Idolator's 70 Best Pop Albums Of 2020

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

A mere 11 months passed between the release of *Lover* and its surprise follow-up, but it feels like a lifetime. Written and recorded remotely during the first few months of the global pandemic, *folklore* finds the 30-year-old singer-songwriter teaming up with The National’s Aaron Dessner and longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff for a set of ruminative and relatively lo-fi bedroom pop that’s worlds away from its predecessor. When Swift opens “the 1”—a sly hybrid of plaintive piano and her naturally bouncy delivery—with “I’m doing good, I’m on some new shit,” you’d be forgiven for thinking it was another update from quarantine, or a comment on her broadening sensibilities. But Swift’s channeled her considerable energies into writing songs here that double as short stories and character studies, from Proustian flashbacks (“cardigan,” which bears shades of Lana Del Rey) to outcast widows (“the last great american dynasty”) and doomed relationships (“exile,” a heavy-hearted duet with Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon). It’s a work of great texture and imagination. “Your braids like a pattern/Love you to the moon and to Saturn,” she sings on “seven,” the tale of two friends plotting an escape. “Passed down like folk songs, the love lasts so long.” For a songwriter who has mined such rich detail from a life lived largely in public, it only makes sense that she’d eventually find inspiration in isolation.

“This is my quarter-life crisis album,” Sasha Sloan tells Apple Music about *Only Child*, which also happens to be her debut full-length. The 25-year-old singer-songwriter, who recently uprooted from Los Angeles to Nashville (“cheaper rent, nicer people,” she quips), had dreamed of recording her first LP in one of Music City’s legendary studios, but the COVID-19 pandemic shut all that down. “I wound up making the whole record in my house with my producer, who is also, conveniently, my boyfriend,” she says. “It was limiting, but also freeing. I got to be totally immersed in my own world.” Solitude, as it happened, was the ideal scenario for writing these contemplative songs, which introduce us to Sloan’s inquisitive personality, against-the-grain perspective, and storytelling flair. “It’s easy to lean into love songs and breakup songs, but there’s a lot more to me than who I date,” she says. “I wanted every song to tell a real story, whether it’s how I struggle with body image or the way I feel about sharing opinions online.” Below, she talks us through the album track by track. **Matter to You** “I took an edible one night and wound up on this website where you start at an atom and slowly zoom out. Suddenly it\'s a plant, and then it\'s a rock, until you make it all the way to Pluto. And I just felt very small after that. I\'m a glass-half-empty kind of person, so when I start to think about how big the world is, I feel really insignificant. It can be almost crushing. But I’ve realized, over time, that I find meaning through love. The song is a little bittersweet, like, ‘Hey, I feel like this really small person who has no purpose here, but you give me that in some way.’ But I thought it was a nice way to kick off the album.” **Only Child** “I had this title written down in my phone for ages, but I didn\'t know how to write it or what the angle would be. Then one day I was writing with King Henry and Shane McAnally, and Shane said, ‘Well, it gets lonely being an only child.’ The whole song just poured out from there. I remember laying in bed that night, listening to the demo over and over, and feeling like it just explained a lot about why I am the way I am. I\'m pretty cynical, I grew up really fast, and it was just my mom and I for a very long time. And only children often feel like outsiders, because we don’t learn how to fight with people, how to make up with people, how to grow. So it kind of summed me up as a person. It felt all-encompassing.” **House With No Mirrors** “My boyfriend and I were going into the studio and I was getting ready to leave the house. I remember putting on this pair of jeans and breaking into tears. They were a little tighter than they used to be, and I was having a really off day, and he said, ‘Man, we need to get you a house with no mirrors.’ We ended up bringing that title into the studio session, and the woman we were working with connected with it immediately. For me, the important thing was to make it as real as possible. A problem I have with a lot of body image songs is that they’re really empowering. It doesn’t feel real. Someone screaming on the radio that I\'m beautiful doesn\'t do it for me. So I started pulling from real examples in my life—I\'ve struggled with an eating disorder and body dysmorphia for a very long time—and getting specific about these vulnerabilities. It was scary putting it out. I posted it and lay on my couch having a panic attack for the next two hours.” **Lie** “I might actually be too empathetic. My mom\'s the same way. We take other people\'s pain and really feel it for them. When I wrote this, I had just gone through a breakup, and even though I was the one who broke up with him, I felt equally heartbroken, maybe even worse because of the guilt that came with it. Going back over everything in my head—how he felt, what he was thinking—is how ‘Lie’ was born. It was the first time I ever wrote from someone else\'s perspective. Of course, I\'ve been rejected plenty of times, so I know what it feels like. There’s a feeling of desperation and a struggle to accept that you\'re not right.” **Hypochondriac** “I used to be a huge piece of shit. Worse than I am now. Beyond the whole eating disorder thing, I really didn’t take care of myself. My nutrition was horrible; I smoked tons of weed and cigarettes. I had never heard of a vitamin. I basically grew up on fast food. And partly as a result of all of these things, I’m sure, I have bad anxiety. It changes depending on what life phase I’m in, and recently I’ve become the biggest hypochondriac. I literally went to the dentist yesterday because I thought I was dying of a tooth infection. There was nothing wrong with my tooth. This is the level of insanity we’re dealing with.” **Is It Just Me?** “I\'m completely obsessed with Reddit and I love the subreddit Unpopular Opinion. I knew I wanted to write a song about it. The idea was like, I\'m sure that my unpopular opinions are actually popular opinions, but people are too scared to say them out loud. We live in such a hypersensitive climate that I\'m scared to say anything, ever. And that isn’t right. We should be able to express ourselves. As scary as this was to put out, it was so much fun to write. It took forever because I wanted to make sure that all my examples were actually somewhat unpopular opinions, but without going too far. You need to be able to sing along.” **Santa\'s Real** “This was initially meant to be a jab at being cynical and jaded, and growing up to realize that shit\'s basically rigged. But then the pandemic happened, and the world caught fire, and it was the first time in my life that my problems felt truly insignificant because everything else seemed so bad. I was in first grade when 9/11 happened, and while I was aware that something tragic was going on, I was still playing with toys. I didn’t grasp it. So ‘Santa\'s Real’ ended up being about how I sometimes wish that I was still a child so I wouldn’t have to reckon with how grave things have become.” **Someone You Hate** “I got all emotional about my ex-boyfriend one day, thinking about how we used to be best friends but now I\'m someone he hates—how I put him through all this shit and it didn’t have to be that way. It’s the most literal I\'ve ever been about my ex in a song, and I think it\'s because enough time has passed that the wounds have begun to heal. I can revisit what went down without shielding myself from pieces of it. And that’s important because in music, there’s power in specificity. That’s what makes a song relatable.” **Until It Happens to You** “A very close friend of mine lost his cousin to leukemia, and it happened really fast. When someone you love experiences something like that, you want to give them everything and yet nothing feels like enough. I’ve never lost anyone, thankfully, and even at funerals I’ve always felt a bit removed. So maybe because of that, I never feel like I know what to say. I never feel like my words are sufficient. I haven’t been there. I tried to funnel that frustration into a song, and I wanted it to sound truly emotional, like an Explosions in the Sky effect that hits you like a wave. It was a way for me to express just how badly I wanted to be there for them.” **High School Me** “This started off as a joke song about hating old pictures of me from high school. Honestly, I think I default to humor when I’m feeling something uncomfortable. When I took the draft to Shane, he was like, ‘Oh my god, I can totally relate to this.’ We both feel the same crushing embarrassment about that period in our lives even though we’re both proud of who we’ve become. Even though I have some regressions, like on ‘House With No Mirrors,’ I like the fact that the album ends with the line ‘I wish I could go back/Tell her it\'s okay.’ It’s saying, even though things aren’t perfect and I don\'t fully love myself yet, I\'m still okay.”

“A disco ball allows you to see light in the darkness,” Kylie Minogue tells Apple Music, neatly encapsulating why her 15th album *DISCO* is a welcome bright spot in a distinctly dingy year. “I’ve turned off the dirt road and onto the supersonic highway—straight to the galactic disco.” Indeed, *DISCO* is a marked departure from 2018\'s country-tinged *Golden*, transporting its listeners straight to the kind of packed dance floor they could only dream of amid 2020’s global lockdown. And yet *DISCO* was recorded during isolation in a makeshift home studio made up of clothes rails, curtains, and blankets—all of which earned Minogue her first engineering credit (“I went to recording kindergarten and had to learn to use GarageBand,” she says). Minogue, of course, isn’t the only artist turning to disco as a radical form of escapism in 2020, a year that’s also seen Lady Gaga, Dua Lipa, Jessie Ware, and Róisín Murphy experiment with the genre. “At its inception, disco was a way of allowing people to dance through their struggle and pain,” says Minogue of why rolling back the years has proven such a tonic. “Some of the best disco songs are mission statements of strength. Even though I started recording before the dramas of 2020, there is a correlation.” Read on as a music legend takes us inside the thrilling *DISCO*, one track at a time. **Magic** “‘Magic’ is a kind of hors d’oeuvre for the album. The main course will be coming in a while—and leave space because there is going to be tiramisu. It feels classic, grown-up, and polished, but there\'s still an element of surprise with the falsetto notes.” **Miss a Thing** “I first heard the demo for this in February and loved it. It fitted the brief: There was enough disco in there, but it also felt like a fresh interpretation. I was due to fly to LA in March and work on it with one of the key writers, \[Finnish songwriter\] Teemu Brunila. Then of course lockdown happened so we ended up working remotely. I had a meltdown one day with him. I was trying to do this vocal and I was so exhausted, and stressed, I couldn’t. I felt like I was failing him and me. I didn’t go to the full cry, but I came close. All this, and yet we’ve never met. I can\'t wait to give him a hug when we finally can.” **Real Groove** “Because I was recording my own vocals at home, I found myself doing a lot more takes than I usually would, to the point where I literally had to back away from my laptop. ‘Real Groove’ was one of the songs where I did the most takes. I wanted to take the melody down half a tone. We experimented with doing it lower, but ultimately the higher notes were the sweet spot. You don’t know what’s coming, and then the song ends up really pumping. It was worth the effort.” **Monday Blues** “I almost gave up on this track. It initially had a different chorus, so it took some juggling. We had to dig deep and nail it with a proper chorus. I became quite insular in lockdown and didn’t really go out much, but I listened to a version of this during a rare walk and it started to make sense. It was so uplifting and cool. It’s so different listening to music away from the environment in which you’re making it. Hearing it on a sunny day, taking a stroll, I really felt: ‘This is going on the album.’” **Supernova** “There’s a vocoder voice at the start of the song. In my mind, it’s the voice of a little space creature who’s my friend in the song. I’m always drawn to celestial words and imagery, so this was a fun chance to play with all of those elements. I think making it slightly spacey was a way to do disco without being trapped in the 1970s. \[Songwriter\] Skylar Adams, who also co-wrote and produced on this, has a baby boy called Jupiter, so we wanted to work his name into the lyrics too. If you weren’t awake before ‘Supernova,’ you’re awake by the time it starts.” **Say Something** “You need a rest after ‘Supernova,’ and ‘Say Something’ is a chance to calm down and reflect a little. It’s one of those songs that just dropped from the sky. I recorded it in my first session, before I even had a timeline or an album planned. I was working with \[writer and producer\] Biff Stannard and \[British songwriter\] Ash Howes, who I’ve worked with a lot, and \[producer\] Jon Green, who I worked with on *Golden*. I knew that the three of us would do something different, but I didn\'t know it would be this. It started as a beat, and we were all just singing into a microphone to capture everything. The ‘love is love’ part is almost like a different song, but somehow it lives with the rest of it. The song literally spilled out of us that day.” **Last Chance** “‘Last Chance’ is very inspired by ABBA and the Bee Gees. I was obsessed with ABBA as an eight- or nine-year-old. They’re pure perfection. I can\'t compare with these all-time epic, amazing songs. So what I tried to do was absorb them, try to understand them and then just stay on my own path. This was one of the last songs that came about, just as the doors were about to shut. It just goes to show you\'ve really got to keep going until it’s closing time.” **I Love It** “This was another one that I started working on with Biff, a day or two before lockdown. Again, it had a slightly different chorus, which just wasn’t hitting it. We didn’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so when I was making changes at home I chipped away at it and added the line ‘So come on, let the music play, we’re gonna take it all the way,’ which was inspired by Lionel Richie. That little restructure lifted it to where it needed to go, and it found its place on the album.” **Where Does the DJ Go?** “I wrote this with songwriters Skylar Adams and Daniel Shah, and Kiris Houston, who’s a wonderful instrumentalist and very hands-on. It was in the period just before lockdown, so we were acutely aware that something was happening. The lyric ‘The world’s trying to break me, I need you to save me’ echoes how we were feeling, and the ‘Singing I will survive’ line was inspired by the Gloria Gaynor song. It was our way of saying, ‘Please pull me out of this situation!’” **Dance Floor Darling** “There are songs on the album that have another meaning to them, or a slight melancholy. ‘Dance Floor Darling’ doesn’t have any real depth to it, but I think it feels like a hug. It feels like a wedding reception where everyone’s eaten sufficiently, had a few drinks, all the official stuff’s out of the way, and—especially once the track speeds up in the middle eight—Gramps is on the dance floor. It makes me picture David Brent busting out his dad moves. We wanted escapism, and we committed to it.” **Unstoppable** “Earlier I was describing ‘Magic’ as an hors d’oeuvre. Well, ‘Unstoppable’ is a refreshing sorbet, a palate cleanser. I worked on it with \[songwriter, producer, and instrumentalist\] Troy Miller, who is another writer I only know from the waist up on Zoom. The vocals are quite different, and I wasn’t sure if he was pleased with what I was doing when we were recording because he really didn’t say much. But it turned out he just wanted to go with the vibe and let me go for it!” **Celebrate You** “I’ve never written a song in the third person before. The character of Mary was born out of mumble-singing melodies. Mary is anyone and everyone who needs reassurance that we are enough and we\'re loved. The last part of the album has a pretty high BPM, so ‘Celebrate You’ is the wind-down. It’s last orders at the pub—all of the family’s there, and Auntie Mary’s had a few too many. I’ve introduced you to this stellar landscape, we’ve gone to supernova, but we’ve come back down to Earth. This is about heart and connection.”

“I just needed to let my old self go,\" Selena Gomez tells Apple Music. After her last album, *Revival*, the superstar weathered a rocky four years during which her love life and personal health were the subject of intense media scrutiny, eventually leading her to check into a treatment center. “I purged multiple different things, but it was specifically who I was then,” she says. Hitting rock bottom revealed a new way forward: She rid her life of toxic relationships, quit social media, and vowed to trust her gut on album three. Flanked by two of her most trusted collaborators and friends—pop hitmakers Julia Michaels and Justin Tranter—Gomez, now 27, wrote *Rare*, her third solo LP and a well-earned fresh start. The project’s back-to-back lead singles—the gutting ballad “Lose You to Love Me” and the more celebratory “Look at Her Now”—effectively bookend the highs and lows of Gomez’s adolescence and trace her journey through recovery. “Took a few years to soak up the tears/But look at her now/Watch her go,” she sings on the latter. From then on, it’s all about release: Gomez spends the rest of *Rare* relishing the joy and lightness found in finally moving on. “I kickstart the rhythm/All the drama’s in remission,” she coos on the sultry club cut “Dance Again,” which casts her newfound independence as a strobe-lit night out. “I’m high off the weight off of my shoulders.” On “Fun,” she pokes fun at her health struggles by turning them into come-ons (“My kind of trouble likes your kind of trouble,” she sings to a love interest who keeps her “higher than the medication”), flipping a perceived weakness into a power source. Crucially, *Rare* is more about self-love than anything—or anyone—else. Marked by playful, exuberant production and thoughtful assists from 6LACK and Kid Cudi, it feels confident, optimistic, and free—as if Gomez is seeing the world with fresh eyes. She may be, but the album’s power is rooted in how far she’s come. Listen to songs like “Let Me Get Me” and “Cut You Off” and find an artist who is older, wiser, stronger, and all grown up.

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

If Oliver Tree confounds you, he’s done his job. The 27-year-old alt-pop-rock eccentric fancies himself a visual artist who just so happens to make music as joyful and strange as his signature look: JNCO jeans, a bowl cut, and a face so expressive it reads like a meme come to life. And yet, outside of all the ornamentation, the prankster public persona, the viral music videos and the Atlantic Records deal, Tree’s debut album *Ugly Is Beautiful* is a masterwork of eclectic hooks and charming sincerity. There’s the anti-consumerist guitar-pop “Cash Machine,” the twenty one pilots-esque rap-rock of “Hurt,” the old-school turntablist nod “Bury Me Alive,” the harmonious indie-rock fuzz of “Miracle Man,” and everything in between. “Eighty percent of my recording process is improvised,” Tree tells Apple Music. “I get into the booth and record for 30 minutes; the songs tend to write themselves. Sometimes it’s gibberish; sometimes they’re perfect and I couldn’t recreate them if I wanted to. There’s some magic in that moment—\[music\] that is raw, vulnerable, and pure. It can’t be replicated.” Below, Oliver Tree walks Apple Music through his debut (and, apparently, last) album, track by track. Take his humor with a grain of salt and take the message at face value: “In my trials and tribulations, I’ve fallen on my face time after time,” Tree explains. “*Ugly Is Beautiful* is about finding the things in ourselves that we see as flaws and learning to love those things.” **Me, Myself & I** “People tend to feel like they have to keep to themselves in fear of saying something stupid. This song, to me, is about how I\'d rather say some stupid things in my life than say nothing at all. At this point, I\'m currently working on learning how to filter my thoughts so that I can be a little more fine-tuned with it, but ultimately, I\'d rather say something than nothing. It can be a bit much, but it does make for very honest reactions.” **1993 (feat. Little Ricky ZR3)** “Ricky Robinson is Little Ricky ZR3, and he\'s the only feature on this debut album. I don\'t really listen to music. The only real artist who I fuck with at this point is Little Ricky ZR3. This dude is totally in his own world. I sincerely feel in the next few years, he\'s going to be the biggest artist on the planet. The song is really about growing up. I spent my whole life falling on my face, but I never let that stop me. I was given the name Oliver Tree at my birth. I was born in 1993, but it somehow took me 27 years, until I finished this album, until I realized who I was.” **Cash Machine** “I spent the last three years traveling around the world, and everything I own fits inside a big \[faux\] Gucci carry-on suitcase. That and my backpack fits my entire life. If you think you need money or material objects to be happy, then I honestly think there\'s something wrong with you and you are sick in your head. We waste the best years of our lives chasing after money so that we can buy all these things we don\'t need. It\'s absurd.” **Let Me Down** “I wrote that song a couple of days after \[Los Angeles went on\] shutdown. I had to cancel \[my album release\] due to COVID-19. I couldn’t shoot the videos I needed to shoot, so everything got pushed back. I couldn\'t share this without the proper visual support. And so ultimately that song is really an apology to my fans. I let a lot of people down when I had to cancel the album. I lost 150,000 Instagram followers over the course of a few days. I let people down, and I wrote the song to ask for forgiveness. Ultimately, if they forgive me or not, I don\'t give a fuck. They can do whatever they want. It\'s not my problem, but it was just a nice memento.” **Miracle Man** “As far as ‘Miracle Man’ goes, all I can say is, do not spend your life waiting around for a miracle. You got to go out there, you got to get your hands dirty, you got to fall on your face. If you want to do it, you got to follow my three-simple-step formula: One, wake the fuck up; two, get your ass off the couch; and three, go do that shit. This comes down to one experience I had in elementary school. This kid at my school, his sister was drowning. His name was Danny Stromboli and his sister was in the lake and she couldn\'t swim. She\'s out there by herself, she\'s screaming, and there was no lifeguards, nothing. So I run out there, jump into the water, I reach her, I bring her back into shore. And I realized, what if someone just prayed for her to come back? It\'s like, am I going to wait here hoping someone\'s going to come save this poor little girl or am I going to go and save her myself?” **Bury Me Alive** “‘Bury Me Alive’ is actually about the time I ate too much acid on a family vacation at Burning Man. I thought I had overdosed and I was convinced I had died. I watched my whole funeral take place. I ended up running naked through the desert for about six hours and I nearly died that night. I went through a period of dealing with drug issues, and that was my rock bottom. After that experience, I realized that was not the way to live my life. Instead of being consumed by drugs, I became consumed by music. The trouble with getting off drugs or changing your lifestyle is that you don\'t have something to fill that void. I was very fortunate that music was there.” **Alien Boy** “The song ‘Alien Boy’ is dedicated to all the alien boys and all the alien girls out there. The human experience is extremely strange. Most of us feel like aliens at some point. We feel like an outcast, but at the end of the day, who wants to be normal? This song is really about embracing our true selves and really letting your true self shine.” **Joke’s on You!** “Never judge a book by its cover. I\'ve seen the way people treat you for looking different, for being a little \'outside the box.\' I\'ve seen the toxic energy that exists in the way that people project their own insecurities and their own unhappiness on others. A lot of people struggle to look in the mirror and say, ‘I love myself. I\'m able to accept myself. Flaws make me beautiful. They make me me.’ You need to learn to love yourself, you need to learn how to laugh at yourself, and you need to stop taking yourself so fucking seriously.” **Again & Again** “We are all habitual beings. Our patterns tend to repeat themselves, some for better, some for worse. If we don\'t learn from the mistakes, we will repeat them over and over again. But the human brain is so powerful that it can pick out whatever these negative patterns are and it can actually start new and improved patterns. We have the capability to re-hardwire the brain. You can go from a drug addict to being completely sober. Nothing happens overnight, but it starts with recognizing an issue.” **Waste My Time** “Little Ricky ZR3 actually played the violin on this song, and it’s only for the outro. He did a violin, viola, and then he also doubled it with the cello, which was incredible. As far as the song goes, time is the most precious, coveted thing in existence. There really isn\'t enough hours in the day to do what we need to do. One thing I will say is do everything you want to do. Your time here is extremely short, and that needs to be taken with great understanding.” **Jerk** “This is a song that I made when I went to Marshmello\'s house. I made it there with him and my engineer. But as far as the song explanation goes, I think we\'ve all met a jerk or two. We all know people that we hope we\'ll never see again, but it\'s important to understand that we\'ve all probably been jerks at some point in our lives, as well. It’s a double-sided blade, but it\'s a song about those people that you really hope you never see again.” **Hurt** “I grew up competing in freestyle scootering, the pro circuit. I did that for a couple of years. During a semifinal run, I was going down this 25-foot roll, at 35, 40 miles an hour. I was going balls to the wall, and out of nowhere, this little fucking pebble shows up. I hit this thing. I go flying roughly 12, 13 feet. I put both my hands out to break the fall, and sure enough, I break my left wrist, I break my right wrist, I break the joint that connects my thumb to my hand. I had a concussion. There were some minor abrasions. My right hand was less usable, but my left still had some good fingers, so I started learning how to produce. I spent the entire scooter season—five months—locked up in a bedroom, just writing music. And the first song I wrote and the song that really capsulated this experience was ‘Hurt.’” **Introspective** “The song ‘Introspective’ is really about getting lost in the thoughts in your own head. Sometimes we have things we want to keep to ourselves, things we don\'t want to share with others. Sometimes we just don\'t have the right words. Sometimes those words don\'t exist. Sometimes we make assumptions. Sometimes we, in our head, make up a million scenarios, and it\'s not the best way to go about things. Don\'t overthink it. Don\'t try to spend too much time trying to think about how it\'s going to go wrong. Just put your bootstraps on, buckle up, buddy, and go in there, do it.” **I’m Gone** “It’s over. This is the first and last Oliver Tree album. It was fun while it lasted, but this industry is too much for me and this is not what I want to spend my life doing. I don\'t want to be a 60-year-old guy with a bowl cut dancing around onstage. I can\'t do this anymore. I\'m going to be segueing on to the next portion and moving out of music. At this point, I have no interest to make album after album for these snotty-ass fans and people who literally talk shit and make my life miserable for this art that I\'ve dedicated my whole life making for them. I\'m fucking done. I am out.”

“I was a total idealist,” Cam tells Apple Music. The Nashville country singer, who’s also one of the city’s most sought-after songwriters, says the five years she spent writing her sophomore album were some of the hardest of her life. “I had this Disney idea of how the world worked, and at some point that just...broke.” Tracing a string of major life changes—breaking up with her old label, inking a new contract, marrying her husband, and welcoming her first child—*The Otherside* reflects a dramatic shift in thinking, or her journey through disillusionment into clear-eyed realism. That evolution unlocked a new side to her sound. “My songs have always pulled from my psychology background, but I had this filter on and didn’t even know it,” she says. “Once I took that off, I could be so much more honest. I could see the world, and myself, for exactly what they were.” Read on as Cam tells us the inside story behind each song. **Redwood Tree** “I grew up in the Bay Area with a redwood tree in my backyard, and I did a lot of thinking up there. I wasn’t raised in a specific religion, but the most magical, awe-inspiring experience I can think of is being in the redwoods, feeling so small. It’s like a cathedral in that it reminds you of your place in everything. Fallen redwoods have rings that represent the thousands of years that they lived, and you’re like, ‘Oh, we’re just flies buzzing around.’ We wake up one day shocked to realize our parents are suddenly old. Like, when did my dad\'s beard get so white? I had watched the movie *Arrival* around the time we wrote this song, and I loved the idea of time not being linear. The soundtrack has these voices that go ‘Da, da, da, da,’ and we nod to that in the production. I hope time isn\'t linear. I hope I get more time with my parents.” **The Otherside** “Tim, or Avicii, came to Nashville a few years ago to write for one of his albums, and we were in the studio with Hillary Lindsey and Tyler Johnson. He started playing this piano melody over and over and over again, and I don\'t smoke cigarettes but when Hillary took a cigarette break, I was like, ‘I\'m going, too.’ It was just so intense. He was really stuck on this thing. While we\'re out on the back porch, she and I came up with an idea for the chorus, and he loved it. But he fiddled with it for hours. He was thinking about cadence, about how we speak, about code-mapping it onto a melody, and about the actual phonetics. Tim never wound up releasing that song, so I was like, ‘Ooh, maybe that means I can.’ Even though it’s such a heavy thing not having him around for the final edits, I did feel this great responsibility to work my ass off to get it right. Because I knew that’s what he would have done.” **Classic** “On the other side of the spectrum, this is one of those songs that just magically fell into place. I went up to New York for a few sessions with Jack Antonoff at Electric Lady Studios, and it was so fun. Creatives tend to beat themselves up a lot, but Jack and I sat there jangling around on this 12-string guitar and writing a song that had this nostalgic Simon & Garfunkel ‘Cecilia’ vibe. It’s about how there are people in your life that outlast everything else—technology, fashion trends, swings in politics, whatever. Nothing\'s a constant in life, but a few people are. It was inspired by this moment when my husband and I were in Argentina and he found a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes. He doesn\'t smoke anymore, but he goes, ‘I’ve got to smoke these because they don\'t make ‘em like this anymore.’ And then he looks at me and goes, ‘That\'s a country lyric.’” **Forgetting You** “I was writing with Lori McKenna, Tyler Johnson, and Mitch Rowland, and we’re all pals from working on various projects together. Still, I always get nervous when I go write with Lori, even though she\'s so humble and chill, because I’m like, ‘Don\'t embarrass yourself in front of the poet of our generation!’ Which is to say, I knew I needed to bring in something cool. I had this line, ‘I\'m getting older/But you never change.’ The song is about holding on to the concept of someone from the past, and measuring everyone up to them even though it’s no longer real. That\'s why you keep moving forward but they never seem to age.” **Like a Movie** “Before we were married and had a kid, I’d come home from tour and my husband and I would have this tiny bit of quality time together. And the truth is, we’d usually get high and go to Walmart. One day, we were unloading all our groceries and I was like, ‘How did you know it was me? How did you know not to settle for someone earlier or wait for someone else?’ And he just smiled and said, ‘Because when I met you, it was like a movie.’ Now, I can remember when we met. I was a mess. It did not look like a movie. But it was so, so sweet. I wrote with the love junkies—Lori McKenna, Liz Rose, and Hillary Lindsey—and the strings are David Campbell, who’s actually Beck’s dad. Jeff Bhasker wanted a ’50s movie soundtrack vibe with strings that swelled like an orchestra, and David immediately got it. Apple Music did a teaser video for the album, and if you watch it, there should be video footage from that string session.” **Changes** “I usually write all my own music, but this is the first of a couple songs on this album that I didn’t. I guess I feel like it\'s cheating. I\'m supposed to be digging all this personal stuff up and figuring myself out, so taking someone else’s song feels like a shortcut. But I trust Harry \[Styles\]’s writing. I feel like he tries so hard to be himself in his music, and he doesn\'t take it lightly. That pursuit resonates with me. The demo had Lori McKenna singing with Harry on background vocals and his whistle, which is still in the track. It was amazing to hear a song that someone else wrote that clicked so much with me personally. It’s about feeling like you’ve outgrown where you\'re from, and you don\'t really want to admit that. It’s kind of an uncomfortable thing to say, but I love when things are uncomfortable. That means it’s important.” **Till There\'s Nothing Left** “This song has steamy sexual energy... Like, ‘I\'m giving you my whole heart but also my body and a quickie in the back seat.’ While we were recording my vocals, I was trying to sit back and make it cool and sexy, and I realized I was blushing. I was blushing because society tells us that sexuality is a private thing. If you want to be respected as a woman, if you want to be considered intelligent, you can’t be sexual. But then I was reminded of my grandmother who was raised Baptist on a farm in Saskatchewan. She\'s the one who gave me the sex talk, unbeknownst to my mother. She said, ‘Sex is like a milkshake. Once you have it, you\'re always going to want it.’ She was comfortable with her sexuality without it being the main *thing* about her. So I thought, ‘If a woman born in the 1930s on a farm in Canada can own it, I can own it.” **What Goodbye Means** “A friend of mine was going through a divorce. It was pretty ugly, but he was being so kind. I asked him, ‘How are you being so nice right now? I don\'t get it.’ And he said, ‘Because she might change her mind.’ I still get goosebumps thinking about it. We\'ve all been there, not quite ready to accept the reality of something, and that\'s okay. You\'ve got to take it at the rate you can take it. This song has such a classic melody. It’s warm. For some reason it feels like a summer evening in New Mexico to me.” **Diane** “This song is a response to Dolly Parton’s ‘Jolene,’ and man, it really seems to resonate with people. Crowds sing it back to me in this emotional, over-the-top, theatrical way. I suppose most people have had infidelity affect their life one way or another, but it’s hard to watch people you care about go through it. There\'s so much shame around it that you don\'t get to talk about what you need or how to heal. And you almost never get to hear the other party’s side. So ‘Diane’ is my moment to role-play, I guess. I\'m the other woman and I slept with your husband and I didn\'t know he was married, but you’ve got to know the truth. Parton\'s lyrics to the other woman include the word ‘please,’ and that just killed me. She\'s so humble and human, asking someone to please not take the love of her life away. Immediately, I was like, ‘That\'s the narrative. That\'s what is so often left unsaid.’” **Happier for You** “This is the other song that I didn\'t write, and it’s from Sam Smith and Tyler \[Johnson\]. Sam and I have a great relationship because I helped write the song ‘Palace’ for their album and then they brought me out on tour. We have a lot of trust. When Lindsay \[Marias, Cam’s manager\] and I first heard this demo and Sam came in singing, our jaws dropped. The emotion was so raw and honest and real. I love the juxtaposition of saying something very loud and publicly—to the point where it almost feels proud—but actually it’s something that makes you want to curl up in a ball.” **Girl Like Me** “This is the author\'s note at the end of the book. Natalie Hemby had come over and started playing a verse on the piano, and I was like, ‘Oh god, that is so sad.’ And she\'s like, ‘It\'s your story. This is your comeback story.’ It’s funny how sometimes you can’t recognize your own self. Writing this song was uncomfortable but in the best way, trying to pull lyrics out in the chorus (‘They’re going to give up on you/You\'re going to give up on them’). You can’t just become jaded. You have to push through. It’s a gift to be able to see life for what it is, and to see yourself for who you are. I think anyone who has been through that phase of disillusionment will think, ‘Oh, yeah, tough. But this side is better.’”

“I have such a personal connection to dance music,” Georgia Barnes tells Apple Music. “I grew up around the UK rave scene, being taken to the raves with my mum and dad \[Leftfield’s Neil Barnes\] because they couldn’t afford childcare. I\'d witness thousands of people dancing to a pulsating beat and I always found it fascinating, so I\'m returning to my roots. The story of dance music and house music is a familiar one—it helped my family, it gave us a roof over our heads.” Five years on from her self-titled debut, the Londoner channels the grooves and good times of the Detroit, Chicago, and Berlin club scenes on the single “About Work the Dancefloor,” “The Thrill,” and “24 Hours.” Tender, twinkling tracks like “Ultimate Sailor” recall Kate Bush and Björk, while her love of punk, dub, and Depeche Mode come through on “Ray Guns,” “Feel It,” and “Never Let You Go.” “My first record was a bit of an experiment,” she explains. “Then I knew exactly what needed to be done—I just locked myself away in the studio and researched all the songs that I love. I also got fit, I stopped drinking, I became a vegan, so these songs are a real reflection of a personal journey I went on—a lot happened in those five years.” Join Georgia on a track-by-track tour of *Seeking Thrills*. **Started Out** “Without ‘Started Out’ this album would be a completely different story. It really did help me break into the radio world, and it was really an important song to kickstart the campaign. Everything you\'re hearing I\'ve played: It\'s all analog synthesizers and programmed drum machines. We set the studio up like Frankie Knuckles or Marshall Jefferson did, so it’s got a real authenticity to it, which was important to me. I didn\'t just want to take the sounds and modernize them, I wanted to use the gear that they were using.” **About Work the Dancefloor** “During the making of this track I was very heavily listening to early techno music, so I wanted to create a song that just had that driving bassline and beat to it. And then I came up with that chorus, and I wanted it to be on a vocoder to have that real techno sound. Not many pop songs have a vocoder as the chorus—I think the only one is probably Beastie Boys’ ‘Intergalactic.’” **Never Let You Go** “I thought it\'d be really cool to have a punky electronic song on the record. So, ‘Never Let You Go’ started as this punk, garage-rock song, but it just sounded like it was for a different album. So then I wrote the chorus, which gave it this bit more pop direction. During the making of this record I was really disciplined, I wasn\'t drinking, I was on this very strict routine of working during the day and then finishing and having a good night’s sleep, so I think some of the songs have these elements of longing for something. I also liked the way Kate Bush wrote: Her lyrics were inspired by the elements, and I wanted to write about the sky like she did. It just all kind of came into one on that song.” **24 Hours** “This was written after I spent 24 hours in the Berghain club in Berlin. It was a life-changing experience. I was sober and observing all these amazing characters and having this kind of epiphany. I saw this guy and this girl notice each other on the floor, just find each other—they clearly didn\'t know each other before. They were dancing together and it was so beautiful. People do that even in an age where most people find each other on dating apps. That\'s where I got the line ‘If two hearts ever beat the same/We can beat it.’” **Mellow (feat. Shygirl)** “I wasn\'t drinking, but I\'ve had my fair share of doing crazy stuff. I wrote this song because I really wanted to go out and seek my hedonistic side. I wanted another female voice on it, and I heard Shygirl’s \[London singer and DJ Blane Muise\] music and really liked it. She understood the type of vibe I was going for because she likes to drink and she likes to go out with her girls. I didn\'t want many collaborations on the record, I just wanted that one moment in this song.” **Till I Own It** “I\'ve got a real emotional connection to this song. I was listening a lot to The Blue Nile, the Glaswegian band, who were quite ethereal and slow. I was interested in adding a song that was a bit more serious and emotive—so I wrote this because I just had this feeling of alienation in London at the time. Also, during the making of this record Brexit happened, so I wrote this song to reflect the changing landscape.” **I Can’t Wait** “‘I Can’t Wait’ is about the thrill of falling in love and that feeling that you get from starting something new. I was listening to a lot of reggae and dub and I\'d wanted to kind of create a rhythm with synthesizers that was almost like ragga. But this is definitely a pop record—and quite a sweet three-minute pop song.” **Feel It** “This was one of the first songs that I recorded for the second record. It’s got that kind of angry idea of punk singers. There are a couple of moments on this record where I was definitely listening to John Lydon and Public Image Ltd., and it\'s also an important song because I felt like it empowers the listener. I wanted people to listen to these songs and do something in their lives that is different, or to go and experience the dance floor. I think \'Feel It\' does that.” **Ultimate Sailor** “‘Ultimate Sailor’ was something that just came along unexpectedly. I really wanted to create a song that just put the listener somewhere. All the elemental things really inspired this record: skies, seas, mountains, pyramids. I think that is one of the things that\'s rubbed off on me from Kate Bush. She’s the artist that I play most in the studio.” **Ray Guns** “I had a concept before I wrote this song about an army of women shooting these rays of light out of these guns, creating love in the sky to influence the whole world. It\'s about collective energy again. I was influenced by all the Chicago house and Detroit techno, and how bravery came from this new explosive scene. And \'Ray Guns\' was meant to try and instill a sense of that power to the listener.” **The Thrill (feat. Maurice)** “At this point I was so influenced by Chicago house and just feeling like I wanted to create a song in homage to it. I wanted a song that took you on a journey to this Chicago house party, and then you have these vocals that induce this kind of trip. Maurice is actually me—it’s an alter ego! That\'s just my voice pitched down! I thought, ‘I’m going to fuck with people and put \'featuring Maurice.’” **Honey Dripping Sky** “I love the way Frank Ocean has the balls to just put two songs together and then take the listener on a journey. This song has a quite dub section at the end, and it\'s about the kind of journey that you go through on a breakup, so it’s really personal. It’s also quite an unusual track, and I wanted to end the album on a thrilling feeling. It\'s a statement to end on a song like that.”

The harmonies that Chloe and Halle Bailey conjure sound like heaven. It\'s what got them tens of millions of views on YouTube; it\'s what eventually attracted Beyoncé\'s attention; and it\'s what continues to make them a force on their second album, *Ungodly Hour*. The duo experiments with a multitude of sounds and textures—many of their own making—while keeping their voices centered and striking as ever. Where their 2018 debut *The Kids Are Alright* played up an almost angelism that connected that moment to their origins as child stars, this new project is about maturation—both musically and otherwise. “I feel like we were more sure of ourselves, more sure of our messaging and what we wanted to get across in just showing that it\'s okay to have flaws and insecurities and show all the layers of what makes you beautiful,” Halle tells Apple Music. “I feel like we\'ve come a long way and in our growth as young women, and you\'d definitely be able to hear that in the music.” This time around, they\'re owning their sexuality and, along with it, the messiness that comes with being an adult and trying to figure out your place. On its face, *Ungodly Hour* is an uplifting album, but it doesn\'t shy away from the darker feelings that come along the way. “A lot of the world sees us as like little perfect angels, and we want to show the different layers of us,” Chloe says. “We\'re not perfect. We\'re growing into grown women, and we wanted to show all of that.” Here the sisters break down each song on their second album. **Intro** Halle: “This intro was made after we had finished making ‘Forgive Me.’ We thought about how we wanted to open this album, because our musicianship and musical integrity is always super-duper important to us, and we never want to lose the essence of who we are in trying to also make some songs that are a bit more mainstream. It felt like us being us completely and just drowning everyone in harmonies like we love to and just playing around. That was our time to play and to open the album with something that will make people\'s ears perk up as well as allow us to have so much fun creatively.” Chloe: “And the reason why we wanted to say the phrase ‘Don\'t ask for permission, ask for forgiveness’ is because that was a statement that wrapped and concluded the whole album. We should never have to apologize for being ourselves. You should never apologize for who you are or any of your imperfections, and you don\'t need to get permission from the world to be yourself.” **Forgive Me** Chloe: “I love it because it\'s so badass, and it\'s taking your power back and not feeling like your self-worth is in the trash. I remember we were all in the studio with \[songwriter\] Nija \[Charles\] and \[producer\] Sounwave, and for me personally, I was going through a situation where I was dealing with a guy and he picked someone else over me, and it really bothered me because I felt like it wasn\'t done in the most honest light. I like to be told things up front. And so when we were all in the session, this had just happened to me. I went in the booth and laid down some melodies, and some of the words came in, and then Halle went in and she sang ‘forgive me,’ and I thought that was so strong and powerful, and Nija laid down some melodies. We kind of constructed it as a puzzle in a way. It felt so good—it felt like we were taking our power back, like, ‘Forgive me for not caring and giving you that energy to control me and make me sad.’” **Baby Girl** Halle: “‘Baby Girl’ is a girl empowerment song, but our perspective when we were writing the song, personally, for me, it was a message that I needed to remind myself of. I remember we wrote this song in Malibu. We decided for the day after Christmas, we wanted to rent an Airbnb, and we wanted to just go out there with no parents and be by the beach and bring our gear and just create. And I remember at that time I was just feeling a little bit down, and I just needed that pick-me-up. So I started writing these lyrics about how I was feeling, how everybody makes it looks so easy and how everything that you see—it seems real, but is it really? So that was definitely an encouraging, empowering song that we wanted other girls to relate to and play when they needed that messaging—when you\'re feeling overwhelmed and insecure and you\'re just like, \'Okay, what\'s next?\' Like, nope, snap out of it. You\'re amazing.” **Do It** Chloe: “We just love the energy of that record. It feels so lighthearted and fun but simple and complex at the same time. We worked with Victoria Monét and Scott Storch on this one, and when we were creating it, we were just vibing out and feeling good. Our intention whenever we create is never to make that hit song or that single, because whenever you kind of go into that mindset, that\'s when you kind of stifle your creativity, and there\'s really nowhere to go. So we were just all having fun and vibing out, and we were just going to throw whatever to the wall and see what sticks. After we created the song, about two weeks later, we were listening to it and we were like, \'Uh-oh, we\'re really kind of feeling this. It feels really, really good.\' And we decided that that would be one that we would shoot a video to, and it just kind of made a life of its own. I\'m always happy when our music is well received, and it just makes us happy also seeing people online dancing to it and doing the dance we did in the music video. It\'s really exceeding all of our expectations.” **Tipsy** Halle: “‘Tipsy’ was such a fun record to write. My beautiful sister did this amazing production that just brought it to a whole nother level. I remember when we were first starting out the song, I was playing like these sort of country-sounding guitar chords that kind of had a little cool swing to it, and then we just started writing. We were thinking about when we\'re so in love, how our hearts are just open and how the other person in the relationship really has the power to break your heart. They have that power, and you\'re open and you\'re hoping nothing goes wrong. It\'s kind of like a warning to them: If you break my heart, if you don\'t do what you\'re supposed to do, yes, I will go after you, and yes, this will happen. Of course it\'s an exaggeration—we would never actually kill somebody over that. But we just wanted to voice how it\'s very important to take care of our hearts and that when we give a piece of ourselves, we want them to give a piece of themselves as well. It\'s a playful song, so we think a lot of people will have fun with that one.” **Ungodly Hour** Chloe: “I believe it was Christmas of 2018, and we knew that we wanted to start on this album. With anything, we\'re very visual, so we got a bunch of magazines, and we got like three posters we duct-taped together, and we made our mood board. There was a phrase that we found in a magazine that said \'the trouble with angels\' that really stuck out with us. We put that on the board, and we put a lot of women on there who didn\'t really have many clothes on because we wanted this album to express our sexuality. Halle\'s 20, I\'m 22. We just wanted to show that we can own our sexuality in a beautiful way as young women and it\'s okay to own that. So fast-forward a few months, and we were in the session with Disclosure. Whenever my sister and I create lyrics, sometimes we\'re inspired randomly on the day and we\'ll hear a phrase or something. I forgot what I was doing or what I was watching, but I heard the phrase \'ungodly hour\' and I wrote it in my notes really quick. So when we were all in a session together, we were putting our minds together, like, what can we say with that? And we came up with the phrase \'Love me at the ungodly hour.\' Love me at my worst. Love me when I\'m not the best version of myself. And the song kind of wrote itself really fast. It\'s about being in a situationship with someone who isn\'t ready to fully commit or settle down with you, but the connection is there, the chemistry is there, it\'s so electric. But being the woman, you know your self-worth and you know what you won\'t accept. So it\'s like, if you want all of me, then you need to come correct. And I love how simple and groovy the beat feels, and how the vocals kind of just rock on top of it. It feels so vibey.” **Busy Boy** Halle: “So ‘Busy Boy’ is another very playful love song. The inspiration for it basically came from our experiences, kiki-ing with our girls, when we have those moments where we\'re all gossiping and talking about what\'s going on in our lives. This one dude comes up, and we all know him because he is so fine and he\'s tried to holler at all of us. It was such a fun story to ride off of, because we have had those moments where—\'cause we\'re friends with a lot of beautiful black girls, and we\'re all doing our thing, and the same guy who is really successful or cute will hop around trying to get at each of us. So that was really funny to talk about, and also to talk about the bonding of sisterhood, of just saying all this stuff about this guy to make ourselves feel better. I mean, because at the end of the day, we have to remind ourselves that even though you may be cute, even though you may be trying to get my attention, I know that you\'re just a busy boy, and I\'m going to keep it moving.” **Overwhelmed** Chloe: “Halle and I really wanted to have interludes on this album, and we were kind of going through all of the projects and files that were on my hard drive listening on our speakers in our studio. This came up and we were like, wow. The lyrics really resonated with us, and we forgot we even wrote it. We went and reopened the project and laid down so many more harmonies on top of it. We just wanted it to kind of feel like that breath in the album, because there\'s so many times when you feel overwhelmed and sometimes you\'re even scared to admit it because you don\'t want to come off as weak or seeming like you can\'t do something, but we\'re all human. There have been so many times when Halle and I feel overwhelmed, and I\'ll play this song and feel so much better. It\'s okay to just lay in that and not feel pressured to know what\'s next and just kind of accept, and once you accept it, then you could start moving forward and planning ahead. But we all have those moments where we kind of just need to admit it and just live in it.” **Lonely** Halle: “This song is so very important to us. We did this with Scott Storch, and it ended up just kind of writing itself. I think one friend that we had in particular was kind of going through something in their life, and sometimes, a lot of the situations that we\'re around we take inspiration from to write about. We were also feeling just stuck in a way, and we wanted to write something that would uplift whoever it was out there who felt the same way we did, whether it was just being lonely and knowing that it\'s okay to be alone. And when you are alone, owning how beautiful you are and knowing that it\'s okay to be by yourself. We kind of just wrote the story that way, thinking about us alone in our apartment and what we do, what we think when we\'re in our room, and what they think when they go home. I mean, what is everybody thinking about in all of this? When people are waiting by the phone, waiting for somebody to call them, and the call never comes—you don\'t have to let that discourage you. At the end of the day, you are a beautiful soul inside and out, and as long as you\'re okay with loving yourself wholeheartedly, then you can be whoever you want to be, and you can thrive.” **Don\'t Make It Harder on Me** Chloe: “We wrote this with our good friend Nasri and this amazing producer Gitty, and we were all in the studio, and I believe Halle really inspired this song. She was going through a situation where she was involved with someone, and there was also someone else trying to get her attention, and we kind of just painted that story through the lyrics: You\'re in this wonderful relationship, but there\'s this guy who just keeps getting your attention, and you don\'t want to be tempted, you want to be faithful. And it\'s like, \'Look, you had your chance with me. Don\'t come around now that I\'m taken. Don\'t make it harder on me.\' I love it because it feels so old-school. We wanted the background to feel so nostalgic. Afterwards, we added actual strings on the record. It just feels so good—every time I listen to it, I just feel really light and free and happy.” **Wonder What She Thinks of Me** Halle: “I was really inspired for this song because of a story that was kind of happening in my life. I mean, the themes of \'Don\'t Make It Harder on Me\' and this song as well are kind of hand in hand. There was this amazing guy who\'s so sweet, and it just talks about this bond that you have with somebody and how this person came out of nowhere. And then all of a sudden, you kind of find yourself wanting that person, but they\'re in a situation and you\'re in a situation, and you don\'t want to seem like you\'re trying to take this girl\'s man. We spun it into this story of being the other woman—even though, just so you know, Chloe and I were never that. So we pushed that story so far, and it was really fun and exciting to talk about, because I don\'t think we had ever experienced or heard another song that was talking about the perspective of the other woman—the woman who is on the side or the girl who wishes so badly that she could be with him and is always there for him. So we flipped it into this drama-filled song, which we really feel like it\'s so exciting and so adventurous. The melodies and the lyrics and the beautiful production my sister did, it just really turned out amazing.” **ROYL** Chloe: “I love \'Rest of Your Life\' because it kind of feels like an ode to our debut album, *The Kids Are Alright*, with the anthemic backgrounds and feeling so youthful and grungy. With this song, we just wanted to wrap this album up by saying, \'It doesn\'t matter what mistakes you make, just live your life, go for it, have fun. You don\'t know when your time to leave this earth is, so just live out for the rest of your life.\' And even though we are in the ungodly hour right now, and we\'re learning ourselves through our mistakes and our imperfections, so what? That\'s what makes us who we are. Live it out.”

If 2014’s *Singles* was Future Islands’ unexpected breakthrough, its follow-up, 2017’s *The Far Field*, was a reminder to slow down. “We’d played 800 shows and then we did *Letterman*, and all of a sudden, our star was on the rise for the first time ever,” frontman Samuel T. Herring tells Apple Music. “At 30 years old, we were in the spotlight, which is kind of weird. Things just got bigger than we could control, and we essentially gave a lot of decision-making away, to make our lives easier. What we\'re trying to do now is put the load back on our own shoulders.” While *The Far Field* was made quickly in an effort to capitalize on the momentum that *Singles* had generated, the Baltimore outfit spent an entire year recording and rerecording, reworking and rewriting all of *As Long As You Are* until it felt finished. The result finds Herring, newly in love, singing about pressing political issues (a first) just as soulfully as he would matters of the heart. “It\'s funny, because I told my partner, when we first started dating, that I would never write a song about her,” he says. “I didn\'t want to screw it up, like I did all the other people that I wrote songs about. But then you find yourself in those moments: You write about your life, and what you feel. Just having that person in my life—someone who really trusted me, someone who I trusted—gave me more space and confidence to write about things that I was afraid of.” Here, he walks us through every song on the record. **Glada** “A *glada* is a type of bird in Sweden, a bird of prey with a large V-shaped tail. That song was written in the countryside in Southern Sweden, the Skåne region. A big part of Swedish life is spending time in nature—in the summertime, you\'re basically not allowed to go inside your house until it\'s time to go to sleep. The song is about the rebirth of spring, and the rebirth of feeling love again, with Julia in the countryside. And I think the bigger question in the song is the question of feeling deserving of love. When we met, I\'d given up on the idea that I\'d ever find that kind of love, the kind that makes you feel giddy—like a young love. We deserve the good feelings, and the bird is just evocative of that.” **For Sure** “I feel like our music has always been imbued with certain amounts of hope, within the darkness. It\'s the idealism of a song like ‘Light House’—which is a song about suicide—and hoping that someone will save you from yourself. People find hope in that song because it’s there. This song in particular is filled with those understandings of love and trust, and feeling free to be oneself. And being given the courage to do the things that we want to do in this world, because someone else gives us that courage.” **Born in a War** “I work completely off feeling and vibe. I don\'t really have an agenda—the world is an inspiration, especially right now. To me, gun violence in America is a huge issue. And growing up—where me and \[keyboardist\] Gerrit \[Welmers\] and \[bassist\] William \[Cashion\] grew up—everybody has guns and everybody goes hunting. And then they go to church. It\'s just a way of life. The second verse of this song is about being a man, and being told to man up, saying, ‘Why don\'t you have a gun? What\'s wrong with you?’ One of my favorite lines of this album is ‘Raised up in a town that\'s 80 proof/Shotgun shells under every roof, every jail.’ We are in that mind state, a mental jail of our own making.” **I Knew You** “This whole song is a true story. It’s one of those things written about a person that I said I would never write another song about, as an agreement—someone that\'s canon in Future Islands\' work. They pulled some crazy shit one night. And I have to write this down. I have to tell this story. ‘This has lived on record and I\'m going to end it on record,’ is how I felt. I was told that I was poison to this person, and that I ruined their life. I say it in the song: I was happy to hear these things. This person left with no closure. They left in radio silence. So this was me finally getting closure.” **City’s Face** “‘City’s Face’ was inspired by a relationship that I was in, my only relationship that I had in Baltimore. It\'s the relationship that ‘Seasons’ is about, and it\'s about somebody that really hurt me. They cheated on me a bunch and made me feel paranoid in my own city. I didn\'t deserve to be treated that way. She didn\'t deserve to be treated that way. I think I was allowing myself to be a victim, and not owning up to my own bullshit. Hating a place just because of a person is kind of crazy.” **Waking** “This one I fought with a bit. Sometimes the guys write a song that\'s so good and catchy that I don\'t think that I can do anything with it. We\'re at a point culturally, in our society, where we can\'t just sit back and not say something, or not do something. It’s as simple as helping your neighbors. That does mean something. It does mean something to say hello. It means something to reach out to people within our communities. That song is about those self-defeating feelings, and trying to get over them. And knowing how the hardest thing sometimes is just starting something, within our daily lives, to better ourselves.” **The Painter** “To me, ‘The Painter’ is about race in America, and the way that we see things and we paint things. We\'re art school kids, but I always thought that to be able to make a painting that everyone saw the same exact way was the greatest possible thing that you could do. It\'s like, ‘Why can\'t we see it the same way?’ And understanding that we fight these ideological battles, but this isn\'t something that we can debate over, when it\'s people\'s lives that we\'re talking about. So ‘The Painter’ is about red and blue, and it\'s about black and white. And it\'s about red, white, and blue, and what the hell that means. I think it\'s about people that paint it the way they want to see it, and say that they don\'t see color, but that\'s all they see. It\'s a charged song, and it\'s begging of those people to open your eyes. Because this isn\'t a painting, this is life.” **Plastic Beach** “I have had issues with my body since I was cognizant of what that meant. This song is about those struggles with self. I spent a lifetime in the mirror trying to change myself. And all those ideas of the way you love your family and who they are, and then you look at your own face. How can you hate it, when it has those bits and pieces of your own family in it? I think a lot of things were heightened through our visibility, through *Letterman* and things like that, where you can become a meme or a joke online. It\'s easy for people not to see how that might affect us. ‘Plastic Beach’ is a song that\'s a thank-you to the people who see us for who we are, who see people for who they are. And thanking the people around you, for loving you for those reasons. I\'m getting a little emotional talking about it.” **Moonlight** “It\'s very much a love song. It\'s also a love song about depression. And another song about acceptance. The line ‘So we just laid in bed all day/I couldn\'t see/I had a cloud in my arms’ is to say, ‘I was carrying a rain cloud.’ This gray thing—it’s my depression. ‘But if I asked you/Would you say it\'s only rain?’ Which is to say, it doesn\'t matter how you feel, I still love you. You don\'t have to apologize for those feelings, I still love you.” **Thrill** “The setting of this song is Greenville, North Carolina, where some of us went to college. And it\'s about feeling completely alone in Greenville. It\'s about drug addiction. It\'s about alcohol abuse. It’s about being drunk at the bar, being refused drinks with no friends around. It\'s about being drunk on the way to the bar. It\'s about being drunk on the way home from the bar. And it\'s about that isolation, and that anger, and that fear of feeling different in this place. Greenville is a quintessential college town, and in a big way, it\'s a quintessential Southern town. There\'s definitely issues of race there. On the north side of town, there’s the Tar River, which is famous for flooding. This song is about this diluted, dirty river that\'s been used for hundreds of years by Americans. It’s about all of that stuff spilling over into the river, spilling over into us, our American experience, and that question of how will we feel when this water rushes over us—will we sink or swim in it?” **Hit the Coast** “I had this old tabletop desk recorder that we used to record jam sessions and pratice tapes on, back in 2009 or 2011. It’s the actual deck that we sampled here. I played a loop through the vocal mic, recorded that, and then we laced it in. If you listen back, right when I say that line, ‘Pressing play on this old tape was a bad move/Reduced to hiss/Some record I love/Some record I\'ve missed,’ you\'ll hear it. And then the song ends with me pushing stop on the tape—just that big *p’chunk*. Sometimes I think a record label will usually tell you to start big, go with your hit, go with your single for the first song, and end things more somber. And we just wanted to flip it on its head. It made sense to end on this kind of triumphant note.”

For years, Katy Perry dealt with her depression by writing hit songs. “It was like, ‘You break up with me? I’ll show you. Here’s a No. 1,’” she tells Apple Music. But after the release of her 2017 album *Witness*, which struggled to resonate with fans and critics, her method fell apart. Feeling creatively lost and emotionally disconnected, the world’s biggest pop star finally got help. It was an adjustment. “I was like, ‘I’m Katy Perry. I wrote “Firework.” I’m on medication. This is fucked up,’” she said. The next three years were wholly transformative. With the support of her fiancé, actor Orlando Bloom, Perry embarked on a psychological, spiritual, and emotional journey in which she learned how to be kinder to herself and take control of her mental health. She chronicles that progress on her joyous and confessional sixth album *Smile*, which often feels like a message of hope to her younger self. Through giddy pop beats and breathy balladry, she details some of the life lessons she’s learned during her rebound: that love takes work (“Champagne Problems”), survival is persistence (“Resilient”), and failure is ultimately subjective (“Not the End of the World”). “This is a record full of hope,” she says, and you can hear the determination baked into these songs; even the most anguished numbers (“Teary Eyes”) are designed to be danced to. The project’s most triumphant moment is easily “Daisies,” which addresses the fair-weather public that “counted her out” when she was down. “They said I’m going nowhere/Tried to count me out/Took those sticks and stones/Showed ’em I could build a house,” she sings. Through that pain, Perry learned to rely on herself. It feels poetic that on the very day that *Smile* was released, the superstar gave birth to her first child, also named Daisy, and embarked on another new chapter in her life: motherhood. Now, she feels ready. “This record is a representation that I overcame \[the pain\] and got to the other side,” she says. “I’m not saying I’ll always be on this side. I could fall backwards. But at least I have this body of work that says, ‘You did it once, you can do it again.’”

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

Since her days fronting Moloko beginning in the mid-’90s, Róisín Murphy has been dancing around the edges of the club, and occasionally—for instance, on the 2012 single “Simulation” or 2015’s “Jealousy”—she has waded into the thick of the dance floor. But on *Róisín Machine*, the Irish singer-songwriter declares her unconditional love for the discotheque. Working with her longtime collaborator DJ Parrot—a Sheffield producer who once recorded primitive house music alongside Cabaret Voltaire’s Richard H. Kirk in the duo Sweet Exorcist—she summons a sound that is both classic and expansive, swirling together diverse styles and eras into an enveloping embrace of a groove. “We Got Together” invokes 1988’s Second Summer of Love in its bluesy, raving-in-a-muddy-field stomp; “Shellfish Mademoiselle” sneaks a squirrelly acid bassline under cover of Hammond-kissed R&B; “Kingdom of Ends” is part Pink Floyd, part “French Kiss.” The crisply stepping funk of “Incapable”—a dead ringer for classic Matthew Herbert, another of her onetime collaborators—is as timeless as house music gets. So are the pumping “Simulation” and “Jealousy,” which bookend the album, and which haven’t aged a day since they first burned up nightclubs as white-label 12-inches.

“This album is how I healed myself,” Sam Smith tells Apple Music. “And it sums up what I went through so perfectly.” Perhaps unsurprising for an artist who has made songs about love and loss their trademark, the singer is referring to heartbreak, which they document in granular detail on their third album *Love Goes*. There’s relatable post-split hedonism (\"Dance \[’Til You Love Someone Else\]\"), the crushing low of hearing your ex has moved on (“Another One”), and the slow journey towards self-acceptance (“Love Goes”). But if you’re expecting Smith to only explore such subjects via balladry: don’t. This is an album full of life-affirming pop, as well as disco, acoustic guitars, and cinematic strings. This is, too, an album that the singer made us wait for. Originally titled *To Die For* and slated for release in early 2020, it was delayed—then reworked—to become *Love Goes*, as Smith took stock during 2020’s global lockdown. “When everything stopped, it made me realize the album wasn’t finished, in a weird way,” they say. “And that the title felt really inappropriate. There was talk of me not releasing anything at all and just going back to the drawing board. But the last two years for me as a writer and a singer were so beautiful and freeing. And I wanted to share that with people.” The finished product, says Smith, is the record they are most proud of so far—and the album on which they feel the most free. “I felt at one point that I was going to be trapped onstage wearing a suit and singing ballads for the rest of my life,” they say. “When I look back at this album, it reminds me of the courage it took. To this day, there’s a music industry of people that wants me to do a certain thing, to abide by the rules. The risks that I took and the stress that it caused for me to truly be myself and express myself in a queer way was really difficult. I’m proud of myself for doing that.” Read on as Smith candidly walks us through *Love Goes*. **Young** “‘Young’ is really sad. I wrote it with \[British producer and songwriter\] Steve Mac, and the lyrics were a commentary on fame and the position I’m in. I became well-known when I was 21. After *In the Lonely Hour*, there was this constant feeling of wanting to be normal and do normal things, and feeling like I can\'t because of the pressure on me. All I wanted to do was smoke a joint, have a drink, go out, kiss loads of boys and have one-night stands—just be young. And I felt like I had that right taken away from me because when I do it, people are watching and judging me. I wanted to start the album with this song because it was a declaration. But it was also saying, ’This isn\'t going to be an album of only uptempo pop. I\'m still the person who was writing those sad love songs.’” **Diamonds** “When I wrote ‘Diamonds’—in 2019 in London—I was in the studio and I was pretending to be a really rich woman whose husband had left her and taken all her things. She’s just in this wedding dress in the middle of a huge mansion. Think Moira Rose of *Schitt’s Creek*. This wasn’t even going to be on the album, but I just kept returning to it in quarantine. The moment I knew this song was something was when I played it to my mum and she freaked out. I call it a sexy exorcism.” **Another One** “My favorite song I’ve ever done. The day I wrote it in LA, I had that moment we’ve all been through: hearing through the grapevine that someone you\'ve been with has met someone else. I was so sad. We were just dancing and drinking, and it was such a healing moment. We gave the song to Guy \[Lawrence\] from Disclosure, who made the ending really trance-y. It just captures the emotion that I was feeling that day perfectly.” **My Oasis (feat. Burna Boy)** “I can’t believe Burna Boy said yes to this—I’m still in shock about it, to be honest. I wrote this song during lockdown and sent it to him, because I heard him on it immediately. It’s more about sex, finding someone that you\'re enjoying and finding sex during a dry period. When I wrote it, it was really organic. It was the lockdown mood I was in that day. Being single in lockdown? It\'s tough!” **So Serious** “The lyrics in this song are some of the deepest on this album. It’s talking about my mental health and my depression. About how you think everything\'s okay and then suddenly you\'re crying in the street and asking yourself, ‘Why am I so serious? Why am I so dark? Why do I get so down?’ This song is saying, ‘I\'m beating myself up. Is anyone else beating themselves up?’ Because what you need when you\'re sad is you need to know that other people are in it with you. I wrote this song thinking that one day me and my fans can all sing that together and sing about being miserable in a really playful way. It\'s a cute little pop song.” **Dance (’Til You Love Someone Else)** “This is like ‘Dancing With a Stranger’ part two. If on ‘Dancing With a Stranger’ I\'m sexy, heartbroken, and dancing with a stranger feeling sad, on this one I\'m going out and I need to find someone to heal that feeling. I need to mask the heartbreak immediately with someone else. It\'s more aggressive, darker, and more desperate. There’s angst to this song and it’s a bit more hedonistic.” **For the Lover That I Lost** “This could be musical theater, to be quite honest. But I thought after ‘Dance (’Til You Love Someone Else),’ which is so dramatic, I wanted to shift the album. It would still be dramatic, but in a ballad way. \[Norwegian LA-based production team\] Stargate and I wrote this, and we gave it to Céline Dion, who had it on her 2019 album *Courage*. But just to try it, I went into the studio and sang it again. It’s like it\'s not even my song and more like I’m covering Céline\'s song. But it’s my ode to her, because she has been a huge part of the last few years for me. The day I went through my breakup, I went for a long walk in a forest and I just went into the middle of it, where no one could see me, and listened to ‘It\'s All Coming Back to Me Now.’ I just cried my eyes out. So I had to have a nod to Céline on this album.” **Breaking Hearts** “This is a light song and a really sad song. We wrote it slow and then it became bouncier. But I didn\'t want this to reach the stars. I didn\'t want it to go anywhere. It’s me being a bitch and saying, ‘Fuck you.’ It’s going through an angry moment of heartbreak.” **Forgive Myself** “It doesn\'t get sadder on the record than this song. This was the freshest one after my breakup. Two people can\'t collide into one, they have to grow alongside each other. ‘Forgive Myself’ was the beginning of me understanding that and saying, ‘Okay, for me to feel better, I\'m going to have to forgive myself for all the things I’ve done in that relationship, and for all the things that I\'ve ever done in relationships that were bad. And I need to work on myself to feel better.’” **Love Goes (feat. Labrinth)** “When Labrinth and I were talking about this song, it was about the journey of love and the journey of heartbreak. In my head—and he probably won’t be happy with me saying this—Labrinth is the boyfriend or the ex. He’s saying, ‘Look, we both know you\'re fucked up. That\'s why this is isn\'t working.’ And I’m replying, ‘No, *you\'re* fucked up. *That\'s* why this isn\'t working.’ The ending is big, and when the beat comes in, you can dance to it. It\'s almost like coming home to yourself. If there was one musical snippet that I could take to describe the last three years, it would just be that piece of music at the end. Because I felt free.” **Kids Again** “This song is completely different to everything else on the album. ‘Kids Again’ is the moment when you sit and look back at everything. I made the record and I was ready to move on to album four, and was doing just that. But it\'s also my piece to the relationship. It\'s saying, ‘I still miss you sometimes, but we were kids.’ And it\'s the other side of ‘Young.’ It was like a bookend for me. This song is also starting to lean into a more stripped-back, soulful musicality that I want to get into on the next record. I want to step away a little bit from electronic music and get back to some rootsy queer soul. I like to keep people on their toes.” **Dancing With a Stranger (with Normani)** “I wrote this on tour and was just playing around. I was genuinely dancing with strangers, and I wrote about this one guy I met who was just such a lovely man. It was the first time after ‘Promises’ that I got into the studio and thought, ‘I can write some pop songs now and have a little bit of fun with this.’ Vocally, too, it was so nice just singing with ease and not belting. The Normani featuring happened so beautifully. The day I wrote this song, she was downstairs having a meeting. I was like, ‘She would smash this.’ So she came upstairs and listened to it and she cut it there and then. It was really special. I had no idea it would do what it\'s done. It\'s been one of my biggest-ever songs.” **How Do You Sleep?** “We wanted to nod towards George Michael in a 2019 way (because it was 2019 when we wrote it). And it was just so fun. But I remember the day after I wrote this, I played it to my sister and she hated it! It put me off it a little bit. And then I lived with it for a bit and then we all just started to fall in love with it.” **To Die For** “There’s a street in LA called Abbot Kinney, which is very bougie. I got lavender ice cream there one Sunday and was walking around. Everyone around me was so happy, but I was not feeling good. Sometimes, you just get fed up with being single. It\'s such a nice feeling to be in love and to go through life having a partner by your side. And I thought that we captured that in a song. I will always love this one.” **I\'m Ready (with Demi Lovato)** “This song is nuts. I don\'t even know what it is, and I\'m not sure if I love it or I hate it. Either way, it’s an ode to a trashy queer club. I grew up in the countryside and then came to London. The only places I could go to be around people who were like-minded were these really awful gay bars. They play awful music. It\'s loud, it\'s intense. Your feet are sticking to the floor. There\'s loads of confused people there. Sometimes angry people, sometimes highly sexual people. Lots of drugs. I started to have this real connection to the pop songs that would play in these places, which I find beautiful now. A lot of my peers and people around me would say that music is awful. But I find it uplifting. I feel like I captured that in some way in ‘I’m Ready.’ I wanted to almost make a song that would make people squirm a bit.” **Fire on Fire** “This song was written for \[the 2018 BBC adaptation of\] *Watership Down*. And I wrote it when I was very much in love. It\'s probably one of the only love songs I\'ve written. But it\'s very dramatic. Again, I think I was trying to be Céline Dion. It was about intense passion—about two people who are fire and trying to make it work, which is a dangerous game. It was so fun to make, stepping into that musical theater side which is always going to be in me. One day I want to be in a dress in the Royal Albert Hall singing it with a huge orchestra.” **Promises** “I was called a crooner for the first six years of my career. But then, after *The Thrill of It All*, I got in the studio with Calvin Harris and Jessie Reyez. Jessie poured us both a glass of whiskey and we just started dancing around. Normally it would be like, ‘Sit down, let\'s write a song. Let\'s get into it.’ But this was like, ‘I don\'t have to take myself that seriously in the studio. This can be a fun space.’ So it was the catalyst to how I wrote this record, which was ‘Let\'s go in the studio and let\'s have a laugh. Let\'s shoot for the stars. The rule book\'s out the window now. Let\'s just enjoy ourselves.’”

A lump forms in the back of your throat at the beginning of Chris Stapleton’s exquisite fourth album, and basically hovers there until the final strum. It isn’t that there are bombshell moments about his afflictions or personal tragedies; he’s just singing about the small ways life catches him by surprise. But it’s the *way* he does it—sentimental and observant, like a misty-eyed gentle giant—that makes even his simplest songs overwhelmingly emotional to listen to. By making everyday stories feel weighty and profound—the temptation of a highway, the sting of getting older, the yearning for a better life—he teases tangled, complex emotions right up to the surface. Here, guilt, wonder, disappointment, and hope feel as clear as joy and pain. *Starting Over* traces a period of intense self-reflection. After a string of hugely successful albums and high-profile collaborations (Justin Timberlake, John Mayer), Stapleton had reached a level of fame that he wasn’t entirely comfortable with. He moved his family out of Nashville and tried to mix things up, briefly trading RCA Studio A for Muscle Shoals. In the end, the LP was recorded in both places, with added support from Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench of Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers. They helped him assemble hard-rocking stompers like “Arkansas,” about road-tripping through the Ozarks, and “Watch You Burn,” a pointed song about the 2017 mass shooting at a country music festival in Las Vegas. Among the album\'s three covers are “Old Friends” and “Worry B Gone” by Guy Clark and John Fogerty’s “Joy of My Life.” But Stapleton just hits different when he’s singing Stapleton. Maybe it’s his devastatingly specific lyrics, recalling, in “Maggie’s Song,” how the family dog placed her head on his hands before passing away (there’s that lump). Or perhaps it’s the way he makes sweeping observations about ineffable things like love and America and still manages to strike a nerve. “I’m 40 years old and it looks like the end of the rainbow/Ain’t no pot of gold,” he sings on “When I’m With You,” a slow-burning song to his wife and singing partner Morgane Stapleton. The album’s final number, a graceful farewell to Nashville, captures the way that cities inevitably let you down. “You build me up, you set me free/You tore down my memories,” he sings with the heartache of someone leaving a first love. “You’re not who you used to be/So long, Nashville, Tennessee.”

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

For six years beginning at age 12, Lennon Stella wasn’t herself. She was Maddie Conrad on the hit musical drama *Nashville*, co-starring alongside her younger sister Maisy. By 19, she released her debut EP, 2018’s *Love, Me*, a pop departure stacked with broody beats, followed closely by 2019’s delightfully deviant single “BITCH (takes one to know one).” She toured with The Chainsmokers and 5 Seconds of Summer, and experimentation allowed her the confidence to become candid on her debut album, *Three. Two. One.*, eight years into her career. “This is me releasing myself from the pressure of prior expectations and intimidations,” Stella tells Apple Music. “Three, two, one, I’m diving in and doing what feels good to myself. The album is a free fall.” Her statement piece is stacked with dark dance-club breakup anthems for the end of the world, fueled by invigorating indie pop (“Kissing Other People”), dystopic disco influences (“Fear of Being Alone”), a fluid Potemkin village reference (“Pretty Boy”), and a brilliant interpolation of the Donna Lewis classic “I Love You Always Forever” (“Save Us”). “Ultimately, I wanted \[this album\] to be an honest introduction, true to who I am as a human being,” she explains. “And hopefully people will draw parallels to their own lives.” Below, she breaks down each track on her debut album. **Much Too Much** “This song I wrote when I was in what felt like this very intense, very deep relationship. Looking back now, it was so much more surface. I was so concerned about letting it go, because I had this fear of, like, ‘Well, what about later when we think that we\'re supposed to rekindle?’ So this is that fear-based concept: of being scared of letting go of something because you think, \'What if later on I\'m like, it was perfect, and now it\'s not?\'” **Kissing Other People** “I did a writing camp in Cabo \[Mexico\] with my favorite writers and producers. This song came together the first night we got there. All of us went to a little club, and on our way back at like 3:00 in the morning, \[songwriter\] Caroline \[Ailin\] was asking me about boys. I was talking to her casually and said, ‘I don’t feel weird anymore when I kiss people... It feels normal. I don’t feel guilty for it.’ She took that into her session the next day.” **Games** “This one is about falling into this trap—and I’ve fallen into it so many times—where \[dating\] is literally just a game. He’ll wait two hours to text me, and then I’ll wait two and a half because I have to prove that I care less than he does. It’s so normal in our generation, and it’s not about treating each other properly and respectfully and with love. It’s just insecurities.” **Fear of Being Alone** “This song, production-wise, is definitely one of my favorites, if not my favorite. Malay produced it; he beautifully meshes all the sounds that I love. There’s a darkness...I really just wanted some of that. It’s a different feeling than the rest of the album.” **Pretty Boy** “‘Pretty Boy’ was also written in Cabo. We were inspired by DJ duo The Blaze—their synth sounds and drum sounds are so watery and unique. I\'ve played this song live and people sometimes take that away that it\'s just about a pretty boy. The thing is, he really was and is so much deeper than that, and I was trying to dig \[beyond\] this shield.” **Golf on TV (feat. JP Saxe)** “We were talking about monogamy in general and how rare it feels, and how normal and frequent open relationships have become, and JP said, ‘I just don’t get how people do that. But some people watch golf on TV, and I don’t get that either.’ We were like, ‘That’s such a cool song title,’ so we wrote about that.” **Older Than I Am** “I\'ve never felt more connected to a song, and it\'s so weird because I didn\'t write it. It\'s one of those things where I feel like it\'s so close to me that I don\'t even know that I would have been able to write it. When I heard this song for the first time, I was literally sobbing uncontrollably, and I was very quick to put my vocal on it and dive in and make it feel even more like myself.” **Bend Over Backwards** “This one I wrote in LA. It’s about wanting to not completely mold into what other people want of you. It’s me saying, ‘I can compromise with you and I\'m down to be polite and not overstep, but I\'m also not going to bend over backwards and completely lose my initial vision over something that you want.’ It doesn’t have to be creatively. It can be in relationships, too.” **Jealous** “I started writing this one with FINNEAS. He\'s so creative and so musical; I was refreshed and inspired. The song started with the idea of you moving on faster than somebody else. It\'s a lighthearted take on \'I\'m not trying to make you jealous, I\'m just moving on and I\'m feeling good, and it\'s not an intentional, calculated thing to hurt you.\'” **Since I Was a Kid** “It\'s really about growing up and holding on to the way that I was, trying not to change the moral openheartedness that my parents ingrained in me. Life makes you jaded, and \[this is me\] steering away from that and trying to continue to look at things through rose-colored glasses.” **Weakness (Huey Lewis) (feat. Maisy Stella)** “With Maisy, all that we did together, it\'s forever going to be such a massive part of my life. I\'m such a fan of her as an artist, and I really wanted her to be a part of my debut album. This song was very much written about her and for her.” **Save Us** “This one, again, is about Maisy—the idea of no matter what, no matter where you go, no matter how fast you get there, I\'ll always be there with you.” **Goodnight** “This song has a feeling of not wanting something to end—wanting it to just be good night so that you can wake up to it in the morning, rather than it being goodbye, because then obviously it\'s gone. It’s hopeful.”

Who could’ve seen them coming—a K-pop girl group reaching total global ubiquity and instantaneous virality without a full-length album to their name? And yet BLACKPINK has been announcing their plans for world domination since their first single, 2016’s “Boombayah,” when rapper Jennie Kim opened the song with the quartet’s now-illustrious slogan, “BLACKPINK in your area!” It was not a request or a demand—it was a declaration of arrival. Jennie, Lisa (Lalisa Manoban), Rosé (Chae-young Park), and Jisoo (Ji-soo Kim) have been meticulously preparing for this moment since meeting as trainees in 2011: the release of their long-awaited debut LP, appropriately titled *THE ALBUM*. (If most new artists go the eponymous route for their definitive work, BLACKPINK has taken it a step further, claiming the format as a whole.) From their A-list collaborations (2018’s “Kiss and Make Up” with Dua Lipa, 2020’s “Sour Candy” with Lady Gaga) to their world-record-breaking hits “DDU-DU DDU-DU” and “Kill This Love,” BLACKPINK has worked hard with their longtime producer, YG Entertainment’s Teddy Park, to establish their sonic signatures: big, brassy production; sprightly raps; stacked multilingual harmonies; and genre-ambivalent transitions. On *THE ALBUM*, they’ve perfected the equation, offering saccharine girl-crush confections (“Ice Cream” with Selena Gomez, cowritten by Ariana Grande and Victoria Monét—their “pink” side) and fierce, no-nonsense empowerment messaging (“Pretty Savage”—their “black”) in equal measure. Across eight tracks, *THE ALBUM* is expansive. “Bet You Wanna,” cowritten by OneRepublic’s Ryan Tedder and BTS songwriter Melanie Joy Fontana, is BLACKPINK’s first collaboration with a rapper, the preeminent Cardi B. “Lovesick Girls” echoes big, loud, and feminist Icona Pop-esque dance music, and “Love to Hate Me” is Y2K-era R&B pop worship. Even *THE ALBUM*’s closer “You Never Know” traverses unexpected territory: an anti-judgment anthem, a ballad for their beloved Blinks. *How you like that?*

When Niall Horan became the third member of One Direction to release a solo album (2017’s *Flicker*), the Irishman revealed a refreshingly low-key sound bathed in acoustic guitars and Americana melodies. For his second effort, Horan emerges from his comfort zone and cuts loose musically. See the album’s first single “Nice to Meet Ya”—an unapologetic soft-rock anthem charting the thrill of meeting someone new on a night out, featuring handclaps, rolling piano, and the kind of swagger usually reserved for his associate Harry Styles. Elsewhere on an album exploring heartbreak in all its majesty (written following his own public breakup), Horan dissects a relationship’s demise on the string-laden tearjerker “Put a Little Love on Me,” documents moving on with someone else (“Arms of a Stranger”), and commends always being there for a loved one (the Sheeran-esque “No Judgement”). Horan may not have healed his heart by “Still,” the album’s moving outro (“I’m still in love with you/Oh, we will be all right”), but this former boy-band member has never sounded so good on his own.

When Niall Horan became the third member of One Direction to release a solo album (2017’s Flicker), the Irishman revealed a refreshingly low-key sound bathed in acoustic guitars and Americana melodies. For his second effort, Horan emerges from his comfort zone and cuts loose musically. See the album’s first single “Nice to Meet Ya”—an unapologetic soft-rock anthem charting the thrill of meeting someone new on a night out, featuring handclaps, rolling piano, and the kind of swagger usually reserved for his associate Harry Styles. Elsewhere on an album exploring heartbreak in all its majesty (written following his own public breakup), Horan dissects a relationship’s demise on the string-laden tearjerker “Put a Little Love on Me,” documents moving on with someone else (“Arms of a Stranger”), and commends always being there for a loved one (the Sheeran-esque “No Judgement”). Horan may not have healed his heart by “Still,” the album’s moving outro (“I’m still in love with you/Oh, we will be all right”), but this former boy-band member has never sounded so good on his own.

“It was about halfway through this process that I realized,” Rina Sawayama tells Apple Music, “that this album is definitely about family.” While it’s a deeply personal, genre-fluid exploration, the Japanese British artist is frank about drawing on collaborative hands to flesh out her full kaleidoscopic vision. “If I was stuck, I’d always reach out to songwriter friends and say, ‘Hey, can you help me with this melody or this part of the song?’” she says. “Adam Hann from The 1975, for example, helped rerecord a lot of guitar for us, which was insane.” Born in Niigata in northwestern Japan before her family moved to London when she was five, Sawayama graduated from Cambridge with a degree in politics, psychology, and sociology and balanced a fledgling music career’s uncertainty with the insurance of professional modeling. The leftfield pop on her 2017 mini-album *RINA* offered significant promise, but this debut album is a Catherine wheel of influences (including, oddly thrillingly, nu metal), dispatched by a pop rebel looking to take us into her future. “My benchmark is if you took away all the production and you’re left with just the melody, does it still sound pop?” she says. “The gag we have is that it’ll be a while until I start playing stadiums. But I want to put that out into the universe. It’s going to happen one day.” Listen to her debut album to see why we feel that confidence is not misplaced—and read’s Rina’s track-by-track guide. **Dynasty** “I think thematically and lyrically it makes sense to start off with this. I guess I come from a bit of an academic background, so I always approach things like a dissertation. The title of the essay would be ‘Won\'t you break the chain with me?’ It\'s about intergenerational pain, and I\'m asking the listener to figure out this whole world with me. It\'s an invitation. I\'d say ‘Dynasty’ is one of the craziest in terms of production. I think we had 250 tracks in Logic at one point.” **XS** “I wrote this with Nate Campany, Kyle Shearer, and Chris Lyon, who are super pop writers. It was the first session we ever did together in LA. They were noodling around with guitar riffs and I was like, ‘I want to write something that\'s really abrasive, but also pop that freaks you out.’ It\'s the good amount of jarring, the good side of jarring that it wakes you up a little bit every four bars or whatever. I told them, \'I really love N.E.R.D and I just want to hear those guitars.’” **STFU!** “I wanted to shock people because I\'d been away for a while. The song before this was \[2018 single\] \'Flicker,\' and that\'s just so happy and empowering in a different way. I wanted to wake people up a little bit. It\'s really fun to play with people\'s emotions, but if fundamentally the core of the song again is pop, then people get it, and a lot of people did here. I was relieved.” **Comme Des Garçons (Like the Boys)** \"It\'s one of my favorite basslines. It was with \[LA producers and singer-songwriters\] Bram Inscore and Nicole Morier, who\'s done a lot of stuff with Britney. I think this was our second session together. I came into it and said, \'Yeah, I think I want to write about toxic masculinity.\' Then Nicole was like, ‘Oh my god, that\'s so funny, because I was just thinking about Beto O\'Rourke and how he\'d lost the primary in Texas, but still said, essentially, \'I was born to win it, so it’s fine.’” **Akasaka Sad** “This was one of the songs that I wrote alone. It is personal, but I always try and remove my ego and try to think of the end result, which is the song. There\'s no point fighting over whether it\'s 100% authentically personal. I think there\'s ways to tell stories in songs that is personal, but also general. *RINA* was just me writing lyrics and melody and then \[UK producer\] Clarence Clarity producing. This record was the first time that I\'d gone in with songwriters. Honestly, up until then I was like, \'So what do they actually do? I don\'t understand what they would do in a session.\' I didn\'t understand how they could help, but it\'s only made my lyrics better and my melodies better.” **Paradisin’** “I wanted to write a theme song for a TV show. Like if my life, my teenage years, was like a TV show, then what would be the soundtrack, the opening credits? It really reminded me of *Ferris Bueller\'s Day Off* and that kind of fast BPM you’d get in the ’80s. I think it\'s at 130 or 140 BPM. I was really wild when I was a teenager, and that sense of adventure comes from a production like that. There\'s a bit in the song where my mum\'s telling me off, but that\'s actually my voice. I realized that if I pitched my voice down, I sound exactly like my mum.” **Love Me 4 Me** “For me, this was a message to myself. I was feeling so under-confident with my work and everything. I think on the first listen it just sounds like trying to get a lover to love you, but it\'s not at all. Everything is said to the mirror. That\'s why the spoken bit at the beginning and after the middle eight is like: \'If you can\'t love yourself, how are you going to love somebody else?\' That\'s a RuPaul quote, so it makes me really happy, but it\'s so true. I think that\'s very fundamental when being in a relationship—you\'ve got to love yourself first. I think self-love is really hard, and that\'s the overall thing about this record: It\'s about trying to find self-love within all the complications, whether it\'s identity or sexuality. I think it\'s the purest, happiest on the record. It’s like that New Jack Swing-style production, but originally it had like an \'80s sound. That didn\'t work with the rest of the record, so we went back and reproduced it.” **Bad Friend** “I think everyone\'s been a bad friend at some point, and I wanted to write a very pure song about it. Before I went in to write that, I\'d just seen an old friend. She\'s had a baby. I\'d seen that on Facebook, and I hadn\'t been there for it at all, so I was like, ‘What!’ We fell out, basically. In the song, in the first verse, we talk about Japan and the mad, fun group trip we went on. The vocoder in the chorus sort of reflects just the emptiness you feel, almost like you\'ve been let go off a rollercoaster. I do have a tendency to fall head-first into new relationships, romantic relationships, and leave my friends a little bit. She\'s been through three of my relationships like a rock. Now I realize that she just felt completely left behind. I\'m going to send it to her before it comes out. We\'re now in touch, so it\'s good.” **F\*\*k This World (Interlude)** “Initially, this song was longer, but I feel like it just tells the story already. Sometimes a song doesn\'t need that full structure. I wanted it to feel like I\'m dissociating from what\'s happening on Earth and floating in space and looking at the world from above. Then the song ends with a radio transmission and then I get pulled right back down to Earth, and obviously a stadium rock stage, which is…” **Who’s Gonna Save U Now?** “When \[UK producer and songwriter\] Rich Cooper, \[UK songwriter\] Johnny Latimer, and I first wrote this, it was like a \'90s Britney song. It wasn\'t originally stadium rock. Then I watched \[2018’s\] *A Star Is Born* and *Bohemian Rhapsody* in the same week. In *A Star Is Born*, there\'s that first scene where he\'s in front of tens of thousands of people, but it\'s very loaded. He comes off stage and he doesn\'t know who he is. The stage means a lot in movies. For Freddie Mercury too: Despite any troubles, he was truly himself when he was onstage. I felt the stage was an interesting metaphor for not just redemption, but that arc of storytelling. Even when I was getting bullied at school, I never thought, \'Oh, I\'ll do the same back to them.\' I just felt: \'I\'m going to become successful so that you guys rethink your ways.\' For me, this song is the whole redemption stadium rock moment. I\'ve never wanted revenge on people.” **Tokyo Love Hotel** “I\'d just come back from a trip to Japan and witnessed these tourists yelling in the street. They were so loud and obnoxious, and Japan\'s just not that kind of country. I was thinking about the \[2021\] Olympics. Like, \'Oh god, the people who are going to come and think it\'s like Disneyland and just trash the place.\' Japanese people are so polite and respectful, and I feel that culture in me. There are places in Japan called love hotels, where people just go to have sex. You can book the room to simply have sex. I felt like these tourists were treating Japan as a country or Tokyo as a city in that way. They just come and have casual sex in it, and then they leave. They’ll say, ‘That was so amazing, I love Tokyo,\' but they don’t give a shit about the people or don\'t know anything about the people and how difficult it is to grow up there. Then at the end of each verse, I say, \'Oh, but this is just another song about Tokyo,\' referring back to my trip that I had in \'Bad Friend\' where I was that tourist and I was going crazy. It\'s my struggle with feeling like an outsider in Japan, but also feeling like I\'m really part of it. I look the same as everyone else, but feel like an outsider, still.” **Chosen Family** “I wrote this thinking about my chosen family, which is my LGBTQ sisters and brothers. I mean, at university, and at certain points in my life where I\'ve been having a hard time, the LGBTQ community has always been there for me. The concept of chosen family has been long-standing in the queer community because a lot of people get kicked out of their homes and get ostracized from their family for coming out or just living true to themselves. I wanted to write a song literally for them, and it\'s just a message and this idea of a safe space—an actual physical space.” **Snakeskin** “This has a Beethoven sample \[Piano Sonata No. 8 in C Minor, Op. 13 ‘Pathétique’\]. It’s a song that my mum used to play on the piano. It’s the only song I remember her playing, and it only made sense to end with that. I wanted it to end with her voice, and that\'s her voice, that little more crackle of the end. The metaphor of ‘Snakeskin’ is a handbag, really. A snakeskin handbag that people commercialize, consume, and use as they want. At the end my mum says in Japanese, ‘I\'ve realized that now I want to see who I want to see, do what I want to do, be who I want to be.’ I interviewed her about how it felt to turn 60 on her birthday, after having been through everything she’s gone through. For her to say that…I just needed to finish the record on that note.”

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

“This music actually healed me.” That’s the hopeful message Lady Gaga brings with her as she emerges from something of a career detour—having mostly abandoned dance pop in favor of her 2016 album *Joanne*’s more stripped-back sound and the intimate singer-songwriter fare of 2018’s *A Star Is Born*. She returns with *Chromatica*, a concept album about an Oz-like virtual world of colors—produced by BloodPop®, who also worked on *Joanne*—and it’s a return to form for the disco diva. “I’m making a dance record again,” Gaga tells Apple Music, “and this dance floor, it’s mine, and I earned it.” As with many artists, music is a form of therapy for Gaga, helping her exorcise the demons of past family traumas. But it wasn’t until she could embrace her own struggles—with mental health, addiction and recovery, the trauma of sexual assault—that she felt free enough to start dancing again. “All that stuff that I went through, I don’t have to feel pain about it anymore. It can just be a part of me, and I can keep going.” And that’s the freedom she wants her fans to experience—even if it will be a while before most of them can enjoy the new album in a club setting. “I can’t wait to dance with people to this music,” says Gaga. But until then, she hopes they’ll find a little therapy in the music, like she did. “It turns out if you believe in yourself, sometimes you’re good enough. I would love for people that listen to this record to feel and hear that.” Below, Lady Gaga walks us through some of the key tracks on *Chromatica* and explains the stories behind them. **Chromatica I** “The beginning of the album symbolizes for me the beginning of my journey to healing. It goes right into this grave string arrangement, where you feel this pending doom that is what happens if I face all the things that scare me. That string arrangement is setting the stage for a more cinematic experience with this world that is how I make sense of things.” **Alice** “I had some dark conversations with BloodPop® about how I felt about life. ‘I’m in the hole, I’m falling down/So down, down/My name isn’t Alice, but I’ll keep looking for Wonderland.’ So it’s this weird experience where I’m going, ‘I’m not sure I’m going to make it, but I’m going to try.’ And that’s where the album really begins.” **Stupid Love** “In the ‘Stupid Love’ video, red and blue are fighting. It could decidedly be a political commentary. And it’s very divisive. The way that I see the world is that we are divided, and that it creates a tense environment that is very extremist. And it’s part of my vision of Chromatica, which is to say that this is not dystopian, and it’s not utopian. This is just how I make sense of things. And I wish that to be a message that I can translate to other people.” **Rain on Me (With Ariana Grande)** “When we were vocally producing her, I was sitting at the console and I said to her, ‘Everything that you care about while you sing, I want you to forget it and just sing. And by the way, while you’re doing that, I’m going to dance in front of you,’ because we had this huge, big window. And she was like, ‘Oh my god, I can’t. I don’t know.’ And then she started to do things with her voice that were different. And it was the joy of two artists going, ‘I see you.’ Humans do this. We all do things to make ourselves feel safe, and I always challenge artists when I work with them, I go, ‘Make it super fucking unsafe and then do it again.’” **Free Woman** “I was sexually assaulted by a music producer. It’s compounded all of my feelings about life, feelings about the world, feelings about the industry, what I had to compromise and go through to get to where I am. And I had to put it there. And when I was able to finally celebrate it, I said, ‘You know what? I’m not nothing without a steady hand. I’m not nothing unless I know I can. I’m still something if I don’t got a man, I’m a free woman.’ It’s me going, ‘I no longer am going to define myself as a survivor, or a victim of sexual assault. I just am a person that is free, who went through some fucked-up shit.’” **911** “It’s about an antipsychotic that I take. And it’s because I can’t always control things that my brain does. I know that. And I have to take medication to stop the process that occurs. ‘Keep my dolls inside diamond boxes/Save it till I know I’m going to drop this front I’ve built around me/Oasis, paradise is in my hands/Holding on so tight to this status/It’s not real, but I’ll try to grab it/Keep myself in beautiful places, paradise is in my hands.’” **Sine From Above (With Elton John)** “S-I-N-E, because it’s a sound wave. That sound, sine, from above is what healed me to be able to dance my way out of this album. ‘I heard one sine from above/I heard one sine from above/Then the signal split into the sound created stars like me and you/Before there was love, there was silence/I heard one sine and it healed my heart, heard a sine.’ That was later in the recording process that I actually was like, ‘And now let me pay tribute to the very thing that has revived me, and that is music.’”

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

Kesha’s third album, 2017’s *Rainbow*, came with more baggage than any pop album should be asked to carry. Her first project since her high-profile lawsuit against former collaborator Dr. Luke and its subsequent legal and label entanglements, it was heralded on arrival as a bold and cathartic statement of intent, but wasn’t necessarily the good-time dance-pop she’d made her name on. Three years later, the 15 cheeky, genre-hopping songs that make up *High Road* are about—and the results of—having a lot of that weight lifted. “I just tried to make it as low-pressure as possible because I feel like my whole career has been this race against time,” she tells Apple Music. “And on this album, I didn\'t know exactly what I wanted to make—exactly what genre, exactly what sound—and I wanted to not put a time on it and just see what would happen if I allowed that for myself.” Here Kesha talks through the inspiration behind a few of her favorite *High Road* tracks. **Tonight** “When I first started making the record, I wasn\'t so sure how honest I could be about who I am and where I\'m at in my life. I didn\'t want to take away from or minimize what I\'ve been through by coming out with songs that are about me going out and having fun. And it took me a little bit of time to really come to terms with the fact that I don\'t owe it to anybody to be eternally miserable. It\'s kind of a sound-fuckery, because you think it\'s going to be a ballad and then it goes into me doing my shit-talking—kind of a quintessential off-of-my-first-record thing that I purposefully left off of *Rainbow*. This is a record for my fans, because they have been there for me through all of the bullshit I\'ve gone through and I just wanted them to know I\'m back and I\'m ready to have a fucking amazing night and tonight\'s the night to do that. That\'s what I wanted to open the record with.” **Resentment (feat. Brian Wilson & Sturgill Simpson)** “Having Sturgill on it and having Brian on it and having \[LA singer-songwriter\] Wrabel on this, it still doesn\'t really feel real. How did that come about? I have no fucking idea. God was on my side this time, I guess, or whoever you want to call it, whatever you believe in. It was just a dream list for me, and I never thought in a million years it would actually all come together so beautifully the way it did. I think *Pet Sounds* is one of the most influential records ever made. I mean, it\'s changed pop music forever, and Brian Wilson has always been at the top of my dream list of collaborators. I wasn\'t sure if he wanted to do a more upbeat song or slowish one, and he just gravitated towards this one, and the fact that he knows I exist as a human on earth is insane. Sturgill, I picked him up and I kind of kidnapped him for the day, and he had his guitar with him, and we put his guitar in my car and I took him to go see *Lords of Chaos*, about Norwegian black metal. He\'s a hard read, and I couldn\'t tell if I completely traumatized him by taking him to see this movie—it was just like blood and guts everywhere. I think it\'s the biggest compliment an artist could give another artist to collaborate with them. It\'s a sign of mutual respect.” **My Own Dance** “That was the first pop song I wrote for *High Road*, and it was me talking to myself in my head about what my expectations for this record were, what I thought the public\'s expectations for this record were, what my apprehensiveness making a pop song was. Why deprive myself of something that I love doing so much? If that makes me a cheesy bitch, then by all means sign me up, and I don\'t care because I\'m just following what makes me happy. I\'m not going to pretend to be cool if that means I don\'t get to write pop music.” **High Road** “Obviously this has a double meaning. I think after I put up ‘Praying,’ people would expect me to be very pious and take the high road. And it\'s quite the opposite: It\'s about talking about how things have bothered me in the past about people talking shit or just being up my ass. And especially in a culture where everyone is so ready to just cancel you if you say one wrong thing. It\'s just about me being like, ‘Do you know what? I\'m just going to get high and I\'m going to laugh about this because it\'s so ridiculous.’ All of these things used to give me so much anxiety, and now I\'m just at a point where I can sit back, smoke a little weed, and have a laugh and not be so invested in all this shit that people talk.” **Father Daughter Dance** “I never set out to write a song about the fact that I grew up without a father. I was just with people I really am very, very comfortable around and who know me really well and the song just kind of started flowing out of my mouth. I opened some sort of unconscious floodgates; I had no idea I had all these feelings about the subject. It feels so vulnerable and embarrassing when you\'re writing a song like that, because there\'s shame, there\'s guilt, there\'s sadness, there\'s resentment—so many questions that are in the back of your mind when you have a situation in the way I grew up in. I didn\'t intend to put it on the record, and then I played it for a couple of people and they all insisted that being a strong woman doesn\'t mean you always have to be strong. I don\'t want to take away from the way my mom raised me, because I had such respect for single parents and women that decide to have children on their own or without a man.” **Raising Hell (feat. Big Freedia)** “I met Big Freedia on a Kesha cruise. I\'d never been on a cruise before and I got on this and it was like a music festival on the ocean. We were all being so loud because there were no sound restraints, no time restraints. Everybody on this boat was just having the best time of their life but also taking care of each other and could just feel 100% themselves. There were people taking their clothes off and getting naked. It was just like this little island of magic for four days. And I also really wanted to write a song with Big Freedia after seeing her show; it was so inspiring. Spirituality shouldn\'t be exclusive—you shouldn\'t have to meet some sort of requirement to love or not love a certain gender of person to be included into getting into heaven or having eternal happiness. I find the salvation in being together and just being really supportive of people being positive and taking care of each other and living in a really loving way. But it doesn\'t mean you can\'t get naked and get drunk and be wild. I just grew up really seeing some disconnect with spirituality and religion. So I just wanted to give a shout-out to that \[cruise\], because it was really fucking fun.”

In 2015, HBO aired the documentary *Heroin, Cape Cod USA*. Like many who saw it, Allie X was deeply moved by the stories of young, well-to-do adults whose lives had been destroyed by fentanyl addiction. But for Allie (the Toronto singer born Alexandra Ashley Hughes), the film became more than just something to recommend to friends—it provided the conceptual framework for her second full-length album. *Cape God* is not just a convenient pun, but an imaginary parallel universe—“a place on the East Coast that kind of looks like a Gregory Crewdson photo,” she tells Apple Music—in which Allie uses one of the film’s female subjects as an avatar to confront painful memories from her own past. “I wasn\'t writing songs when I was a teenager,” she explains. “I wasn\'t sharing my pain or my fears or my shame or all the things that were going on with me. And that’s all stayed with me, so I needed to sing about it now—because that stuff is really what causes us to be the adults that we are.” The themes of alienation and insecurity that course through the record are also highly emblematic of Allie’s musical trajectory as a Canadian indie outsider who’s managed to infiltrate the upper ranks of the Hollywood pop machine, earning kudos from Katy Perry and writing credits for stars like Lea Michele. Recorded in Sweden with producer Oscar Görres, *Cape God* is a testament to Allie’s unique stature as an artist who can lure both Top 40 sensations (Troye Sivan) and key alt-rock players (Mitski) into her amorphous sound world. R&B bops like “Devil I Know” and “June Gloom” may flex the pop prowess Allie brought to past hits like “Casanova” and “Paper Love,” but lyrically speaking, they’re party jams for the misfits who weren’t invited to the party. Here, Allie takes us on a track-by-track tour of *Cape God*’s unique topography. **Fresh Laundry** “I wrote that opening line—‘I want to be near fresh laundry’—when I was sick in the bathtub, like, three years ago. And I was just like, \'Oh, fuck—I wish that I could just go back to being taken care of by my mom, and just put my face into a clean, Tide-smelling towel.’ But that\'s a feeling that I\'ve had for a long time—like, wanting to be taken care of, but not really knowing how.” **Devil I Know** “This one’s maybe the most accessible song, the one you remember right away. But lyrically, it’s pretty dark! I\'m singing about myself—for me, it\'s about battling your own demons. There\'s a line: \'I can pretend that I\'m just praying now, but I\'m only on my knees/I could scream, “Somebody, help me out,” but the wicked one is me.’ When you boil it down, that\'s the message of the song.” **Regulars** “This is one of my favorite songs I’ve ever written; it’s like my torch song. It\'s how I\'ve always felt. It\'s a very universal theme: There\'s a lot of people that feel like outsiders. Like, I know how to fake it, I know how to please people, but I don\'t feel understood a lot of the time. That applies to the music industry; it also applies to all the boys that never thought I was attractive in high school. I had a real visual in my mind when I was writing that one—when I sing, \'What a feeling/Hanging off a building,\' I pictured people going to their nine-to-five jobs in their corporate suits and they\'re just there hanging from skyscrapers by the edge of their fingertips, smiling and thinking, \'I might just let go.\'” **Sarah Come Home** “There\'s a songwriter, Sarah Hudson, who\'s known for writing \'Dark Horse\' for Katy Perry. She was supposed to come to this session and she had to cancel at the last minute, so we were just joking around in the room and being like, \'Sarah come home!\' And I was like, \'Wait a second—that\'s actually a really good lyric for this world that I\'m currently building!\' The song isn\'t directly about something that happened to me—I didn\'t have a friend named Sarah that ran away and couldn\'t find her. But I did have friends that felt lost, and I wanted to help them, and I also relate to the feeling of not being able to fit in with my family. I think I was musing on what my family had been feeling when I was nowhere to be found. And I had one friend in high school who was so dear to me, we were just like sisters—I had so much love in my heart for her, and I still do. And so I put those feelings into the song as well. It\'s kind of like a weird mixture of a bunch of things that just really fit perfectly in this world.” **Rings a Bell** “This was another thing that I had written in my Notes on my iPhone for years, and I told Oscar that I wanted to do something that has a swing in it—like \'Everybody Wants to Rule the World\' by Tears for Fears, or \'The Way You Make Me Feel\' by Michael Jackson. And Oscar was like, \'Oh, it\'s so hard to make that sound cool.\' And I was like, ‘Just try it!\' And sure enough, he did. When the chorus comes in, and suddenly you\'ve got all this percussion going on, it’s really impactful. Lyrically, it’s one of the more lighthearted songs on the record. It’s more about nostalgia and infatuation, written from the perspective of somebody—me, I guess!—meeting someone for the first time and feeling a hopefulness and possibility it could go somewhere.” **June Gloom** “That song has a bit of soul in it; we found a really cool drum loop for it. There’s a lot of sarcasm in it—even the name ‘June Gloom,’ it\'s sort of poking fun at itself. I pictured that being written from my bedroom window, looking out at the street at a bunch of cool kids smoking and being hot and flirting with each other...and not being able to participate at all and being stuck in bed and just kind of making fun of the whole situation.” **Love Me Wrong (feat. Troye Sivan)** “Troye had tweeted about \[my 2015 single\] ‘Bitch’ before he even became a musician, and was just known as a YouTuber. I DMed him, and he had been working on music, so I was like, ‘We should try writing together.’ And then Leland—aka Brett McLaughlin, a very successful writer now—was the one who put us all in a room together, and the rest is history. I\'ve written for Troye for years now—I wrote half the songs on *Blue Neighbourhood* and *Bloom*. With him, there\'s never any pressure to sound like what\'s on the radio, which is usually how it is when you\'re writing for another artist in LA. ‘Love Me Wrong’ was actually originally written for a film that Troye was in and it didn\'t make the cut, but I was so in love with it from the day that we wrote it in 2017. At that time, it was so different from the record that I was working on, *Super Sunset*. But then when *Cape God* started coming together, I was like, \'Oh, this *has* to be on it.\' I knew that really early on—thematically, it totally fits in. When we wrote it, I was really tapping into those same feelings, even though I didn\'t know I was about to make a record about them.” **Super Duper Party People** “I\'ve never had a song like this where I’ve performed it before its release, and it gets the biggest response of my set! It wasn\'t written specifically for *Cape God*. My boyfriend and I were driving home from Niagara, and we were just joking around—he said, ‘You should write a song called “Super Duper Party People.”’ I was like, ‘Oh my god, I love that!’—and then I just back-burnered the idea. Cut to me in Denmark on a writing trip a year later and my iTunes is on shuffle, and this loop comes on that Ollie Goldstein had sent me, and I was like, ‘Oh my god! This is “Super Duper Party People.”’ So I was Skyping with my boyfriend that night, and I was so jet-lagged and we were laughing so much, and I wrote this whole rap over it, and that’s what the verses are. Julius, the guy who manages the studio in Sweden, came in to do backup vocals, and that inspired me to sing it in a more Swedish way, like ‘supa doopa!’ That song just brings me a lot of joy.” **Susie Save Your Love (feat. Mitski)** “I discovered Mitski’s music a couple of years ago and was instantly smitten. She has such a singular voice—it was so authentic, so sad, so relatable. Mitski’s taking a break from the music industry at the moment—she’s not on social media, she’s not touring. And so when I asked her to sing on the track, she was like, ‘I love this song so much, but I\'m saying no to every feature right now.’ But then one day I was flying somewhere and when I landed, there was a text from Mitski saying, \'Hey, no pressure, but if you still want me to do the feature on the song, I think I would like to do it.’ And I was like, ‘Oh my god, yes!\' She doesn\'t really do features, so I feel very lucky. ‘Susie Save Your Love’ is a song about being in love with your best friend and she\'s dating a guy you don\'t like—you know he doesn\'t treat her right, and you just want to scoop her up and save her.” **Life of the Party** “This is one of the last songs written for *Cape God*. It’s based on the idea of being at a party or in a social setting and being completely inebriated to the point where you come out of your shell and you feel like you’re part of the group. But, at the same time, there\'s a part of you—even in your state—that knows you\'re not, and that you’re actually being made fun of. It\'s not like everything that I\'m saying in that song happened to me. I took it really far—like, there are implications of sexual assault. But I don\'t think there\'s a song like this right now, and I wanted to write something for anyone who\'s been put in that position, whether it\'s being kicked when you\'re down or being taken advantage of. There\'s also some bliss in it, which makes it even more complicated. I\'ve definitely had that feeling where I was like, \'I am completely destroying myself here…but at least I\'m feeling *something*.’” **Madame X** “This was written with one of my favorite writers in Los Angeles, a fellow Canadian named Simon Wilcox—she wrote ‘Jealous’ for Nick Jonas. She’s one of the only writers in LA that’s able to go there lyrically with me. It\'s a song about singing to your drug of choice: \'Come into my room with me and wrap me up/I love your touch/Come into my room with me and make it stop/I think too much.\' It\'s about being held in the arms of your drug of choice, and then we also put in a lot of East Coast imagery in there. I saw myself being in the freezing cold water of Cape Cod—or Cape God, I should say—and feeling really good, even though my body was freezing.” **Learning in Public** “This song is almost written from my current state of mind, all these years later, having gone through everything and becoming a more confident woman. The process of writing the record was therapeutic—I was able to reflect and sympathize with my younger self and give her a voice. That was a very liberating thing to do for myself. I\'m saying: Life is flawed, I\'m flawed. I\'m still learning. I\'ve learned a lot, but I\'ve got a lot more to learn.”

“I think what helps me to be so vulnerable with my writing is that I don\'t think about who\'s going to be listening to it,” BENEE tells Apple Music. “If I did, I\'d freak out. It’s weird because I release it for all these people to listen to, yet I can\'t talk to my closest friends about it.” The New Zealand singer and songwriter’s debut album, *Hey u x*, is filled with honesty and anxiety and mental health and heartbreak, and all those little thoughts that wiggle around in our heads and keep us up at night. Though we all experience it, most of us can’t harness those feelings and turn them into lovely, innovative, thoughtful alt-pop songs. But for BENEE, it’s more of a necessity than anything else. “I\'m really terrible at telling people if I\'m feeling poo. I just won\'t talk about my feelings or emotions. I bottle it up and vomit it onto a page when I\'m writing,” she says. “Then I think about, ‘Oh shit, I have to release this, now people are going to hear what I\'ve been thinking.’ But it usually doesn’t stop me—I want my music-making to be super honest and raw.” Here, she takes us through each track on *Hey u x*. **Happen to Me** “This is probably is my favorite track on the album, possibly my favorite song that I\'ve made. I sing about my anxiety, which I\'ve only had to deal with in the last few years. I can\'t go to a shop by myself without freaking out. I write about my fear of flying, about someone kidnapping me or me burning in fire, all these terrible things that could possibly happen. It’s really silly.” **Same Effect** “I wrote it about my ex-boyfriend, the same one I\'ve written most of my relationship songs about. I\'ve struggled with this one dude, being completely in love with him since I was 17 in a long-distance, on-and-off relationship. I broke up with him midway through last year. I was frustrated with myself because I knew I deserved someone who treated me better and he wasn\'t for me, but at the same time, nobody else had the same effect for a long time. I was stuck in this weird mindset which I think a lot of people can relate to. Someone can do terrible things and be really horrible, but you still don\'t feel like you’ll find better.” **Sheesh (feat. Grimes)** “I’d joked around about making a drum-and-bassy EDM song. Then I was in a session with my producer Josh \[Fountain\], and I was like, ‘It\'s time. I want to make a really upbeat, crazy one. I want Auto-Tune everywhere, I want to sound like a robot.’ I wrote it about this guy I maybe know, who’s really nice, they\'re really great for me. But when it\'s not there, it\'s not there. You can\'t force yourself to like someone. And for some reason Grimes wanted to do something on it, which is insane, because I\'m such a huge fan of hers. Apparently she was a fan, and somehow it worked out. I\'m still shocked. I have no idea what she’s talking about in her lyrics, but I love that.” **Supalonely (feat. Gus Dapperton)** “I’d broken up with that dude maybe a week before leaving to LA for a month to make music. It was the first session of the trip and I just vented to this woman I was working with. I was just like, ‘I\'m heartbroken, but I know I\'ve made the right decision. I just feel lonely as heck.’ I knew I\'d be making very sad songs for the rest of the trip. I decided to put a spin on it and be super self-deprecating, and make a song that made me feel happy in the session. It ended up being really, really fun. Sometimes it\'s nice to laugh off the times when you\'re really, really sad.” **Snail** “This was a song that I wrote coming out of the first lockdown in New Zealand. I, for some reason, was fascinated by snails during lockdown. I lived with my parents at the time and they were *everywhere* outside my room. I was watching them, wondering what a snail thinks. And when I got into the studio a week after \[lockdown\], I wrote a little tale of a snail and a person, and the snail wondering why the human isn\'t coming outside or doing anything. It’s because of a global pandemic, but the snail doesn\'t know. Well, maybe it does. Maybe I\'m just assuming.” **Plain (feat. Lily Allen & Flo Milli)** “Sometimes, the music I like to listen to when I\'m sad about an ex is mean, bad-bitch stuff that makes you feel really good at the same time. My mum hates the song because it sounds like I\'m putting down another woman in it, but I would never actually do that in real life. I wanted a song that made me feel better about someone fucking me around and me being sad at home because I\'m still obsessed with them. And I got Lily and Flo Milli on it because I feel like they\'re both pros at being sassy.” **Kool** “I was imagining this woman walking into a party scene with a red velvet coat or something glamorous, and everyone\'s like, ‘Oh my god, she’s amazing.’ It was inspired by a couple artists I follow who come off as effortlessly cool and so confident, and they always say the right things in interviews. Maybe it’s a response to someone saying they think I\'m cool and me being like, ‘You have no idea.’ At times I feel like the most uncool thing—not that being cool even matters, but I wish I didn\'t have this anxious bloody head that overthinks everything. I often say the wrong things and do things that embarrass myself. I just wish I didn’t have to be like that.” **Winter (feat. Mallrat)** “I made ‘Winter’ in the middle of my LA trip, but I completely ran out of steam. It was like, ‘All right, it\'s time for me to go home. I\'ve had enough. I don\'t feel like making music right now.’ Which was a really horrible space to be in, because music is my way of venting and when I don\'t feel like making it, there\'s something wrong. It’s happened twice, and both times I needed to step out and get some help. You feel very small and alone when you\'re in a place like that and you don\'t know anyone. I was singing about how I wanted to go home—the winter suits me better.” **A Little While** “This is one that I made in lockdown. I produced it, which was new for me. It’s a romantic love story that I made up because I’d had enough of singing about my ex. It was more fun to make up a story about being in the car with a new love interest. But it’s also about the real feeling of being afraid to say something to someone who you like.” **Night Garden (feat. Kenny Beats & Bakar)** “I did this during a session with Kenny in LA. It was my first time meeting him and my first time working with a different producer, which was interesting, but really cool. It was the fastest I\'ve ever had to write a song, because the guy was chopping up these drum samples that he had recorded in maybe 20 minutes. I wrote about a similar story to another song of mine, ‘Monsta,’ about a fear I have of someone being outside my room or in the garden while I\'m trying to go to sleep. I went in and freestyled my lyric ideas and melodies. It was really sick, I was so happy with it. And I got Bakar because I wanted a husky, almost scary-sounding vocal and thought a British accent would sound really sick on it.” **All the Time (feat. Muroki)** “It’s about being spacey, maybe you\'re a bit drunk or a bit high, and you’re in a room with someone and you’re the only two on the same buzz. They get exactly where you are right now. It\'s also about how you can get into this routine of also using alcohol and drugs to cope, which is a horrible thing to fall into, but it’s pretty common. It’s just a trippy song. I wanted that beachy, surfy sound. I was definitely inspired by a lot of the more indie and reggae bands that come out of New Zealand. I met Muroki at a really small techno and house festival in New Zealand. I found one of his songs called ‘For Better or Worse’ and was just in love with his voice.” **If I Get to Meet You** “This song is more about speaking to people in the last couple of years who I didn\'t know before the music thing, and now I\'m talking to them more than normal. I feel like it\'s this weird thing of, like, do I know if your intentions are genuine? I also made up that maybe I have a thing with this person and it\'s like, ‘What are you going to say to people around you? Are you going to say you’re talking to this singer?’” **C U** “It\'s like ‘A Little While’ in that I was thinking up this story. I’m at a beach house with someone who I am really getting along well with, and then I have to go because reality calls, I have to work. And as much as I’d like to stay and live on the beach for the rest of my life and just be one with the bloody earth and not have to worry about anything else, I also have to work. I love to work and love to make music, and I love to meet people and work with people. Sometimes I think I really could do it—move to a farm and live there for the rest of my life. But I think I just want to go on holiday.”

As much as 2019’s *11:11* demonstrated just how epic and immaculate the Colombian superstar’s pop game could be, there’s just something so satisfying about Maluma indulging his dirty side on record. For this surprise album, he gives those thirsty fans all the steamy, sordid jams they crave as he adopts the rakish loverman persona Papi Juancho. Reuniting with the Rude Boyz, the Medellín-based production duo behind his raunchy smash “Felices los 4,” he takes to the titular alter ego with debonair ease on sexually charged cuts like “Cuidau” and the polyamorous ode “Cielo a un Diablo.” Reggaetón rhythms reign across these luxe expressions of a lifestyle marked by trysts at 30,000 feet, though he weaves in R&B grooves on “Ansiedad” and the bilingual “Boy Toy.” He reminisces on the Myke Towers-assisted “Madrid” about a lustful romance that he wants to rekindle, and does the total opposite on the embittered kiss-off “Parce” with Lenny Tavárez and Justin Quiles in tow.

Undeniable pop music royalty, Mariah Carey has enjoyed a multi-decade career that has produced *28* top 10 singles and six No. 1 albums. Of course, not everything makes it off the cutting room floor, and *The Rarities* offers a peek of the music that got lost to time or the archives, from her earliest cuts up through 2020. The front half aptly opens with “Here We Go Around Again,” a nostalgia-inducing dance-pop track from 1990 initially intended for her first demo tape, and wraps up with a brand-new acoustic rendition of “Close My Eyes,” from her sixth album *Butterfly*. As the compilation unfolds through soaring emotional ballads and ebullient upbeat jams, the singer’s brilliance is revealed again and again—the singular qualities of her unparalleled voice, the agility which allows her to snake between style and genre with ease, the minute details that make Mariah Carey’s presence within the space of a track immediately identifiable. And after you get your fill of unreleased songs, B-sides, and reworks, the second half offers live recordings of her bona fide classics, taken from a 1996 concert at Japan’s Tokyo Dome during her *Daydream* tour. If hearing her in the studio is breathtaking in its own right, listening to her raw and in her element onstage is altogether transcendent.

The times have finally caught up with The Chicks. With *Gaslighter*, their first album in 14 years, the country trio formerly known as the Dixie Chicks seem to have met their moment in the current activist climate. It’s been 17 years since outspoken lead singer Natalie Maines, along with sisters Emily Strayer and Martie Maguire, brazenly risked alienating a large chunk of their audience—and lost the support of the country music industry—when she railed against George W. Bush and the invasion of Iraq (controversial opinions at the time, especially for their conservative fanbase). Their last LP, 2006’s *Taking the Long Way*, doubled down on the politics, winning them an armful of Grammys but little notice from Nashville. Now paired with pop producer Jack Antonoff (Taylor Swift, Lorde) and a who’s who of superstar songwriters (Justin Tranter, Julia Michaels, Teddy Geiger), The Chicks are still not ready to make nice. The incendiary opening title track is a trademark Chicks kiss-off that could as easily be addressing a jealous ex as the current US president. “March March” was inspired by a political rally that all three Chicks attended with their families, but its timely video draws a natural parallel between the song’s broad self-empowerment message and this year’s Black Lives Matter protests. The rest of the album maintains the personal-is-political bent, with universal messages of hope and self-help addressed autobiographically to the band member’s children (“Young Man,” “Julianna Calm Down”), their ex-husbands (“Tights on My Boat,” “Hope It’s Something Good”), and even themselves (“For Her”). “We were always thinking and writing about that stuff,” Strayer tells Apple Music, “but the news kind of caught up to what we were already talking about—whether it was the #MeToo movement or what\'s happening right now with Black Lives Matter. So it was coincidental in a way, but I think those things are cyclical. They might be the newest news stories, but they’ve always been here.” The Chicks spoke to Apple Music and reflected on the making of the album and the inspirations behind a few of the album\'s most memorable songs. **Gaslighter** Natalie Maines: “That was the first song we wrote with Jack Antonoff, who produced the majority of the record. I know I came in with the word ‘gaslighter’ and some lyrics in a notebook and wanted to write about gaslighting, but I\'m sure it was Jack that thought of coming out cold with the chorus.” Martie Maguire: “I remember him loving that word and you having to explain what it meant. I was definitely impressed with him right off the bat. He would start playing and singing that word, and then having us record it. When we went to record it, it took like five minutes.” NM: “And that became the title track just because most Americans didn\'t know what that meant a few years ago. I learned about that in therapy. We never thought of any other title for the album, because it really is a buzzword now because of President Trump. It just seemed like the perfect word and captured this time that we\'re in.” **Texas Man** NM: “Wasn\'t that when Julia Michaels came over here to my house and sat with just like a tape roll? She just has an interesting way of scoring melodies. We\'d just go through a tape, and just let her go. She\'ll go for like half an hour just vamping.” Emily Strayer: “Remember how we did vocals? It\'s literally the smallest closet.” NM: “My coat closet!” MM: “That song is about Natalie. We just wanted to get her groove back. It still hasn\'t happened yet, but maybe that song will bring that energy.” **For Her** ES: “The song is about speaking to your younger self and giving some wisdom. It was written with Ariel Rechtshaid and Sarah Aarons. We were with writers in this room, in this very dark, dingy studio, and I remember just feeling really drained. It was just so tired and gloomy. Wasn\'t it where Michael Jackson recorded *Thriller*? He had this booth built for Bubbles, with a little window. You could just imagine this chimp looking out the window. Sarah was hilarious, just so self-deprecating. She was just a joke a minute, she has such a personality, and her lyrics—it’s different to write with a woman, just to write those kind of female lyrics with another female.” NM: “She was a huge driving force behind those lyrics, for sure. And once she gets going, it\'s like a lyric train that you can\'t stop and you don\'t want to stop. By the time we left that session, we had loads of options, and we kept a lot of her lyrics but changed some as well, just so we could have a part in the song. Sarah Aarons did not need us.” MM: “And she was great writing for Natalie\'s voice, because she has such a strong voice and she can do these acrobatics. Not many people can keep up with Natalie\'s voice and have the same type of inflections.” NM: “But also—and I’m not saying this is what I am but—I loved her soul. She\'s a very soulful singer. It would be interesting to go back and listen to those original recordings, because she made a lot of soul in her voice and her phrasing and I definitely stole some of that.” **March March** NM: “We went to the March for Our Lives in Washington, D.C., with our kids. It was so impactful for me. That\'s the first time I\'ve ever been in a march that large. And we weren\'t there as performers, we were just in the crowds, with my little girls on my shoulders. We took a lot from that, the energy of it. We didn\'t want it to be about one particular march, so on the verses we talk about different things that are important to us.” ES: “We were always thinking and writing about that stuff, but the news kind of caught up to what we were already talking about—whether it was the #MeToo movement or what\'s happening right now with Black Lives Matter. So it was coincidental in a way, but I do think those things are cyclical. They might be the newest news story, but they\'ve always been there.” NM: “You don\'t need a group around you if you\'re on the right side of history. We wanted to empower people who stand up for what they believe. Unless you believe in racism, then sit down. \[laughs\] Know what\'s right, act on it, speak out, be an army of one; you don\'t need to be a follower or go along with a group if you feel strongly about what\'s right.” **My Best Friend\'s Weddings** ES: “It\'s my wedding—weddings.” NM: “Yeah, everybody kept calling it ‘My Best Friend\'s Wedding,\' and I was like, \'No, *weddings*.\' That one\'s definitely got a lot of personal truths in it. There are three songs—\'My Best Friend\'s Weddings\' was one of them—that we consider the Hawaii songs, that we wrote in mostly Kauai. We spent three weeks in Hawaii all together making this record. We\'d go from the studio to my house, and it was a family vacation for everybody as well. It was a lot of fun, and there\'s songs with ukulele, and if you have headphones, you can hear birds chirping and waves, and a rooster.” **Julianna Calm Down** MM: “I\'ll just say that that was one that Julia wasn\'t sure that she wouldn\'t want for herself, but once we heard it, we pounced on it. Unbeknownst to her, Natalie went home and rewrote all the verses to make them about our closest family, our nieces and our cousins. Originally it was called ‘Julia Come Down’—it\'s her talking about breathing, taking a moment, everything\'s not going to be so bad. But Nat flipped it on its head to make it a song about advice to our girls and our nieces.” NM: “When Jack told her that we had written on it and asked if we could have that song, she was like, ‘Oh yeah, they can have the verses and the bridge. But I\'m going to keep the chorus and rework it.’ And I was just like, \'No, no, no!\' We kind of tricked her out of it.”

JYP Entertainment K-pop girl group TWICE plays a numbers game, and it’s a good thing their equation is a winner: TWICE fans are called ONCE, they boast nine members (Momo, Sana, Mina, Nayeon, Jeongyeon, Dahyun, Jihyo, Chaeyoung, Tzuyu), and their second full-length studio album, *Eyes wide open*, is ’80s and ’90s melancholy—their most enterprising release since debuting in 2015. “I CAN’T STOP ME” is revisionist ’80s pop-funk that could sit comfortably on Dua Lipa’s *Future Nostalgia* (notably, Lipa co-wrote the album closer, the ecstatic synth coda “BEHIND THE MASK”). Staccato riffs and rhythms introduce “HELL IN HEAVEN,” easing into the buzzing EDM of “BRING IT BACK,” the Euro-pop-meets-’90s-club of “BELIEVER,” and the marching band arena anthem “SHOT CLOCK.”

In the early 2010s, CamelPhat set themselves apart by combining the anthemic thrust of progressive house with the moods and textures of classic deep house, and over the next decade, the duo’s Dave Whelan and Mike Di Scala developed enough crossover pop appeal to net themselves a Grammy nomination for 2017’s “Cola.” CamelPhat’s debut album cycles through all the phases of their versatile sound. Wrapping nervous synth arpeggios around Jake Bugg’s distant vocals, “Be Someone” puts a pensive spin on Life and Death-style melodic house; the melancholy “For a Feeling” glances back at ’90s trance; the wistful, driving “Hypercolour” nods to the New Wave that once inspired Whelan and Di Scala’s bootleg remixes, pre-CamelPhat. “Panic Room,” featuring an irresistible hook from the Antiguan German singer Au/Ra, melds ’80s synths with one of their most epic productions yet, while the Skream collaboration “Keep Movin’” imagines a theoretical union between Depeche Mode and vintage Chicago house. Even Noel Gallagher shows up, with a yearning performance that gives “Not Over Yet” the feel of early ’90s Underworld. “Cola” is here as well, of course, in the form of an atmospheric “Dark Matter Edit” that makes the most of the duo’s flair for subtle drama.

JoJo\'s later career has come to be defined by a seven-year battle with her label which all but halted her momentum—in 2004, she was then the youngest singer to ever top the Hot 100—and kept her from releasing a proper album for a decade. In 2017, she created her own imprint, Clover Music, and good to me marks the first full-length of this brave new chapter, as much a rebirth as a reintroduction. The singer\'s maturation, even from her 2016 release *Mad Love.*, is evident, but she carries it without a hint of reticence. When she sings of the nuances of heartache—trying to move on, establishing boundaries—sincerity penetrates her every lyric. “For the first time, I finally believe we\'re done,” she belts at the peak of the piano-driven closer, “Don\'t Talk Me Down,” wounded grit bleeding into her tone. Throughout the album, she also expands to showcase a bit of her range in both subject and sound: “Pedialyte” is an anthemic ode to partying and forgotten nights, while “Small Things” is a graceful acoustic ballad about pretending to be okay that doubles as a flooring display of her vocal prowess. Elsewhere, the sexy slow jams “So Bad” and “Comeback” are executed with aplomb. No matter the subject matter, JoJo overarchingly sounds like a woman liberated, finally ready to find her voice anew.

Hayley Williams’ *Petals for Armor* takes its name from an idea: “Being vulnerable,” she tells Apple Music, “is a shield. Because how else can you be a human that’s inevitably gonna fuck up, and trip in front of the world a million times?” On her first solo LP, the Paramore frontwoman submerges herself in feeling, following a period of intense personal struggle in the wake of 2017’s *After Laughter*. To listen start to finish is to take in the full arc of her journey, as she experienced it—from rage (“Simmer”) to loss (“Leave It Alone”) to shame (“Dead Horse”) to forgiveness (“Pure Love”) and calm (“Crystal Clear”). The music is just as mercurial: Williams smartly places the focus on her voice, lacing it through moody tangles of guitar and electronics that recall both Radiohead and Björk—whom she channels on the feminist meditation “Roses / Lotus / Violet / Iris”—then setting it free on the 21st-century funk reverie “Watch Me While I Bloom.” On the appropriately manic “Over Yet,” she bridges the distance between Trent Reznor and Walt Disney with—by her own description—“verses like early Nine Inch Nails, and choruses like *A Goofy Movie*.” It’s a good distance from the pop-punk of Paramore (bandmate Taylor York produced and Paramore touring member Joey Howard co-wrote as well), but a brave reintroduction to an artist we already thought we knew so well. “It was like a five- or six-month process of beating it out of myself,” she says of the writing process. “It felt like hammering steel.”

LANY\'s third album, *mama\'s boy*, is a chance for vocalist Paul Klein to reconcile with his family, his upbringing, and past demons. And even though the record was written and recorded in Nashville and Los Angeles, it\'s the middle of the country—Tulsa, Oklahoma, to be exact—that draws the most inspiration. The sprawling ballad \"you!\" opens with an undying appreciation for the trio\'s past and present, while the tender \"cowboy in LA\" bridges modern Americana with the band\'s indie-pop sound. Songs like \"paper,\" an airy soft-pop number, and the electro-tinged slow burn of \"sad\" explore the complicated nature of romantic relationships. But Klein wanted to tap into a vulnerability that reached beyond that drama, instead taking an introspective look into his personal relationships with his faith (\"i still talk to jesus\" soars with church-choir-backed soul) and his family (the gentle acoustic of \"if this is the last time\" serves as a love letter to his parents).

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