into this one S.O.S. Band song called \'Looking for You.\' In the first verse, Mary Davis does this little speaking thing where all of a sudden she breaks from singing. I just thought it sounded so good. At the time, I was feeling really angry, really sad, and just trying to write in opposition of that feeling, so I think \'Over and Over\' is a very good example of me trying to do that—and trying to copy Mary Davis. It comes back again to the theme of patterns in your life that, if you\'re lucky, you\'ll notice them before you die. Not to get too self-help, like we\'re in a therapy session, but it really is about just noticing things that just keep happening over and over, and I think it comes back to, \'Wow, these issues in my new relationship are the same issues I\'ve been having throughout my adult life with people.\'\" **All the Time** \"\'All the Time\' was like the catalyst for the whole record, because it was the oldest song on the record. Jeremy sent me a really simple chord progression and drums, and it was right when I was moving and we just weren\'t sure if we were going to make another record together. And then I wrote the vocal and the lyrics over top of what he sent me, and we were both so happy with it. I think it was a good omen or something. It was just a sweet, sad song that we both loved so much, and it was a really nice motivator. It was the spark to make a whole nother record together.\"
“My language for producing music is way more diverse now and allows me to create different-sounding music,” Yaeji tells Apple Music. With her mesmerizing voice and chill vibe, the New York (by way of South Korea) DJ, producer, and multimedia artist Kathy Yaeji Lee is a unique presence in dance music. Her songs are celebratory yet meditative—influenced by house, R&B, and hip-hop. They’re reflective of her dual heritage and intercontinental mindset, ranging from stunt anthems (“raingurl,” “drink i’m sippin on”) to her lowercased cover of Drake’s “Passionfruit.” Recorded before inking a deal with XL (the home to Tyler, The Creator and other sonic misfits), *WHAT WE DREW 우리가 그려왔던* is a personal and intimate mixtape she likens to a musical diary. Sung-spoken in whispery tones in English and Korean, Yaeji’s observations are sharp, whether yearning for stillness (“IN PLACE 그 자리 그대로”), indulging in simple pleasures (“WAKING UP DOWN,” “MONEY CAN’T BUY”), or getting in her feelings (“WHAT WE DREW 우리가 그려왔던,” “IN THE MIRROR 거울”). It also represents a time when she soaked up new production techniques and was inspired by 2000s bossanova-influenced electronica, ’80s-’90s Korean music (curated by her parents, who live outside of Seoul), R&B, and soul. Below Yaeji walks through each song on her mixtape. “Every track is a bit different,” she says “I really hope it brings a little bit of positivity.” **MY IMAGINATION 상상** “I wrote it with the intention of warming people up to what I do. I repeat a lot in this song in Korean: ‘If you follow me in this moment I chose, right in this moment.’ And I repeat ‘my imagination’ over and over in Korean. I wanted it to feel really smooth and continuous, almost cyclical, but in a way that felt relaxing. It’s a way to ease you into the next song, which is quite emotional for me.” **WHAT WE DREW 우리가 그려왔던** “It’s one of the older songs on the mixtape. It was written at a very emotional time, when I was going through a lot of transitions and growing pains. In the midst of all that darkness, I was able to stay positive because of family around me. I think that notion of family and unconditional love is so Korean to me. Thinking of Korea gets me very emotional. My dad messaged \[himself scatting\] to me on KakaoTalk \[a Korean messaging app\] a year and a half ago. He said, ‘I have a song idea for you. Use it if it helps you in any way.’ When I finished up the mixtape, I realized it would be so perfect and meaningful for the track, so I added it in.” **IN PLACE 그 자리 그대로** “It was written around the time me and my friends were watching a video of Stevie Wonder performing live with a talk box \[a cover of The Carpenters’ ‘Close to You’ on *The David Frost Show* in 1972\]. We were listening to that a lot and it was stuck in my head. I loved how the talk box sounded; it’s so warm and fuzzy, his performance is so playful. It also has such a robotic quality. I wanted to create this feeling but using a completely different technique. I layered nine different vocal tracks to create that harmony you hear in the intro. It affected each layer differently and holds a similar feeling that I received when I heard Stevie Wonder. Emotionally, it was written when I didn’t want things to change. Just for a moment, I wanted things to stay still. It’s about yearning for stillness.” **WHEN I GROW UP** “It’s an idea I’ve been settling and meditating on for a long time. It’s the concept of a younger me, or a younger person, imagining what it’s like to become an adult. There’s another perspective in the song where it’s me, the adult version of myself, telling my younger self: ‘Unfortunately, when you grow older, you’re fearful for a lot of things. You don’t want to get hurt. You suppress your emotions and pretend like everything is OK.’ All these things I had no idea would happen when I was younger; it’s my reality, our reality, as adults. It’s a kind of back and forth about that.” **MONEY CAN’T BUY (feat. Nappy Nina)** “It’s the really playful one. It’s purely about friendship and being goofy and positive. The thing I repeat in Korean: ‘What I want to do is eat rice and soup.’ It’s pretty common for me. I’ll put the rice in the soup and mix it up, so it becomes like a porridge. I’m repeating that and it’s followed by ‘What I want, money can’t buy.’ Friendship isn’t something that’s quantifiable or measurable with materialism. It’s completely magical and far more special than what can be described. It’s like an appreciation song for friendship. It’s kind of perfect that Nappy Nina was featured on it. I had met her last minute. She’s a friend of my mixing engineer. She came in and recorded immediately; we realized we had mutual friends, so now we keep in touch. That lends itself well to the message of the song.” **FREE INTERLUDE (feat. Lil Fayo, Trenchcoat & Sweet Pea)** “It felt really liberating to include this in the mixtape. It was a completely natural, goofy hang with my friends. We were having fun making music together, kind of first takes of freestyles. The spirit of our hang and our friendship is really in that track. It’s a very meaningful one for me.” **SPELL 주문 (feat. YonYon & G.L.A.M.)** “It was a joy to put together. It started as a bare-bones demo that I had lyrics to. When I was writing it, I was thinking of the experience of performing onstage to a sea of people that you’ve never met before and sharing your most intimate thoughts and experiences. It’s casting a spell; you’re sharing something that only you know, and then they’re applying it in whatever way it means for themselves. I thought of YonYon because we went to the same middle school in Japan when I was living there for one year. We’ve stayed in touch since, and she’s doing great with music in Japan, so she’s always on my mind to collaborate, and this felt perfect. G.L.A.M. is a close friend of a friend. I had also played shows with her a long time ago when I moved to New York, so I thought she was also another perfect collaborator.” **WAKING UP DOWN** “Purely a feel-good song. There’s a moment of questioning and hesitation. The Korean verses embody that side of it. The parts in English are about the feeling I had when I had all of these basic life routines down and felt healthy, mentally and physically. It’s a song to groove to and hopefully feel inspired by. And also, not to get too wrapped up in the literal things: cooking, waking up, hydrating. Yes, it’s important, but the Korean lyrics remind you: Don’t forget, there are these bigger themes in life you have to think about.” **IN THE MIRROR 거울** “It’s the dramatic one. I really wanted to try singing in a way that feels like I’m unleashing pent-up energy. It was written after a difficult tour that mentally and physically stretched me quite thin. It came from a thought I had while I was looking in the mirror in the airplane bathroom. I think being up in the air makes you more emotional. I don’t know how true that is, but I definitely feel that way. I was really in my feelings and really upset.” **THE TH1NG (feat. Victoria Sin & Shy One)** “I want to credit Vic and Shy because I knew I wanted to work with them. I sent them a pretty bare-bones demo, just synth and samples. They’re partners and based in London. Vic is an incredible performing artist and Shy is an incredible DJ. Vic came up with all of the lyrics and vocals. They wrote it on their birthday, stayed at home alone in their bedroom, surrounded themselves with plants, meditated, and had an introspective stream of consciousness of what is this ‘TH1NG.’ It sounds really abstract, but they explore the concept. Shy did a lot of the production on it and built on the little things I sent them.” **THESE DAYS 요즘** “Do you know the \[anime\] genre Slice of Life? It feels like a Slice of Life song, which is, the way I understand it, it’s mundane day-to-day lifestyle about meditating on time. I would visually describe it as feeling like sitting on a stoop with your friends on a nice fall afternoon sharing stories with each other about how you’re doing. That kind of feeling. It’s not overly dramatic or purposeful; it’s a mood.” **NEVER SETTLING DOWN** “It’s a song about making a determined promise to myself to never settle. I should always stay open-minded, to continue unlearning and learning things, to shed things that felt toxic to me in the past. I say things like ‘I’m never shooting the shit,’ which is a balance of not taking myself too seriously but also that I’m not playing, I’m working every day. It’s a confident track, and I hope it brings confidence to other people that hear it. At the end, the breaks come in, and it feels like a big release, like a moment where you’re taking flight or dancing like crazy, alone in your room. That’s how I wanted to end the mixtape.”
If bioluminescence could assume a musical form, it might sound like Ana Roxanne’s *Because of a Flower*. On the Los Angeles-based electronic musician’s second album, dream pop and ambient swirl together, glowing as they drift; in “Venus,” the gentle sound of lapping waves even accompanies her spoken-word ruminations on the nature of liquids, keyboards twinkling like a galaxy reflected in the tide. She has a minimalist’s sense of economy: Most of her music is made of little more than synthesizer and her own multi-tracked and harmonized voice. But her influences are vast, taking in medieval European choral music (“A Study in Vastness”), slowcore (“Suite Pour L’invisible”), new age (“- - -”), trip-hop (“Camille”), and even Hindustani singing (“Venus”). And though the mood is often melancholy, it is never despondent; grief and hope exist in equal measure. As she sings in the spare, searching “Suite Pour L’invisible,” “Endless sorrow, endless joy, endless sorrow/I’ll hold your joy/I’ll hold your pain.”
The sublime songs comprising New York-based musician Ana Roxanne's second record, Because Of A Flower, germinated gradually across five years, inspired by interwoven notions of gender identity, beauty, and cruelty. She describes her process as beginning with “a drone element and a mood,” then intuiting melody, syllables, and lyrics incrementally, like sacred shapes materializing from mist. The experience of identifying as intersex informs the album on levels both sonic and thematic, from spoken word texts borrowed from tonal harmony textbooks to cinematic dialogue samples and castrati aria allusions. It's an appropriately interstitial vision of ambient songcraft, a chemistry of wisps and whispers, sanctuary and sorrow, conjured through a fragile balance of voice, bass, space, and texture. Despite a background studying at the prestigious Mills College in Oakland, Roxanne's music rarely feels conceptual, instead radiating an immediate and emotive aura, rooted in the present tense of her personal journey. She speaks of the flower in the title as a body, singular and sunlit, as many petals as thorns, an enigma beholden only to itself. But whether taken as surface or subtext, Because is a transfixing document of a rare artist in the spring of their ascension.
Esther Edquist is Melbourne artist Sweet Whirl. She is also one of the best songwriters you have heard in a very long time. How Much Works is her debut album proper, after a handful of releases acclaimed by the likes of Gorilla Vs Bear, The Guardian and Clash Magazine. How Much Works arrives fully formed, a classic ten song album from an artist with both a command of history and a drive for new expression. The album is a beautifully crafted triumph over bleak moments. It’s the love-addled confessions of a seasoned party girl, romantic yet sardonic, a troubadour who sings of the heart with a knowing sense of the timeless victory of song. Esther dissects experiences with wit and depth, emerging as a powerful, indomitable voice. Musically and lyrically, How Much Works draws on wells as deep as Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Jean-Paul Sartre and Sheryl Crow. It distils personal, reflexive narratives into something universal and wondrous. Esther plays almost everything on the album, with guitar and therevox from engineer Casey Hartnett (Sui Zhen, Sleep Decade) and drums from Monty Hartnett (Dreamin Wild, Sleep Decade). Fellow Chapter Music recording artist Gregor contributes backing vocals to Make That Up For Me and Conga Line. Esther has previously served in Melbourne duo Superstar, who released two delay-drenched albums during the mid 10s. She has also been a member of Scott & Charlene’s Wedding.
Cruise the city in a night ship, dressed to kill in the Seville. Float down waterfalls and fountains, reclined on some pimp shit. The time zone ghost returns to paint a picture that echoes through infinity. The sun is put to rest, the soliloquy is killer bee. A diamond purpose lying beneath the surface. Nothing is ever what it seems, but forever is the theme. It’s time. Shabazz Palaces are back with yet another classic of divine mathematics design. More dazzling Afrofuturist sutras to illuminate distant constellations with sacred abstractions. Enter The Don of Diamond Dreams, raw and uncut, but glowing with 10,000 karat shine. If you adhere to the corporeal limitations of space and chronology, it’s been roughly a decade since Shabazz Palaces first shook the ramparts with their debut stylistic revolution, Black Up -- which Pitchfork named as one of the Best of the 2010s, hailing it as an “album of impossible vision.” But the project masterminded by vocalist and producer Ishmael Butler (with levitational assists from multi-instrumentalist Tendai "Baba" Maraire) has never conformed to gravitational consideration or terrestrial measurement. They are heirs to the astral imagination of Sun Ra and George Clinton, Octavia Butler and Alice Coltrane. If they technically claim residence in Seattle, their sound emanates much closer to Alpha Centauri than Alki Beach. In his unstinting drive to reimagine hip-hop, Butler remains one of the preeminent visionaries of the last quarter-century. His first album with Digable Planets, Reachin (A New Refutation of Time and Space, nodded at Miles Davis in the first half of its title, but 27 years later, he has become one of the most vaunted inheritors of the trumpet deity’s rarefied legacy -- still innovating as he enters his fourth decade as a working musician -- splintering, rebuilding, and expanding the possibilities of sound. He has collaborated with like-minded visionaries Flying Lotus and Thundercat, Battles and Animal Collective. While all-timers like Radiohead and Lauryn Hill have invited him to join them on tour. It remains impossible to accurately describe a Shabazz Palaces album without lapsing into cosmic tropes. Yet sometimes clichés are stand-ins for eternal truths. Therein, The Don of Diamond Dreams embodies a futuristic manifestation of ancient myth, full of robotic vocoder and warped auto-tune, Funkadelic refracted into different dimensions, weird portals and warm nocturnal joy rides alongside the coast (a reflection of it being mixed near the beach in California). The synthesizers are alien but the drums speak a universal language. It is hip-hop, dub, jazz, R&B, soul, funk, African, experimental, and occasionally even pop. But over the course of five albums, Shabazz Palaces have conceived the fluid boundaries of their own one-band genre. Even though the construction of the album is meticulous, it’s a startling masterpiece of improvisation and instinct. It’s both cerebral and automatic, with Butler jotting down phrases and ideas in his phone and eventually shaping them into amorphous abstract expressionist canvasses. If anything, their latest illustrates Butler’s gift for being a conduit of sounds and experience. It’s partially shaped by his own reflection on being a parent and watching his son, Jazz, become internationally renowned as the artist, Lil Tracy. If you listen closely, you can hear the interplay between father and son, as Butler does what is impossible for most veteran artists: he absorbs the sounds of today’s youth, but filters it through his own fractured lens, spitting back convex poems with wild cadences, freestyling with the wisdom of age and the frenetic passion of someone still trying to show and prove. It’s confident and suffused with the thing that defines almost all great art: the willingness to risk attempting something new. There is “Ad Ventures,” a shout out to Butler’s crew, The Black Constellation. The beat operates like a melodic free jazz hymn, with Ish boasting about Ethiopian carats and watching lakes from a theological terrace. It’s an imagistic rendering of their tours through Europe in sprinter vans, blitzing from place to place and absorbing every detail. Featuring Purple Tape Nate, “Fast Learner” offers odd splendor, spoken word reveries and flexes that wriggle through a wrinkle in time. The synthesizers sound like New Age from the 37th century crossed with 90s R&B, the drums are slow and seething. On top of that, Butler laid a guitar line down and auto-tune harmonies that instantiate the feeling of driving along PCH at night. “Wet” is a freestyle of sorts with Ish offering his own twist on contemporary rap cadences but making it sound like an underwater Atlantis symphony. There are Based God shoutouts and fuzzy guitars that wouldn’t sound out of place on an Ariel Pink album. “Chocolate Souffle” is some god-level shit-talking in the way that only Butler could do: replete with Maurice Chevalier allusions and admissions of being an “elitist at the zenith of slick demeanor.” While “Thanking the Girls” might be the most poignant song in the Shabazz catalog, a song that acknowledges the myriad positive ways in which women have shaped Butler’s life. The second verse is dedicated to his two daughters and the pride which they engender. Of course, this is a Shabazz Palaces song so the beat sounds like a riff on Panda Bear distilled through a bent futuristic boom-bap prism. In some respects, it’s difficult to consider the possibility that this might be the best Shabazz Palaces album yet. Very few musicians have ever peaked in their fifth decade on earth, but whoever said they were actually from earth? It’s wrong to say that Shabazz Palaces have gone beyond the looking glass. This time they’ve shattered it entirely and created a brilliant new universe in each one of the shards. Shabazz Palaces The Don of Diamond Dreams will be available April 17th, 2020 worldwide on Sub Pop. The 10-track album includes the highlights “Fast Learner (ft. Purple Tape Nate),” “Chocolate Souffle,” “Bad Bitch Walking (ft. Stas THEE Boss), and “Thanking The Girls.” It also features contributions from singer/keyboardist Darrius Willrich, Percussionist Carlos Niño, Knife Knights collaborator OCnotes, Saxophonist Carlos Overall, and bassist Evan Flory-Barnes. The Don of Diamond Dreams was recorded throughout 2019 and produced by Shabazz Palaces at Protect and Exalt: A Black Space in Seattle, mixed and engineered by Erik Blood with mixing assistance from Andy Kravitz at Studio 4 Labs in Venice, California, and mastered by Scott Sedillo at Bernie Grundman Mastering in Los Angeles.
The idea for Daniel Lopatin’s ninth Oneohtrix Point Never LP came as he began revisiting old radio mixtapes he’d made as a teenager just outside of Boston. “Unlike a mixtape that you make for somebody else, they\'re non-sequential,” he tells Apple Music. “You’re reacting to something that you may have not even heard before, that you\'re just titillated by for the first few seconds. It’s like a map of your unconscious in a way.” Meant to simulate the experience of listening to FM radio for an entire day, *Magic Oneohtrix Point Never*—a nod to Boston soft rock station Magic 106, and the name to which Lopatin’s 2007 debut *Betrayed in the Octagon* was originally attributed—had to have “an eclecticism” that made you feel like you were spinning the dial. So in addition to collages of hallucinogenic DJ chatter, there are also mutant pop ballads (“No Nightmares,” which features friend and co-executive producer The Weeknd), warped alt-rock anthems (“I Don’t Love Me Anymore”), New Age satires (“The Whether Channel”), and sculptures wrought from sound that most people would dismiss as garbage or background noise. All of it speaks to a career defined by liquid sensibilities and an open mind. “I wanted to make a cohesive, punchy, 50-minute record that was very personal, but pulled from FM palettes that I was personally interested in,” Lopatin says. “I think it works really well as a metaphor for how I\'ve changed. The things that I try to understand about my own life and being an avid musical listener and how much that\'s influenced me as a musician is kind of apparent on this record. That metaphor of transformation is something that I came to by thinking about the radio.” Here, Lopatin walks us through the day, from sunup to midnight. **Cross Talk I** “You’re in alarm clock territory. You’re waking up kind of inside the fucking radio, not listening to it. I really want the setting of the album to be almost within a kind of psychic environment—Magic Oneohtrix Point Never as a radio station. So you’re waking up. Time to get on with the day.” **Auto & Allo** “It\'s really a track of two parts. The first half is really abstract, and in the second half it comes together. I called it \'Auto & Allo,\' which means self and other. So it’s like you\'re orienting and you\'re moving towards something. The album is becoming, earning its subjectivity out of this haze.” **Long Road Home** “I imagined it as the beginning of the album’s journey. It\'s setting the thesis of the whole record up, which is sort of embracing transformation, even if it\'s kind of disturbing and the future is vast and unfortunately filled with question marks. But that\'s it. That\'s the game. That\'s where we are. That\'s who we are. And so, how to live alongside your incompleteness, instead of fight against it or to think that you can overcome it. There\'s no home you come to. There\'s just this kind of road, and the road is the thing. That\'s what that song is for me.” **Cross Talk II** “You\'re in the Midday Suite. The collaged-together narrative there is the DJ saying, ‘Somehow our childhood fantasies don\'t relate to our adult realities.’ And from there, the record gets a little bit more dense. I like to think of midday as active and energetic. There\'s a lot of optimism, weirdly.” **I Don’t Love Me Anymore** “Basically it’s Frankensteined together—partially a bratty pop-punk song, partially motorik, like psych rock that\'s drum-machine-driven. There\'s a lot of weird over-sampled guitars on it, like the kinds that you might hear in a Sega Genesis video game.” **Bow Ecco** “A lot of the more ambient moments on the record are references to weather. The liminal space of a weather report is always, I\'ve found, really calming, but it’s scary because you\'re essentially just somebody sitting there talking about unpredictable dynamic systems and trying to figure them out and conquer them. A bow echo is a weather pattern that\'s shaped like an archer\'s bow, this thing that could be like a tornado. This song is calm and there’s a lot of repetition. Then I\'m trying to characterize a moment of weather where it flares up like a cyclone, a music-as-sculpture moment where I try to characterize this thing that was like something you\'d see on a Weather Channel broadcast.” **The Whether Channel** “It\'s like ‘Bow Ecco’ is the actual weather outside, happening somewhere in the lower atmosphere. And ‘Whether Channel’ is like a station, a place where something\'s commenting on it, dealing with it, or trying to track it. And so it flows out of that. \[Rapper\] Nolan \[berollin\] did that part off the cuff, and it\'s really interesting because he\'s talking almost in this pseudo-motivational-speaker way, which I thought was really funny. That fit so perfectly and wonderfully into this whole New Age thing that I\'m interested in anyway. I was like, ‘Oh. Let\'s do this kind of Law of Attraction satire where, by the end of his verse, his voice is totally transformed into this super-saturated bit-crushed thing and it sounds like weird baby voices are being pulled apart from each other.” **No Nightmares** “It kind of has this 10cc/Godley & Creme/‘Take My Breath Away’ kind of vibe to it that could be like a late-night thing because it\'s slow. But I felt that it was so sweet and kind of pretty. It also has a kind of blue-sky quality to it even if it\'s kind of slow and romantic. It’s as poppy as the record gets. I mean, this is not a pop record. It references popular music a lot, but it\'s not sequenced or created to be a series of singles in that way. It\'s very much a record that is meant to be listened to almost like how you watch a film, so this really needed to be there in a way for me. It just made sense as the moment on the record—if there is one—that’s going to have this big, brash FM radio moment, right there in the middle.” **Cross Talk III** “It’s sundown now, the sun is setting. This one is pretty lighthearted. I think it was a commercial for a candy bar and I just did a kind of Negativland-style collage where I made the woman in the advertisement talk about styles of music—about background music and elevator music—as if it was something she was tasting.” **Tales From the Trash Stratum** “The trash stratum is a reference to \[author\] Philip K. Dick. Here’s the quote: ‘Elements of the divine trash stratum,’ he says. ‘The clue lies there. Symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum.’ It’s a very spiritual way of thinking about trash: If everything, if all material, is kind of equally alive in a sense, because we\'re here to witness it and observe it, then everything is kind of special. Trash is a discarded thing, but for a lot of artists—me included—there\'s always been an interest in the abject or in the trash and the discarded stuff. That’s been such a big part of my music and my philosophy in thinking about musical tastes—like trashy tastes or dustbin stuff or throwaway New Age records that really meant a lot to me.” **Answering Machine** “Really, the record to me is about listening—and all these sort of overlapping modes of listening. We have voicemails now, but I remember the eeriness of an answering machine, and having to come home and press a button. There\'s this weird beep and you could hear the sort of mechanism itself, the thing—there’s a tape in it and it looks all weird. I wanted to make an interlude that had an homage to this other thing that I would imagine I\'d be listening to while I was listening to the radio. It\'s as simple as that.” **Imago** “In nature, an imago is the fully realized final stage of an insect when it becomes its final form—so a butterfly when it\'s fully winged. I wrote the piece first and then named it that because it seemed to have that kind of narrative to it—it sounds like pieces in between that are almost barely there, like something\'s happening. Beautiful music was a style of music on the radio that was essentially background music, and to me this sounded like a really doomed piece of beautiful music that you\'d never hear. As the song progresses, it both decays and becomes more itself at the same time. By the time the strings come in and there\'s this really crazy kind of symphonic string arrangement that hugs the decaying loop, it occurred to me that that was kind of like an imago, a butterfly abandoning its exoskeleton and becoming this new thing.” **Cross Talk IV / Radio Lonelys** “The beginning of the overnight, and that’s when things get a little darker, seedier, and, in a way, more fun and cynical. Things open up. To me, the overnight programming on freeform radio was either generically stuck in there and wasn\'t actually what the station was doing all the rest of the time, or it was this inverse—a more freeform chunk where it was more libidinous and weird. I mean, it\'s overnight, so who the fuck is up listening?” **Lost But Never Alone** “It\'s like ‘Lost But Never Alone’ and ‘No Nightmares’ are two sides of the same coin. I just love a triumphant power ballad, and I love Def Leppard. To me, this is like a Def Leppard song but it\'s hybridized with other things that are a little bit more like 1980s synth-pop but on the gothier side of it, so like Depeche Mode’s *Violator* and stuff like that. That was always alchemically interesting to me, because you were either hair metal or you were goth—but if you were both, you were schizophrenic, basically.” **Shifting** “Arca and I really connect on this idea that we\'re both interested in transformation as a powerful formal device in music. Because you can do stuff with sound design and production in a way that can really encapsulate all these other ways of thinking about transformation, whether it\'s bodily transformation or evolving your ideas or devolving your ideas. The whole thing is sort of reinforcing that theme of liquid ideas as liquid sounds, and I really wanted Arca to be on the record somewhere because I think she\'s doing it and has been doing that so well for so long. I always felt such a kinship with her that way.” **Wave Idea** “Much like ‘Shifting’—which I think of as a weird spooky theremin, kind of an Ed Wood vibe but turned into something really futuristic—‘Wave Idea’ is like, what if you could animate this sort of stuff between the dials and sculpt it into something that had a body, that had its own sort of psychic importance and its own physical kind of manifestation? So it\'s like a creature, my hallucination, how I sculpt something that becomes much more interesting than just noise or trash.” **Nothing’s Special** “There\'s a kind of thesis in it. It was a really rough fucking year and it\'s been hard for everybody. Something that\'s always given me a lot of solace when I\'m in a funk is that I notice that I\'ve become disenchanted. The thing that can kind of re-enchant me very quickly when I get there is to remember that—like the Philip K. Dick quote said—everything is kind of divine, and everything is interesting, including the stuff between the dials. The noise. I wanted to end the album on a high note, so it crescendos towards the lyric that says no matter how bleak things get, I\'m still fundamentally fascinated that I can find such enchantment in such random, small things.”
Straight from the depths of an unused Boston-area concrete laboratory comes the debut of Sweeping Promises. Written and recorded with a patented "single mic technique" just before quarantine, "Hunger for a Way Out", is a post-punk leaning gem of unpolished DIY sound. The title track kicks things off in absolutely classic fashion, full of spirited hooks that echo the early Rough Trade sound. Angular guitars and sharp synth notes float atop a raw rhythm section, while Lira Mondal's effervescent vocals truly define Sweeping Promises' sound. There's something simple yet otherworldly about these tracks - you have the DIY prowess of Kleenex/LiLiPUT and Girls at Our Best!, a brooding new wave-y minimal synth sound woven in, and an undeniable pop-leaning appeal captured in vibrant monaural glory. It's hard to mistake these ten tracks of naturally urgent and driving post-punk for anything other than sheer brilliance. Sweeping Promises deliver in spades on "Hunger for a Way Out". Packaged in a full color jacket with risograph lyric insert designed by D.H. Strother.
“It’s about struggle and release,” Will Westerman tells Apple Music of his debut album *Your Hero Is Not Dead*. “It’s about being honest about things I find difficult or uncomfortable or unfair, and then creating a response, mostly for myself, and then sharing that to make something communal—something that has hope in it.” It’s an approach that sees the London singer-songwriter ponder and process his observations about modern life—be it climate change (“Blue Comanche”), the knock-on effects of our everyday choices (“Easy Money”), or the inability to live in the moment when you’re, as he says, “not feeling fantastic about things” (“Your Hero Is Not Dead”). But if such subjects sound heavy, the music they are housed in is anything but. *Your Hero Is Not Dead* is a collection of electro-folk songs which unfurl to reveal comforting, intricate melodies and irresistible pop hooks. “There’s quite a lot of conflict for me in the music,” says Westerman. “But the aesthetics are kind of calming.” The album, recorded primarily in Lisbon with London producer Bullion, also delivers on the momentum the singer has been gathering ever since he started releasing music in 2016. A former choir singer and saxophone player who taught himself to play guitar at 15, Westerman credits Bullion (aka Nathan Jenkins) with helping him move from writing songs influenced by artists like Joni Mitchell, Nick Drake, Elliott Smith, and Neil Young towards a sound with more “space and texture.” “I’m interested in the idea that you can have an emotional response and feel like there’s some human understanding in instrumental music,” he says. “You hope to write something that people connect to. I’m just trying to give a helping hand or a message of encouragement.” Below, Westerman guides us through *Your Hero Is Not Dead*, track by track. **Drawbridge** “I was thinking about what I wanted the pace to be even before a lot of these songs were written. I had this rhythmic thing on the guitar, and it conjured an image of a drawbridge. That strong visual image felt like quite a fun thing to put at the start of a record. There are no lyrics in this song, so it’s hard to say what it means in some ways. But it’s for my own creative enjoyment, of just being more exploratory and having a bit more space to try different things for different effects.” **The Line** “This song is an internal monologue and it jumps around to a few different places. The overall theme is quite anxious. It’s thinking about how fast accepted norms shift—which is good in terms of societal development and as long as it’s progressive. But just thinking about the disorientating nature of basically being told one thing a few years ago is fine, and being told now it’s not. It’s not about being angry about that, just what it means for the way you view the world and the relationship you have with your own understanding of things. The refrain at the end—having gone through this examination and feeling quite destabilized and agitated—gets to a place where ultimately it’s good and it’s not all just at the whim of the mass movement of public opinion.” **Big Nothing Glow** “Probably the least optimistic song on the record. That’s why I wanted to have it towards the start, given what I was trying to do with the whole album. The song is about an experience I had when I was in London. I saw a homeless man approaching people for money, and then it suddenly clicked that this guy was someone I had been best friends with when I was three or four years old at nursery. It really stuck with me, in terms of where I’m at now and what’s happened to him. And how that’s not really anyone’s fault, or because of anyone doing anything particularly fantastic. It’s more just about the brutal nature of how unfair causality can be sometimes. I didn’t say anything and then was really troubled by that, so I had to go and write about it. The song itself is almost just a loop. Something I’ve been exploring since working with Bullion is that you don’t have to move around a huge amount in every piece of music. What’s the best way to bring attention to the things that you’re trying to bring attention to?” **Waiting on Design** “This was my favorite song on the record when we made it. I had this clear mental image of someone being stuck in a cube of jelly, who is watching people who have been a part of their life getting on with their own lives. The person is incapacitated, a passive bystander, and is almost watching those people like a film. ‘Waiting on Design’ incorporates that image of being stuck and hoping it will become clear at some point why you’ve made the decisions you’ve made. A friend, Laura Groves, who sings elsewhere on the album, is a really great pianist. We would jam in the evening \[while creating the record\] and she started playing these wobbly chords on the synth—it felt like going from a soft focus to a sharper focus and then in again. Given what my mental image was of the song when I was writing the lyrics, that seemed to work quite well.” **Think I’ll Stay** “When I’m writing, I tend to get a central melodic phrase and lyrics and then build it out. I had the lyric ‘I don’t know how I got here, but now that I am, I think I’ll stay.’ When it came out of my mouth, I thought, ‘That’s a thing I would like to have as a centerpiece of this song.’ The second verse is based on a conversation I had with a friend where he was talking about the fact that our generation is going to have to work until we’re 80. He was saying it in a really flippant, throwaway way. I thought it was interesting—thinking about this kind of acceptance of the strange idea that you’ll be working for your entire life.” **Dream Appropriate** “This is about pace, really. But I also spend quite a lot of time just writing instrumentals on the guitar. I wanted to use some of those as bridges on the album, just to try and break up the music and add variety while also thinking about the arc of the record. It’s almost like a little tonic after this bombardment.” **Easy Money** “The song is mostly about secondary consequence—it’s about the knock-on effects of one action. For example, if I go to the shop and I buy some battery-farmed chicken eggs but think, ‘I don’t think it’s good that there are battery-farmed chickens but I’m just buying the eggs.’ It’s the idea of voting with your wallet. I was quite angry when I was writing this song, and it sounded kind of angry even if my voice makes things sound really soft. It’s kind of taut. Nathan and I made this song together—there’s no one else playing on it, and we only had a few days to get it done. In a way, it made a kind of economy of sound. It’s just quite minimalist and there’s not very much happening at the beginning, but by the end, we maximized the elements that were there to try and change the mood.” **Blue Comanche** “I’m mulling over feeling uncomfortable with the idea of the inevitable annihilation of certain ways of life in the name of progress. But there’s no cognitive idea of what the progress is, it\'s just \'progress\' in inverted commas. I\'m not a complete Luddite, and I think that the world is what it is—I have no idea if it was better or worse a thousand years ago. But it\'s just kind of thinking about that idea of the inevitability of that sort of process. I spend quite a lot of time thinking about the balance of the lyrics and the melody and the instrumentation—a combination of happy and sad tends to be the music I like a lot. I was trying to sort of make something that sounded not angry, but thought-provoking if you wanted to listen to the lyrics.” **Confirmation (SSBD)** “This song quite radically changed the complexion of what I was doing very fast, which was amazing and very exciting. I was very keen on making sure that I’d made an album which wasn’t in any way dependent on previous pieces of music, so the idea of reapproaching the song and doing it in a different way seemed to make sense. It was a new creative process, so in a way it feels almost new. That being said, we didn’t actually record anything new for it, because we had all these parts we hadn\'t used in the first version. Nathan wanted to elongate the ending and to do something slightly different with the percussion. I think the ending works better now.” **Paper Dogs** “I used to play a version of this song a few years ago by doing the bassline on the bass string of my guitar and just singing it in a very exposed way. Then I start doing it a cappella. We fused the two things by just putting a very simple beat on it and a kind of drone. For me, it’s quite a circular song—it doesn’t have a chorus and it goes round almost in a chant. When the bass comes in, it adds a different sort of propulsion and movement to it. I guess the title just popped into my head. The starting point was the fragility of existence, and then just a load of questions which I can’t answer, which I sing at you.” **Float Over** “This is another bit that has been put there for pace. It’s very light and, for me, sounds pretty soothing. There’s no edge to it: It’s just trying to say something quite reassuring and supportive. A lot of the record is concerned with a lot of questions, and there’s a degree of anxiety at points. I think this is just a little sentence about trying to be at peace with not knowing. It’s the happy ending.” **Your Hero Is Not Dead** “I didn’t have something that felt like it was the right sort of close to the record. I had the phrase for a while, and when it clicked, I wrote it quite quickly and spent a lot less time on the lyrics than I usually do. I tried to keep them as unfiltered and open as I could—talking to a person without thinking about what I’m saying. This is less of a head song, it’s more of a heart song. There are lyrics that speak to the fact that I feel like a lot of the time I get in my own way of feeling better about things or just enjoying the moment that I’m in. And the person in that situation is mostly who I\'m singing to. I\'m just trying to give a response and give a helping hand or just a message of encouragement to them.”
Midwestern by birth and temperament, Freddie Gibbs has always seemed a little wary of talking himself up—he’s more show than tell. But between 2019’s Madlib collaboration (*Bandana*) and the Alchemist-led *Alfredo*, what wasn’t clear 10 years ago is crystal now: Gibbs is in his own class. The wild, shape-shifting flow of “God Is Perfect,” the chilling lament of “Skinny Suge” (“Man, my uncle died off a overdose/And the fucked-up part of that is I know I supplied the n\*\*\*a that sold it”), a mind that flickers with street violence and half-remembered Arabic, and beats that don’t bang so much as twinkle, glide, and go up like smoke. *Alfredo* is seamless, seductive, but effortless, the work of two guys who don’t run to catch planes. On “Something to Rap About,” Gibbs claims, “God made me sell crack so I had something to rap about.” But the way he flows now, you get the sense he would’ve found his way to the mic one way or the other.
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.”
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.”
Squirrel Flower - the moniker of Ella O’Connor Williams - announces I Was Born Swimming, her debut album, out January 31st on Full Time Hobby (Polyvinyl in the US), and presents the lead single/video, ‘Red Shoulder’. The album’s title was inspired by Williams’ birth on August 11th 1996 - the hottest day of the year - born still inside a translucent caul sac membrane, surrounded by amniotic fluid. Throughout the 12 songs, landscapes change and relationships shift. The album’s lyrics feel like effortless expressions of exactly the way it feels to change — abstract, determined and hopeful. Squirrel Flower’s music is ethereal and warm, brimming over with emotional depth but with a steely eyed bite and confidence in it’s destination. The band on I Was Born Swimming plays with delicate intention, keeping the arrangements natural and light while Williams’ lead guitar is often fiercely untethered. The album was tracked live, with few overdubs, at The Rare Book Room Studio in New York City with producer Gabe Wax (Adrienne Lenker, Palehound, Cass McCombs). The musicians were selected by Wax and folded themselves into the songs effortlessly. At the heart of the album lives Williams’ haunting voice and melancholic, soulful guitar. The sounds expand and contract over diverse moods, cutting loose on the heavier riffs of ‘Red Shoulder’. “‘Red Shoulder’ is a song about destabilisation and dissociation,” explains Williams. “Something soft and tender becomes warped and sinister, turning into sensory overload and confusion. How can something so lovely turn painful and claustrophobic? The song ends with a heavy and visceral guitar solo, attempting to reground what went awry.” Williams comes from a deep-rooted musical family tree. Her grandparents were classical musicians who lived in the Gate Hill Co-op, an artistic cooperative from upstate New York that grew out of Black Mountain College. Ella’s father, Jesse Williams, spent most of his life as a touring jazz and blues performer and educator, and lends his bass playing to the album. Growing up in a family of hard working musicians fostered a love of music and started Williams down her own musical path. As a child, Williams adopted the alter ego of Squirrel Flower. A couple years later, she began singing with the Boston Children’s Chorus while studying music theory and teaching herself to play the guitar. As a teen, she discovered the Boston DIY and folk music scenes and began writing, recording, and performing her own songs, now returning to Squirrel Flower as her stage name. Sheer determination and belief quickly saw her make a name for herself in this newly discovered scene. Doing everything from making videos to the production of her music herself she recorded two EP’s and began touring, supporting the likes of Soccer Mommy and Adrienne Lenker (Big Thief). During this time the signature artful songcraft heard on I Was Born Swimming was formed.
Having uprooted herself from her NYC home after 16 years, ambient composer Julianna Barwick relocated to Los Angeles in search of a fresh start and a new creative path for her first album in four years. She made some changes to her usual recording setup, working for the first time with a pair of studio monitors gifted by Sigur Rós frontman Jónsi to work alongside her vocal looping technique. On “Oh, Memory,” she offsets strikingly beautiful soundscapes and the plucking strings of classical harpist Mary Lattimore. Barwick and Jónsi trade harmonies on “In Light,” letting their beatific vocals drift over pounding drum machines and sweeping synths. The guest features are new for Barwick, but her approach is just as minimal and never feels slight, applying a curative touch with her gentle, meditative songs that explore—as the title suggests—both emotional and physical healing.
Four years on from the release of her last, critically acclaimed LP, Julianna Barwick returns with “Healing Is A Miracle”, to be released on July 10th on new home, Ninja Tune. A distinctive meditation on sound, reverb and the voice, “Healing Is A Miracle” is a record built on improvisation and a close affinity to a couple of trusted items of gear, from which she spins engrossing, expansive universes. Additionally, Barwick draws on the input of three collaborators with whom she has nurtured deep friendships with over the years: Jónsi (Sigur Rós), Nosaj Thing and Mary Lattimore; who each gently nudge out at the edges of her organically-evolved sound. Recorded in the wake of a seismic shift in her life following a move from New York—where she had lived for 16 years—to Los Angeles where she is now based, the title of the record came to her after thinking about how the human body heals itself, of the miraculous processes we pay little attention to: “You cut your hand, it looks pretty bad, and two weeks later it looks like it never happened… That’s kind of amazing, you know?” It’s a sentiment that feels particularly apt for the moment. From there, she conceived of the record’s simple statement title, ran it past a couple of friends, and it was settled. Like with the record itself, and all of her work, it’s about following her gut, and seeing where it takes her. “Healing Is A Miracle” began life in spring of last year, when Barwick sat down with her vocal looping set-up and began sketching out some ideas for new solo material. “It had been so long since I had done that,” she recalls, “making something for myself, just for the love of it… it was emotional, because I was recording music that was just from the heart, that wasn't for an 'assignment' or project… it brought me to tears a little”. Part of the joy also came from a small but significant switch up to her recording process: the addition of some studio monitors—a birthday gift from Jónsi and Alex (Somers)—having previously recorded all of her music on headphones. “The first song I remember making with those was the first song on the album, Inspirit.” she explains, “When I added the bass I really felt it in my body, you know, in a way you just wouldn’t with headphones… it was kind of euphoric and fun. I got really excited about making the record in that moment, and I think that really had an impact on the sounds I ended up making.” Excitement too came from the chance to work with three dream collaborators. Her connection to Jónsi began via producer Alex Somers, when Barwick flew to Reykjavík to record some sessions with him for her 2013 record “Nepenthe”, a trip which would begin a long-standing affinity with Iceland and the people she connected with there. “I think he has the best voice in the world,” she says, “and hearing my voice with Jonsi's is one of the joys of my life.” Nosaj Thing—the highly respected electronic producer and stalwart of the LA scene who has worked with the likes of Kendric Lamar—had gotten in touch to express his affection for her 2011 album “The Magic Place”, and they’d since been trying to find a way to work together. Barwick and Lattimore had struck up a friendship over many years performing live together, and had moved to LA around the same time. Finding herself in the same city as all three for the first time, it felt natural to include them in her process, and added to the feeling of newness, support and friendship she had while producing the record. Beyond her records, Barwick’s impressive live shows have gained incredible praise over the years from the likes of The Guardian—who described her performance as “exquisite in its eloquence, reflection and compassion” in their 5* review—The New York Times, NPR, and more. She has also supported and performed with an amazing array of artists including Bon Iver, Grouper, Explosions in the Sky, Sigur Rós, Sharon Van Etten, Angel Olsen, Perfume Genius, Mas Ysa, and Nat Baldwin. Barwick has additionally been involved in some head-turning collaborations over the years. In 2015 she took part in The Flaming Lips’s Carnegie Hall show, performing music from their reimagining of “Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band”, alongside Phillip Glass, Debbie Harry, Laurie Anderson and Pattie Smith. That same year she was invited to play two shows with Yoko Ono, one at MoMA (“my favorite thing ever”) and one in Central Park. In 2012 she released a collaborative album with Helado Negro as OMBRE, and has also released a collaborative single with Rafael Anton Isarri, on the super-limited Thesis label, and most recently, the “Command Synthesis” EP, on RVNG Intl. sub-label Commend There, which employed AI to build five tracks that responded to the airborne environment outside a hotel room. In 2019 she teamed up with Doug Aitken on his nomadic art project, and created stunning performances in the Massachusett wilderness. The album’s artwork was shot in Iceland by Joel Kazuo Knoernschild and is taken from a series of aerial films shot by drone above the country’s breathtaking coastline, which also make up the video for ‘Inspirit’.
Mia Gargaret is an ambient, (mostly) instrumental album by Chicago, IL singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist & producer Gia Margaret. Mia Gargaret was not the follow-up album that Gia intended to release after the critical success of her 2018 debut, There’s Always Glimmer. But after she suddenly found herself without use of her primary instrument, she had to rethink her methods, at least temporarily. Gia explains: “After having to cancel tours because of illness, I was unable to sing for nearly half of the year. This left me feeling like a shell of myself, so I turned to my synthesizer for comfort. These compositions helped me hold onto my identity as a music maker. At times this music helped soothe my anxiety more than therapy or anything else could.” Without singing or lyrics to steal the focus, the instrumental tracks on Mia Gargaret shine a light on Gia Margaret’s skills as a musician, composer & producer. Spare but immersive arrangements of synthesizer, piano & acoustic guitar simultaneously ache & soothe, building emotional landscapes that rise & recede like scenery through a train window. “I wanted to make something that sounded hopeful, which is a little ironic because I felt essentially hopeless during the entire process. I was making music to self-soothe. I had synth loops going while I walked around my apartment, forming my own daily soundtrack.” Mia Gargaret documents Gia Margaret’s self-healing. Album opener “apathy” includes an excerpt from her actual vocal therapy exercises. “body” samples a lecture from British philosopher Alan Watts, a continuous source of comfort & perspective for Gia in times of confusion. (Permission to use the sample was personally granted by Mark Watts, son of the late lecturer, in exchange for the use of “body” in his documentary film about his father.) Other tracks feature the sounds of footsteps, church bells, crackling fires, lake waves & other field recordings from Gia’s day-to-day. “I wanted to capture the feeling of a truly strange time in my life, even though I would prefer to forget it altogether. This process helped me understand something about myself, & hopefully it can help others, too.” Mia Gargaret ends with “lesson,” the album’s only track to feature Gia’s singing voice. The short song teases at what we can expect from the next Gia Margaret album, a return to more traditional forms of songwriting, due in 2021. In the meantime, Mia Gargaret stands as a gorgeous experiment & a memorable meditation on the healing power of music. Mia Gargaret was composed, performed & recorded at home by Gia Margaret during the summer & fall of 2019, with guest performances by Emily Cross (clarinet on “ash”), Stephen Steinbrink (vocals, organ & guitar on “lesson”) & There’s Always Glimmer collaborator Doug Saltzman (electronic drum production to on “body” & “lesson”).
The music of Darren Cunningham, the British electronic musician known as Actress, is notoriously difficult to categorize. Over the past 15 years, he has evaded the confines of more familiar dance music with avant-garde, abstract compositions that gaze inward. Although he references house, techno, dubstep, and R&B, he deconstructs, twists, and stretches them into practically unrecognizable forms. But make no mistake, his records are still intensely emotional—vivid soundscapes so full of depth and light that they can feel overwhelming. And *Karma & Desire*, his seventh LP, feels, in many ways, like mourning. Guided by meandering piano arpeggios and hushed vocals about heaven and prayer, it evokes funereal images of death and rebirth (“I’m thinking/Sinking/Down/In Heaven,” Zsela sings on “Angels Pharmacy”). A glitchy, fuzzy texture permeates the album, as if the tracks had been passed through an old-fashioned Instagram filter, and it builds a general sense of uneasiness. Actual beats are scarce, but those that do appear feel almost meditative (“Leaves Against the Sky,” “XRAY”), as if to provide relief from the amorphous expanse. It’s easy to see the metaphor for getting lost in dark corners of your own mind, and the solace that you feel when reality returns.
After recent mixtape “88”, Actress reveals new album "Karma & Desire". ‘Walking Flames’ featuring Sampha is out now. “Karma & Desire” includes guest collaborations from Sampha, Zsela and Aura T-09 and more. It’s “a romantic tragedy set between the heavens and the underworld” says Actress (Darren J. Cunningham) “the same sort of things that I like to talk about – love, death, technology, the questioning of one's being”. The presence of human voices take the questing artist into new territory. ‘Walking Flames’: “These are like graphics that I’ve never seen / My face on another human being / The highest resolution / Don't breathe the birth of a new day.” Flute-like melodies contributed by Canadian organist and instrument builder Kara-Lis Coverdale.
PV-11 Available on vinyl from The Death of Rave: boomkat.com/products/crooner-qui-coule-sous-les-clous A/ Qui dit Play dit Pique - Intro - Nouman - Cold Régalienne - Plagiat - Du Bellay B/ Rien ne Tient dans tes Mains - Rien ne Tient dans tes Mains - Nabitu C/ 2db - 2db - Elasticité Fine D/ Fulmine - Fulmine - PMAPFCDT - Pro-errance - Outro ‘Crooner qui coule sous les clous’, which translates to ‘A crooner that sinks under nails’, is Aude Van Wyller’s full-length debut under the Oï les Ox moniker. The album’s libretto was written by the Brussels-based artist in her native French. The text utilizes wordplay, automatic writings, and word-by-word translations. Van Wyller’s goal was to find order in a series of poems, outlining a story that follows Nouman, “quite anonymous, just someone making some shopping online,” and Cold Régalienne, a totalitarian governor who forces people to dance to music she broadcasts “at some hours of the day and of the night.” Through pop ballads and spoken word passages, ‘Crooner qui coule sous les clous’ creates vivid sonic scenes that channel styles as diverse as coldwave, leftfield, and IDM. The result is a genre-bending opera, split into four parts, where melody, lyrics, and sound collage are merged into a cinematic experience.
How do you speak through a stranger? Contain multitudes. And begin to find new kinds of design in accident. True story. In September 2015 Jon bought an old Teac A-2340, a reel-to-reel tape recorder, tapes included. He exchanged a few emails with the online seller while negotiating a deal, but they never met. The first time Jon tested out the machine at home it disclosed a beautiful dream. A single tape of astounding samples from an unknown source. He nicknamed it the Royal Sampler. They began to jam together. I want to hear you speak. The tape might have been a lost demo for the games of hide and seek that accustom us to evasion. Listening and gathering, the only way out was through. A collaboration constructed in echo. The completed songs seem to start mid-sentence, waiting a little further along the trail. Watch your step the ground gets uncertain by the bend. The maple trees in giggling fits. The shoreline no longer sure. I hear the mourning dove. Hang on a second. You were saying. Sometimes what’s past isn’t prologue it’s blocked. How you have to pause for your mind to work backwards. Not to remember but to unforget. What if something’s missing and you get stranded in “the futureless future”? Distend time? The not-so-distant waves wrinkling. An answer. 1968 isn’t just some numbers. Scraps of an otherwise. Maybe written in another language or maybe…Is that what you meant? The album was recorded during the summer of 2019 at Jay Crocker’s home studio in Crousetown. Under the watchful eye of Edward Snowden and a Blue Heeler named Judy. Jay and Jon transferred all the material they could excavate from the Royal Sampler along with the dialogic samples Jon had been making since that fateful September introduction. They combined these two samples with the following design principle: even in the songs organized around a Jon sample, the stranger would be woven in. A shared sonic architecture. The rest belongs a mystery. Tell me what you see. A game of hide and seek. A field wears the fog like an ancient argument. Wayward voices take shape just up ahead. Count down from 10 and be alone again. Abandoned to potential. In the green wide open. The colour of another time. The hammock gets twisted in the wind. Knotting and undoing. A fishnet. Let loose or captured, a life repeated, a life revised. Nothing is effortless. From another era insisting, there all along. I was there all along. These sounds, like truth, can be measured in time. Speak through me. Who can tell you what is real?
When No Joy last released a full-length album—2015’s *More Faithful*—the Montreal noise-pop trio was still refining the fusion of fuzzy shoegaze overdrive and beautifully smeared melodies they had been exploring since their 2009 formation. But what felt like a logical evolution at the time proved to be something of an aesthetic dead end—and with the subsequent departures of guitarist Laura Lloyd and drummer Garland Hastings, singer/guitarist Jasamine White-Gluz seized the opportunity to thoroughly reformulate No Joy’s essence through a series of EPs (including a 2018 collaboration with Spacemen 3’s Sonic Boom) that gradually embraced more electronic experimentation. “Being in a band for 10 years, life comes into play and there\'s things that change your path,” White-Gluz tells Apple Music. “*More Faithful* was the point where No Joy the rock band was over. So the EPs were kind of an exercise in just reframing the band a bit, and trying to figure out what I would do as a solo songwriter.” On *Motherhood*, we get the answer—and it involves banjos, scrap metal, trip-hop beats, death metal screams, samples of laughing babies, slap bass, and kitchen appliances. With the help of longtime No Joy producer Jorge Elbrecht (Ariel Pink, Japanese Breakfast), White-Gluz sculpts all those disparate elements into an exhilarating, shape-shifting art-pop statement that recalls the kaleidoscopic splendor of Caribou (“definitely an influence,” she confirms) and the radical kitchen-sink ethos of early Mercury Rev. “As a listener, I really like maximalism and having as much going on as possible,” White-Gluz says, “so that\'s probably why the songs are just loaded!” But embedded within the album’s joyously anarchic sound design are sobering ruminations on family, aging, death, and womanhood. Here, White-Gluz provides her track-by-track breakdown to help us make sense of it all. **Birthmark** “I come from the Cocteau Twins school of writing where you just make up a bunch of garbage that is a melody, and then you fill in the words after. That\'s usually how I write lyrics. But this one was actually written when I was visiting a grandmother in palliative care and just getting to know the neighbors and the other people that were in there, and just spending time there.” **Dream Rats (feat. Alissa White-Gluz)** “My sister Alissa is the singer of the \[Swedish death metal\] band Arch Enemy, and we had never collaborated on anything before. But because the record is so much about family and loved ones—and the fact we were both in town at the same time, which rarely happens—I was like, ‘We gotta do something together.’ So I had her do a guest vocal and she\'s just, like, such a pro! For me, doing vocals took six months of me figuring it out, and with her, it was one take.” **Nothing Will Hurt** ”With a lot of the songs on this record, specifically this one, we had a lot of moments where we were like, ‘Is this stupid or good? We don\'t know, so we\'re just gonna keep it!’ It could go either way, but I\'m really happy with the slap bass on this song.” **Four** “Jorge and I were in LA, and we wrote the rock part of the song. We left for the day and when we came back, we just lost our mind and put in this whole dance section. It was another one of those ‘Is this a very bad idea?’ moments. And I was just like, \'Who cares? Let\'s just do it!\' We started getting samples and DJ scratches and pitching up our own voices—no idea was left untried, and most ideas made it onto the song. Some of the lyrics are about that time where you realize your parents are just adults—they\'re just people, and you realize, ‘Oh shit, I\'m the same!’ You come into your twenties and you\'re sort of like, \'Okay, things get real around now,\' and you\'re comparing yourself to what your parents were doing when they were your age. It\'s loosely based on that kind of idea.” **Ageless** “This song was written sometime in 2017, probably around the same time I recorded the Sonic Boom EP. Making that record definitely influenced this, because I was able to understand how to utilize synths and programming and drum machines a bit better. I really like doing vocal loops and samples and chopping it up. We also found some metal in the garbage, and then just brought it in to hit it and make that snare sound. Or we recorded the construction that was happening in Montreal and then took pieces of that to build drum tracks. That\'s all stuff I learned with Jorge through working with Sonic Boom.” **Why Mothers Die** “Musically, this was a song that was on guitar, but once we put it to piano, it kind of took on more of a sad tone than it had when it was a rock song. And when we did the vocal loop and manipulated that, it really took it to a different place. It\'s another song about loved ones and trying to understand loss and having some sort of rational understanding for why this happens, and just watching people grieve and exploring the grieving process—not in a directly emotional way, but by taking a step back and looking at death as a function of life. Some people say death is the same as birth—it\'s something that just happens in the life cycle. So this song is a loose exploration of that.” **Happy Bleeding** “I was very influenced by some of my formative music years when I was in high school—like ’98, \'99, when there was a weird thing happening where rock was also electronic, and all these quote-unquote alternative artists were suddenly on major labels and they could have money to make these records that sound really cool, and labels were putting money behind things that maybe now wouldn\'t be so mainstream. Things like Massive Attack, Sneaker Pimps, Chemical Brothers, Tricky. So I wanted to create a song that kind of had no musical genre and that kind of had an upbeat feeling but maybe lyrically was dealing with things like blood and guts.” **Signal Lights** “This one I had written in the dead of winter in Montreal, which is pure hell, which is why I think the song sounds kind of sunny. It was a guitar-based song that actually stayed guitar-based, even though we used a ton of pads and ambient sounds.” **Fish** “This was a really old demo I had that we took some synth and vocal lines from. I kind of wanted to have a weird mix of new age and Gwen Stefani, and put it together and see what happens. It\'s almost ska at times, and it\'s like, ‘What\'s going on?’ We also did a lot of banjo playing on the record, and on this song in particular—we use it often as a texture, so we would have banjo and piano playing the same parts to create kind of like a piccolo sound.” **Primal Curse** “Not everything on this record is directly personal, it\'s also just things I\'ve observed. As a woman, you have this ability to have kids and be a mother, and I feel like having a family, to some people, is a curse. Sometimes, they feel hijacked by hormones. Having a child is this thing that\'s in your nature to do, but whether or not you want to do it depends on if you see it as a blessing or a curse. I think this song was the oldest demo, from early 2016. But in the studio, any idea that anybody had, we tried it. And on this one, everything is there: flute, banjo, piano. So it gets a little wild, but that\'s kind of how it was when we recorded it.” **Kidder** “Sometimes I do this thing where I take two demos and just figure out a way to put them into one song, and that\'s what happened here. Lyrically, it\'s the most stark and most honest song. It\'s like your parents giving you straight talk—‘just tell me the truth, rip off the Band-Aid!\' But production-wise, there are things that make it a little less serious when I listen to it. I\'m one of those people who has, like, 5000 keys on my carabiner, so the sound of my keys dropping into a bowl is the drums, and we had a coffee grinder to make some other drum sounds. So even though it\'s a very honest and sentimental song, there\'s a lot of musical stuff around it that is me trying to distract you from the fact that it\'s a very honest song!”
On the eponymously titled final song of her debut album Land of No Junction, Irish songwriter Aoife Nessa Frances (pronounced Ee-fa) sings “Take me to the land of no junction/Before it fades away/Where the roads can never cross/But go their own way.” It is this search that lies at the heart of the album, recalling journeys towards an ever shifting centre – a centre that cannot hold – where maps are constantly being rewritten. The songs traverse and inhabit this indeterminate landscape: the beginnings of love, moments of loss, discovery, fragility and strength, all intermingle and interact. Land of No Junction is shot through with a sense of mystery – an ambiguity and disorientation that illuminates with smokey luminescence. Navigated by the richness of Aoife’s voice, along with the layers gently built through her collaborators’ instruments (strings, drums, guitars, keys, percussion) gives a feeling of filling up space into every corner and crack. A remarkable coherent sonic world: buoyant and aqueous, with dark undercurrents. Where nostalgia and newness ebb and flow in equal measure.
“I wanted to make a small, punk, club album,” Ela Minus tells Apple Music about her sharp-edged debut full-length *acts of rebellion*. Punk is the key word here; the Colombian-born, Brooklyn-based electronic producer, who cut her teeth playing drums in Bogotá’s DIY scene, wrote the album partly as a rallying cry for the current political moment. *rebellion*, which is at once fiercely turbulent and disarmingly tender, fuses techno’s communal energy with the cerebral introspection that comes with more solitary moments on the dance floor. “These songs are gritty, sweaty, and in the moment; they have an active spirit,” Minus says. “To me, punk and electronic music come from the same rebellious place. They say, ‘The world is kind of fucked up and we’re going to change it.’” Read the inside story behind every song on the album below. **N19 5NF** “This track begins with a breath, and that’s very symbolic. It’s titled after the zip code from a London hospital where I had been sick and had a close call. Essentially, it’s where I believe my life before this album ended and the new life began. This is the first song of the first album of that new life. It felt like a new beginning, like I was born again. Long before any of that had happened, I’d made this track with a bunch of samples from my favorite philosophy podcasts. But after a while, I muted them and realized, ‘Ah, this works way better.’ The samples were just extremely literal. I like to send a message with my music, but if you do it right, the spirit of the messages will still be there.” **they told us it was hard, but they were wrong.** “I wanted to make a hymn for weirdos, for everybody who is told that their ideas won’t work or can’t be done. That has happened to me so many times in my life and I’ve had to just say, ‘Fuck everybody. I can do whatever I want.’ For me, the fact that I was sitting in my house, completely free to make the album that I wanted to make, with time to breathe and everything...it felt like a huge achievement. It felt like I finally had the life that I wanted.” **el cielo no es de nadie** “This is the most direct—and maybe the only—love song on the album. With this whole project, I\'m trying to give everybody an alternative, another way of doing things or another perspective. In this song, I sing in Spanish about what it means to really love someone. I say, ‘Everybody goes to the moon and back to show someone how much they love them, but anybody can do that. Not everybody can give you their time every single day, consistently. So if you love me, don\'t give me the moon or grand gestures. Be there every single day.’ It’s a call for all of us to seek and give real love.” **megapunk** “I made this entire album at night. I’d record before bed and edit when I woke up. With this song, I remember having so much fun making it and then waking up the next day thinking, ‘Okay, maybe too much fun.’ It’s ‘megapunk’ after the demo because it was so loud and ten minutes long. But clearly it was very healing to me. I was angry. I wanted to write a motivating anthem for people to step up, organize, and march. I had this image in my head of a group of women getting together to march for feminism, and I wanted to relay a sense of empowerment while also inviting them to act.” **pocket piano** “When I’m playing live, I never stop. I keep going, and in between songs I leave empty space. I have the ability to leave all my machines running even though no sound is coming out so I can improvise and play whatever I want. One night, I played this track intuitively during a transition at a show. I remember thinking I wanted to ground everybody a little bit. I had gone too fast and too loud for too long, and it was time for a group hug. That’s what I think it does in this album, too. The whole song has just one synth, and it’s one I actually made myself years ago and named pocket piano.” **dominique** “This is the most autobiographical song on the album. I was very deep into writing and had basically lost all sense of time. I was doing everything alone, and because I could do whatever I wanted, my days and schedule slowly shifted. One day, I woke up at 7 pm and just felt bad and confused. So I made myself some coffee, pulled up the music from the night before, found the track without the lyrics and wrote, ‘I just woke up/It\'s 7 pm/My brain feels like it\'s going to break.’” **let them have the internet** “I\'m a geek and I love technology, and for a long time I think we all thought about it romantically. Then, it became the total opposite, where it’s ruled by capitalism, corporations, and banks just like everything else. But one day I had an uplifting thought: The more that all greed takes over the internet, the more the offline world will become less capitalized. The more our money goes digital, the less it interrupts the physical world. In a way, it’s never been easier to disconnect from everything. You can turn your phone off and be present without anyone selling you anything. This song was a way for me to acknowledge that freedom. To say, ‘Let them have the internet, because we have everything else.’” **tony** “This song follows that idea of being present, but on a more personal level. Whenever you meet someone you’re interested in, the beginning of any relationship is always texting. And the truth is, I don’t actually like talking that much. I’m awkward. If I want to get to know someone, I\'d rather go for a walk with them or go to a show, and share a physical space where we can spend time together. I want to say to people, ‘Let’s just meet up and dance all night and see where that goes instead.’ ‘tony’ is an invitation to conquer our fear of human interaction.” **do whatever you want, all the time.** “I was initially attracted to dance music because it felt rebellious. I grew up in the punk scene, and that\'s what I\'ve always been drawn to, that community for outsiders. It makes you feel like you have a say in your life and the world. So much of contemporary club music is fun...but it’s soft. It isn’t pointed. I was craving something with a point of view. I really believe that if we just did whatever we wanted all the time, the world would be a better place. Suppression is a very dangerous thing. One of the most rebellious things you can do is follow your tastes and instincts wherever they lead.” **close \[feat. Helado Negro\]** “This song is like a little candy. It\'s so sweet, it’s a jar of honey. I made it on a quiet, hot night and remember thinking that it felt like I had channeled my eight-year-old self and made a song she would like. A friend said she thought it should be a duet, and it was already a cheesy song, so I thought, why not go for it? A few months before, I had worked with Helado Negro on his album *This Is How You Smile*, and we both thought our voices sounded really nice together. I\'m a huge fan of his; he’s a godfather of Latin artists in New York and is just incredibly wise and generous. I think it’s a beautiful symbol that it’s the only feature on the album, which was really a very insular experience. I did everything myself, on my own. To have a guest on the last song feels like the end of that period of solitude. Maybe in the next album, I’ll be more open to working with other musicians I love.”
Ela Minus’ debut album is a collection about the personal as political and embracing the beauty of tiny acts of revolution in our everyday lives. Throughout, a sense of urgency and a call to arms is mixed with this love and appreciation for reality—because even revolutionaries need to leave space for simple human interaction.
Cave Vaults on the Moon in New Mexico is the debut album from Tan Cologne, a new project by interdisciplinary artists Lauren Green and Marissa Macias. The two met in Taos, New Mexico and have been exploring musical and creative terrains together ever since. From forming an underground gallery space to composing experimental soundscapes, Cave Vaults on the Moon in New Mexico emerged from parallel observations and growth, with New Mexico as the axis of the journey. The album is a story of time capsules and contact; examining fossilized terrains, monsoons, New Age dreams, alien visitations, resurrected communes, and the life cycle of a human ego on Earth. Cave Vaults on the Moon in New Mexico is an entryway to a new portal - a journey that explores the mysteries and oddities of New Mexico, alongside spatial inner-workings of growth and spirit. Using sound as a vibrational connective tissue, Cave Vaults was recorded in two unique spaces - a 250+ year old historic adobe fortress located in Ranchos de Taos Plaza, and a small casita in Northern New Mexico. Everything you hear was written, performed, recorded, and produced by Green and Macias. The only other musician on the debut album is Green’s mother, who plays the flute on New Dune + Empty Vessels. The album title was grafted from Taos Composer Joanne Forman’s 1987 soundscape. Her composition “Cave Vaults of The Moon” accompanied a sculpture exhibition in Taos, NM on imagined alien artifacts - a resonant investigation and scent of Tan Cologne.
A Mythology of Circles is the new album from Brooklyn-based composer and musical artist Faten Kanaan, her first to be released on Fire Records. It explores cyclical repetitions in nature & time, and the allegories attached to them. Cosmological myths explaining natural phenomena have long been part of human narratives: the movements of planets and seasons, of time and tides. Some of these symbolic stories continue to resonate today because they illustrate something in our collective spirit. They're re-conjured here as an attempt to embrace 'mystery' and temper the anthropocentric hubris. To revere nature without the need to overpower it. The album also has an autobiographical side: a story of movement, migration, and return. Of renewing hope in the face of political and environmental struggles. Cyclical patterns and ‘variation through repetition’ are central to Faten's music. Harmony and counterpoint are composed intuitively and treated as narrative tools- with sound, silence, and the resulting mystical relationship between notes used as gestures to tell a wordless story. The album is separated into a ‘dusk to evening’ side, and an ‘underworld/dream-state’ side; highlighting the myths of Ishtar, Inanna, Orpheus, and others. All the sections are played in real time, neither looped nor sequenced- allowing for subtle changes to unfold. The use of VST sampled choral voices in this album embodies the forlorn state of technological acceleration, and the desire to return to a vulnerable human sound. The album art also explores a complicated relationship with technology: the statue comes from a series of digital replicas, returning in its last stage to a more intimate and handmade feel. “Strangely haunting yet beautiful bouquet of nocturnal, electronic blooms ranging from poignant ambient vignettes to chamber-like pop, from Brooklyn’s Faten Kanaan- a gifted musical story-teller” Boomkat
It took Kelly Lee Owens 35 days to write the music for her second album. “I had a flood of creation,” she tells Apple Music. “But this was after three years that included loss, learning how to deal with loss and how to transmute that loss into something of creation again. They were the hardest three years of my life.” The Welsh electronic musician’s self-titled 2017 debut album figured prominently on best-of-the-year lists and won her illustrious fans across music and fashion. It’s the sort of album you recommend to people you’d like to impress. Its release, however, was clouded by issues in Owens’ personal life. “There was a lot going on, and it took away my energy,” she says. “It made me question the integrity of who I was and whether it was ego driving certain situations. It was so tough to keep moving forward.” Fortunately, Owens rallied. “It sounds hippie-dippie, but this is my purpose in life,” she says. “To convey messages via sounds and to connect to other people.” Informed by grief, lust, anxiety, and environmental concerns, *Inner Song* is an electronic album that impacts viscerally. “I allowed myself to be more of a vessel that people talk about,” she says. “It’s real. Ideas can flow through you. In that 35-day period, I allowed myself to tap into any idea I had, rather than having to come in with lyrics, melodies, and full production. It’s like how the best ideas come when you’re in the shower: You’re usually just letting things be and come through you a bit more. And then I could hunker down and go in hard on all those minute nudges on vocal lines or kicks or rhythmical stuff or EQs. Both elements are important, I learned. And I love them both.” Here, Owens treats you to a track-by-track guide to *Inner Song*. **Arpeggi** “*In Rainbows* is one of my favorite albums of all time. The production on it is insane—it’s the best headphone *and* speaker listening experience ever. This cover came a year before the rest of the album, actually. I had a few months between shows and felt like I should probably go into the studio. I mean, it’s sacrilege enough to do a Radiohead cover, but to attempt Thom’s vocals: no. There is a recording somewhere, but as soon as I heard it, I said, ‘That will never been heard or seen. Delete, delete, delete.’ I think the song was somehow written for analog synths. Perhaps if Thom Yorke did the song solo, it might sound like this—especially where the production on the drums is very minimal. So it’s an homage to Thom, really. It was the starting point for me, and this record, so it couldn’t go anywhere else.” **On** “I definitely wanted to explore my own vocals more on this album. That ‘journey,’ if you like, started when Kieran Hebden \[Four Tet\] requested I play before him at a festival and afterwards said to me, ‘Why the fuck have you been hiding your vocals all this time under waves of reverb, space echo, and delay? Don’t do that on the next album.’ That was the nod I needed from someone I respect so highly. It’s also just been personal stuff—I have more confidence in my voice and the lyrics now. With what I’m singing about, I wanted to be really clear, heard, and understood. It felt pointless to hide that and drown it in reverb. The song was going to be called ‘Spirit of Keith’ as I recorded it on the day \[Prodigy vocalist\] Keith Flint died. That’s why there are so many tinges of ’90s production in the drums, and there’s that rave element. And almost three minutes on the dot, you get the catapult to move on. We leap from this point.” **Melt!** “Everyone kept taking the exclamation mark out. I refused, though—it’s part of the song somehow. It was pretty much the last song I made for the album, and I felt I needed a techno banger. There’s a lot of heaviness in the lyrics on this album, so I just wanted that moment to allow a letting loose. I wanted the high fidelity, too. A lot of the music I like at the moment is really clear, whereas I’m always asking to take the top end off on the snare—even if I’m told that’s what makes something a snare. I just don’t really like snares. The ‘While you sleep, melt, ice’ lyrics kept coming into my head, so I just searched for ‘glacial ice melting’ and ‘skating on ice’ or ‘icicles cracking’ and found all these amazing samples. The environmental message is important—as we live and breathe and talk, the environment continues to suffer, but we have to switch off from it to a certain degree because otherwise you become overwhelmed and then you’re paralyzed. It’s a fine balance—and that’s why the exclamation mark made so much sense to me.” **Re-Wild** “This is my sexy stoner song. I was inspired by Rihanna’s ‘Needed Me,’ actually. People don’t necessarily expect a little white girl from Wales to create something like this, but I’ve always been obsessed with bass so was just wanting a big, fat bassline with loads of space around it. I’d been reading this book *Women Who Run With the Wolves* \[by Clarissa Pinkola\], which talks very poetically about the journey of a woman through her lifetime—and then in general about the kind of life, death, and rebirth cycle within yourself and relationships. We’re always focused on the death—the ending of something—but that happens again and again, and something can be reborn and rebirthed from that, which is what I wanted to focus on. She \[Pinkola\] talks about the rewilding of the spirit. So often when people have depression—unless we suffer chronically, which is something else—it’s usually when the creative soul life dies. I felt that mine was on the edge of fading. Rewilding your spirit is rewilding that connection to nature. I was just reestablishing the power and freedoms I felt within myself and wanting to express that and connect people to that inner wisdom and power that is always there.” **Jeanette** “This is dedicated to my nana, who passed away in October 2019, and she will forever be one of the most important people in my life. She was there three minutes after I was born, and I was with her, holding her when she passed. That bond is unbreakable. At my lowest points she would say, ‘Don’t you dare give this up. Don’t you dare. You’ve worked hard for this.’ Anyway, this song is me letting it go. Letting it all go, floating up, up, and up. It feels kind of sunshine-y. What’s fun for me—and hopefully the listener—is that on this album you’re hearing me live tweaking the whole way through tracks. This one, especially.” **L.I.N.E.** “Love Is Not Enough. This is a deceivingly pretty song, because it’s very dark. Listen, I’m from Wales—melancholy is what we do. I tried to write a song in a minor key for this album. I was like, ‘I want to be like The 1975’—but it didn’t happen. Actually, this is James’ song \[collaborator James Greenwood, who releases music as Ghost Culture\]. It’s a Ghost Culture song that never came out. It’s the only time I’ve ever done this. It was quite scary, because it’s the poppiest thing I’ve probably done, and I was also scared because I basically ended up rewriting all the lyrics, and re-recorded new kick drums, new percussion, and came up with a new arrangement. But James encouraged all of it. The new lyrics came from doing a trauma body release session, which is quite something. It’s someone coming in, holding you and your gaze, breathing with you, and helping you release energy in the body that’s been trapped. Humans go through trauma all the time and we don’t literally shake and release it, like animals do. So it’s stored in the body, in the muscles, and it’s vital that we figure out how to release it. We’re so fearful of feeling our pain—and that fear of pain itself is what causes the most damage. This pain and trauma just wants to be seen and acknowledged and released.” **Corner of My Sky (feat. John Cale)** “This song used to be called ‘Mushroom.’ I’m going to say no more on that. I just wanted to go into a psychedelic bubble and be held by the sound and connection to earth, and all the, let’s just say, medicine that the earth has to offer. Once the music was finished, Joakim \[Haugland, founder of Owens’ label, Smalltown Supersound\] said, ‘This is nice, but I can hear John Cale’s voice on this.’ Joakim is a believer that anything can happen, so we sent it to him knowing that if he didn’t like it, he wouldn’t fucking touch it. We had to nudge a bit—he’s a busy man, he’s in his seventies, he’s touring, he’s traveling. But then he agreed and it became this psychedelic lullaby. For both of us, it was about the land and wanting to go to the connection to Wales. I asked if he could speak about Wales in Welsh, as it would feel like a small contribution from us to our country, as for a long time our language was suppressed. He then delivered back some of the lyrics you hear, but it was all backwards. So I had to go in and chop it up and arrange it, which was this incredibly fun challenge. The last bit says, ‘I’ve lost the bet that words will come and wake me in the morning.’ It was perfect. Honestly, I feel like the Welsh tourist board need to pay up for the most dramatic video imaginable.” **Night** “It’s important that I say this before someone else does: I think touring with Jon Hopkins influenced this one in terms of how the synth sounded. It wasn’t conscious. I’ve learned a lot of things from him in terms of how to produce kicks and layer things up. It’s related to a feeling of how, in the nighttime, your real feelings come out. You feel the truth of things and are able to access more of yourself and your actual soul desires. We’re distracted by so many things in the daytime. It’s a techno love song.” **Flow** “This is an anomaly as it’s a strange instrumental thing, but I think it’s needed on the album. This has a sample of me playing hand drum. I actually live with a sound healer, so we have a ceremony room and there’s all sorts of weird instruments in there. When no one was in the house, I snuck in there and played all sorts of random shit and sampled it simply on my iPhone. And I pitched the whole track around that. It fits at this place on the record, because we needed to come back down. It’s a breathe-out moment and a restful space. Because this album can truly feel like a journey. It also features probably my favorite moment on the album—when the kick drums come back in, with that ‘bam, bam, bam, bam.’ Listen and you’ll know exactly where I mean.” **Wake-Up** “There was a moment sonically with me and this song after I mixed it, where the strings kick in and there’s no vocals. It’s just strings and the arpeggio synth. I found myself in tears. I didn’t know that was going to happen to me with my own song, as it certainly didn’t happen when I was writing it. What I realized was that the strings in that moment were, for me, the earth and nature crying out. Saying, ‘Please, listen. Please, see what’s happening.’ And the arpeggio, which is really chaotic, is the digital world encroaching and trying to distract you from the suffering and pain and grief that the planet is enduring right now. I think we’re all feeling this collective grief that we can’t articulate half the time. We don’t even understand that we are connected to everyone else. It’s about tapping into the pain of this interconnected web. It’s also a commentary on digital culture, which I am of course a part of. I had some of the lyrics written down from ages ago, and they inspired the song. ‘Wake up, repeat, again.’ Just questioning, in a sense, how we’ve reached this place.”
One night fated to be slept on the streets of Drab City turns out lasts entire generations We both drop dead hungry each night under foreign stars Hair matted and mashed into the sidewalk glue grime, spit, snot, olive pits, ashes, spoiled cream We sleep huddled in the thinnest linens and dream startlingly beautiful stuff like ships with eight sails and fifty canons mooring at the quay or even just Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous When the landlord pays a visit he arrives cheerful and singing in a flute like voice an underdeveloped, simple and predictable tune He wears boots like Robin Leach And at the back of the skull Wakes us with a kick Then we’re off and away digging other people’s ditches all day We’re staring out the big window in this Turkish bakery on the dirty boulevard after sunset blank, silent and sucking the last of the grounds Probably everyone around here wants us to die Our feelings are unfashionable Creative little groups of artists and influencers pass carrying uniquely scented wallets Everybody’s got nice stuff but me I want a stereo I want a TV Well I guess that’s everything Avoid the authorities, live free, then die when it’s cool
McDermott is releasing Roped In, a gorgeous, intimate, and often spare album that pulls back from the collaborative nature established on Going Steady for a collection of fragile drone pieces anchored by McDermott’s intricate but direct guitar playing and haunting pedal steel work from Portland, Oregon’s Barry Walker. Featuring contributions from William Tyler on guitar and Mary Lattimore on harp.
Shimmering ‘Basset is due for release this October through Upset The Rhythm, Artist: The Green Child Title: Shimmering Basset Catalogue Number: UTR136 Formats: LP / DIGITAL Running Time: 39 mins
