Part of the fun of listening to Lana Del Rey’s ethereal lullabies is the sly sense of humor that brings them back down to earth. Tucked inside her dreamscapes about Hollywood and the Hamptons are reminders—and celebrations—of just how empty these places can be. Here, on her sixth album, she fixes her gaze on another place primed for exploration: the art world. Winking and vivid, *Norman F\*\*\*\*\*g Rockwell!* is a conceptual riff on the rules that govern integrity and authenticity from an artist who has made a career out of breaking them. In a 2018 interview with Apple Music\'s Zane Lowe, Del Rey said working with songwriter Jack Antonoff (who produced the album along with Rick Nowels and Andrew Watt) put her in a lighter mood: “He was so *funny*,” she said. Their partnership—as seen on the title track, a study of inflated egos—allowed her to take her subjects less seriously. \"It\'s about this guy who is such a genius artist, but he thinks he’s the shit and he knows it,” she said. \"So often I end up with these creative types. They just go on and on about themselves and I\'m like, \'Yeah, yeah.\' But there’s merit to it also—they are so good.” This paradox becomes a theme on *Rockwell*, a canvas upon which she paints with sincerity and satire and challenges you to spot the difference. (On “The Next Best American Record,” she sings, “We were so obsessed with writing the next best American record/’Cause we were just that good/It was just that good.”) Whether she’s wistfully nostalgic or jaded and detached is up for interpretation—really, everything is. The album’s finale, “hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have - but I have it,” is packaged like a confessional—first-person, reflective, sung over simple piano chords—but it’s also flamboyantly cinematic, interweaving references to Sylvia Plath and Slim Aarons with anecdotes from Del Rey\'s own life to make us question, again, what\'s real. When she repeats the phrase “a woman like me,” it feels like a taunt; she’s spent the last decade mixing personas—outcast and pop idol, debutante and witch, pinup girl and poet, sinner and saint—ostensibly in an effort to render them all moot. Here, she suggests something even bolder: that the only thing more dangerous than a complicated woman is one who refuses to give up.
On April 14, 2018, Beyoncé Knowles-Carter etched her name even deeper into the history books with a transcendent, career-spanning Coachella performance. The show was the first of two headlining sets—the second taking place the following weekend—with Bey making it a point to call out the fact that she was the festival\'s first-ever Black female headliner. The whole thing, in fact, was a year behind schedule: Beyoncé was originally slated to headline in 2017 in the wake of her ultra-personal *Lemonade*, but postponed after announcing she was pregnant. So in 2018, some 10 months after delivering Sir and Rumi, Beyoncé got up on one of the biggest stages in the world, in front of millions collectively freaking out during the livestream, and delivered one of the most memorable live performances in the history of that festival or any other. Her set—presented in full on *HOMECOMING: THE LIVE ALBUM*—which included highlights from the whole of her catalog dating back to her Destiny’s Child days, spoke directly to her moment as historymaker, synthesizing generations (and regions) of Black musicality through the filter of an HBCU-style marching band (members of DrumLine Live, performing here as Queen Bey’s “The Bzzzz”). In the American college tradition, she called the performance “Homecoming,” packing it over the course of nearly 40 songs with the sounds of brass-heavy New Orleans second-line bands (“Single Ladies \[Put a Ring on It\]”); reggaetón (“Mi Gente”); bounce music (“Formation”); Washington, DC’s go-go (“Love On Top”); her native Houston’s chopped and screwed music (“I Been On”); dancehall reggae (“Baby Boy”); and the Dirty South hip-hop she grew up on (“Crazy In Love,” “Diva”). For good measure, there\'s also a duet with her husband (“Deja Vu”), a Destiny\'s Child reunion (“Say My Name,” “Soldier”), and as an added bonus at the end of the album, a backyard-barbecue-ready studio rendition of Maze featuring Frankie Beverly’s “Before I Let Go” that also interpolates Cameo’s “Candy.” You can hear the voice of Malcolm X on “Don\'t Hurt Yourself,” and there\'s an a cappella version of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” known colloquially as the “Black National Anthem”—beyond blockbuster production values and expert musicianship, it remains an earnest tribute to her experience as a young Black woman working to contribute to the rich musical legacy that inspires her. And according to her mother, this was the plan from the beginning: In an Instagram post the week of the first Coachella performance, Tina Knowles wrote that her daughter told her, “I have worked very hard to get to the point where I have a true voice. And at this point in my life and my career I have a responsibility to do what\'s best for the world and not what is most popular.” But the two are far from mutually exclusive, and that performance—and this vital document of it—is proof.
Maggie Rogers spent the first three years of her career retracing one chance encounter: In 2016, a video of her singing a song that moved Pharrell to tears during a master class at NYU went viral, earning her a record deal, magazine features, and headlining tours (watch it and you’ll understand). But the Maryland native, then 22, was still figuring out who she was, and this sudden flood of fame was a lot to bear. Determined to take control of her own narrative, she assembled a debut album powerful enough to shift the conversation. Measured, subtle, and wise beyond her years, it feels like the introduction she always wanted to make. Like her 2017 EP, *Now That the Light Is Fading*, *Heard It In A Past Life* is a thoughtfully sewn patchwork of anthemic synth-pop, brooding acoustic folk, and soft-lit electronica, the latter of which was inspired by a year spent dancing through Berlin’s nightclub scene. But here, her vision feels both more daring and more polished. On “Retrograde,” long stretches of propulsive synths are punctuated by high-pitched *hah-hah-hah*s; “Say It” blends R&B with light, breathy indie-pop; and “The Knife” could be a sultry come-on or a daring confession. On the Greg Kurstin-produced “Light On,” Rogers seems to make peace with her surreal story. “And I am findin’ out/There’s just no other way/And I’m still dancin’ at the end of the day,” she sings, a bittersweet hat-tip to the moment that got her here. And to her fans, a promise: “If you leave the light on/Then I’ll leave the light on.”
“Destruction” isn’t usually the word most people associate with Irish singer-songwriter Hozier’s music. So it’s surprising when, taking stock of his second album, Andrew Hozier-Byrne tells Apple Music, “There was either language that seemed to focus upon drowning or the burning of things, or the ending of things.” Fear not: This is hardly a gloom-and-doom record, despite the subject matter occasionally veering toward end times. Hozier’s cynicism, when it’s present at all, can’t help but be subtle, tongue-in-cheek, maybe even a little sweet—and, more often than not, couched in endlessly hummable melodies and bluesy, folky guitar lines. “It\'s held at a distance,” he says, “but so too is hopefulness.” Hozier puts that balance into perspective while talking us through each of the album’s songs. **\"Nina Cried Power\" (feat. Mavis Staples)** \"The artists I\'m singing about \[Nina Simone, James Brown, Joni Mitchell, Woody Guthrie\] managed to define the zeitgeist in which they lived by just writing about the times and how they experienced the world, and then, as a result, provided us with a document and a legacy that lives forever. The intention was to be a thank-you note to that—and something that was decidedly uncynical. I wanted to write something that spoke to that spirit of action in music. Mavis Staples is somebody who embodies that in a very real way.\" **\"Almost (Sweet Music)\"** \"I think the song is kind of summed up in that line, \'I\'m almost me again, she\'s almost you.\' Then the chorus hook is obviously about hearing sweet music. It\'s just kind of fun to do a self-deprecating joke in the title, because it references so many sweet songs and wonderful classics. It seemed appropriate to refer to this song as something that was *almost* sweet music.\" **“Movement”** “I was really enjoying stuff like LCD Soundsystem, and the idea of dancing as a human form of expression—obviously from a distance; you\'d be very hard-pressed to find me on a dance floor. Rather than write a dance song, I wanted to write a song about dancing, and on the surface about somebody watching their lover dancing. Then just inquiring into movement and playing around with the language of comparing them to something enormous. There\'s references to Jonah and the whale—a person inside of a much larger thing that is moving.” **\"No Plan\"** “I came across this lecture about the end of the universe through heat death—where all the stars just burn out. As things move away from each other, they just get colder and colder, to the point where there will be no light or heat left. This song is a squeeze of the hand, saying, ‘Whatever your neuroses and your problems are, don\'t even worry about it. There will be darkness again.\'” **“Nobody”** \"This is about the limitations of love between flawed people. It\'s just taking into account how flawed this person is and saying, \'Look, it\'s the best we have at the moment.\' It\'s one of the closest things to a road song that I\'ve written.\" **\"To Noise Making (Sing)\"** \"It\'s just trying to take stock of what \[the act of\] singing about anything can give us. It\'s best summed up in the line \'You don\'t have to sing it right/But who could call you wrong/To put your emptiness to melody/Your awful heart to song.\' At the end of the day, if you find some comfort in it, it\'s still a worthwhile act. There\'s a poem by Seamus Heaney called \'At the Wellhead.\' He just writes about this singer, basically. It\'s just a very lovely poem, which was a big part of me wanting to write that song.\" **\"As It Was\"** \"This nods back to ‘Nobody\' as a road song. It\'s about reassuring somebody upon your returning, comparing all the wonderful things you\'ve experienced, and being able to only compare how marvelous it was to this person you\'re talking to. There\'s a sense of foreboding to it as well.\" **“Shrike”** \"I was kind of leaning into some Irish folk influences. I probably write more folk songs than I\'ll ever end up releasing. I was fascinated by the imagery of this bird—the shrike—and the relationship it has with the thornbush, which it lives in and relies upon for everything.\" **“Talk\"** \"The singer in the song would be a bit of an unreliable narrator. The verse is expressing in very lofty terms the idea of a perfect true love. Then in the chorus, the narrator admits that it\'s all just smoke and mirrors to distract somebody from their true intentions, which are not exactly aboveboard. It\'s playing around with a mythical sort of love, but at the end of the day it\'s just talk.\" **\"Be\"** \"This was me sort of leaning into Leonard Cohen imagery. It looks at loving somebody as an increasingly radical act, or looking at love as a transgressive act.\" **\"Dinner & Diatribes”** \"It\'s somebody saying, \'I\'m bored—let\'s get the f\*\*k out of here.\' Being at a very stuffy social obligation, sort of high-society types, and I suppose being in the heart of the cultural wasteland and wanting to go home and do something more interesting.\" **\"Would That I”** \"It’s about somebody characterizing all of their past romances, people that they cared for, as trees that they took shelter under, and describing a would-be jealous lover as basically the fire that ultimately burns that wood: \'In awe there I stood as you licked off the grain/Though I\'ve handled the wood, I still worship the flame.\' But there\'s a weirdly elaborate pun in it: \'Would that I\' is like a way of saying \'I wish that I did.\' It\'s a pun on all the wood that I loved.\" **“Sunlight\"** “If \'No Plan\' is cosmically pessimistic—there will be darkness again, all things will die out and go cold—I think ‘Sunlight\' is best described as \'You Are My Sunshine.’ I couldn\'t really have one without the other.\" **\"Wasteland, Baby!\"** \"It\'s a love song for the end of the world. Even though a lot of the songs here tend to play with the imagery of terrible things happening—like, say, the sea levels rising—in a metaphorical kind of way, I wanted to write something that dealt with those anxieties in a literal way—then putting it into a whistleable, catchy tune, to the point where it\'s absurd, nearly. If the album opened with a song about what can be achieved when people stand firm by their values, I think \'Wasteland, Baby!\' is just imagining things if all efforts fail and all things come to naught, you know?\"
Singer-songwriter Natalie Mering’s fourth album as Weyes Blood conjures the feeling of a beautiful object on a shelf just out of reach: You want to touch it, but you can’t, and so you do the next best thing—you dream about it, ache for it, and then you ache some more. Grand, melodramatic, but keenly self-aware, the music here pushes Mering’s \'70s-style chamber pop to its cinematic brink, suffusing stories of everything from fumbled romance (the McCartney-esque “Everyday”) to environmental apocalypse (“Wild Time”) with a dreamy, foggy almost-thereness both gorgeous and profoundly unsettling. A self-described “nostalgic futurist,” Mering doesn’t recreate the past so much as demonstrate how the past is more or less a fiction to begin with, a story we love hearing no matter how sad its unreachability makes us. Hence the album’s centerpiece, “Movies,” which wonders—gorgeously, almost religiously—why life feels so messy by comparison. As to the thematic undercurrent of apocalypse, well, if extinction is as close as science says it is, we might as well have something pretty to play us out.
The phantom zone, the parallax, the upside down—there is a rich cultural history of exploring in-between places. Through her latest, Titanic Rising, Weyes Blood (a.k.a. Natalie Mering) has, too, designed her own universe to soulfully navigate life’s mysteries. Maneuvering through a space-time continuum, she intriguingly plays the role of melodic, sometimes melancholic, anthropologist. Tellingly, Mering classifies Titanic Rising as the Kinks meet WWII or Bob Seger meets Enya. The latter captures the album’s willful expansiveness (“You can tell there’s not a guy pulling the strings in Enya’s studio,” she notes, admiringly). The former relays her imperative to connect with listeners. “The clarity of Bob Seger is unmistakable. I’m a big fan of conversational songwriting,” she adds. “I just try to do that in a way that uses abstract imagery as well.” “An album is like a Rubik’s Cube,” she says. “Sometimes you get all the dimensions—the lyrics, the melody, the production—to line up. I try to be futuristic and ancient at once, which is a difficult alchemy. It’s taken a lot of different tries to get it right.” As concept-album as it may sound, it’s also a devoted exercise in realism, albeit occasionally magical. Here, the throwback-cinema grandeur of “A Lot’s Gonna Change” gracefully coexists with the otherworldly title track, an ominous instrumental. Titanic Rising, written and recorded during the first half of 2018, is the culmination of three albums and years of touring: stronger chops and ballsier decisions. It’s an achievement in transcendent vocals and levitating arrangements—one she could reach only by flying under the radar for so many years. “I used to want to belong,” says the L.A. based musician. “I realized I had to forge my own path. Nobody was going to do that for me. That was liberating. I became a Joan of Arc solo musician.” The Weyes Blood frontwoman grew up singing in gospel and madrigal choirs. “Classical and Renaissance music really influenced me,” says Mering, who first picked up a guitar at age 8. (Listen closely to Titanic Rising, and you’ll also hear the jazz of Hoagy Carmichael mingle with the artful mysticism of Alejandro Jodorowsky and the monomyth of scholar Joseph Campbell.) “Something to Believe,” a confessional that makes judicious use of the slide guitar, touches on that cosmological upbringing. “Belief is something all humans need. Shared myths are part of our psychology and survival,” she says. “Now we have a weird mishmash of capitalism and movies and science. There have been moments where I felt very existential and lost.” As a kid, she filled that void with Titanic. (Yes, the movie.) “It was engineered for little girls and had its own mythology,” she explains. Mering also noticed that the blockbuster romance actually offered a story about loss born of man’s hubris. “It’s so symbolic that The Titanic would crash into an iceberg, and now that iceberg is melting, sinking civilization.” Today, this hubris also extends to the relentless adoption of technology, at the expense of both happiness and attention spans. The track “Movies” marks another Titanic-related epiphany, “that movies had been brainwashing people and their ideas about romantic love.” To that end, Mering has become an expert at deconstructing intimacy. Sweeping and string-laden, “Andromeda” seems engineered to fibrillate hearts. “It’s about losing your interest in trying to be in love,” she says. “Everybody is their own galaxy, their own separate entity. There is a feeling of needing to be saved, and that’s a lot to ask of people.” Its companion track, “Everyday,” “is about the chaos of modern dating,” she says, “the idea of sailing off onto your ships to nowhere to deal with all your baggage.” But Weyes Blood isn’t one to stew. Her observations play out in an ethereal saunter: far more meditative than cynical. “I experience reality on a slower, more hypnotic level,” she says. “I’m a more contemplative kind of writer.” To Mering, listening and thinking are concurrent experiences. “There are complicated influences mixed in with more relatable nostalgic melodies,” she says. “In my mind my music feels so big, a true production. I’m not a huge, popular artist, but I feel like one when I’m in the studio. But it’s never taking away from the music. I’m just making a bigger space for myself.”
Beginning with the haunting alt-pop smash “Ocean Eyes” in 2016, Billie Eilish made it clear she was a new kind of pop star—an overtly awkward introvert who favors chilling melodies, moody beats, creepy videos, and a teasing crudeness à la Tyler, The Creator. Now 17, the Los Angeles native—who was homeschooled along with her brother and co-writer, Finneas O’Connell—presents her much-anticipated debut album, a melancholy investigation of all the dark and mysterious spaces that linger in the back of our minds. Sinister dance beats unfold into chattering dialogue from *The Office* on “my strange addiction,” and whispering vocals are laid over deliberately blown-out bass on “xanny.” “There are a lot of firsts,” says FINNEAS. “Not firsts like ‘Here’s the first song we made with this kind of beat,’ but firsts like Billie saying, ‘I feel in love for the first time.’ You have a million chances to make an album you\'re proud of, but to write the song about falling in love for the first time? You only get one shot at that.” Billie, who is both beleaguered and fascinated by night terrors and sleep paralysis, has a complicated relationship with her subconscious. “I’m the monster under the bed, I’m my own worst enemy,” she told Beats 1 host Zane Lowe during an interview in Paris. “It’s not that the whole album is a bad dream, it’s just… surreal.” With an endearingly off-kilter mix of teen angst and experimentalism, Billie Eilish is really the perfect star for 2019—and here is where her and FINNEAS\' heads are at as they prepare for the next phase of her plan for pop domination. “This is my child,” she says, “and you get to hold it while it throws up on you.” **Figuring out her dreams:** **Billie:** “Every song on the album is something that happens when you’re asleep—sleep paralysis, night terrors, nightmares, lucid dreams. All things that don\'t have an explanation. Absolutely nobody knows. I\'ve always had really bad night terrors and sleep paralysis, and all my dreams are lucid, so I can control them—I know that I\'m dreaming when I\'m dreaming. Sometimes the thing from my dream happens the next day and it\'s so weird. The album isn’t me saying, \'I dreamed that\'—it’s the feeling.” **Getting out of her own head:** **Billie:** “There\'s a lot of lying on purpose. And it\'s not like how rappers lie in their music because they think it sounds dope. It\'s more like making a character out of yourself. I wrote the song \'8\' from the perspective of somebody who I hurt. When people hear that song, they\'re like, \'Oh, poor baby Billie, she\'s so hurt.\' But really I was just a dickhead for a minute and the only way I could deal with it was to stop and put myself in that person\'s place.” **Being a teen nihilist role model:** **Billie:** “I love meeting these kids, they just don\'t give a fuck. And they say they don\'t give a fuck *because of me*, which is a feeling I can\'t even describe. But it\'s not like they don\'t give a fuck about people or love or taking care of yourself. It\'s that you don\'t have to fit into anything, because we all die, eventually. No one\'s going to remember you one day—it could be hundreds of years or it could be one year, it doesn\'t matter—but anything you do, and anything anyone does to you, won\'t matter one day. So it\'s like, why the fuck try to be something you\'re not?” **Embracing sadness:** **Billie:** “Depression has sort of controlled everything in my life. My whole life I’ve always been a melancholy person. That’s my default.” FINNEAS: “There are moments of profound joy, and Billie and I share a lot of them, but when our motor’s off, it’s like we’re rolling downhill. But I’m so proud that we haven’t shied away from songs about self-loathing, insecurity, and frustration. Because we feel that way, for sure. When you’ve supplied empathy for people, I think you’ve achieved something in music.” **Staying present:** **Billie:** “I have to just sit back and actually look at what\'s going on. Our show in Stockholm was one of the most peak life experiences we\'ve had. I stood onstage and just looked at the crowd—they were just screaming and they didn’t stop—and told them, \'I used to sit in my living room and cry because I wanted to do this.\' I never thought in a thousand years this shit would happen. We’ve really been choking up at every show.” FINNEAS: “Every show feels like the final show. They feel like a farewell tour. And in a weird way it kind of is, because, although it\'s the birth of the album, it’s the end of the episode.”
Look past its futurist textures and careful obfuscations, and there’s something deeply human about FKA twigs’ 21st-century R&B. On her second full-length, the 31-year-old British singer-songwriter connects our current climate to that of Mary Magdalene, a healer whose close personal relationship with Christ brought her scorn from those who would ultimately write her story: men. “I\'m of a generation that was brought up without options in love,” she tells Apple Music. “I was told that as a woman, I should be looked after. It\'s not whether I choose somebody, but whether somebody chooses me.” Written and produced by twigs, with major contributions from Nicolas Jaar, *MAGDALENE* is a feminist meditation on the ways in which we relate to one another and ourselves—emotionally, sexually, universally—set to sounds that are at once modern and ancient. “Now it’s like, ‘Can you stand up in my holy terrain?’” she says, referencing the titular lyric from her mid-album collaboration with Future. “‘How are we going to be equals in this? Spiritually, am I growing? Do you make me want to be a better person?’ I’m definitely still figuring it out.” Here, she walks us through the album track by track. **thousand eyes** “All the songs I write are autobiographical. Anyone that\'s been in a relationship for a long time, you\'re meshed together. But unmeshing is painful, because you have the same friends or your families know each other. No matter who you are, the idea of leaving is not only a heart trauma, but it\'s also a social trauma, because all of a sudden, you don\'t all go to that pub that you went to together. The line \[\'If I walk out the door/A thousand eyes\'\] is a reference to that. At the time, I was listening to a lot of Gregorian music. I’d started really getting into medieval chords before that, and I\'d found some musicians that play medieval music and done a couple sessions with them. Even on \[2014\'s\] *LP1*, I had ‘Closer,’ which is essentially a hymn. I spent a lot of time in choir as a child and I went to Sunday school, so it’s part of who I am at this stage.” **home with you** “I find things like that interesting in the studio, just to play around and bring together two completely different genres—like Elton John chords and a hip-hop riff. That’s what ‘home with you’ was for me: It’s a ballad and it\'s sad, but then it\'s a bop as well, even though it doesn\'t quite ever give you what you need. It’s about feeling pulled in all directions: as a daughter, or as a friend, or as a girlfriend, or as a lover. Everyone wanting a piece of you, but not expressing it properly, so you feel like you\'re not meeting the mark.” **sad day** “It’s like, ‘Will you take another chance with me? Can we escape the mundane? Can we escape the cyclical motion of life and be in love together and try something that\'s dangerous and exhilarating? Yeah, I know I’ve made you sad before, but will you give me another chance?\' I wrote this song with benny blanco and Koreless. I love to set myself challenges, and it was really exciting to me, the challenge of retaining my sound while working with a really broad group of people. I was lucky working with Benny, in the fact that he creates an environment where, as an artist, you feel really comfortable to be yourself. To me, that\'s almost the old-school definition of a producer: They don\'t have to be all up in your grill, telling you what to do. They just need to lay a really beautiful, fertile soil, so that you can grow to be the best you in the moment.” **holy terrain** “I’m saying that I want to find a man that can stand up next to me, in all of my brilliance, and not feel intimidated. To me, Future’s saying, ‘Hey, I fucked up. I filled you with poison. I’ve done things to make you jealous. Can you heal me? Can you tell me how to be a better man? I need the guidance, of a woman, to show me how to do that.’ I don\'t think that there are many rappers that can go there, and just put their cards on the table like that. I didn\'t know 100%, once I met Future, that it would be right. But we spoke on the phone and I played him the album and I told him what it was about: ‘It’s a very female-positive, femme-positive record.’ And he was just like, ‘Yeah. Say no more. I\'ve got this.’ And he did. He crushed it. To have somebody who\'s got patriarchal energy come through and say that, wanting to stand up and be there for a woman, wanting to have a woman that\'s an equal—that\'s real.” **mary magdalene** “Let’s just imagine for one second: Say Jesus and Mary Magdalene are really close, they\'re together all the time. She\'s his right-hand woman, she’s his confidante, she\'s healing people with him and a mystic in her own right. So, at that point, any man and woman that are spending that much time together, they\'re likely to be what? Lovers. Okay, cool. So, if Mary had Jesus\' children, that basically debunks the whole of history. Now, I\'m not saying that happened. What I\'m saying is that the idea of people thinking that might happen is potentially really dangerous. It’s easier to call her a whore, because as soon as you call a woman a whore, it devalues her. I see her as Jesus Christ\'s equal. She’s a male projection and, I think, the beginning of the patriarchy taking control of the narrative of women. Any woman that\'s done anything can be subject to that; I’ve been subject to that. It felt like an apt time to be talking about it.” **fallen alien** “When you\'re with someone, and they\'re sleeping, and you look at them, and you just think, \'No.\' For me, it’s that line, \[\'When the lights are on, I know you/When you fall asleep, I’ll kick you down/By the way you fell, I know you/Now you’re on your knees\'\]. You\'re just so sick of somebody\'s bullshit, you\'re just taking it all day, and then you\'re in bed next to them, and you\'re just like, ‘I can\'t take this anymore.’” **mirrored heart** “People always say, ‘Whoever you\'re with, they should be a reflection of yourself.’ So, if you\'re looking at someone and you think, ‘You\'re a shitbag,’ then you have to think about why it was that person, at that time, and what\'s connecting you both. What is the reflection? For others that have found a love that is a true reflection of themselves, they just remind me that I don\'t have that, a mirrored heart.” **daybed** “Have you ever forgotten how to spell a really simple word? To me, depression\'s a bit like that: Everything\'s quite abstract, and even slightly dizzy, but not in a happy way. It\'s like a very slow circus. Suddenly the fruit flies seem friendly, everything in the room just starts having a different meaning and you even have a different relationship with the way the sofa cushions smell. \[Masturbation\] is something to raise your endorphins, isn\'t it? It’s either that or try and go to the gym, or try and eat something good. You almost can\'t put it into words, but we\'ve all been there. I sing, \'Active are my fingers/Faux, my cunnilingus\': You\'re imagining someone going down on you, but they\'re actually not. You open your eyes, and you\'re just there, still on your sofa, still watching daytime TV.” **cellophane** “It\'s just raw, isn\'t it? It didn\'t need a thing. The vocal take that\'s on the record is the demo take. I had a Lyft arrive outside the studio and I’d just started playing the piano chords. I was like, ‘Hey, can you just give me like 20, 25 minutes?’ And I recorded it as is. I remember feeling like I wanted to cry, but I just didn\'t feel like it was that suitable to cry at a studio session. I often want everything to be really intricate and gilded, and I want to chip away at everything, and sculpt it, and mold it, and add layers. The thing I\'ve learned on *MAGDALENE* is that you don\'t need to do that all the time, and just because you can do something, it doesn\'t mean you should. That\'s been a real growing experience for me—as a musician, as a producer, as a singer, even as a dancer. Something in its most simple form is beautiful.”
“Honesty, heartbreak, love, lust, elation: Those concepts are in a lot of music that I love, but it\'s just never been something I\'ve attempted on my own records,” DJ-turned-superproducer Mark Ronson tells Apple Music about the genesis of his fifth album. “When I dip into other people\'s worlds—whether it\'s Queens of the Stone Age or Gaga, whoever—that\'s when I get to work on deep shit, but my own records should just be either record collector-y or for the dance floor.” But on the heels of a breakup, Ronson rallied a typically star-studded cast of collaborators, including Miley Cyrus, Lykke Li, and Alicia Keys, for sessions in New York and Los Angeles that plumbed personal topics previous albums would have danced right past. “It was the first time I couldn\'t really hide behind a concept,” he says. “It was like, \'No, no, you have to put yourself into the music this time.\'” Here Ronson puts himself into telling the stories behind each track on *Late Night Feelings*. **“Late Night Prelude”** “Just for my own sanity, when I start off a record, it has to be a little bit of a statement—something that\'s a little grand and foreshadows the rest of the record. David Campbell, the string arranger, came up with this beautiful, slightly Barry White Love Unlimited Orchestra-inspired arrangement—a little slowed down and psychedelic. Then that kicks off right into...” **“Late Night Feelings” (feat. Lykke Li)** “This was the first song that we came up with that really felt like it was pointing the way for the record. I started working with this writer named Ilsey Juber, who I met through Diplo. She came up with the first verse, this melodic idea. Then, when we were thinking who should sing this, she was like, \'Well, Lykke would be perfect.\' She was just wrapping up Lykke\'s album *So Sad So Sexy*. Actually, Lykke came up with that lyric; I loved it for the name of the album because, instead of calling it *Club Heartbreak* or some of the other things we were throwing around, late-night feelings can be anything really that keeps you up at night. It could be heartbreak, it could be lust, it could be love, it could be Brexit, it could be whatever.” **“Find U Again” (feat. Camila Cabello)** “Two years ago, when I was working with Kevin Parker and we were doing some DJ dates, we were messing around with some ideas, and he had this melodic idea and these chords. When we really didn\'t get to finish our stuff, because he was going back to Perth and starting the Tame Impala record, I asked him, \'Can I finish that song and use it for my record?\' It\'s such a great, strong idea that I\'m not gonna waste it until I really have the perfect person whose voice is just gonna cut through, and it\'s gonna be the right person to write the lyrics—Camila Cabello. She\'s such a huge pop star, I sometimes just think like, \'Oh, those people aren\'t gonna want to fuck with me.\' Then I sent her the track and she loved it. She came in and she wrote it. I was just really in awe of how serious she takes the stuff, each take. A lot of pop music, people sing the chorus once and they just fly it over three times.” **“Pieces of Us”** “King Princess, she\'s on \[Ronson\'s label Zelig\] and she pretty much does everything. I jump in and give my two cents every now and then, but she\'s super self-contained. She has such a special thing that she does: music that\'s slightly moody, dreamy, ethereal, not always super aggressive with the drums and the tempo. I wanted to preserve that; it\'s probably the longest I\'ve ever waited to bring in the drum and bass arrangement on a song. She kept bringing me songs \'cause she\'s very smart and prolific—she can write a good song in like seven minutes. I\'d have to keep being like an annoying dad: \'It\'s not good enough, go back, bring me something else.\' Everything on this record needed to tug at the heartstrings just a little bit, you know?” **“Knock Knock Knock”/“Don\'t Leave Me Lonely”/“When U Went Away”** “These are all YEBBA tunes. In the next two years when everyone discovers her stuff, it\'s gonna be insane. I loved the idea of giving YEBBA her own suite on the album: \'Don\'t Leave Me Lonely,\' which is maybe the emotional core of the record, sandwiched between these two interludes. And it sort of tells a story: \'Knock Knock Knock\' is the hookup song, a little flirty. Then \'Don\'t Leave Me Lonely\' is this \'Don\'t leave me lonely tonight/\'Cause I can\'t forget you\'—it\'s almost like a Whitney/Tina Turner vibe. And then the third part, \'When You Went Away,\' is kinda despondent-but-I\'m-gonna-be-all-right. It\'s the entire relationship process: the hookup, the loneliness, and the healing in this three-song run.” **“Truth”** “Dodgr\'s part was this really great rap, but it was unconventional where it fell on the beat. Sometimes my super pop brain was like, \'Well, I don\'t know. Do we need more stuff? What\'s the verse?\' Diana Gordon just came in and she was like, \'You guys are crazy. This sounds like a fucking movement. Don\'t worry about what\'s what, it just feels good.\' She came up with the melody for part of the chorus, which was great. And then Alicia Keys helped us finish it.” **“Nothing Breaks Like a Heart” (feat. Miley Cyrus)** “Miley was somebody I\'ve wanted to work with for ages. And for maybe four years, I\'d been sending ideas. Occasionally I would hear back, occasionally not. Ilsey had this little seed of this idea. I was like, \'The perfect person for this would really be Miley. I mean, she kind of writes me back 50 percent of the time, let\'s just try one Hail Mary.\' Miley came in and wrote the rest of the song.” **“True Blue” (feat. Angel Olsen)** “Angel Olsen: Her last album, I probably played it to death. I actually heard it through the wall at this Pilates class that I went to, and I had to go next door and ask this dance instructor what that song was. Angel sent me this little voicemail, this melody. It was incredible. She was singing at an organ, I think in her house, and it sounded like it could\'ve been a little aria or some kind of mermaid in the \'30s. I just remember thinking, \'Goddamn, if she lets me put a drum beat behind this, this is gonna be like ABBA on quaaludes or something.\' So she came in the studio and the first day I think she was probably looking at me like, \'Who is this guy, this pop dude, some pretender?\' It kinda is a little bit like ABBA produced by Nick Lowe on quaaludes.” **“Why Hide”** “This was the last thing that we got on the record. Diana Gordon has been part of this whole creative process and is this kind of lovely person. Her voice has just got this wonderful, ethereal, bewitching thing to it—so broken and powerful at the same time. It\'s sort of Aaliyah, Massive Attack, some kind of thing in between those two, sort of downtempo.” **“2 AM”** “This is sort of the counterpoint to \'Late Night Feelings,\' another song with Lykke that we wrote when we were in \[Rick Rubin\'s Los Angeles studio\] Shangri-La. \'I\'m not your lover but we\'re making love/Why are you only calling me at 2 a.m.?\' I don\'t usually put ballads on my records—I\'m a DJ, who wants to hear a fucking ballad? But I wanna hear ballads on records. I never wanna hear if it\'s oppressively fun from start to end. It was good and felt like it belonged.” **“Spinning”** “There\'s certainly a lot of uptempo songs and stuff you can dance to, but heartbreak is really the prevailing theme, and I just thought it would be nice to have something that felt a tiny bit like the light at the end of the tunnel. Lykke sings on it—the end—and she brings back the refrain from the opening song. YEBBA heard it and she was kinda moved, and she was like, \'You gotta let me sing something on this,\' so she does these beautiful choir-type harmonies like she did for Chance the Rapper. It\'s really nice that this last record goes out with Ilsey, Lykke, and YEBBA on it \'cause they\'re all such a big part of the record.”
“The whole inspiration for this record was completely and utterly based on going out in Lisbon and trying to make friends,” Madonna tells Apple Music\'s Julie Adenuga. “Portugal is such a melting pot for so many different cultures—there\'s a lot of people from Brazil, Angola, Spain. You can stand out on a balcony and hear some incredible voice carrying through the starlit sky, and it\'s just so magical you can\'t help but be inspired by it.” Fourteen albums in, it may be standard practice for Madonna to immerse herself in new cultures as a way of sparking artistic ideas, but her recent move to Lisbon opened her to incorporating not just different sounds but different languages. As evidence, look no further than “Medellin,” one of two collaborations on the album with Colombian pop star Maluma. “I heard from his manager that he wanted to collaborate with me,” she said. “\[My producer and I\] started listening to his music more closely, thinking, \'Okay, how can we do something slightly different but that still has a connection to the music that he makes?’” This adventurous strategy—as much a cultural bridge as a musical technique—is what makes the sprawling *Madame X* so bold and timely. By fusing some of pop’s trendiest sounds (deep house, disco, and dancehall are a few) with characteristically eccentric imagery and serious subject matter (gun control, narcissism, ageism, and political noise), she doesn’t just acknowledge the current moment, she confronts it. “This is your wake-up call,” she sings on “God Control,” which morphs from spiritual hymn into ironic disco-funk at the sound of disquieting gunshots. “We don’t have to fall/A new democracy.” She seems to find hope in her own perseverance: “Died a thousand times/Managed to survive,” she sings on “I Rise.” “I rise up above it all.”
British music is fortunate to have Charlotte Aitchison. A restless collaborator and denier of pop borders with an unteachable ear for a hook, she’s one of the UK’s proudest exports. Her third studio LP serves as a blueprint for how a modern pop album should sound. Audacious but introspective, it’s straining with potential hits and subtler moments fans will hold close. And then there’s the cast list. If she tires of this pop star business, a sterling career in A&R probably awaits. She talked through some of the album’s standout moments on her Beats 1 show The Candy Shop. **“Next Level Charli”** “I wrote this track for the Angels—my fans. This is the Angel anthem. Everything in this song is about things that I imagine my fans doing: driving to a party, getting ready for a party, playing their music in their Prius, whatever it is. This song is for you guys. Thank you for loving me. Thank you for supporting me.” **“Gone” (with Christine and the Queens)** “This is the bop. The song of the summer, if I don’t say so myself. Me, Christine, dancing on a car, rain: What more do you want? We literally gave you everything.” **“Cross You Out” (feat. Sky Ferreira)** “I’m so happy that we got to make this song together. This was one of the first songs that kind of came to reality for this album. I sent this over to Sky, she felt it and came into this studio in LA with \[co-writer\] Linus Wiklund. She sounds so amazing and I’m so happy because Sky and I have known each other for quite a few years now. We kind of came up together in many ways, and we’ve shared a lot of the same producers. We’ve been on the same magazine covers together, and you know, I feel like we were on Myspace at the same time! I think her voice is really important and what she does is brilliant.” **“2099” (feat. Troye Sivan)** “My favorite dreamboat, my dream boy: Troye Sivan. I’m just in love with him. I just think he’s so brilliant. After we made \[the 2018 single\] ‘1999’, I kind of knew he wanted to get a little bit weirder than we got, as I’d heard him mention that he was into \[Charli’s 2017 mixtape\] *Pop 2*. So after ‘1999’ came out, I hit him up again and said, ‘Should we just go there? Should we just go out of space? Like, let’s do a weird moment.’ And he was like, ‘Yes, let’s do it.’” **“Click” (feat. Kim Petras & Tommy Cash)** “I’m not going to lie—and no shade to any of the other artists on the album— but I kind of think Kim’s verse might be my favorite on the whole album. I remember when I originally sent Kim this song, I did a verse and it was so bad. She sent me her demo back and her verse *killed*, and I was like, ‘Oh my god, I cannot put this song out with the verse I currently have.’ So I had to rerecord my thing, as Tommy had also sent me his and killed it, too. I was the weakest! It was bad! I love this song. It goes so hard. And Kim is still shining so bright on this song.” **“Warm” (feat. HAIM)** “This song is produced by A.G. Cook. He actually wrote a few of the melodies on this song, too. When we were making this song, we were working at \[Australian producer and DJ\] Flume’s studio in LA, and this was at the point where we thought we were still going to do a third mixtape. But then we had this song and a couple of ideas and were like, ‘Let’s just do the album. Now’s the time for the *Charli* album.’ When HAIM came to the studio house that I had rented in LA at the beginning of 2019, I had just had a lot of dental work done, so my whole mouth was super numb. I was dribbling; I couldn’t really speak. They were like, ‘What happened to you!’ It was a funny session, but the three of them came through. I’m so happy with the song.” **“White Mercedes”** “This is one of my favorite songs from the album. I guess it’s my version of a ballad.”
In some ways, Aldous Harding’s third album, *Designer*, feels lighter than her first two—particularly 2017’s stunning, stripped-back, despairing *Party*. “I felt freed up,” Harding (whose real name is Hannah) tells Apple Music. “I could feel a loosening of tension, a different way of expressing my thought processes. There was a joyful loosening in an unapologetic way. I didn’t try to fight that.” Where *Party* kept the New Zealand singer-songwriter\'s voice almost constantly exposed and bare, here there’s more going on: a greater variety of instruments (especially percussion), bigger rhythms, additional vocals that add harmonies and echoes to her chameleonic voice, which flips between breathy baritone and wispy falsetto. “I wanted to show that there are lots of ways to work with space, lots of ways you can be serious,” she says. “You don’t have to be serious to be serious. I’m not a role model, that’s just how I felt. It’s a light, unapologetic approach based on what I have and what I know and what I think I know.” Harding attributes this broader musical palette to the many places and settings in which the album was written, including on tour. “It’s an incredibly diverse record, but it somehow feels part of the same brand,” she says. “They were all written at very different times and in very different surroundings, but maybe that’s what makes it feel complete.” The bare, devastating “Heaven Is Empty” came together on a long train ride and “The Barrel” on a bike ride, while intimate album closer “Pilot” took all of ten minutes to compose. “It was stream of consciousness, and I don’t usually write like that,” she says. “Once I’d written it all down, I think I made one or two changes to the last verse, but other than that, I did not edit that stream of consciousness at all.” The piano line that anchors “Damn” is rudimentary, for good reason: “I’m terrible at piano,” she says. “But it was an experiment, too. I’m aware that it’s simple and long, and when you stretch out simple it can be boring. It may be one of the songs people skip over, but that’s what I wanted to do.” The track is, as she says, a “very honest self-portrait about the woman who, I expect, can be quite difficult to love at times. But there’s a lot of humor in it—to me, anyway.”
Aldous Harding’s third album, Designer is released on 26th April and finds the New Zealander hitting her creative stride. After the sleeper success of Party (internationally lauded and crowned Rough Trade Shop’s Album of 2017), Harding came off a 200-date tour last summer and went straight into the studio with a collection of songs written on the road. Reuniting with John Parish, producer of Party, Harding spent 15 days recording and 10 days mixing at Rockfield Studios, Monmouth and Bristol’s J&J Studio and Playpen. From the bold strokes of opening track ‘Fixture Picture’, there is an overriding sense of an artist confident in their work, with contributions from Huw Evans (H. Hawkline), Stephen Black (Sweet Baboo), drummer Gwion Llewelyn and violinist Clare Mactaggart broadening and complimenting Harding’s rich and timeless songwriting.
What happens when the reigning queen of bubblegum pop goes through a breakup? Exactly what you’d think: She turns around and creates her most romantic, wholehearted, blissed-out work yet. Written with various pop producers in LA (Captain Cuts), New York (Jack Antonoff), and Sweden, as well as on a particularly formative soul-searching trip to the Italian coast, Jepsen’s fourth album *Dedicated* is poptimism at its finest: joyous and glitzy, rhythmic and euphoric, with an extra layer of kitsch. It’s never sad—that just isn’t Jepsen—but the “Call Me Maybe” star *does* get more in her feelings; songs like “No Drug Like Me” and “Right Words Wrong Time” aren\'t about fleeing pain so much as running to it. As Jepsen puts it on the synth ballad “Too Much,” she’d do anything to get the rush of being in love, even if it means risking heartache again and again. “Party for One,” the album’s standout single, is an infectious, shriek-worthy celebration of being alone that also acknowledges just how difficult that can be: “Tried to let it go and say I’m over you/I’m not over you/But I’m trying.”
What do you do when things fall apart? If you’re Ariana Grande, you pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and head for the studio. Her hopeful fourth album, *Sweetener*—written after the deadly attack at her concert in Manchester, England—encouraged fans to stay strong and open to love (at the time, the singer was newly engaged to Pete Davidson). Shortly after the album’s release in August 2018, things fell apart again: Grande’s ex-boyfriend, rapper Mac Miller, died from an overdose in September, and she broke off her engagement a few weeks later. Again, Grande took solace from the intense, and intensely public, melodrama in songwriting, but this time things were different. *thank u, next*, mostly recorded over those tumultuous months, sees her turning inward in an effort to cope, grieve, heal, and let go. “Though I wish he were here instead/Don’t want that living in your head,” she confesses on “ghostin,” a gutting synth-and-strings ballad that hovers in your throat. “He just comes to visit me/When I’m dreaming every now and then.” Like many of the songs here, it was produced by Max Martin, who has a supernatural way of making pain and suffering sound like beams of light. The album doesn\'t arrive a minute too soon. As Grande wrestles with what she wants—distance (“NASA”) and affection (“needy”), anonymity (“fake smile\") and star power (“7 rings”), and sex without strings attached (“bloodline,” “make up”)—we learn more and more about the woman she’s becoming: complex, independent, tenacious, flawed. Surely embracing all of that is its own form of self-empowerment. But Grande also isn\'t in a rush to grow up. A week before the album’s release, she swapped out a particularly sentimental song called “Remember” with the provocative, NSYNC-sampling “break up with your girlfriend, i\'m bored.” As expected, it sent her fans into a frenzy. “I know it ain’t right/But I don’t care,” she sings. Maybe the ride is just starting.
“I have journals from when I was nine years old,” Swedish-born singer Tove Lo tells Apple Music. “The ones from my teenage years up to my early twenties are filled with these hilarious, detailed stories about people I was dating or hooking up with.” These tales are dispersed throughout her fourth album, *Sunshine Kitty*—a bright collection that delivers synth-pop with a forthright edge. “All over this record, there’s a mix of current love, future fears, being naive, and actual people in my life.\" In this track-by-track guide, Tove shares the stories of each song on *Sunshine Kitty*. **Gritty Pretty (Intro)** “There’s a few songs about certain characters in my life. One of them—Mateo—is the guy getting a phone call in this song. His friends support him through his breakup with Uma, and Uma is my best friend who calls me in the ‘Glad He’s Gone’ video. There’s little connections that show that the album is one world.” **Glad He’s Gone** “You know what’s best for your friends, and you want to make sure that the person they date is good for them. When they’re dating someone and you feel like they’re not really themselves and that your relationship isn’t what it used to be, you’re bummed. When they break up, you feel for them because they’re sad, but at the same time you’re also happy to have your partner in crime back.” **Bad as the Boys (feat. ALMA)** “‘Bad as the Boys’ is based on one of my first crushes that I had on a girl. When I realized that I was attracted to girls as much as boys, it was an exciting but confusing feeling. I was writing this song with Ludvig Söderberg and Jakob Jerlström, and right away we felt that it was nostalgic, but it needed to have some kind of pain. I really wanted another girl on it who also is into girls. ALMA is a good friend of mine with a beautiful voice. She’s always very open. I asked her, ‘Do you relate to this?’ And she said, ‘Are you fucking kidding me? Yes.’” **Sweettalk My Heart** “This was the first song I wrote where I felt, ‘Am I making my fourth album right now? Is this where it’s going to go?’ This song is about being happy with the ability to be naive when it comes to love. It\'s not about being cynical, it\'s about choosing to believe someone because you feel them in the moment.” **Stay Over** “‘Stay Over’ is about luring someone into something physical. It’s a very sexual song that’s about instant infatuation and feeling like you’re not in a place where you should *go for it* because you’ve just been through something hard, but the attraction and instant connection you feel makes it impossible to not want to try.” **Are U gonna tell her? (feat. Mc Zaac)** “This came out of a drunken experimental session with Ludvig and Jakob. They played the track and I said, ‘This is fucking awesome. What do we do on this?’ The song is about a guilt hookup and making mistakes. I really wanted to work with a Brazilian artist because I have so much love for Brazil; Mc Zaac was someone that a lot of people recommended. We listened to his music and felt that his voice would be perfect. It was tricky, because he doesn’t speak English, and none of his team did either. We ended up finding someone to translate a *very interesting* session on FaceTime.” **Jacques** “Me and Jax Jones had two amazing sessions in London—this was one of the songs that came out of that. This is the club banger on the record. I love house and techno, and I wanted a song with that.” **Mateo** “‘Mateo’ is based on a guy that doesn’t even know what he puts people who are falling for him through. Growing up, I was never the first one to be noticed. I was competing with beautiful girls who wanted the same guy as me that would *always* get the attention. You ask yourself, ‘How do I get their attention if I have different things to offer?’ It’s always embarrassing to be in love with the one person that everyone also wants.” **Come Undone** “When you’ve met someone and you’re really in love, you’re over the moon and it feels like you’re floating on clouds. Everything is *perfect*. Then you have your first fight and feel like everything is falling apart and that you’ll never get back to where you were. You feel as if you’ve ruined everything because of just one fight.” **Equally Lost (feat. Doja Cat)** “I got that song title while I was with some friends of mine at the club. I was telling them, ‘I need to get a good title. I need to spark something in me lyrically.’ I asked them to tell me about things they did when they went through hard times, and they told me that they were ‘equally lost’ and both brokenhearted, trying to find *something* to ease the pain. I’d been following Doja Cat and listened to her a lot and was loving her voice. I reached out and asked her if she would want to be on a song with me, and she was super excited and said, ‘I can kill this.’” **Really Don’t Like U (feat. Kylie Minogue)** “I met Kylie Minogue in Hong Kong. We played at the same charity, and she said, ‘It would be so fun to do a song together sometime.’ I was writing for the album and her words were at the back of my mind. When I wrote this song, I felt like it could be the perfect one for her voice. I reached out not knowing if it would even work, but she loved it and was down. She’s had such a long, amazing career, and you don’t know what to expect when you talk to anyone in her position. It was a surreal moment.” **Shifted** “Sometimes you have to let the lyrics be the carrying moments. We had the chorus first and worked the bouncy bassline in later.” **Mistaken** “This song is the opposite end of confidence. You’re admitting to your weird jealousies. It’s a blunt and honest song about being jealous of someone’s ex, or comparing yourself to someone in the past because you’re not enough. It’s me asking someone to help me not feel these feelings. It’s something that you don’t want to have ask.” **Anywhere U Go** “It’s about my move to LA. I moved there for a person, but I didn’t tell them that I moved there for them because I didn’t want to create any pressure. It was hard at first, and I wrote this song out of frustration of not feeling at home there. There’s also hopefulness and feeling good for taking that leap. Even if it’s a struggle, I’m still hopeful.”
“I wrote *American Teen* at 17 years old,” Khalid told Beats 1 host Zane Lowe. “Now I get to release this at 20-21, so it\'s a completely different mind frame.” His much-anticipated second album, the 17-track *Free Spirit*—and its companion film of the same name, created by Khalid along with director Emil Nava—is a soulful, sober meditation on what he\'s learned in those intervening years and about what happens when you long for personal freedom but aren\'t yet totally sure what to do with it. Khalid talked through the stories and inspiration behind each song with Zane, so read along as you take it all in. **“Intro”** “I wanted people to find their own name for this song and what it means to them. It was made to be the intro: I\'m naming it \'Intro.\' No other name popped up in my head. It\'s so cinematic and it washes over you, and I\'m like, \'People have to hear this first.\'” **“Bad Luck”** “*American Teen* started a little bit more up, a little bit more happy. For *Free Spirit*, overall, the vibe\'s completely different—the melancholy tone, the melodies. \'Bad Luck\' was so fitting to the intro it had to go right after. That intensity—it\'s literally like it\'s punching you in the face.” **“My Bad”** “It\'s so crazy because that song floated out of me. I wrote that in less than 10 minutes flat. So I was obviously in my bag for real.” **“Better”** “I was in LA, I was at the studio. I was surrounded by my friends. Good energy. I was just in the pocket. I think I was fresh off of tour and I was like, I gotta create, I gotta. I held all of that energy that I had on tour and it was just like, boom boom boom boom. All the songs just flew out of me, and \'Better\' was definitely one.” **“Talk”** “I love Disclosure so much, and they were on my wish list of people I wanted to collaborate with since I started music. It\'s like a gift to myself. It was a little naive of me to go into the session expecting to walk out with a house record. This beat was my second pick—until I sang on it and was like, \'Oh OK, this makes so much sense.\' This song is so huge, it\'s just one of my favorite songs I\'ve ever done. And there is definitely another Disclosure song floating out there somewhere in the world.” **“Right Back”** “I love working with \[producers\] Stargate because every time I work with them, the melodies just flow right out of me. It gives me this level of nostalgia from one of my favorite areas of music, the \'90s. The way that it sounds, the way that I see my friends dance to it, and the fact that my mom really, really loves it—that was the tipping point. If my mom doesn\'t like a song, it\'s not making the album.” **“Don\'t Pretend” (feat. SAFE)** “I think I did this song with SAFE in like 2016, 2017. I love his tone, I love his melody. And this was actually one of the last songs I recorded for the album. It got brought back to my attention and I was like, \'I love this song so much, it has to find a way out.\'” **“Paradise”** “I feel like having enough songs for people to see different sides of me as an artist. I could\'ve gone forever—there were like 30 more songs. Although there were some that didn\'t make the album, that doesn\'t mean those won\'t have a life. I could hit up some of my favorite artists and be like, \'Yo, do you want to turn this into a collab and you want to hop on it?\'” **“Hundred”** “\'Hundred\' is the soundtrack of my life. When I\'m in the mix of everything, I\'m on autopilot and I can\'t stop. I swear I could get into car crash after car crash, I\'m making my way through wherever I got to go and I\'m getting the job done. I hate canceling anything. I performed shows sick. If I gotta walk onstage with a broken foot, I\'m going to do it. Keep it a hundred. I got a hundred things I got to do.” **“Outta My Head”** “I think \'Outta My Head\' is definitely my favorite because of just how timing came into play. It was ridiculous—I\'m walking out of the studio and I run into John Mayer. And then I\'m like, \'Yo, you want to hear my project?\' Third song in and then he hopped on it and it was great. It\'s such a moment.” **“Free Spirit”** “This is the pivotal point, sonically, of the album. It starts off a little dark and gets a little bit more lighthearted. I feel like \'Free Spirit\' is the start of where everything gets intense and more cinematic.” **“Twenty One”** “I love that my friends and I have such a complete understanding of each other emotionally. I get to talk to them and I get to make time for them, they get to make time for me. Just to hang out and just to live and tell stories. You can\'t write a song if you don\'t have anything to write about. My friends give me something to write about every single day.” **“Bluffin\'”** “This is so heavy and soulful. It\'s almost like that make-up-after-breakup song. If you\'ve gotten into an argument with your bae or whatever you got going on, you play that song. It sets the tone completely. If it didn\'t make the album, if they made another *Fifty Shades*, maybe that song would fit there.” **“Self”** “I had to get ready to be comfortable with allowing myself to literally talk about loss, and talk about losing, and talk about how even though I\'m at this high to the world, mentally I feel like I\'m at a low at that moment when I wrote that song. I wanted to leave my fans with something where they felt connected to me on a different level and they realized, \'Wow, he\'s just like me and he goes through what I go through, and he has his time where he stares in front of a mirror and picks himself apart and then builds himself back together.\'” **“Alive”** “This is the second chapter of everything—chapter two, act two. I felt like ending it giving people a song they can listen to whenever they\'re feeling down, whenever they\'re going through something. Though these songs feel very sad, I feel like they have a brighter message.” **“Heaven”** “Father John Misty wrote \'Heaven.\' That\'s a song he loved a lot and he felt like it was so fitting for me. I feel like my voice is not too far off from his because that\'s a voice I grew up with, and sat with, and lived with. How many people do you know out there who can say they sang a song Father John Misty wrote? The fact that he looks to me like, \'You\'re going to do this song justice, and you\'re going to sing this song the way that it should be sung.\' Amazing.” **“Saturday Nights”** “I don\'t think I really wanted to end the album on such a dark and tense note. It\'s one of my favorite songs I\'ve ever written. The fact that it gets a new life because there\'s going to be a lot of people who listen to *Free Spirit* that didn\'t listen to \[2018 EP\] *Suncity*, and the fact that it plays a big part of the film as well—it was perfect. It had to go last.”
After months of drip-feeding her first full-length project to fans—devising her own release schedule and dropping a new song each week—German-born pop superstar Kim Petras presents the full, glittering package. *Clarity* is baked in ’80s bubblegum nostalgia—it’s neon, cartoonishly girly, and largely apolitical—but isn’t without layers. Underneath the raunch and sass of Madonna-inspired bops like “Broken” and “Do Me,” Petras offers glimpses at her own empowering journey through gender reassignment surgery and self-discovery. Sometimes, she tells that story through an outstretched hand: “From the bottom you come up/From haters to lovers/From nada to Prada/You know you’re the star that you are,” she belts on closing track “Shinin’,” which feels like an it-gets-better anthem for LGBTQ+ kids and outsiders. “If you’re lost/Don’t get down/Don’t give up now/You should know just what you are.”
We all have friends who, when they fall in love, turn into Shakespeare-quoting, starry-eyed Pepé Le Pews. That’s all good, but not many can convey emotion with a flawless soprano like Camila Cabello. *Romance*, her second album, feels like a transitional moment for the Cuban American singer. Most notably, her adorable relationship with pop superstar Shawn Mendes provided much of this album’s inspiration. Next, she steps away from the Latin vibes that carried her earlier hits like “Havana” and “Señorita” to explore pop more broadly. She plunges down moody Ariana/Weeknd-type wormholes on “Should’ve Said It,” “Feel It Twice,” “Used to This,” and “Easy.” The latter shares feelings that are pure catnip for hopeless romantics: “Always thought I was hard to love till you made it seem so easy,” she confesses. Similarly, “Dream of You” and “Living Proof” are like intercepted handmade crush notes—complete with swirly lettering—between lovers. She briefly reconnects with her Latin roots (“Liar,” and “Señorita,” which makes an encore here) and mingles with vintage rock ’n’ roll (“This Love”). But the track that will gain the most attention, and compete for father-daughter dance rotation at every wedding henceforth, is “First Man”—a beautiful message to the most important male figure in her life, not named Shawn, about finding a person who will care for her as much as he did.
Upon erupting into a house single fit for any Vegas club, *Courage*’s opener, “Flying on My Own,” finds Celine Dion alone. “The warmer winds will carry me,” she sings at high altitude, her voice climbing. “Anywhere I want them to/If you could see what I can see/That nothing’s blocking my view.” *Courage* is the Canadian star’s first album (in any language) since the 2016 death of her husband and longtime manager, René Angélil. Recorded almost entirely in Las Vegas—near the end of the wildly successful eight-year residency there that she and Angélil had conceived of together—these are songs of resilience, of moving forward when all you want is to look back. To get there, she collaborated with some of modern pop’s biggest names (Sia, Sam Smith, Skylar Grey, Greg Kurstin, David Guetta) for everything from heartbreaking ballads (“Courage”) to brief flirtations with rapping (the piano-driven lullaby “Perfect Goodbye,” which features contributions from Steve Aoki). “I’m having some kind of breakthrough,” she sings on “Lying Down,” a tale of faltering love. “I’m ready to live.”