Idolator's 70 Best Pop Albums Of 2020

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

Twelve-member K-pop girl group LOONA’s third mini-album, *\[12:00\]*, read as midnight, begins with sounds from space: radar bleeps, recordings from NASA, explosive synths. It sets the listener up for eight ambitious tracks as wide and vast as the final frontier. On *\[12:00\]*, HeeJin, HyunJin, HaSeul, YeoJin, ViVi, Kim Lip, JinSoul, Choerry, Yves, Chuu, Go Won, and Olivia Hye journey to the great beyond—from the echoes of ’80s pop on “Voice” and the English-language “Star” to the surprising neo-soul (or is it neo-Seoul?) of “Fall Again,” the Euro-pop club banger “Hide & Seek,” and the trappy self-love anthem “OOPS!” Their transmission is clear: When it comes to genre, LOONA has no limitations.

Prolific Brooklyn-based pop experimentalist Jeremy Zucker’s strength is in his ability to articulate nuance through explicit lyricism and intricate production. His numerous EPs, regularly recorded and released since 2015, are soft and direct, effortlessly generating viral hits like 2018’s “all the kids are depressed” and his collaboration with rapper blackbear “talk is overrated.” On his debut solo LP, *love is not dying*, Zucker pushes beyond the obvious. “I\'m not writing these songs with the intent of making sure people understand,” he tells Apple Music. “I\'m writing songs to really express the way that I feel about these very specific situations in my life, and my hope is that people feel comforted and justified in their own feelings.” Touching on simultaneously universal and unexpected desires such as quietude (“still”), acquiescence (“we’re f\*\*ked, it\'s fine”), and resolve (“julia”) over pictorial production that runs the gamut from tinny, folksy singer-songwriter to explosive distortion, *love is not dying* aims for the heart without leaning on melodrama. Come for the humor of “not ur friend,” stay for the subtle interpolation of James Taylor’s “Mexico” on closer “oh, mexico.” “I make music because I was a fan first,” he says. “My goal was to really emulate the experiences that I had and have as a fan, that feeling of connection.” Here, Zucker details each track on the album. **still** “The song starts with the sound of birds, and almost, like, a church choir. Those are sounds that I sampled from my street right outside my apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The title came from something that someone said to me once. Everything was moving so fast and everything was so hectic, and this person was like, ‘I just wish we could be still,’ and that phrase really stuck with me. The voices in this, it\'s the voice of that person that said that to me. It\'s this crescendo of madness and insanity, but also intense beauty.” **we’re f\*\*ked, it’s fine** “The theme for that song is extremely apparent in the title: I know that everything\'s going to go to s\*\*t, but I\'m willing to accept that things are about to be horrible. That\'s the tone for a lot of the album—accepting the beauty in a moment, knowing that it\'s not perfect. It is what it is, and it might f\*\*k everything up.” **somebody loves you** “That was one of the first songs that I wrote for the album. I wrote it while I was talking to this girl online for a long time before we actually met in person. It was this feeling of falling for someone when you know things could be completely different when you meet them in person.” **orchid** “I got an upright piano for my studio, and this was the first song that I recorded on it. I put a damper on my piano, which is this felt sheet that goes between the hammers and the strings, and it makes the piano sound so soft and gentle. At the end of the song, you\'ll hear these crows come in, which is a sample that I recorded in Iowa when I was visiting my brother for his engagement party.” **lakehouse** “If you listen carefully, you\'ll hear mumbling voices in the background. I came up with the idea for the song in my studio. I had a friend in there, and while we were having this conversation, I came up with this riff. I didn\'t want to interrupt her because she was telling me an important story, so I recorded a voice memo on my phone of me doing a triplet chord progression. Her voice in the background hit these weird notes that I couldn\'t have placed myself, and I stacked mandolin on top of it and built the whole song around it. When the chorus hits, it\'s this really strange time signature. Seven beats in a measure.” **good for her** “It’s the outro to ‘lakehouse,’ but I wanted to cut it into its own song because of how different the lyrical sentiment is—it comes off as a little melancholic because I\'m left in the dust in this situation.” **not ur friend** “This was the only song on the album that I wrote with other writers, \[Max Martin’s MXM\]. We worked on a bunch of ideas with that team, and ‘not ur friend’ was the coolest song that came out of those sessions. We were just all cracking up while writing it because the lyrics are just so flippant. This is the antithesis to the type of music that I make, because it\'s very much like, \'F\*\*k you, I\'m out.\' It\'s a selfish song, which, in its own way, is a really celebratory thing. I\'ve gotten lots of messages from fans saying that this song helped them cut somebody toxic out of their life, and they\'re better for it.” **full stop** “The idea behind ‘full stop’ is, ‘All right, I\'ve removed this person from my life, but now what?’ So it\'s this spiraling train of thought. It is one of my favorite productions on the album, just because of how random and weird and nonsensical the structure is and how different each section is but how it all flows together so perfectly. To me, it feels like the sky is falling and the world is crashing.” **julia** “Everything about ‘julia’—the lyrics and the melody and the production and the structure and the dynamic shifts—is exactly what I wanted to make. It is a song about a person who I wrote a lot of my previous songs about. This was the last song that I was going to write about her. I needed some closure. Between all those reasons, I guess that\'s why it\'s my favorite. It fits a very specific part of my life.” **hell or flying** “This is one of my favorites on the album as well because of how simple it is, and how it really escalates at the end. It\'s sort of like asking somebody to keep a promise you know they won\'t keep and ignoring that.” **always, i’ll care** “I wrote this one about my college friend Jamie. She would always call me just to catch up and I would not answer her texts or call her back until days later, and I felt like a really sh\*\*ty friend. And so it was this song of ‘I\'ll be better than I was before, despite every text of yours ignored.’ She was so understanding, and I\'m still sorry for not being as responsive or as attentive or not being a great friend, but I will do better. And that\'s me showing how much I care.” **brooks** “‘brooks’ is very much a train-of-thought piece. There\'s the obvious line, \'This kid I knew in college just died on a plane.\' That\'s true, and that was a crazy thing that happened to me and shook my world. And even in the song, that is just a detail. The song is just about feeling strange.” **oh, mexico** “It\'s me on my guitar, and a capo on the 10th fret, playing really, really high, and I pitched it way down on my computer. I wrote the song chronologically, and when I got to the chorus, I kept finding myself singing James Taylor\'s \'Mexico.\' I was like, \'Why don\'t I just make this a flip of “Mexico”?\' It still doesn\'t even feel like a flip to me, because it is so much its own song. It felt like a really appropriate ending to the album, because it is this idea of falling into old habits and old patterns, and realizing that no matter how much you\'ve experienced, we always still have things to learn. That\'s a hard thing to accept.”

In 2015, when Kiara Saulters was 19 years old and working in a hardware store in the Chicago suburbs, she uploaded an unmistakably catchy, glitchy pop song to SoundCloud. Within weeks, she’d signed her first contract, and by the end of the year, “Gold” had been featured in an Apple commercial. It was as close to a fairy tale as the music business gets. Then, things took a turn. Saulters’ transition from the Midwest to Los Angeles was more difficult than she’d anticipated. She felt unprepared in media interviews and outnumbered in studio sessions, where producers pressured her to make songs that were carbon copies of “Gold.” “You\'re expected to know what you\'re doing, but you have no idea,” she tells Apple Music. “I think I rubbed a lot of people the wrong way because I felt immediately on the defense.” The punches kept coming. In 2016, she became addicted to painkillers after a surgery on her tonsils—a dependency that she thinks, in retrospect, was a way to cope with the pressure of fame. Her wake-up call came the following year when Chester Bennington, the lead singer of Linkin Park and a friend of Saulters, took his own life. Then, right as she’d cleaned up her act and finished her first tour, her mother was diagnosed with cancer. “I almost quit,” she says. “It was too much.” Even though it arrives five years after her initial debut, *lil kiiwi* is Saulters’ first official full-length. “I wanted to finally introduce myself,” she says, “to bring people into my world and what I’ve been going through the past few years.” The songs—smart, incisive reflections on early-twenties recklessness—showcase the breadth of Kiiara’s sound, from anthemic EDM-lite anthems to hushed synth-pop lullabies. Here, the reinvigorated pop star talks us through her five favorite tracks. **So Sick (feat. blackbear)** “I call this a playful, petty love song. Like ‘You’ve got me feeling so sick, *ugh*.’ It’s something Bear and I would’ve said to each other a few years back, because we dated for a short period of time. By the time I recorded it, we hadn’t been in touch for years—in fact I think he’d blocked me—but I still knew he would sound perfect on it. And thanks to some help from our managers, he was down. He killed it. He hit me up and was like, ‘Sorry if I was harsh on my verse...’ but I thought it was perfect. We’re cool.” **Don’t Get Confused** “I’m so over dating right now, so this is a girl anthem. Because men always expect something. There’s always ulterior motives. Like, I didn’t ask you to buy me a drink, I didn’t ask you to take me to dinner, when did this become a transaction? This song is me setting the record straight: I can wear whatever I want and I’m doing it for me, not you. I love it because it has a lot of attitude and is more talky. It shows a different side to me. Basically, don’t mess with me!” **Never Let You** “I went through a lot while writing this album, and this song traces it all. Wondering why it took me four years to finish it, thinking about quitting and going home—I just felt drained. Then one day I went into the studio and let it all out, freestyling with a few producers who I really trusted. It felt like therapy. The song wonders about what my life would have been like if I didn’t write ‘Gold,’ which is something I think about a lot. What if I had followed a more normal path like my brother, who has a house and a dog and a good relationship? Stability just looks so relaxing. But I know the grass is always greener. Eventually I figured, maybe I can write about this and help other people who feel this way, too.” **Accidental** “This is about me being the fucking worst. I met this great guy in 2016 and he invited me to dinner. He asked me where I wanted to go, checked in to see how I was feeling, handled my mood swings, showed me nothing but love and patience...and I was just the fucking worst. Looking back, I think I was just young and overwhelmed by everything else going on in my life, and maybe a little scared because I really liked him and wasn’t ready. If I could go back and do it all differently, I would. I sent him the demo so he knows it’s about him. He said he loved it. Maybe there’s a chance for us, I don’t know. I’m down! I told my managers that I was going to name the song after him and they were like, ‘Absolutely not.’” **Bad One** “When you’re young, you always want the rebel. As we’ve discussed, a good guy can be right in front of you and you’re like, ‘Nope!’ Later, you wonder what the hell you were thinking; in hindsight it’s so obvious that the bad guys were wrong for you. But it’s the truth of how I felt at the time. *lil kiiwi* is about a very specific period in my life when I was experimenting, making mistakes, and figuring out who I was. In some ways, releasing it feels like closure, like I said what I needed to say. I always wanted to be an artist, but I never wanted to let people in. Here, you’re finally in.”

Following 2018’s post-incarceration project *Real Hasta la Muerte* and a string of huge new hits over the subsequent two years, there were high expectations for Anuel AA’s second album. Still, nobody could have expected that the familiar sounds of Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry”—transmuted into the Spanish-language rock ballad “No Llores Mujer” with blink-182’s Travis Barker on the drums—would lead off the long-awaited *Emmanuel*. Nonetheless, fans surely knew that the Latin trap superstar had the pop chops to pull off such a bold move towards the mainstream, especially after all but reinventing himself with the smash Shaggy interpolation “China.” Fittingly, those two songs bookend his sophomore set, a double album that announces Anuel as more than just an urbano maestro. Willfully broadening his sonic range, he sounds downright exuberant over the uptempo tropical dance groove of “El Manual” and amid the thumping island vibes of “Que Se Joda” with Farruko and Zion. He reaches across generations of Latin music on the hopeful “Fútbol y Rumba” with the legendary Enrique Iglesias and on the J Balvin-referencing “Bandido” with Miami-bred up-and-comer Mariah. Those who come to *Emmanuel* seeking something more in the trap vein will find plenty to appreciate in cuts like “Narcos” and “Somos o No Somos.” Anuel secures no less than Lil Wayne himself for the bilingual team-up “Ferrari,” a braggadocious track that recalls his previous single “YES” with Fat Joe and Cardi B. Yet it’s the chilling “Rifles Rusos” with pioneer Tego Calderón that most recalls the grimness of Anuel’s well-respected early material. Calderón also appears on the throbbing reggaetón jam “Jangueo,” and the embrace of that vital genre’s past and present is where the album truly draws its power. Both of the Bad Bunny collaborations here tap into that rejuvenated spirit, with “Así Soy Yo” giving off that throwback perreo sound and the shinier duet “Hasta Que Dios Diga” showcasing their contemporary star power.

Koe Wetzel knows what his fans might be thinking. “For the last nine years, we\'ve just kind of been doing our own thing and building up this fanbase,” he tells Apple Music. “And whenever we announced we were signing with Columbia Records, we had a lot of people that were coming on and commenting and going, you know, \'He\'s a sellout. He\'s finally sold out. We lost him.\' And I feel like sometimes they kind of want to keep you to themselves.” A cult favorite among fans of independent country music, he conquered the touring circuit of his native Texas before spreading his singular blend of \'90s rock and rowdy country far beyond the borders of the Lone Star State. Wetzel addresses the elephant in the room in the album\'s opening skit, then goes on, along with his band and producer Taylor Kimball, to create daring soundscapes for *Sellout*\'s songs, which explore substance abuse, romantic entanglement, and life on the road with candor and confidence. Wetzel flexes his muscles as a lyricist too, as on standout track \"Good Die Young\" when he sings, \"My mama called to say she’s praying for me and Jesus called but I wasn’t there.\" Below, Wetzel shares the inspiration behind the songs. **Pre-Sellout** \"Especially in our scene, the Texas music scene that we kind of came up in, when somebody signs a record deal, they feel as if they\'ve lost, because they either turn into pop country music or something that wasn\'t what the fans were used to. And so that was the whole reason behind naming the album *Sellout*, because our music hasn\'t changed at all. If anything, I think this is some of the better music that we\'ve put out, especially with the sound that we came up with on this record.\" **Kuntry & Wistern** \"It was right when COVID hit and everybody got quarantined. Social media was going crazy and everybody was losing their mind. Me and my buddy have a studio in Denton, and I called him up and I was like, \'Screw it. If we\'re going to quarantine somewhere, we might as well quarantine in the studio and make some music.\' So we went in and we just started from the ground up. We had a riff that we came up with and then I was like, \'I lost my fucking mind,\' whatever. And it kind of stuck. It was kind of a joke at first, but it just stuck. And then we got really tanked in the studio and finished off the rest of it. We put it out just because we hadn\'t put out music in a long time and we wanted to put out something people could relate to at that moment in time.\" **Cold & Alone** \"I just put myself in somebody else\'s shoes going through a breakup, you know what I mean? Just kind of mixed with personal feelings that I\'ve had going through breakups and then how somebody would feel if they were just dropped out of the sky from a long-term relationship. And so I just took that and we came up with that song from the ground up. All these songs were pretty much put together within a two-month period, if that.\" **Crying From the Bathroom** \"My producer, Taylor Kimball, he actually had that line \'crying from the bathroom\' when we were recording our last record, **Harold Saul High**. We did a demo to that song and it was just the chords and just the first line, \'You called me from the bathroom.\' And it was a bunch of mumble-jumble throughout the whole song and I kind of freestyled, but none of it really made sense. Whenever we went back to actually start cutting songs for the record and start making new songs, we went back on that song and I was like, \'Man, this song has a really good feel to it.\' So we threw in the whistle and we threw the big drop in it with the big heavy guitars, and I finished writing to it. We got done with it and we were like, \'Man, that sounds pretty cool.\' I was like, \'Let\'s kind of mix it up a little bit. Let\'s throw some steel guitar on it and kind of give it a country vibe. But at the same time, whenever that drop hits, let\'s not take out the steel guitar. Let\'s let it ride with the rest of the song and kind of throw people off.\'\" **The Fiddler** \"\'Lubbock\' and \'The Fiddler\' were originally one big track. It\'s just me trying, attempting to play fiddle, because I don\'t play fiddle for shit. So it\'s me just fucking around and it sounds pathetic, it really does. I\'m just like mumbling the words to \'Lubbock\' on it and there\'s a guy in the background, he\'s like, \'Oh, my god, it sounds terrible.\' And I\'m just like, \'Fuck this thing,\' and I throw it down. And then it leads right into \'Lubbock.\'\" **Lubbock** \"There\'s a bar we always play in Lubbock, it\'s called the Blue Light. We kind of cut our teeth in Lubbock, and you know, that\'s where Texas Tech is, and it\'s out in the middle of nowhere. But we have a lot of good memories in Lubbock, especially on the come-up. And every time we go back, we feel at home in Lubbock. So it was actually a song that I wrote back in like 2013 or \'14. We were kind of looking for a country-esque song to put on the record. It\'s kind of like a boot-stomper, I guess you could say. And we came back on that song, but I couldn\'t remember all the lyrics. So I had to rewrite like the second half of both verses on the song to fit the record.\" **SideChick** \"It was like 4:00 am and I was probably like two or three bottles of wine deep and just off in my feels and I grab a guitar and I told my producer, \'Push play.\' And I brought in the shaker and I just laid on my back and I sang this. I just freestyled this whole song. So the whole song is surrounded by a side chick\'s point of view.\" **Drug Problem** \"The song in general, whenever you see it and you hear it for the first 10 seconds, you\'re like, \'Oh, my god, this guy\'s a druggie.\' Like the Sunday school people are going to hate this song for the first 10 seconds. But at the end of it, it just revolves around the drug being the girl or the significant other and the relationship. And you can\'t get enough of it. So it\'s kind of like a hidden message, you just got to get through the first 15 seconds of the song and give it a chance.\" **Outcast** \"\'Outcast\' is a William Clark Green song. He wrote that song. It was off of his first album. One of my best friends passed away back in 2017, and in high school we would listen to that song constantly. And especially really late in the night, whenever we were pretty toasted up. I put that together for the homeboy because if he was still here, we\'d be jamming that pretty hard still.\" **Sundy or Mundy** \"I\'m a huge Nirvana fan—Kurt Cobain, Soundgarden, Sonic Youth, like the Seattle grunge era. I\'d just seen like one tweet or something that was, I can\'t remember what it was, but it got me pissed off. And so I was just like, \'Fuck everybody,\' kind of, on this song.\" **Good Die Young** \"After my buddy Saul passed away, I\'d actually started writing this song and I had the first verse. We\'ve been playing it for like the last three or four years, but that\'s all I could get to, was just the first verse. And then after that, I just couldn\'t write anymore to it. You see all these younger people that are going through stuff or people that are passing away way before their time. And it sucks so bad. So that was kind of the essence of the song, to kind of help people get through.\" **Drunk Driving** \"Everybody\'s drunk-drove before. I don\'t condone it. I don\'t think that\'s the message of the song, obviously. But it kind of puts you in the driver\'s seat of somebody that\'s drunk driving, I guess you could say. And kind of what they\'re going through, not necessarily why they would be drunk driving, but somebody that\'s gone through a lot.\" **FGA** \"So everybody\'s like, \'What does FGA stand for?\' And I\'m like, \'I\'m not telling you,\' or \'I don\'t know.\' Everybody\'s just been guessing. But no, it\'s only just the chords to the song, so...if you want to just put that it\'s the chords to the song, then that\'d be cool.\" **Post-Sellout** \"\'Post-Sellout\' is another skit, but it has a hidden track behind it. It\'s just a song about a chicken farmer and his wife cheating on him.\"

Queensland’s Tia Gostelow may have been born in 1999, but she clearly looks back to the 1980s for her musical references. Indeed, the fact that *CHRYSALIS*, her second album, begins with the sound of a tape deck rewinding is a clear indication of where her heart truly belongs. And with that time being so far in the past, Gostelow can cherry-pick the best elements of what made that decade great—big sing-along choruses, layers of fizzing synths, and cavernous drums. *CHRYSALIS* displays a maturity and assuredness that belies Gostelow’s youth, and that precociousness has seen her pick up multiple nominations at both the Queensland Music Awards and the National Indigenous Music Awards. Her sound is addictive electro-pop by way of Taylor Swift (Gostelow has even said that attending a Taylor Swift show inspired her to play music), which makes her music reminiscent of the chillwave of the early 2010s, or perhaps a sweeter take on CHVRCHES. Sydney indie band Holy Holy crops up on album highlight “ALWAYS,” which is little surprise given that the band’s guitarist Oscar Dawson is on production duties, reprising his role from Gostelow’s 2018 debut *Thick Skin*. Dawson adds a quality which, when paired with Gostelow’s knack for melody, means *CHRYSALIS* is tailor-made to fill stadiums.

In the six busy years since Meghan Trainor released “All About That Bass,” the winking doo-wop throwback that made her a viral sensation, the Grammy-winning pop star dropped two albums, toured the world, judged TV talent shows, and collaborated with Kaskade and CNCO. But her biggest strides, she says, have come in her relationship with herself. The singer’s panoramic and upbeat third album, aptly titled *TREAT MYSELF*, honors her commitment to making music for herself rather than bending to others, and is easily her most confident work to date. She spans a broad range of styles and influences—from tender, gospel-inflected balladry (“Babygirl”) to slick R&B with “Truffle Butter”-esque synths (\"Nice to Meet Ya\" featuring Nicki Minaj)—but her sweet spot is the glossy R&B-pop that shaped her youth. “Genetics,” a slick early-oughts take on Top 40 disco funk (it even has a chorus that spells out the song title), features none other than than The Pussycat Dolls. Trainor makes a point to look ahead, too, arranging several of the collaborations here to spotlight new artists she believes in. Up-and-comers Lennon Stella and Sasha Sloan, for example, guest on “Workin’ On It,” a heartfelt resolution to be kinder to herself. “Never liked compliments ’cause it’s always been so hard believing them,” she sings, “but I’m workin’ on it.”

“When I first met busbee, I told him, ‘I know you\'re a pop guy first, but you can\'t change who I am, which is a country singer,’” says Carly Pearce of the writer-producer, who helped her shape both her 2017 debut *Every Little Thing* and her new self-titled album before his sudden passing in 2019 from brain cancer. “I felt like really on this record we dialed into the perfect blend of that. He was able, even more on this record than the first, to really push me into seeing where we could take my voice, with it still remaining country.” The final full record that busbee made is powered by sleek, energetic rhythms but colored by incisive licks and solos played on bluegrass-style resonator guitar. “I know that he was very proud of this record and was excited for me, because he really felt like it was going to change the game for me.” Another major event also altered the way Pearce and her fans would experience the songs on her sophomore full-length. When recording began, she was in a new a romance, widely covered by country blogs, with her fellow hitmaker and now-husband Michael Ray. “Forever that will be the start of our relationship,” she says. “We really did fall in love during this record.” Here Pearce walks through each track on her second album. **Closer to You** “That song was the right moment to introduce what was going on in my life, which was falling in love. And I didn\'t want to come out with something that was too heavy right out the gate.” **Call Me** “That song was written by the boys of Little Big Town \[Phillip Sweet and Jimi Westbrook\] with busbee and then with Emily Shackelton, who wrote ‘Every Little Thing’ with me. I could hear in there the sass and the swagger that fits my vibe. I have figured out that fans like sad from me and they like sass from me. I just loved what it said. Yes, I am married, and yes, that\'s an amazing thing. But that doesn\'t mean that I don\'t want to feel sexy and want to sing things like that.” **I Hope You’re Happy Now** “‘I Hope You\'re Happy Now’ was completely my story. I played with Luke \[Combs\] when ‘Hurricane’ was out, so way before he was what he is now, and I just fell in love with his voice. I felt like we grew up the same; we grew up on \'90s country, we\'re the same age, and we just really love real songs and real singing. So I had asked to write with him, and we went in the room and just started talking and he knew exactly what I was getting out of and entering into, which is my now-husband. \[Luke\] had the idea, ‘I hope you\'re happy now,’ and he told me, ‘What if I play the role of your ex and we do a double meaning on it?’ And he started playing this groove and that entire first verse just fell out of my mouth. It just was something that I felt like I needed to say. I would have loved to have sung it with Luke, but at the time I knew I wanted to put it out as my next single, just to further explain to people who I am—I want to be the next-generation female country artist—he wasn\'t able to do that. I have been a Lee Brice fan for years and years and sent him the song and he flipped out over it. And I will tell you he took it to a place that I didn\'t even know it could go vocally.” **Dashboard Jesus** “It\'s almost ‘Jesus, Take the Wheel’ meets ‘Wide Open Spaces.’ I kind of felt like it was my ‘Wide Open Spaces’ moment; I totally can relate to the girl in that story that\'s just giving it her all. I had a record deal in 2012 on Sony, and that song was actually pitched to me then. I never forgot that song. What it reminds me is so many labels in town, so many people in town told me that I was singing music that was dated, that my time had passed in country music: ‘Oh, you would\'ve been so big in the \'90s.’ And that song represents that I\'m still the same girl singing the same music with the same story. It was just the right timing. And that song is just really special to me because it stood the test of time.” **Halfway Home** “This one was hard to write. I wrote this song before I was able to write ‘I Hope You\'re Happy Now.’ This is emotions that were happening during the end of a relationship that this person didn\'t know it was coming to an end. And it\'s just really real and raw. A lot of people don\'t want to say that they broke somebody\'s heart, but we do it. And sometimes we\'re the one that is at fault. This one is hard for me to even play for people, but I had to go there.” **Heart’s Going Out of Its Mind** “I wrote that song three days after my first date with Michael, and it just kind of happened. I wrote it with Laura Veltz; she\'s a phrasing genius. She\'s behind so many songs on the radio right now. I just wanted to capture that feeling of what is happening to me. And I loved that phrasing, just because it felt really hooky. There was almost magic in it; you didn\'t even have to really know what I was saying. When I took it to busbee, he of course really loved it. I was a backup singer for a while. I sing harmony a lot. I feel like he pushed me on a lot of these harmony parts and this was a fun one for us to build some vocal things to.” **Finish Your Sentences** “Michael and I were just dating. But it was such a moment of me going, ‘Why did I not think of this?’ Because so many people say, ‘Oh my god, we finish each other\'s sentences,’ but I had never heard a duet where you literally are doing what the song is about. And when \[Michael and I\] got in there, it was just really fun and we did a lot of layering. I just wanted to capture that fun, flirty feeling.” **It Won\'t Always Be Like This** “This one, I think, will forever be the most vulnerable song I could personally write about my story. It took on a new meaning in a studio. busbee actually started crying in the studio because it moved him so much, because he was going through something with his brother and making amends. Little did we know he was literally sitting there fighting brain cancer. This song, just when I thought it couldn\'t get any more personal, it took on a new thing, and I think that everybody can insert their own story into that message.” **Lightning in a Bottle** “Hannah Ellis is one of my good friends, and I had her out on the road with me and she played me \[the song\]. She was like, ‘I feel like I wrote this song for you and I didn\'t even know it.’ Even though the demo was pretty R&B, I felt like this could really have some old-school country moments vocally. And it was just a fun departure that I feel like will be a really cool moment live for us to strip down the band and do something a little different.” **Love Has No Heart** “This song reminded me of all those Martina McBride power ballads, and just that really challenging melody. This song really challenged me vocally in a way that I had never been challenged. Trevor Rosen of Old Dominion is a good friend, and he sent me the song and I immediately was just like, ‘I have to do this.’ Dobro has become such a part of my sound, and I wanted just to really take it to a country place in a way that I used to really love and try my hardest to sing like Martina in my bedroom.” **Woman Down** “I heard this song and immediately thought of my mom and the things that she sacrificed through her life. She\'s been through hell. It\'s an interesting time right now for women, and I wanted one of those anthemic moments for women. No matter what you\'ve gone through, what you face, what you deal with in any capacity, you are resilient. And the women in my life are super resilient, so I wanted to sing it for them.” **You Kissed Me First** “Hillary Lindsey actually sent this song to my publisher, Daniel. I heard it and it did remind me again, the heartbeat of this record is me finding my way to Michael. I definitely experienced that moment where you\'re like, ‘Oh my goodness, Is this for real?’ And I loved that Hillary wrote it in mind for me, just because she\'s been a key part of my sound from the beginning as well.” **Greener Grass** “The lyric just really killed me. I felt like it was such a cool take on the phrase ‘the grass is always greener’ and the elements of the country lyric. I loved ‘Wildest Dreams’ from Taylor Swift, and I felt like this was a moment that we could really make into that for me, just this dreaming world.”