GQ [UK]'s Best Albums of 2023

Conforming to the expected has never been Amaarae’s strong suit. And it should come as no surprise that the Ghanaian American artist would create a sonic otherworld where the trappings of R&B, hip-hop, Afropop, punk, and alternative rock mesh with globe-trotting instrumentation and exist harmoniously without question on her album *Fountain Baby*. The result? A culmination of what a transnational pop star is in 2023—boundless. *Fountain Baby* lends its credence to Amaarae’s continued quest for growth and mastery, but not in a contrived way. There are pockets of carefully crafted yet carefree melodies like the dreamy “Angels in Tibet” and sultry “Reckless & Sweet.” On “Counterfeit,” the singer-songwriter swiftly glides with confidence on production by KZ Didit that’s reminiscent of an early-2000s movie soundtrack. “Wasted Eyes” opens with a quick koto solo and progresses as Amaarae soliloquizes about a wounded romance. The 14-track solo project pushes the ante of its 2020 predecessor, *The Angel You Don’t Know*, towards newer heights.

ANOHNI’s music revolves around the strength found in vulnerability, whether it’s the naked trembling of her voice or the way her lyrics—“It’s my fault”; “Why am I alive?”; “You are an addict/Go ahead, hate yourself”—cut deeper the simpler they get. Her first album of new material with her band the Johnsons since 2010’s *Swanlights* sets aside the more experimental/electronic quality of 2016’s *HOPELESSNESS* for the tender avant-soul most listeners came to know her by. She mourns her friends (“Sliver of Ice”), mourns herself (“It’s My Fault”), and catalogs the seemingly limitless cruelty of humankind (“It Must Change”) with the quiet resolve of someone who knows that anger is fine but the true warriors are the ones who kneel down and open their hearts.

You’ll be hard-pressed to find a description of boygenius that doesn’t contain the word “supergroup,” but it somehow doesn’t quite sit right. Blame decades of hoary prog-rock baggage, blame the misbegotten notion that bigger and more must be better, blame a culture that is rightfully circumspect about anything that feels like overpromising, blame Chickenfoot and Audioslave. But the sentiment certainly fits: Teaming three generational talents at the height of their powers on a project that is somehow more than the sum of its considerable parts sounds like it was dreamed up in a boardroom, but would never work if it had been. In fall 2018, Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker released a self-titled six-song EP as boygenius that felt a bit like a lark—three of indie’s brightest, most charismatic artists at their loosest. Since then, each has released a career-peak album (*Punisher*, *Home Video*, and *Little Oblivions*, respectively) that transcended whatever indie means now and placed them in the pantheon of American songwriters, full stop. These parallel concurrent experiences raise the stakes of a kinship and a friendship; only the other two could truly understand what each was going through, only the other two could mount any true creative challenge or inspiration. Stepping away from their ascendant solo paths to commit to this so fully is as much a musical statement as it is one about how they want to use this lightning-in-a-bottle moment. If *boygenius* was a lark, *the record* is a flex. Opening track “Without You Without Them” features all three voices harmonizing a cappella and feels like a statement of intent. While Bridgers’ profile may be demonstrably higher than Dacus’ or Baker’s, no one is out in front here or taking up extra oxygen; this is a proper three-headed hydra. It doesn’t sound like any of their own albums but does sound like an album only the three of them could make. Hallmarks of each’s songwriting style abound: There’s the slow-building climactic refrain of “Not Strong Enough” (“Always an angel, never a god”) which recalls the high drama of Baker’s “Sour Breath” and “Turn Out the Lights.” On “Emily I’m Sorry,” “Revolution 0,” and “Letter to an Old Poet,” Bridgers delivers characteristically devastating lines in a hushed voice that belies its venom. Dacus draws “Leonard Cohen” so dense with detail in less than two minutes that you feel like you’re on the road trip with her and her closest friends, so lost in one another that you don’t mind missing your exit. As with the EP, most songs feature one of the three taking the lead, but *the record* is at its most fully realized when they play off each other, trading verses and ideas within the same song. The subdued, acoustic “Cool About It” offers three different takes on having to see an ex; “Not Strong Enough” is breezy power-pop that serves as a repudiation of Sheryl Crow’s confidence (“I’m not strong enough to be your man”). “Satanist” is the heaviest song on the album, sonically, if not emotionally; over a riff with solid Toadies “Possum Kingdom” vibes, Baker, Bridgers, and Dacus take turns singing the praises of satanism, anarchy, and nihilism, and it’s just fun. Despite a long tradition of high-wattage full-length star team-ups in pop history, there’s no real analogue for what boygenius pulls off here. The closest might be Crosby, Stills & Nash—the EP’s couchbound cover photo is a wink to their 1969 debut—but that name doesn’t exactly evoke feelings of friendship and fellowship more than 50 years later. (It does, however, evoke that time Bridgers called David Crosby a “little bitch” on Twitter after he chastised her for smashing her guitar on *SNL*.) Their genuine closeness is deeply relatable, but their chemistry and talent simply aren’t. It’s nearly impossible for a collaboration like this to not feel cynical or calculated or tossed off for laughs. If three established artists excelling at what they are great at, together, without sacrificing a single bit of themselves, were so easy to do, more would try.

“You can feel a lot of motion and energy,” Caroline Polachek tells Apple Music of her second solo studio album. “And chaos. I definitely leaned into that chaos.” Written and recorded during a pandemic and in stolen moments while Polachek toured with Dua Lipa in 2022, *Desire, I Want to Turn Into You* is Polachek’s self-described “maximalist” album, and it weaponizes everything in her kaleidoscopic arsenal. “I set out with an interest in making a more uptempo record,” she says. “Songs like ‘Bunny Is a Rider,’ ‘Welcome to My Island,’ and ‘Smoke’ came onto the plate first and felt more hot-blooded and urgent than anything I’d done before. But of course, life happened, the pandemic happened, I evolved as a person, and I can’t really deny that a lunar, wistful side of my writing can never be kept out of the house. So it ended up being quite a wide constellation of songs.” Polachek cites artists including Massive Attack, SOPHIE, Donna Lewis, Enya, Madonna, The Beach Boys, Timbaland, Suzanne Vega, Ennio Morricone, and Matia Bazar as inspirations, but this broad church only really hints at *Desire…*’s palette. Across its 12 songs we get trip-hop, bagpipes, Spanish guitars, psychedelic folk, ’60s reverb, spoken word, breakbeats, a children’s choir, and actual Dido—all anchored by Polachek’s unteachable way around a hook and disregard for low-hanging pop hits. This is imperial-era Caroline Polachek. “The album’s medium is feeling,” she says. “It’s about character and movement and dynamics, while dealing with catharsis and vitality. It refuses literal interpretation on purpose.” Read on for Polachek’s track-by-track guide. **“Welcome to My Island”** “‘Welcome to My Island’ was the first song written on this album. And it definitely sets the tone. The opening, which is this minute-long non-lyrical wail, came out of a feeling of a frustration with the tidiness of lyrics and wanting to just express something kind of more primal and urgent. The song is also very funny. We snap right down from that Tarzan moment down to this bitchy, bratty spoken verse that really becomes the main personality of this song. It’s really about ego at its core—about being trapped in your own head and forcing everyone else in there with you, rather than capitulating or compromising. In that sense, it\'s both commanding and totally pathetic. The bridge addresses my father \[James Polachek died in 2020 from COVID-19\], who never really approved of my music. He wanted me to be making stuff that was more political, intellectual, and radical. But also, at the same time, he wasn’t good at living his own life. The song establishes that there is a recognition of my own stupidity and flaws on this album, that it’s funny and also that we\'re not holding back at all—we’re going in at a hundred percent.” **“Pretty in Possible”** “If ‘Welcome to My Island’ is the insane overture, ‘Pretty in Possible’ finds me at street level, just daydreaming. I wanted to do something with as little structure as possible where you just enter a song vocally and just flow and there\'s no discernible verses or choruses. It’s actually a surprisingly difficult memo to stick to because it\'s so easy to get into these little patterns and want to bring them back. I managed to refuse the repetition of stuff—except for, of course, the opening vocals, which are a nod to Suzanne Vega, definitely. It’s my favorite song on the album, mostly because I got to be so free inside of it. It’s a very simple song, outside a beautiful string section inspired by Massive Attack’s ‘Unfinished Sympathy.’ Those dark, dense strings give this song a sadness and depth that come out of nowhere. These orchestral swells at the end of songs became a compositional motif on the album.” **“Bunny Is a Rider”** “A spicy little summer song about being unavailable, which includes my favorite bassline of the album—this quite minimal funk bassline. Structurally on this one, I really wanted it to flow without people having a sense of the traditional dynamics between verses and choruses. Timbaland was a massive influence on that song—especially around how the beat essentially doesn\'t change the whole song. You just enter it and flow. ‘Bunny Is a Rider’ was a set of words that just flowed out without me thinking too much about it. And the next thing I know, we made ‘Bunny Is a Rider’ thongs. I love getting occasional Instagram tags of people in their ‘Bunny Is a Rider’ thongs. An endless source of happiness for me.” **“Sunset”** “This was a song I began writing with Sega Bodega in 2020. It sounded completely nothing like the others. It had a folk feel, it was gypsy Spanish, Italian, Greek feel to it. It completely made me look at the album differently—and start to see a visual world for them that was a bit more folk, but living very much in the swirl of city life, having this connection to a secret, underground level of antiquity and the universalities of art. It was written right around a month or two after Ennio Morricone passed away, so I\'d been thinking a lot about this epic tone of his work, and about how sunsets are the biggest film clichés in spaghetti westerns. We were laughing about how it felt really flamenco and Spanish—not knowing that a few months later, I was going to find myself kicked out of the UK because I\'d overstayed my visa without realizing it, and so I moved my sessions with Sega to Barcelona. It felt like the song had been a bit of a premonition that that chapter-writing was going to happen. We ended up getting this incredible Spanish guitarist, Marc Lopez, to play the part.” **“Crude Drawing of an Angel”** “‘Crude Drawing of an Angel’ was born, in some ways, out of me thinking about jokingly having invented the word ‘scorny’—which is scary and horny at the same time. I have a playlist of scorny music that I\'m still working on and I realized that it was a tone that I\'d never actually explored. I was also reading John Berger\'s book on drawing \[2005’s *Berger on Drawing*\] and thinking about trace-leaving as a form of drawing, and as an extremely beautiful way of looking at sensuality. This song is set in a hotel room in which the word ‘drawing’ takes on six different meanings. It imagines watching someone wake up, not realizing they\'re being observed, whilst drawing them, knowing that\'s probably the last time you\'re going to see them.” **“I Believe”** “‘I Believe’ is a real dedication to a tone. I was in Italy midway through the pandemic and heard this song called ‘Ti Sento’ by Matia Bazar at a house party that blew my mind. It was the way she was singing that blew me away—that she was pushing her voice absolutely to the limit, and underneath were these incredible key changes where every chorus would completely catch you off guard. But she would kind of propel herself right through the center of it. And it got me thinking about the archetype of the diva vocally—about how really it\'s very womanly that it’s a woman\'s voice and not a girl\'s voice. That there’s a sense of authority and a sense of passion and also an acknowledgment of either your power to heal or your power to destroy. At the same time, I was processing the loss of my friend SOPHIE and was thinking about her actually as a form of diva archetype; a lot of our shared taste in music, especially ’80s music, kind of lined up with a lot of those attitudes. So I wanted to dedicate these lyrics to her.” **“Fly to You” (feat. Grimes and Dido)** “A very simple song at its core. It\'s about this sense of resolution that can come with finally seeing someone after being separated from them for a while. And when a lot of misunderstanding and distrust can seep in with that distance, the kind of miraculous feeling of clearing that murk to find that sort of miraculous resolution and clarity. And so in this song, Grimes, Dido, and I kind of find our different version of that. But more so than anything literal, this song is really about beauty, I think, about all of us just leaning into this kind of euphoric, forward-flowing movement in our singing and flying over these crystalline tiny drum and bass breaks that are accompanied by these big Ibiza guitar solos and kind of Nintendo flutes, and finding this place where very detailed electronic music and very pure singing can meet in the middle. And I think it\'s something that, it\'s a kind of feeling that all of us have done different versions of in our music and now we get to together.” **“Blood and Butter”** “This was written as a bit of a challenge between me and Danny L Harle where we tried to contain an entire song to two chords, which of course we do fail at, but only just. It’s a pastoral, it\'s a psychedelic folk song. It imagines itself set in England in the summer, in June. It\'s also a love letter to a lot of the music I listened to growing up—these very trance-like, mantra-like songs, like Donna Lewis’ ‘I Love You Always Forever,’ a lot of Madonna’s *Ray of Light* album, Savage Garden—that really pulsing, tantric electronic music that has a quite sweet and folksy edge to it. The solo is played by a hugely talented and brilliant bagpipe player named Brighde Chaimbeul, whose album *The Reeling* I\'d found in 2022 and became quite obsessed with.” **“Hopedrunk Everasking”** “I couldn\'t really decide if this song needed to be about death or about being deeply, deeply in love. I then had this revelation around the idea of tunneling, this idea of retreating into the tunnel, which I think I feel sometimes when I\'m very deeply in love. The feeling of wanting to retreat from the rest of the world and block the whole rest of the world out just to be around someone and go into this place that only they and I know. And then simultaneously in my very few relationships with losing someone, I did feel some this sense of retreat, of someone going into their own body and away from the world. And the song feels so deeply primal to me. The melody and chords of it were written with Danny L Harle, ironically during the Dua Lipa tour—when I had never been in more of a pop atmosphere in my entire life.” **“Butterfly Net”** “‘Butterfly Net’ is maybe the most narrative storyteller moment on the whole album. And also, palette-wise, deviates from the more hybrid electronic palette that we\'ve been in to go fully into this 1960s drum reverb band atmosphere. I\'m playing an organ solo. I was listening to a lot of ’60s Italian music, and the way they use reverbs as a holder of the voice and space and very minimal arrangements to such incredible effect. It\'s set in three parts, which was somewhat inspired by this triptych of songs called ‘Chansons de Bilitis’ by Claude Debussy that I had learned to sing with my opera teacher. I really liked that structure of the finding someone falling in love, the deepening of it, and then the tragedy at the end. It uses the metaphor of the butterfly net to speak about the inability to keep memories, to keep love, to keep the feeling of someone\'s presence. The children\'s choir \[London\'s Trinity Choir\] we hear on ‘Billions’ comes in again—they get their beautiful feature at the end where their voices actually become the stand-in for the light of the world being onto me.” **“Smoke”** “It was, most importantly, the first song for the album written with a breakbeat, which inspired me to carry on down that path. It’s about catharsis. The opening line is about pretending that something isn\'t catastrophic when it obviously is. It\'s about denial. It\'s about pretending that the situation or your feelings for someone aren\'t tectonic, but of course they are. And then, of course, in the chorus, everything pours right out. But tonally it feels like I\'m at home base with ‘Smoke.’ It has links to songs like \[2019’s\] ‘Pang,’ which, for me, have this windswept feeling of being quite out of control, but are also very soulful and carried by the music. We\'re getting a much more nocturnal, clattery, chaotic picture.” **“Billions”** “‘Billions’ is last for all the same reasons that \'Welcome to My Island’ is first. It dissolves into total selflessness, whereas the album opens with total selfishness. The Beach Boys’ ‘Surf’s Up’ is one of my favorite songs of all time. I cannot listen to it without sobbing. But the nonlinear, spiritual, tumbling, open quality of that song was something that I wanted to bring into the song. But \'Billions\' is really about pure sensuality, about all agenda falling away and just the gorgeous sensuality of existing in this world that\'s so full of abundance, and so full of contradictions, humor, and eroticism. It’s a cheeky sailboat trip through all these feelings. You know that feeling of when you\'re driving a car to the beach, that first moment when you turn the corner and see the ocean spreading out in front of you? That\'s what I wanted the ending of this album to feel like: The song goes very quiet all of a sudden, and then you see the water and the children\'s choir comes in.”

From the stark gospel soul of his 2013 breakthrough “Take Me to Church,” to the T.S. Eliot-inspired visions of 2019’s *Wasteland, Baby!*, Andrew Hozier-Byrne traverses literature, religion, and classical imagery to chart his own musical course. For the third Hozier album, *Unreal Unearth*, he’s followed that impulse further than ever before. During the pandemic Hozier found himself catching up on literature that had long been on his to-read pile, including Dante Alighieri’s *Inferno*. Not the lightest of reading, but a line from Dante stuck a chord. “There’s a passage in Dante’s *Inferno*, when he’s describing what’s above the door to Hell. The third line is: ‘Through me, you enter into the population of loss,’” the Irishman tells Apple Music. “That line just resonated with me. It felt like the world we were in. The news reports were just numbers of deaths, numbers of cases. It was a surreal moment.” It struck him that the format and themes of Dante’s 14th-century epic, in which the poet descends through the nine circles of Hell, could be the perfect prism through which to write about both the unreal experience of the pandemic and the upheavals in his personal life. “There’s such a rich tapestry there. I didn’t study classics and I’m not an academic, but for me, all those myths are happening around us all the time,” he says. “You can play with them a lot and reinterpret them and then subvert them as well.” The result is Hozier’s most ambitious and emotionally powerful album to date. It’s a remarkable journey, taking in pastoral folk, soaring epics, and tracks addressing the devastation caused by colonialism. Here, Hozier guides us through, one track at a time. **“De Selby (Part 1)”** “I didn’t know the song was going to reference de Selby until it started taking shape. He’s a character in a book by Flann O’Brien called *The Third Policeman* \[written in 1939 but not published until after O’Brien’s death in 1967\]. The book is like *Alice in Wonderland*, and it’s a classic piece of surreal Irish storytelling. De Selby is this lunatic philosopher who—and I don’t want to spoil the ending—doesn’t know he’s dead and in the afterlife. It felt like an appropriate reference for the opening track, to reflect on this darkness that he’s entering into, this infinite space.” **“De Selby (Part 2)”** “Part two comes out in a totally different place. It was always in this funk, rock place, even in the early demos. Part one ends in the Irish language, it’s basically saying: ‘You arrive to me like nightfall. Although you’re a being of great lightness, I experience you like nighttime.’ It’s that idea of ‘I don’t know where you begin and I end,’ and the song explores that a bit lyrically.” **“First Time”** “It felt like a nice place to come out of the heaviness of the previous track. It represents limbo. This cycle of birth and death, of being lifted by an experience and then that experience ending and it feeling like your world collapsing in on you, and then going again. Alex Ryan, my buddy who is also my bass player, sent me this bassline one day and it was really colorful and light and playful to work with. I really enjoyed writing the lyrics, they’re not too structured. It’s almost like talk-singing and I hadn’t really explored that much before this album, so I wanted to try it out.” **“Francesca”** “I had written a song that was very specific to Francesca \[from the Second Circle (Lust) in Dante’s *Inferno*\], that was written from her perspective. I was even trying to write it in terza rima, which is the interlocking triplets that Dante wrote in. But that’s where I was a like, ‘OK, I have to step back a little bit from this.’ When this song came around, it started from personal experience and then I allowed those themes and some of the imagery from that character in and then let the two mix. It’s an example of letting the song have a life above ground and resonate with a life below ground in regard to that character.” **“I, Carrion (Icarian)”** “It’s trying to capture that feeling when you’re lifting off. That sometimes when you’re falling in love with somebody, you’re met with this new lightness that you haven’t experienced ever before, but it’s also terrifying. To fully experience the best of that, you have to take into account that it could all collapse inwards and that you’re OK with that. It’s trying to hold those two realities in both hands and just playing with the imagery of it. It felt appropriate to come out of the hurricane of ‘Francesca,’ where two characters are trapped in a hurricane forever, into someone who is just on the wind.” **“Eat Your Young”** “I don’t know how intentional the reference to Jonathan Swift was in this. That essay \[Swift’s 1729 satirical essay *A Modest Proposal* in which he suggests the Irish poor sell their children as food\] is such a cultural landmark that it’s just hanging in the air. I was more reflecting on what I felt now in this spirit of the times of perpetual short-term gain and a long-term blindness. The increasing levels of precarious living, poverty, job insecurity, rental crisis, property crisis, climate crisis, and a generation that’s inheriting all of that and one generation that’s enjoyed the spoils of it. The lyrics are direct, but the voice is playful. There’s this unreliable narrator who relishes in this thing which was fun to write.” **“Damage Gets Done” (feat. Brandi Carlile)** “I’ve known Brandi Carlile for years, she’s an incredible artist and I’m lucky to call her a friend. As that song was taking shape, I wanted it to be a duet. It’s kind of like a runaway song. It’s not as easy to access that joy, that sense of wonder when you’re young that captures your enjoyment for a moment and then it’s gone. Brandi has one of those voices that is powerful enough to really achieve that feeling of a classic, almost power ballad. There’s very few artists that I know that have voices like that, who can just swing at notes the way Brandi swings at notes and hit them so perfectly with this immaculate energy and optimism.” **“Who We Are”** “This song was like a sneeze. Once we had the structure down, we jammed it and I just started wailing melodies that felt right at the time, and then took that away and came back with a song very quickly. Something I wanted to get into the album was this idea of being born at night, of starting in complete darkness. It’s a song that starts in childhood in this cold and dark hour, being lost and then just scraping and carving your way through the dark. It’s an idea that I wanted to put into a song for years, but never did.” **“Son of Nyx”** “A real collaboration between my bass player Alex Ryan, \[producer\] Daniel Tannenbaum \[aka Bekon\], and myself. Alex sent me a piano piece he recorded when he was at home in County Kerry. What you hear at the beginning is the phone memo, you can hear the clock ticking in his family’s living room. Alex’s dad is called Nick, so the song’s name is a play on words. In Greek fable, Nyx is the goddess of night and one of her sons is said to be Charon, the boatman who brings people to the underworld. All those voices that you hear are the choruses or the hooks from the other songs on the album distorted or de-tuned, so you’re hearing the other songs spinning around in that space.” **“All Things End”** “‘All Things End’ started from a personal place. There was a number of songs that could have taken the place of Heresy \[the Sixth Circle\]. In the medieval or the classic sense of heresy, ‘All Things End’ took that place. In those moments as a relationship is crumbling and it’s slipping away from you, it was something that you truly believed in and you had all your faith in and you had all of your belief in. In approaching that concept of that not happening it feels like something heretical. It’s a song about accepting, about giving up your faith in something.” **“To Someone From a Warm Climate (Uiscefhuaraithe)”** “The previous song reflects upon a parting of ways. I suppose in that context, this reflects upon the great loss of this experience and making sense of love after the fact, which is very often the case. If you’ve grown up in a cold climate like Ireland, you learn to warm up the bed quickly so you’re not shivering for too long. It’s a song I wrote for somebody who is from a warm climate who had never experienced that before. \[It’s about\] the significance of something so mundane but so remarkable—to experience a bed that has been warmed by somebody else in a space that you now share now with somebody new. It’s a love song.” **“Butchered Tongue”** “This reflects upon what is lost when languages are lost off the face of the earth. I’ve been lucky enough to travel the world for the last 10 years, going into places that had either Native American or Australian place names—some of the places I mention in the song—and asking people what the place name means and being surprised that no one is able to tell you. The song nods to some of the actions, some of the processes that are behind the loss of culture, the loss of language. There is a legacy of terrible violence, but we have to acknowledge not just that, but also bear witness to this generosity and welcomeness that I experience in those places.” **“Anything But”** “This one falls into the circle of Fraud. It was fun working with American producers on this. They thought it was a very sweet, caring love song. The lyrics in the verses are like, ‘If I was a rip tide/I wouldn’t take you out...If I was a stampede/You wouldn’t get a kick,’ The song is saying on paper that these are kindnesses, but the actual meaning is a joke—what you’re saying is I want nothing to do with you. The third verse says, ‘If I had death’s job, you would live forever.’ So that’s where it fits into the circle of Fraud. I was having fun with that.” **“Abstract (Psychopomp)”** “As a kid I saw somebody running into traffic to try and pick up an animal that had just been hit by a car. This song looks at that memory in an abstract way and sees all of this tenderness and somebody going to great risk to try and offer some futile gesture of care towards a suffering thing. But it’s also about acceptance and letting go. The alternate title is ‘Psychopomp,’ which is a Greek term for a spirit guide—somebody who moves somebody from one part of life into the next. Charon the boatman would be a psychopomp, so it seemed appropriate for a memory of seeing somebody pick up a dead animal off a road and then place it on the sidewalk where it dies.” **“Unknown/Nth”** “This is pretty much just me and a guitar which is what I enjoy about this. It’s very similar to the approach of my first record. I really enjoyed the space that’s in that song and then letting that space be something that had a lot of stillness and a lot of coldness in it.” **“First Light”** “It seemed like an appropriate ending song—of coming out and seeing the sunlight for the first time. Dante talks a lot about how he misses the sky, how he hasn’t seen the stars for so long. He hasn’t seen clouds, he hasn’t seen the sun. I wanted to put that feeling of being in this very oppressive space for a long time and then to see the sky, as if for the first time. I was writing this song with that feeling in mind, of this great opening, a great sense of furtherance and great open space. The record needed something like that. It needed this conclusive deep breath out, this renewing of the wind in the sails and then going on from there.”

Brimming with astrological fervor and unbridled emotionality, *Red Moon in Venus* finds the Colombian American sensation zeroing in on love. From the proud promises behind “Endlessly” to the sweet little profundities of “Love Between...,” the album plays with genre without losing cohesion or connection. On the guest front, Don Toliver matches her R&B potency amid the polyrhythmic blur of “Fantasy,” while Omar Apollo brings his own certain charm to the sumptuous duet “Worth the Wait.” Yet most of the album keeps the spotlight rightfully on her, leading to breathtaking moments like “I Wish You Roses” and the Sade-esque “Blue.” And while *Red Moon in Venus* returns the artist to a primarily English-language mode, she hasn’t dispatched entirely with the approach taken on 2020’s *Sin Miedo (del Amor y Otros Demonios) ∞*. She brings bilingual lyricism alongside orchestral accents for “Como Te Quiero Yo” and retro grooves for “Hasta Cuando.”

The nearly six-year period Kelela Mizanekristos took between 2017’s *Take Me Apart* and 2023’s *Raven* wasn’t just a break; it was a reckoning. Like a lot of Black Americans, she’d watched the protests following George Floyd’s murder with outrage and cautious curiosity as to whether the winds of social change might actually shift. She read, she watched, she researched; she digested the pressures of creative perfectionism and tireless productivity not as correlatives of an artistic mind but of capitalism and white supremacy, whose consecration of the risk-free bottom line suddenly felt like the arbitrary and invasive force it is. And suddenly, she realized she wasn’t alone. “Internally, I’ve always wished the world would change around me,” Kelela tells Apple Music. “I felt during the uprising and the \[protests of the early 2020s\] that there’s been an *external* shift. We all have more permission to say, ‘I don’t like that.’” Executive-produced by longtime collaborator Asmara (Asma Maroof of Nguzunguzu), 2023’s *Raven* is both an extension of her earlier work and an expansion of it. The hybrids of progressive dance and ’90s-style R&B that made *Take Me Apart* and *Cut 4 Me* compelling are still there (“Contact,” “Missed Call,” both co-produced by LSDXOXO and Bambii), as is her gift for making the ethereal feel embodied and deeply physical (“Enough for Love”). And for all her respect for the modalities of Black American pop music, you can hear the musical curiosity and experiential outliers—as someone who grew up singing jazz standards and played in a punk band—that led her to stretch the paradigms of it, too. But the album’s heart lies in songs like “Holier” and “Raven,” whose narratives of redemption and self-sufficiency jump the track from personal reflections to metaphors for the struggle with patriarchy and racism more broadly. “I’ve been pretty comfortable to talk about the nitty-gritty of relationships,” she says. “But this album contains a few songs that are overtly political, that feel more literally like *no, you will not*.” Oppression comes in many forms, but they all work the same way; *Raven* imagines a flight out.

On Kevin Abstract’s debut album, 2016’s *American Boyfriend: A Suburban Love Story*, the former BROCKHAMPTON leader conjured up alt-pop songs of adolescent love, heartbreak, and every emotion in between. His 2019 sophomore effort *ARIZONA BABY* was deeply inspired by Southern rap and the chopped and screwed stylings of Texas legends like DJ Screw. The Corpus Christi-born singer, rapper, and producer returned home for the project, dealing with his upbringing, sexuality, and the difficulties of managing a band of friends when money, fame, and success enter the picture. His third covers many of the same themes, though from the vantage point of someone wiser, more worn, and less susceptible to the whirlwinds of love and love lost, soundtracked by ’90s-vintage guitar rock. “I’ve been trying to make a solo album for the past two and a half years, and I finally found the confidence to make something that I would actually listen to and share with the world,” he tells Apple Music. Read on for his track-by-track guide. **“When the Rope Post 2 Break”** “This just felt like an intro to me. As soon as we made it, I knew it would be the way to get people into the album. There are some samples of kids playing, which I recorded in the neighborhood. I was interested in capturing the ambience around me. All the details on the album are to help bring the world together.” **“Blanket”** “This is a song to play when everyone’s just pissing you off or something. You could jump around in your room to it, or bump it on the bus. It’s one of those songs. You close your door and play it loud, or put it on your headphones and drown out the world.” **“Running Out”** “I like how there are whispers on this track—that feels like the way I communicate with a lot of my friends. It represents secrets, the idea of hiding something. It represents intimacy for me. That’s what I think of when I hear this song. It’s one of the sadder songs on the record, but it sounds upbeat. I had to write from that perspective.” **“The Greys”** “I wanted to make something sexy, something you could dance to, or look in the mirror and sing along with. You imagine being on stage, but you’re really somewhere, broke and probably struggling. You got that look in your eye, and you’re going to make it one day. It’s a message for the people, but I was that way, too. Once I put this out, it’s no longer mine; it’s a cliché, but it’s real. I really do mean all the stuff I say because when I was younger, any interview I saw with any artist I was looking up to meant a lot if they were encouraging younger people. That helped me get through so much and it helped me trust myself. I’m not capping when I say, ‘Lean into what you feel and follow your heart.’ That shit is real to me.” **“Voyager”** “This song is pure beauty. If you don’t like this, you probably don’t have a soul. It’s the ballad on the album.” **“Madonna”** “Madonna represents being up. Why not want to be Madonna? Madonna, Tupac, and Michael Jackson: Those are the icons that came before us. I wasn’t always allowed to see certain things, but that made me want to see it more. There was always some sort of danger around her art. I didn’t start listening to her until I got older and I started researching all the greats that came before me. I didn’t really discover her until I started actually making music.” **“Today I Gave Up”** “I was extremely sad when I made this. Need I say more? Writing and recording can be cathartic, but I only feel better when it’s a good song. So since a song is fire, I’m like, ‘Oh, this is lit. I gotta play it for friends, and it\'ll be a good confidence boost to show this track off.’ More seriously, though, the feelings don\'t really go away.” **“What Should I Do?”** “Every spring and every fall feels the same to me. If I could put those two seasons together, it would be the feeling of this song.” **“Mr. Edwards”** “This is an intermission. It’s all connected.” **“Scream”** “I’m obsessed with R&B music. I feel like the biggest BROCKHAMPTON songs had some element of R&B in them. I’m going into every album trying to make one song that reminds me of ’90s R&B. The challenge is trying to fit that within the vibe and aesthetic of the album. R&B features some of the best melodies in the world. And I love melody more than anything.” **“Real To Me”** “This is another little dance track. It’s not just a crush.” **“Heights, Spiders, and the Dark”** “I really did all I could to keep all of who this song is about, and it didn’t work. He left me.” **“My Friend”** “Someone showed me MJ Lenderman’s music and I thought it was beautiful, beautiful music. Listening to his shit made me realize that was the bar. He gave me a lot of guidance, and then I sent him this song with my chorus on it and I asked him to re-sing the chorus. I like his voice so much. Then I brought Kara Jackson in to sing some parts. I wrote this song about going to Disneyland with my friends. This one is called ‘My Friend,’ but it’s about all my friends.”

Lana Del Rey has mastered the art of carefully constructed, high-concept alt-pop records that bask in—and steadily amplify—her own mythology; with each album we become more enamored by, and yet less sure of, who she is. This is, of course, part of her magic and the source of much of her artistic power. Her records bid you to worry less about parsing fact from fiction and, instead, free-fall into her theatrical aesthetic—a mix of gloomy Americana, Laurel Canyon nostalgia, and Hollywood noir that was once dismissed as calculation and is now revered as performance art. Up until now, these slippery, surrealist albums have made it difficult to separate artist from art. But on her introspective ninth album, something seems to shift: She appears to let us in a little. She appears to let down her guard. The opening track is called “The Grants”—a nod to her actual family name. Through unusually revealing, stream-of-conscious songs that feel like the most poetic voice notes you’ve ever heard, she chastises her siblings, wonders about marriage, and imagines what might come with motherhood and midlife. “Do you want children?/Do you wanna marry me?” she sings on “Sweet.” “Do you wanna run marathons in Long Beach by the sea?” This is relatively new lyrical territory for Del Rey, who has generally tended to steer around personal details, and the songs themselves feel looser and more off-the-cuff (they were mostly produced with longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff). It could be that Lana has finally decided to start peeling back a few layers, but for an artist whose entire catalog is rooted in clever imagery, it’s best to leave room for imagination. The only clue might be in the album’s single piece of promo, a now-infamous billboard in Tulsa, Oklahoma, her ex-boyfriend’s hometown. She settled the point fairly quickly on Instagram. “It’s personal,” she wrote.

“As I got older I learned I’m a drinker/Sometimes a drink feels like family,” Mitski confides with disarming honesty on “Bug Like an Angel,” the strummy, slow-build opening salvo from her seventh studio album that also serves as its lead single. Moments later, the song breaks open into its expansive chorus: a convergence of cooed harmonies and acoustic guitar. There’s more cracked-heart vulnerability and sonic contradiction where that came from—no surprise considering that Mitski has become one of the finest practitioners of confessional, deeply textured indie rock. Recorded between studios in Los Angeles and her recently adopted home city of Nashville, *The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We* mostly leaves behind the giddy synth-pop experiments of her last release, 2022’s *Laurel Hell*, for something more intimate and dreamlike: “Buffalo Replaced” dabbles in a domestic poetry of mosquitoes, moonlight, and “fireflies zooming through the yard like highway cars”; the swooning lullaby “Heaven,” drenched in fluttering strings and slide guitar, revels in the heady pleasures of new love. The similarly swaying “I Don’t Like My Mind” pithily explores the daily anxiety of being alive (sometimes you have to eat a whole cake just to get by). The pretty syncopations of “The Deal” build to a thrilling clatter of drums and vocals, while “When Memories Snow” ropes an entire cacophonous orchestra—French horn, woodwinds, cello—into its vivid winter metaphors, and the languid balladry of “My Love Mine All Mine” makes romantic possessiveness sound like a gift. The album’s fuzzed-up closer, “I Love Me After You,” paints a different kind of picture, either postcoital or defiantly post-relationship: “Stride through the house naked/Don’t even care that the curtains are open/Let the darkness see me… How I love me after you.” Mitski has seen the darkness, and on *The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We*, she stares right back into the void.

In 2022, NewJeans dropped into the saturated K-pop industry with zero pre-promotion. The music video for “Attention” combined breezy R&B-inspired pop, immaculate Y2K-nostalgic visuals, and the teen-girl cool of Minji, Haerin, Hanni, Danielle, and Hyein. Now they’re back with their second EP, a mini-album featuring six short tracks that reasserts NewJeans’ dominance in the fourth-generation K-pop scene. Sonically, *Get Up* doubles down on NewJeans’ commitment to noughts-era R&B paired with electronic dance elements. Pre-release singles “Super Shy”—which member Hanni says reminds her of flying through space on a rocket ship—and *Powerpuff Girls* collab “New Jeans” are peppy, synth-driven bops that fans of “Ditto” will love. But the girls have never been as solemn as they are on “Cool With You,” a UK garage track, and “Get Up,” two songs that could be teasing an evolution of their vibe. Tying the sophomore project together are the versatile, finely tuned vocals of the young members, which continue to elevate NewJeans’ music from forgettable pop to something more textured—and serve as a tribute to the teen-girl interiority that is at the center of NewJeans’ music and story.

As Olivia Rodrigo set out to write her second album, she froze. “I couldn\'t sit at the piano without thinking about what other people were going to think about what I was playing,” she tells Apple Music. “I would sing anything and I\'d just be like, ‘Oh, but will people say this and that, will people speculate about whatever?’” Given the outsized reception to 2021’s *SOUR*—which rightly earned her three Grammys and three Apple Music Awards that year, including Top Album and Breakthrough Artist—and the chatter that followed its devastating, extremely viral first single, “drivers license,” you can understand her anxiety. She’d written much of that record in her bedroom, free of expectation, having never played a show. The week before it was finally released, the then-18-year-old singer-songwriter would get to perform for the first time, only to televised audiences in the millions, at the BRIT Awards in London and on *SNL* in New York. Some artists debut—Rodrigo *arrived*. But looking past the hype and the hoo-ha and the pressures of a famously sold-out first tour (during a pandemic, no less), trying to write as anticipated a follow-up album as there’s been in a very long time, she had a realization: “All I have to do is make music that I would like to hear on the radio, that I would add to my playlist,” she says. “That\'s my sole job as an artist making music; everything else is out of my control. Once I started really believing that, things became a lot easier.” Written alongside trusted producer Dan Nigro, *GUTS* is both natural progression and highly confident next step. Boasting bigger and sleeker arrangements, the high-stakes piano ballads here feel high-stakes-ier (“vampire”), and the pop-punk even punkier (“all-american bitch,” which somehow splits the difference between Hole and Cat Stevens’ “Here Comes My Baby”). If *SOUR* was, in part, the sound of Rodrigo picking up the pieces post-heartbreak, *GUTS* finds her fully healed and wholly liberated—laughing at herself (“love is embarrassing”), playing chicken with disaster (the Go-Go’s-y “bad idea right?”), not so much seeking vengeance as delighting in it (“get him back!”). This is Anthem Country, joyride music, a set of smart and immediately satisfying pop songs informed by time spent onstage, figuring out what translates when you’re face-to-face with a crowd. “Something that can resonate on a recording maybe doesn\'t always resonate in a room full of people,” she says. “I think I wrote this album with the tour in mind.” And yet there are still moments of real vulnerability, the sort of intimate and sharply rendered emotional terrain that made Rodrigo so relatable from the start. She’s straining to keep it together on “making the bed,” bereft of good answers on “logical,” in search of hope and herself on gargantuan closer “teenage dream.” Alone at a piano again, she tries to make sense of a betrayal on “the grudge,” gathering speed and altitude as she goes, each note heavier than the last, “drivers license”-style. But then she offers an admission that doesn’t come easy if you’re sweating a reaction: “It takes strength to forgive, but I don’t feel strong.” In hindsight, she says, this album is “about the confusion that comes with becoming a young adult and figuring out your place in this world and figuring out who you want to be. I think that that\'s probably an experience that everyone has had in their life before, just rising from that disillusionment.” Read on as Rodrigo takes us inside a few songs from *GUTS*. **“all-american bitch”** “It\'s one of my favorite songs I\'ve ever written. I really love the lyrics of it and I think it expresses something that I\'ve been trying to express since I was 15 years old—this repressed anger and feeling of confusion, or trying to be put into a box as a girl.” **“vampire”** “I wrote the song on the piano, super chill, in December of \[2022\]. And Dan and I finished writing it in January. I\'ve just always been really obsessed with songs that are very dynamic. My favorite songs are high and low, and reel you in and spit you back out. And so we wanted to do a song where it just crescendoed the entire time and it reflects the pent-up anger that you have for a situation.” **“get him back!”** “Dan and I were at Electric Lady Studios in New York and we were writing all day. We wrote a song that I didn\'t like and I had a total breakdown. I was like, ‘God, I can\'t write songs. I\'m so bad at this. I don\'t want to.’ Being really negative. Then we took a break and we came back and we wrote ‘get him back!’ Just goes to show you: Never give up.” **“teenage dream”** “Ironically, that\'s actually the first song we wrote for the record. The last line is a line that I really love and it ends the album on a question mark: ‘They all say that it gets better/It gets better the more you grow/They all say that it gets better/What if I don\'t?’ I like that it’s like an ending, but it\'s also a question mark and it\'s leaving it up in the air what this next chapter is going to be. It\'s still confused, but it feels like a final note to that confusion, a final question.”

Few rock bands this side of Y2K have committed themselves to forward motion quite like Paramore. But in order to summon the aggression of their sixth full-length, the Tennessee outfit needed to look back—to draw on some of the same urgency that defined them early on, when they were teenaged upstarts slinging pop punk on the Warped Tour. “I think that\'s why this was a hard record to make,” Hayley Williams tells Apple Music of *This Is Why*. “Because how do you do that without putting the car in reverse completely?” In the neon wake of 2017’s *After Laughter*—an unabashed pop record—guitarist Taylor York says he found himself “really craving rock.” Add to that a combination of global pandemic, social unrest, apocalyptic weather, and war, and you have what feels like a suitable backdrop (if not cause) for music with edges. “I think figuring out a smarter way to make something aggressive isn\'t just turning up the distortion,” York says. “That’s where there was a lot of tension, us trying to collectively figure out what that looks like and can all three of us really get behind it and feel represented. It was really difficult sometimes, but when we listened back at the end, we were like, ‘Sick.’” What that looks like is a set of spiky but highly listenable (and often danceable) post-punk that draws influence from early-2000s revivalists like Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Bloc Party, The Rapture, Franz Ferdinand, and Hot Hot Heat. Throughout, Williams offers relatable glimpses of what it’s been like to live through the last few years, whether it’s feelings of anxiety (the title cut), outrage (“The News”), or atrophy (“C’est Comme Ça”). “I got to yell a lot on this record, and I was afraid of that, because I’ve been treating my voice so kindly and now I’m fucking smashing it to bits,” she says. “We finished the first day in the studio and listened back to the music and we were like, ‘Who is this?’ It simultaneously sounds like everything we\'ve ever loved and nothing that we\'ve ever done before ourselves. To me, that\'s always a great sign, because there\'s not many posts along the way that tell you where to go. You\'re just raw-dogging it. Into the abyss.”

PinkPantheress’ debut album, *Heaven knows*, opens with the sound of a scaling church organ and heavy rainfall. It’s a grand entrance that’s as fitting for this album’s title as it is perhaps surprising for the artist behind it. But if PinkPantheress broke out thanks to the propulsive, UKG- and D’n’B-shaped pop she’d crafted in her bedroom (and her songs’ wild social-media success), the beginnings of *Heaven knows* feel like an acknowledgment—or a declaration—that she’s outgrown its four walls. Sometimes, that feels literal: “True romance” finds her amid the screaming crowds and clicking cameras of a show as she heralds her love for someone much more famous than her. It’s either a sign of the company she keeps these days (“Every song is about you/And everybody’s shouting out your name”) or a play on the darker side of fan obsession (“I know you’re older/But I really know I’m sure/Held my ticket since they landed at my door/I’ve been a fan of you since 2004/You know you got me”). But this album is also a broadening of her musical world, the songs here—made with collaborators including Greg Kurstin (Adele, Gorillaz, Foo Fighters), Mura Masa, Cash Cobain, Danny L Harle (Caroline Polachek) and Oscar Scheller (Ashnikko, Charli XCX, Rina Sawayama)—are noticeably more expansive than those on 2021’s star-confirming mixtape *To hell with it*. You can expect all the nostalgic sounds and breakbeats that defined that release and made the Kent-raised singer-songwriter/producer famous. But also disco (on the excellent “The aisle”), ’90s R&B (“Mosquito” and “Feel complete,” which sounds like it could have been written for a girl group), rock wig-outs (“Capable of love”), and flourishes of strings, church bells and even birdsong en route. (There are also songs that pass the three-minute mark.) Plus, plenty of collaborations, as Pink recruits a crop of culture-shaping artists to appear alongside her: Rema, Kelela, Central Cee, and, of course, Ice Spice, with whom she reached global domination in summer 2023 with “Boy’s a liar, Pt. 2.” All of which is united by the story of a troubled relationship, the album’s emo-shaped lyricism frequently blurring the lines between heartbreak and death and love and obsession (“You’re not quite stuck with me, but one day you’ll be,” she sings on “The aisle”). It could feel sinister, if her voice—and increasingly boundless, future-facing hyperpop—weren’t quite so sweet. By the time *Heaven knows* closes out with “Boy’s a liar, Pt. 2,” it’s a reminder of the astronomical heights PinkPantheress reached before even announcing her debut. But right in the middle of it, she hints that—despite her social-media beginnings—she can be anything she wants to be. “I am not your internet baby,” she repeats insistently on “Internet baby (interlude).” “I am not your internet baby.”

For the last two decades, Sufjan Stevens’ music has taken on two distinct forms. On one end, you have the ornate, orchestral, and positively stuffed style that he’s excelled at since the conceptual fantasias of 2003’s star-making *Michigan*. On the other, there’s the sparse and close-to-the-bone narrative folk-pop songwriting that’s marked some of his most well-known singles and albums, first fully realized on the stark and revelatory *Seven Swans* from 2004. His 10th studio full-length, *Javelin*, represents the fullest and richest merging of those two approaches that Stevens has achieved to date. Even as it’s been billed as his first proper “songwriter’s album” since 2015’s autobiographical and devastating *Carrie & Lowell*, *Javelin* is a kaleidoscopic distillation of everything Stevens has achieved in his career so far, resulting in some of the most emotionally affecting and grandiose-sounding music he’s ever made. *Javelin* is Stevens’ first solo record of vocal-based music since 2020’s *The Ascension*, and it’s relatively straightforward compared to its predecessor’s complexity. Featuring contributions from vocalists and frequent collaborators like Nedelle Torrisi, adrienne maree brown, Hannah Cohen, and The National’s Bryce Dessner (who adds his guitar skills to the heart-bursting epic “Shit Talk”), the record certainly sounds like a full-group effort in opposition to the angsty isolation that streaked *The Ascension*. But at the heart of *Javelin* is Stevens’ vocals, the intimacy of which makes listeners feel as if they’re mere feet away from him. There’s callbacks to Stevens’ discography throughout, from the *Age of Adz*-esque digital dissolve that closes out “Genuflecting Ghost” to the rustic Flannery O’Connor evocations of “Everything That Rises,” recalling *Seven Swans*’ inspirational cues from the late fiction writer. Ultimately, though, *Javelin* finds Stevens emerging from the depressive cloud of *The Ascension* armed with pleas for peace and a distinct yearning to belong and be embraced—powerful messages delivered on high, from one of the 21st century’s most empathetic songwriters.

When Taylor Swift announced that *1989 (Taylor’s Version)* was finally seeing release, she mentioned that, of all the albums she’s faithfully rerecorded in her quest to retake her master tapes, this one was special. “The *1989* album changed my life in countless ways,” she wrote on Instagram. “To be perfectly honest, this is my most FAVORITE re-record I’ve ever done because the 5 From The Vault tracks are so insane. I can’t believe they were ever left behind.” From “Now That We Don’t Talk” (on which, wowee zowee, she sings, “I don’t have to pretend I like acid rock/Or that I’d like to be on a mega-yacht/With important men who think important thoughts”) to “Say Don’t Go” to “Is It Over Now?”, one gets a real feel for the ferocity and focus with which she was writing at the time, a new audience in sight. It’s not just that any one of the newly uncovered songs here is more than strong enough to have been included (or strong enough to have launched the career of a less prolific artist); it’s that, even on material previously deemed inessential, Swift sounds comfortable bordering on imperious—like she’d been making lush, montage-ready pop music all along. Nearly a decade later—and at the tail end of a 2023 in which her every move seems to have determined pop-cultural weather—it’s weirdly easy to forget that in 2014, she was still approaching (nah, *engineering*) an inflection point in her life and career, reintroducing herself (at just 24) as the all-conquering, planet-like presence we know today. She’d already started adjusting the ratio of country to pop on 2010’s *Speak Now* and 2012’s *Red*, working with Swedish superproducers Max Martin and Shellback on the latter. On *1989*, Swift did away with the idea of ratios entirely—just launched them into the ocean, and went all the way. Musically, it wasn’t just her embrace of big beats and shiny surfaces, but a sense of lightness and play as well. Where 2008’s *Fearless* and *Speak Now* take their dramas to Shakespearean heights, *1989* celebrates a newly liberated life of flings (“Style”), weekend getaways (“Wildest Dreams”), and the kind of confidence a younger Taylor Swift was too passionately involved to grasp. So while “Welcome to New York” is her way of letting everyone know that she’s at least momentarily done with country music and Nashville and the constrictions they put on her image and sound, it’s also a song about turning your eye outward and surrendering to the possibilities only a city like New York can offer. And where she may have taken things personally in the past, now she’s just trying to have fun (“Shake It Off”). “Blank Space” even manages to make light of her gravest and most well-protected subject: Taylor Swift. Like Shania Twain’s *Come On Over* or even Bob Dylan’s *Bringing It All Back Home*, *1989* is an instance in which an artist deliberately defies expectations and still manages to succeed. Swift didn’t exactly grow up with the synthesized, ’80s-inspired sounds that producers like Martin, Shellback, Ryan Tedder, and future bestie Jack Antonoff help her create here; as the album’s title reminds you, she wasn’t even born until the decade was ending. But just as she played with the traditions and conventions of country music on her early albums, Swift uses the nostalgia of *1989* not to look back, but to move ahead.

“I don\'t really want to tell people stories,” Troye Sivan tells Apple Music. “I want to show them. I want them to feel.” At 28, the Australian artist has more than a few stories to pick from. In the years between 2018’s *Bloom* and this, his third full-length, he’s appeared in several films and series; collaborated with artists like Charli XCX, Lauv, Jónsi, and Tate McRae; and launched a luxury lifestyle brand. But beneath those headline-makers, he simply lived his life and experienced the experiences that laid the foundations for *Something to Give Each Other*. “There’s 10 stories, 10 moments,” he says of the album, which took around two and a half years to complete. Between COVID and filming the TV series *The Idol*, he was granted a “luxury of time” he’d never had before. “It ended up serving the album really well because it gave me time to see which songs stuck around.” “I\'ve felt very hopeful and joyous and connected, but there’s a lot of vulnerability as well,” Sivan says. There’s love, sex, and heartbreak, the thrill of reemerging feelings, fleeting yet vital moments of intimacy and communication. There’s a sweaty club moment (“Rush”), balmy dance pop (“Got Me Started”—which samples Bag Raiders’ definitive 2008 hit “Shooting Stars”), gentle confessionals (“Can’t Go Back, Baby”) and sensual house (“Silly”). And it’s all told through the lens of welcome self-discovery and unapologetic, undiluted queerness. Here, he talks through the stories of each song on *Something to Give Each Other*. **“Rush”** “In the moments between Melbourne lockdowns when we were able to go out, I had these nights that were so fun, they were almost emotional. There was this overwhelming joy and euphoria. I was sober and sweating and just so grateful to be with people. And grateful for music, for life, for youth and sex and connection. So I wanted to write that moment.” **“What\'s the Time Where You Are?”** “I felt pretty emotionally dead for a while after my last relationship, and my feelings didn\'t all come back in one go. There were these little sparks I started to feel, and I was so excited when I did. I was talking to this one guy and I had a little crush for the first time in ages. At one point he messaged me saying, ‘What\'s the time where you are?’ Maybe I over-romanticized, but it was so sweet. Because he could definitely google that. But I saw it for what it was, I think: It was an effort at connection and keeping the conversation going. It sparked this idea of two people separated by a great distance, both out there living their lives, having a great time, but looking for each other in music or nights out or little texts like that.” **“One of Your Girls”** “I think this is my favorite song I\'ve ever worked on. This thing kept happening where I was being approached by guys who’d previously or historically identified as straight. They were flirting with me, saying there was something in me that they were interested in. I just felt all these different things. Firstly, I was placing them on such a pedestal. I was like, why is this so hot? And also questioning myself because I’d always end up heartbroken. I think I knew I wasn’t treating myself with the respect I deserved by being the secret or the experiment. We wrote three different choruses and ended up coming to this sad robot thing, inspired by a movie I’d seen. Even that spoke to the way I’d felt: like I was expected to be there when they wanted me, then disappear when they freaked out, then be there again when they wanted. Like this emotionless object. And yet there I was time and time again. You don\'t want to rush them through the process of figuring shit out. This isn’t me making any sort of statement—I have patience for that experience. I’m just musing to myself about it.” **“In My Room” (feat. Guitarricadelafuente)** “I met Guitarricadelafuente \[Álvaro Lafuente Calvo\] and his boyfriend in Paris at a dinner, and they were so sweet. When I got back to the hotel, I started listening to his music and I was just really, really inspired. So I messaged him that we should write sometime. We wrote the song in one day. It\'s the only collaboration on the album, and I love that it\'s with a queer artist. In my head, I\'m lying on my bed, kicking my legs, daydreaming about someone like I’m a teenager. It was a really nice way to write rather than trying to make narrative: We were both just communicating our feelings.” **“Still Got It”** “It’s about a moment where I bumped into my ex-boyfriend and realized he still had all the things that made me fall in love with him in the first place. One of my favorite lyrics on the album is ‘Said hello like an old colleague.’ It was just that weird thing where you\'re like, wow, I lived with this person, I shared so much of my life with this person, and here we are greeting each other like old colleagues. It was a moment of reflection. I love collaboration and writing with people, but sometimes it\'s really nice to just do it by yourself, say exactly what you feel and worry less about the stuff I normally love worrying about, like, ‘How many syllables is it? Does it work from a pop point of view?’” **“Can’t Go Back, Baby”** “I was pretty angry, and I\'ve never really written from an angry place. I was hurt and felt betrayed. It’s a real journey throughout the song and by the end it\'s like, ‘In the morning, I wake up with the sun across my face/In the evening, there I lay with so much love to take your place.’ That\'s not love from other people, it\'s love I have for myself, being able to show up for yourself. But sonically there’s a softness, because I still have so much care for that person, that relationship. I knew I wanted this on the album, but I was dreading writing it. When I eventually did, I was like, ‘Let\'s just record this today and then I don\'t want to look at it.’” **“Got Me Started”** “It’s the first song we wrote for the album. It was one of those moments of a spark, where someone unlocks that side of you again and you\'re like, ‘Oh, I can feel.’ I love the lyric ‘Boy, can I be honest? Kinda miss using my body/Fuck it up just like this party did tonight.’ To me, it\'s just this house party: You\'ve met someone and for whatever reason you just can’t keep your hands off each other—and how exciting it is when that happens.” **“Silly”** “We had sexiness on the album in a few different ways, but one thing we didn\'t have was *icy, cool* sexy—something that just really simmers. I was surprised by the lyrics that came. It ended up being about how someone can get you back into your feelings for them in two seconds. It almost touches on the story of ‘Still Got It.’ I\'ve sung in falsetto as a layer a lot throughout my music, but never as a lead vocal. Here, we started off with that falsetto as a layer, and I was going to track under it, but we left it alone up there. So I essentially got to duet with myself, which was so cool.” **“Honey”** “‘Honey’ started in Melbourne with \[producer\] Styalz Fuego and the Serenity Prayer. My dad taught it to me when I was a kid. One of the lines is something like ‘Give me the courage to accept things I cannot change.’ I love the idea of having these really strong feelings for someone and not knowing how to express them, and almost saying a prayer—even though I\'m very irreligious. ‘Give me the courage to say all these things I feel about you.’ It just felt very joyous, like the confetti moment at the show.” **“How to Stay With You”** “It’s really cruisy and mellow, it’s got saxophone on it. It’s about someone I met who ended up leaving, and I was a bit lost on how to stay with them, because I wanted to, but it didn’t seem possible. There was something interesting to me about putting it at the end. Throughout all the experiences and people on the album, I still have this longing and desire to find a long-term relationship. When it fades out in the outro, the last lyrics on the album are these little background vocals: ‘Starting again when I got all I wanted/Starting to feel a little bit despondent.’ I still haven\'t found the thing I\'m looking for. It doesn\'t negate these prior experiences and how beautiful they are, but I\'m still looking. I thought it was a very real way to end it. I\'m on this journey, I’m really happy and I\'m enjoying every second of it, I\'m so grateful for all the connections, and I\'m curious to see what happens next. But I don’t know what that is yet.”

Young Fathers occupy a unique place in British music. The Mercury Prize-winning trio are as adept at envelope-pushing sonic experimentalism and opaque lyrical impressionism as they are at soulful pop hooks and festival-primed choruses—frequently, in the space of the same song. Coming off the back of an extended hiatus following 2018’s acclaimed *Cocoa Sugar*, the Edinburgh threesome entered their basement studio with no grand plan for their fourth studio album other than to reconnect to the creative process, and each other. Little was explicitly discussed. Instead, Alloysious Massaquoi, Kayus Bankole, and Graham “G” Hastings—all friends since their school days—intuitively reacted to a lyric, a piece of music, or a beat that one of them had conceived to create multifaceted pieces of work that, for all their complexities and contradictions, hit home with soul-lifting, often spiritual, directness. Through the joyous clatter of opener “Rice,” the electro-glam battle cry “I Saw,” the epic “Tell Somebody,” and the shape-shifting sonic explosion of closer “Be Your Lady,” Young Fathers express every peak and trough of the human condition within often-dense tapestries of sounds and words. “Each song serves an integral purpose to create something that feels cohesive,” says Bankole. “You can find joy in silence, you can find happiness in pain. You can find all these intricate feelings and diverse feelings that reflect reality in the best possible way within these songs.” Across 10 dazzling tracks, *Heavy Heavy* has all that and more, making it the band’s most fully realized and affecting work to date. Let Massaquoi and Bankole guide you through it, track by track. **“Rice”** Alloysious Massaquoi: “What we’re great at doing is attaching ourselves to what the feeling of the track is and then building from that, so the lyrics start to come from that point of view. \[On ‘Rice’\] that feeling of it being joyous was what we were connecting to. It was the feeling of fresh morning air. You’re on a journey, you’re moving towards something, it feels like you’re coming home to find it again. For me, it was finding that feeling of, ‘OK, I love music again,’ because during COVID it felt redundant to me. What mattered to me was looking after my family.” **“I Saw”** AM: “We’d been talking about Brexit, colonialism, about forgetting the contributions of other countries and nations so that was in the air. And when we attached ourselves to the feeling of the song, it had that call-to-arms feeling to it, it’s like a march.” Kayus Bankole: “It touches on Brexit, but it also touches on how effective turning a blind eye can be, that idea that there’s nothing really you can do. It’s a call to arms, but there’s also this massive question mark. I get super-buzzed by leaving question marks so you can engage in some form of conversation afterwards.” **“Drum”** AM: “It’s got that sort of gospel spiritual aspect to it. There’s an intensity in that. It’s almost like a sermon is happening.” KB: “The intensity of it is like a possession. A good, spiritual thing. For me, speaking in my native tongue \[Yoruba\] is like channeling a part of me that the Western world can’t express. I sometimes feel like the English language fails me, and in the Western world not a lot of people speak my language or understand what I’m saying, so it’s connecting to my true self and expressing myself in a true way.” **“Tell Somebody”** AM: “It was so big, so epic that we just needed to be direct. The lyrics had to be relatable. It’s about having that balance. You have to really boil it down and think, ‘What is it I’m trying to say here?’ You have 20 lines and you cut it down to just five and that’s what makes it powerful. I think it might mean something different to everyone in the group, but I know what it means to me, through my experiences, and that’s what I was channeling. The more you lean into yourself, the more relatable it is.” **“Geronimo”** AM: “It’s talking about relationships: ‘Being a son, brother, uncle, father figure/I gotta survive and provide/My mama said, “You’ll never ever please your woman/But you’ll have a good time trying.”’ It’s relatable again, but then you have this nihilistic cynicism from Graham: ‘Nobody goes anywhere really/Dressed up just to go in the dirt.’ It’s a bit nihilistic, but given the reality of the world and how things are, I think you need the balance of those things. Jump on, jump off. It’s like: *decide*. You’re either hot or you’re cold. Don’t be lukewarm. You either go for it or you don’t. Then encapsulating all that within Geronimo, this Native American hero.” **“Shoot Me Down”** AM: “‘Shoot Me Down’ is definitely steeped in humanity. You’ve got everything in there. You’ve got the insecurities, the cynicism, you’ve got the joy, the pain, the indifference. You’ve got all those things churning around in this cauldron. There’s a level of regret in there as well. Again, when you lean into yourself, it becomes more relatable to everybody else.” **“Ululation”** KB: “It’s the first time we’ve ever used anyone else on a track. A really close friend of mine, who I call a sister, called me while we were making ‘Uluation’: ‘I need a place to stay, I’m having a difficult time with my husband, I’m really angry at him…’ I said if you need a place to chill just come down to the studio and listen to us while we work but you mustn’t say a word because we’re working. We’re working on the track and she started humming in the background. Alloy picked up on it and was like, ‘Give her a mic!’ She’s singing about gratitude. In the midst of feeling very angry, feeling like shit and that life’s not fair, she still had that emotion that she can practice gratitude. I think that’s a beautiful contrast of emotions.” **“Sink Or Swim”** AM: “It says a similar thing to what we’re saying on ‘Geronimo’ but with more panache. The music has that feeling of a carousel, you’re jumping on and jumping off. If you watch Steve McQueen’s Small Axe \[film anthology\], in *Lovers Rock*, when they’re in the house party before the fire starts—this fits perfectly to that. It’s that intensity, the sweat and the smoke, but with these direct lines thrown in: ‘Oh baby, won’t you let me in?’ and ‘Don’t always have to be so deep.’ Sometimes you need a bit of directness, you need to call a spade a spade.” **“Holy Moly”** AM: “It’s a contrast between light and dark. You’re forcing two things that don’t make sense together. You have a pop song and some weird beat, and you’re forcing them to have this conversation, to do something, and then ‘Holy Moly’ comes out of that. It’s two different worlds coming together and what cements it is the lyrics.” **“Be Your Lady”** KB: “It’s the perfect loop back to the first track so you could stay in the loop of the album for decades, centuries, and millenniums and just bask in these intricate parts. ‘Be Your Lady’ is a nice wave goodbye, but it’s also radical as fuck. That last line ‘Can I take 10 pounds’ worth of loving out of the bank please?’ I’m repeating it and I’m switching the accents of it as well because I switch accents in conversation. I sometimes speak like someone who’s from Washington, D.C. \[where Bankole has previously lived\], or someone who’s lived in the Southside of Edinburgh, and I sometimes speak like someone who’s from Lagos in Nigeria.” AM: “I wasn’t convinced about that track initially. I was like, ‘What the fuck is this?’” KB: “That’s good, though. That’s the feeling that you want. That’s why I feel it’s radical. It’s something that only we can do, it comes together and it feels right.”

WIN ACCESS TO A SOUNDCHECK AND TICKETS TO A UK HEADLINE SHOW OF YOUR CHOOSING BY PRE-ORDERING* ANY ALBUM FORMAT OF 'HEAVY HEAVY' BY 6PM GMT ON TUESDAY 31ST JANUARY. PREVIOUS ORDERS WILL BE COUNTED AS ENTRIES. OPEN TO UK PURCHASES ONLY. FAQ young-fathers.com/comp/faq Young Fathers - Alloysious Massaquoi, Kayus Bankole and G. Hastings - announce details of their brand new album Heavy Heavy. Set for release on February 3rd 2023 via Ninja Tune, it’s the group’s fourth album and their first since 2018’s album Cocoa Sugar. The 10-track project signals a renewed back-to-basics approach, just the three of them in their basement studio, some equipment and microphones: everything always plugged in, everything always in reach. Alongside the announcement ‘Heavy Heavy’, Young Fathers will make their much anticipated return to stages across the UK and Europe beginning February 2023 - known for their electrifying performances, their shows are a blur of ritualistic frenzy, marking them as one of the most must-see acts operating today. The tour will include shows at the Roundhouse in London, Elysee Montmartre in Paris, Paradiso in Amsterdam, O2 Academy in Leeds and Glasgow, Olympia in Dublin, Astra in Berlin, Albert Hall in Manchester, Trix in Antwerp, Mojo Club in Hamburg and more (full dates below) To mark news of the album and the tour, Young Fathers today release a brand new single, “I Saw”. It’s the second track to be released from the album (following standalone single “Geronimo” in July) and brims with everything fans have come to love from a group known for their multi-genre versatility - kinetic rhythms, controlled chaos and unbridled soul. Accompanied by a video created by 23 year old Austrian-Nigerian artist and filmmaker David Uzochukwu, the track demonstrates the ambitious ideas that lay at the heart of this highly-anticipated record. Speaking about the title, the band write that Heavy Heavy could be a mood, or it could describe the smoothed granite of bass that supports the sound… or it could be a nod to the natural progression of boys to grown men and the inevitable toll of living, a joyous burden, relationships, family, the natural momentum of a group that has been around long enough to witness massive changes. “You let the demons out and deal with it,” reckons Kayus of the album. “Make sense of it after.” For Young Fathers, there’s no dress code required. Dancing, not moshing. Hips jerking, feet slipping, brain firing in Catherine Wheel sparks of joy and empathy. Underground but never dark. Still young, after some years, even as the heavy, heavy weight of the world seems to grow day by day.