Indie in 2021

The jazz great Pharoah Sanders was sitting in a car in 2015 when by chance he heard Floating Points’ *Elaenia*, a bewitching set of flickering synthesizer etudes. Sanders, born in 1940, declared that he would like to meet the album’s creator, aka the British electronic musician Sam Shepherd, 46 years his junior. *Promises*, the fruit of their eventual collaboration, represents a quietly gripping meeting of the two minds. Composed by Shepherd and performed upon a dozen keyboard instruments, plus the strings of the London Symphony Orchestra, *Promises* is nevertheless primarily a showcase for Sanders’ horn. In the ’60s, Sanders could blow as fiercely as any of his avant-garde brethren, but *Promises* catches him in a tender, lyrical mode. The mood is wistful and elegiac; early on, there’s a fleeting nod to “People Make the World Go Round,” a doleful 1971 song by The Stylistics, and throughout, Sanders’ playing has more in keeping with the expressiveness of R&B than the mountain-scaling acrobatics of free jazz. His tone is transcendent; his quietest moments have a gently raspy quality that bristles with harmonics. Billed as “a continuous piece of music in nine movements,” *Promises* takes the form of one long extended fantasia. Toward the middle, it swells to an ecstatic climax that’s reminiscent of Alice Coltrane’s spiritual-jazz epics, but for the most part, it is minimalist in form and measured in tone; Shepherd restrains himself to a searching seven-note phrase that repeats as naturally as deep breathing for almost the full 46-minute expanse of the piece. For long stretches you could be forgiven for forgetting that this is a Floating Points project at all; there’s very little that’s overtly electronic about it, save for the occasional curlicue of analog synth. Ultimately, the music’s abiding stillness leads to a profound atmosphere of spiritual questing—one that makes the final coda, following more than a minute of silence at the end, feel all the more rewarding.

“I wanted to get a better sense of how African traditional cosmologies can inform my life in a modern-day context,” Sons of Kemet frontman Shabaka Hutchings tells Apple Music about the concept behind the British jazz group’s fourth LP. “Then, try to get some sense of those forms of knowledge and put it into the art that’s being produced.” Since their 2013 debut LP *Burn*, the Barbados-raised saxophonist/clarinetist and his bandmates (tuba player Theon Cross and drummers Tom Skinner and Eddie Hick) have been at the forefront of the new London jazz scene—deconstructing its conventions by weaving a rich sonic tapestry that fuses together elements of modal and free jazz, grime, dub, ’60s and ’70s Ethiopian jazz, and Afro-Caribbean music. On *Black to the Future*, the Mercury Prize-nominated quartet is at their most direct and confrontational with their sociopolitical message—welcoming to the fold a wide array of guest collaborators (most notably poet Joshua Idehen, who also collaborated with the group on 2018’s *Your Queen Is a Reptile*) to further contextualize the album’s themes of Black oppression and colonialism, heritage and ancestry, and the power of memory. If you look closely at the song titles, you’ll discover that each of them makes up a singular poem—a clever way for Hutchings to clue in listeners before they begin their musical journey. “It’s a sonic poem, in that the words and the music are the same thing,” Hutchings says. “Poetry isn\'t meant to be descriptive on the surface level, it\'s descriptive on a deep level. So if you read the line of poetry, and then you listen to the music, a picture should emerge that\'s more than what you\'d have if you considered the music or the line separately.” Here, Hutchings gives insight into each of the tracks. **“Field Negus” (feat. Joshua Idehen)** “This track was written in the midst of the Black Lives Matter protests in London, and it was a time that was charged with an energy of searching for meaning. People were actually starting to talk about Black experience and Black history as it related to the present, in a way that hadn\'t really been done in Britain before. The point of artists is to be able to document these moments in history and time, and be able to actually find a way of contextualizing them in a way that\'s poetic. The aim of this track is to keep that conversation going and keep the reflections happening. I\'ve been working with Joshua for 15 years and I really appreciate his perspective on the political realm. He\'s got a way of describing reality in a manner which makes you think deeply. He never loses humor and he never loses his sense of sharpness.” **“Pick Up Your Burning Cross” (feat. Moor Mother & Angel Bat Dawid)** “It started off with me writing the bassline, which I thought was going to be a grime bassline. But then in the pandemic lockdown, I added layers of horns and woodwinds. It took it completely out of the grime space and put it more in that Antillean-Caribbean atmosphere. It really showed me that there\'s a lot of intersecting links between these musics that sometimes you\'re not even aware of until you start really diving into their potential and start adding and taking away things. It was really great to actually discover that the tune had more to offer than I envisioned in the beginning. Angel Bat Dawid and Moor Mother are both on this one, and the only thing I asked them to do was to listen to the track and just give their honest interpretation of what the music brings out of them.” **“Think of Home”** “If you\'re thinking poetically, you\'ve got that frantic energy of \'Burning Cross,\' which signifies dealing with those issues of oppression. Then at the end of that process of dealing with them, you\'ve got to still remember the place that you come from. You\'ve got to think about the utopia, think about that serene tranquil place so that you\'re not consumed in the battle. It\'s not really trying to be a Caribbean track per se, but I was trying to get that feeling of when I think back to my days growing up in Barbados. This is the feeling I had when I remember the music that was made at that time.” **“Hustle” (feat. Kojey Radical)** “The title of the track links back to the title of our second album, *Lest We Forget What We Came Here to Do*. The answer to that question is to hustle. Our grandparents came and migrated to Britain, not to just be British per se, but so that they could then create a better life for themselves and their families and have the future be one with dignity and pride. I gave these words to Kojey and he said that he finds it difficult to depict these types of struggles considering that he\'s not in the present moment within the same struggle that he grew up in. He felt it was disingenuous for him to talk about the struggle. I told him that he\'s a storyteller, and storytelling isn\'t always autobiographical. His gift is to be able to tell stories for his community, and to remember that he\'s also an orator of their history regardless of where his personal journey has led him.” **“For the Culture” (feat. D Double E)** “Originally, we\'d intended D Double E to be on \'Pick Up Your Burning Cross.\' But he came into the studio and it really wasn\'t the vibe that he was in. We played him the demo of this track and his face lit up. He was like, \'Let\'s go into the studio. I know what to do.\' It was one take and that was it. I think this might be one of my favorite tunes on the album. The reason I called it \'For the Culture\' is that it puts me back into what it felt like to be a teenager in Barbados in the \'90s, going into the dance halls and really learning what it is to dance. It\'s not just all about it being hard and struggling and striving; there is that fun element of celebrating what it is to be sensual and to be alive and love music and partying and just joyfulness.” **“To Never Forget the Source”** “I gave this really short melody to the band, maybe like four bars for the melody and a very repeated bassline. We played it for about half an hour, where the drums and bass entered slowly and I played the melody again and again. The idea of this, when we recorded in the studio, is that it needs to be the vibe and spirit of how we are playing together. So it wasn\'t about stopping and starting and being anxious. We need to play it until the feeling is right. The clarinets and the flutes on this one is maybe the one I\'m most proud of in terms of adding a counterpoint line, which really offsets and emphasizes the original saxophone and tuba line.” **“In Remembrance of Those Fallen”** “The idea of \'In Remembrance of Those Fallen\' is to give homage to those people that have been fighting for liberation and freedom within all those anti-colonial movements, and remember the ongoing struggle for dignity within especially the Black world in Africa. It\'s trying to get that feeling of \'We can do this. We can go forward, regardless of what hurdles have been done and of what hurdles we\'ve encountered.\' But, musically, there\'s so many layers to this. I was excited with how, on one side, the drums are doing what you\'d describe as Afro-jazz, and on the other one, it\'s doing a really primal sound—but mixing it in a way where you feel the impact of those two contrasting drum patterns. This is at the heart of what I like about the drums in Kemet. Regardless of what they\'re doing, the end result becomes one pulsating, forward-moving machine.” **“Let the Circle Be Unbroken”** “I was listening to a lot of \[Brazilian composer\] Hermeto Pascoal while making the album, and my mind was going onto those beautiful melodies that Hermeto sometimes makes. Songs that feel like you remember them, but they\'ve got a level of harmonic intricacy, which means that there\'s something disorienting too. It\'s like you\'re hearing a nursery rhyme in a dream, hearing the basic contour of the melody, but there\'s just something below the surface that disorientates you and throws you off what you know of it. It\'s one of the only times I\'ve ever heard that midtempo soca descend into brutal free jazz.” **“Envision Yourself Levitating”** “This one also features one of my heroes on the saxophone, Kebbi Williams, who does the first saxophone solo on the track. His music has got that real New Orleans communal vibe to it. For me, this is the height of music making—when you can make music that\'s easy enough to play its constituent parts, but when it all pieces together, it becomes a complex tapestry. It\'s the first point in the album where I do an actual solo with backing parts. This is, in essence, what a lot of calypso bands do in Barbados. So when you\'ve got traditional calypso music, you\'ll get a performer who is singing their melody and then you\'ve got these horn section parts that intersect and interact with the melody that the calypsonian is singing. It\'s that idea of an interchange between the band backing the chief melodic line.” **“Throughout the Madness, Stay Strong”** “It\'s about optimism, but not an optimism where you have a smile on your face. An optimism where you\'re resigned to the place of defeat within the big spectrum of things. It\'s having to actually resign yourself to what has happened in the continued dismantling of Black civilization, and how Black people are regarded as a whole in the world within a certain light; but then understanding that it\'s part of a broader process of rising to something else, rising to a new era. Also, on the more technical side of the recording of this tune, this was the first tune that we recorded for the whole session. It\'s the first take of the first tune on the first day.” **“Black” (feat. Joshua Idehen)** “There was a point where we all got into the studio and I asked that we go into these breathing exercises where we essentially just breathe in really deeply about 30 times, and at the end of 30, we breathe out and hold it for as long as you can with nothing inside. We did one of these exercises while lying on the floor with our eyes shut in pitch blackness. I asked everyone to scream as hard as we can, really just let it out. No one could have anything in their ears apart from the track, so no one was aware of how anyone else sounded. It was complete no-self-awareness, no shyness. It\'s like a cathartic ritual to really just let it out, however you want.”

“I think we approach releasing music like one would approach dating someone,” The Marías frontwoman María Zardoya tells Apple Music about wanting to take it slow with their debut LP. “At the beginning of a relationship, you don\'t want to throw all your cards out there. You don\'t want to give away too much of yourself until you get to know the person.” If the double-volume *Superclean* EPs allowed the LA-based bilingual band to give us a first taste of their lush indie pop, then *CINEMA* expands on their vision with a new set of influences and experiences. Recorded in fits and starts before and during the 2020 quarantine, the album flows with a clear sense of cohesion—like watching a film where, in Zardoya\'s own words, “each song is its own individual scene in its own individual world.” Zardoya also believes her relationship with her partner and bandmate, producer/multi-instrumentalist Josh Conway, strengthens their songwriting. “Our relationship, and our love, is very karmic,” she says. “I think we complement each other in the best ways, and we\'re always pretty much on the same page about the songs and about the creative end. And if we\'re not, we embrace those differences.” Here, Zardoya and Conway take us on a cinematic journey, track by track. **“Just a Feeling”** María Zardoya: “When we came up with the title and the concept of the album, which ties back to our roots of making music together, we knew that we wanted lots of lush string arrangements. And in some of our favorite movies, you can see this motif throughout where they use the same melody, but make different arrangements of it. I just love it so much. During quarantine, we became obsessed with the soundtrack for this ’60s Italian movie called *Amore mio aiutami*. Throughout its soundtrack, there’s this theme that\'s mainly always strings, but also other instruments as well. We heard how lush one of the tracks was on that soundtrack, and that\'s how we wanted it to feel to set the tone for the album as a whole.” **“Calling U Back”** Josh Conway: “‘Calling U Back’ was the first one on *CINEMA* that, once the first idea was written, we were like, ‘Okay, we\'ve got an album coming.’” MZ: “The bark you hear in the beginning is our dog Lucy. You get this really beautiful lush string arrangement. And then, right after, you get this in-your-face dog bark followed by an in-your-face chorus hook. That was definitely very intentional. We wanted to shock the listener in a sense.” **“Hush”** MZ: “In terms of the song’s overall message, there\'s always someone with something to say about what you\'re doing or how you\'re living your life. And this was a song where it was basically telling them to just shut the fuck up and hush. It\'s like, ‘Okay, you\'ve got all these opinions, I\'m going to write a revenge song for you.’ It also has a futuristic sort of feel to it, and so we definitely leaned into that with the visuals for it as well.” **“All I Really Want Is You”** MZ: “This song was written during quarantine while we were putting the finishing touches to the album, working day in and day out on the videos and editing them at 1 or 2:00 in the morning. There was a lot going on during the time that this song was written, so we wanted to go back in time to a month or two prior where Josh and I decided to go on a little LSD journey throughout our neighborhood. We couldn\'t leave or travel in a sense—so we decided to go on a mental trip or a mental journey. We were tripping, just enjoying nature and the stars at night.” **“Hable con Ella”** MZ: “*Hable Con Ella*, or *Talk to Her*, is my all-time favorite film by Pedro Almodóvar. At this point, I think it\'s common knowledge, because he just inspires me so much and I want the world to know about him. There\'s a particular scene in the movie where Caetano Veloso is singing \'Cucurrucucú paloma.\' Obviously, that moment can never be recreated by anybody, but we wanted to recreate the feeling of that beautiful moment with the layered trumpets and this sort of mystic melody.” **“Little by Little”** MZ: “It\'s a classic Marías love song about self-reflection in a relationship and knowing that you need to change things about yourself, but not putting the pressure on yourself to change everything at once. I think it\'s just taking things slow, not putting so much pressure on yourself all at once.” **“Heavy”** JC: “We do this game sometimes where I\'ll pull up some good pictures online, from Pinterest, maybe, and I\'ll show them to María and tell her to sing a melody or anything that comes to mind when she sees it. I pulled up the picture of a woman in a desert, I believe. And María says, ‘I\'m heavy, I\'m nice-eyed.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, okay, here we go.’ And within minutes, we had the verse and the chorus there. This one’s more about wanting to be alone and not wanting to deal with anyone or anything at all. Anyone knocking at your door, you\'re just like, ‘Just go away, let me be alone here.’” **“Un Millón”** MZ: “We approached ‘Un Millón’ like, ‘What would it sound like if The Marías made a reggaetón-inspired song?’ I grew up listening to reggaetón. In my first job ever, at 15, all I wanted to do was save enough money to go to reggaetón concerts with my brother in the VIP section. I ended up saving enough money for Don Omar and Daddy Yankee concerts. It was a huge part of my life and it’s in my blood. We had never made a reggaetón-inspired song, so we were like, ‘Let\'s just try it.’ ‘Un Millón’ happened, and then everybody wanted it on the album.” **“Spin Me Around”** MZ: “It’s definitely our psychedelic ‘what would we listen to while on acid’ song. It’s got that trippiness and waviness that we needed, because psychedelics is a huge part of our life. And we wanted our fans to experience how we feel on psychedelics.” JC: “I think it was the last song written for the album. I personally felt like it needed something a little more open and lighthearted with an indie-rock-type vibe as far as production goes. I\'m stoked that it made it onto the album, because I feel like without it, the album feels a little synth-heavy and very electronic in certain ways. It kind of took those fears of mine away.” **“The Mice Inside This Room”** MZ: “It\'s our most abstract song on the album. Conceptually, it\'s sort of about paranoia. Sometimes, even to this day, I can\'t fall asleep by myself if I don\'t have a light on or hear white noise. I hear one thing and my mind just races. Any little sound could be this mouse inside my room that\'s preventing me from sleeping and from my sanity. It could also be symbolic in how there\'s internal voices, and internal and external chatter, that get in the way from you being completely calm and being able to think clearly.” JC: “It\'s definitely our most Radiohead-inspired song. I think we\'re both very aware of that. Luckily, we didn\'t infringe on anything on it.” **“To Say Hello”** JC: “It was another late one to the album party. María probably spent a good hour and a half recording the vocals to it. I vividly remember there was a moment, about 30 minutes in, when she’s saying the entire first verse—with lyrics and a pre-chorus—and I just remember thinking, ‘This is the song right here.’ After she was done riffing, we went back and I was like, ‘Yo, did you realize that you sang the entire first verse and chorus of this song?’” MZ: “A lot of times when we riff, it\'s subconscious thoughts that need to be released. And I think this one was a subconscious release of me making the shift in moving to LA and leaving my life in Atlanta behind. So when the chorus says, ‘I belong in here,’ it\'s ‘I belong here in LA.’ This is my life, and sometimes I can call you and say hi, but I belong here in LA. It\'s kind of the duality of cities and moving.” **“Fog as a Bullet”** MZ: “This one was written at the start of 2020. I remember sitting in our apartment on a Friday. It was really foggy out on the hills. I was thinking, ‘Wow, this is so beautiful. I just love when it\'s foggy in LA.’ And just how inspiring that was. And then, two days later, Kobe Bryant and his daughter passed away on the helicopter because of the lack of visibility due to that same fog. I was thinking to myself, ‘Wow, something that, just two days ago, I found so beautiful can cause so much destruction.’ I was just feeling the pain of the city and feeling sad, of being in LA and of him being such an iconic figure.” **“Talk to Her”** JC: “One night, María was reading some poetry from her little tour diary. She was reading it and all the guys in the band were there. It was about being on tour. We were all totally taken aback by it because none of us had ever heard that before.” MZ: “It was just my tour notebook, where I would write random thoughts on. I think we all share very difficult moments on that particular tour. You get to see inside our minds during that time, because I don\'t know if a lot of people know how difficult touring is for, I think, most artists. We didn\'t have a lot of money for things.” JC: “There\'s so many ups and downs. There\'s not really any middle ground. It\'s either, as Eddie \[Edward James, The Marías keyboardist\] says, ‘peaks and pits.’ The line towards the end where it says to don’t stop giving up is restorative too. It’s a call and response, like a train of thought that tells you to not stop and that it’ll be fine.”

With attention spans seemingly shrinking by the day, brave is the band that’s prepared to release a sprawling 19-track double album. Oh, and did we mention it’s a concept record based on the circular nature of life? And that it’s inspired by Parcels’ experiences while writing in a forest on the east coast of Australia at the start of 2020, when catastrophic bushfires were followed weeks later by horrific floods? So far, so bold. Musically, there are elements common to *Day/Night* and the band’s self-titled 2018 debut—the Daft Punk-esque smooth funk of “Somethinggreater” and the sweeping ’70s disco-soul of “Famous” and “Free”—but *Day/Night* is also a more introspective proposition (“Thefear,” “Nightwalk”). The swooning strings that envelop much of the album add a cinematic flair, which is fitting given that the band approached the album as though they were soundtracking a movie. Whittled down from more than 150 demos, *Day* is a lighter, softer side to *Night’s* deeper, darker tones, but they combine to make an album that is bursting with ambition and creativity, life-affirming upbeat moments and inward-looking solitude.

Over the course of her first four albums as The Weather Station, Toronto’s Tamara Lindeman has seen her project gradually blossom from a low-key indie-folk oddity into a robust roots-rock outfit powered by motorik rhythms and cinematic strings. But all that feels like mere baby steps compared to the great leap she takes with *Ignorance*, a record where Lindeman soundly promotes herself from singer-songwriter to art-rock auteur (with a dazzling, Bowie-worthy suit made of tiny mirrors to complete the transformation). It’s a move partly inspired by the bigger rooms she found herself playing in support of her 2017 self-titled release, but also by the creative stasis she was feeling after a decade spent in acoustic-strummer mode. “Whenever I picked up the guitar, I just felt like I was repeating myself,” Lindeman tells Apple Music. “I felt like I was making the same decisions and the same chord changes, and it just felt a little stale. I just really wanted to embrace some of this other music that I like.” To that end, Lindeman built *Ignorance* around a dream-team band, pitting pop-schooled players like keyboardist John Spence (of Tegan and Sara’s live band) and drummer Kieran Adams (of indie electro act DIANA) against veterans of Toronto’s improv-jazz scene, like saxophonist Brodie West and flautist Ryan Driver. The results are as rhythmically vigorous as they are texturally scrambled, with Lindeman’s pristine Christine McVie-like melodies mediating between the two. Throughout the record, Lindeman distills the biggest, most urgent issues of the early 2020s—climate change, social injustice, unchecked capitalism—into intimate yet enigmatic vignettes that convey the heavy mental toll of living in a world that seems to be slowly caving in from all sides. “With a lot of the songs on the record, it could be a personal song or it could be an environmental song,” Lindeman explains. “But I don\'t think it matters if it\'s either, because it\'s all the same feelings.” Here, Lindeman provides us with a track-by-track survey of *Ignorance*’s treacherous psychic terrain. **Robber** “It\'s a very strange thing to be the recipient of something that\'s stolen, which is what it means to be a non-Indigenous Canadian. We\'re all trying to grapple with the question of: What does it mean to even be here at all? We\'re the beneficiaries of this long-ago genocide, essentially. I think Canadians in general and people all over the world are sort of waking up to our history—so to sing \'I never believed in the robber\' sort of feels like how we all were taught not to see certain things. The first page in the history textbook is: ‘People lived here.’ And then the next 265 pages are all about the victors—the takers.” **Atlantic** “I was thinking about the weight of the climate crisis—like, how can you look out the window and love the world when you know that it is so threatened, and how that threat and that grief gets in the way of loving the world and being able to engage with it.” **Tried to Tell You** “Something I thought about a lot when I was making the album was how strange our society is—like, how we’ve built a society on a total lack of regard for biological life, when we are biological. Our value system is so odd—it\'s ahuman in this funny way. We\'re actually very soft, vulnerable creatures—we fall in love easily and our hearts are so big. And yet, so much of the way that we try to be is to turn away from everything that\'s soft and mysterious and instinctual about the way that we actually are. There\'s a distinct lack of humility in the way that we try to be, and it doesn\'t do us any good. So this just started out as a song about a friend who was turning away from someone that they were very clearly deeply in love with, but at the same time, I felt like I was writing about everyone, because everyone is turning away from things that we clearly deeply love.” **Parking Lot** “What\'s beautiful about birds is that they\'re everywhere, and they show up in our big, shitty cities, and they\'re just this constant reminder of the nonhuman perspective—like when you really watch a bird, and you try to imagine how it\'s perceiving the world around it and why it\'s doing what it does. For me, there\'s such a beauty in encountering the nonhuman, but also a sadness, and those two ideas are connected in the song.” **Loss** “This song started with that chord change and that repetition of \'loss is loss is loss is loss.\' So I stitched in a snapshot of a person—I don\'t know who—having this moment where they realize that the pain of trying to avoid the pain is not as bad as the pain itself. The deeper feeling beneath that avoidance is loss and sadness and grief, so when you can actually see it, and acknowledge that loss is loss and that it\'s real, you also acknowledge the importance of things. I took a quote from a friend of mine who was talking about her journey into climate activism, and she said, ‘At some point, you have to live as if the truth is true.’ I just loved that, so I quoted her in the song, and I think about that line a lot.\" **Separated** “With some of these songs, I\'m almost terrified by some of the lyrics that I chose to include—I\'m like, \'What? I said that?\' To be frank, I wrote this song in response to the way that people communicate on social media. There\'s so much commitment: We commit to disagree, we commit to one-upping each other and misunderstanding each other on purpose, and it\'s not dissimilar to a broken relationship. Like, there\'s a genuine choice being made to perpetuate the conflict, and I feel like that\'s not really something we like to talk about.” **Wear** “This one\'s a slightly older song. I think I wrote it when I was still out on the road touring a lot. And it just seemed like the most perfect, deep metaphor: ‘I tried to wear the world like some kind of garment.’ I\'m always really happy when I can hit a metaphor that has many layers to it, and many threads that I can pull out over the course of the song—like, the world is this garment that doesn\'t fit and doesn\'t keep you warm and you can\'t move in. And you just want to be naked, and you want to take it off and you want to connect, and yet you have to wear it. I think it speaks to a desire to understand the world and understand other people—like, \'Is everyone else comfortable in this garment, or is it just me that feels uncomfortable?\'” **Trust** “This song was written in a really short time, and that doesn\'t usually happen to me, because I usually am this very neurotic writer and I usually edit a lot and overthink. It\'s a very heavy song. And it\'s about that thing that\'s so hard to wrap your head around when you\'re an empathetic person: You want to understand why some people actively choose conflict, why they choose to destroy. I wasn\'t actually thinking about a personal relationship when I wrote this song; I was thinking about the world and various things that were happening at the time. I think the song is centered in understanding the softness that it takes to stand up for what matters, even when it\'s not cool.” **Heart** “Along with \'Robber,\' this was one of my favorite recording moments. It had a pretty loose shape, and there\'s this weird thing that I was obsessed with where the one chord is played through the whole song, and everything is constantly tying back to this base. I just loved what the band did and how they took it in so many different directions. This song really freaked me out \[lyrically\]. I was not comfortable with it. But I was talked into keeping it, and all for the better, because obviously, I do believe that the sentiments shared on the song—though they are so, so fucking soft!—are the best things that you can share.” **Subdivisions** “This was one of the first songs written before the record took shape in my mind and before it structurally came together. I think we recorded it in, like, an hour, and everyone\'s performance was just perfect. I like these big, soft, emotional songs, and from a craft perspective, I think it\'s one of my better songs. I\'ve never really written a chorus like that. I don\'t even feel like it\'s my song. I don\'t feel like I wrote it or sang it, but it just feels like falling deeper and deeper into some very soft place—which is, I think, the right way to end the record.”

“Straight away,” Dry Cleaning drummer Nick Buxton tells Apple Music. “Immediately. Within the first sentence, literally.” That is precisely how long it took for Buxton and the rest of his London post-punk outfit to realize that Florence Shaw should be their frontwoman, as she joined in with them during a casual Sunday night jam in 2018, reading aloud into the mic instead of singing. Though Buxton, guitarist Tom Dowse, and bassist Lewis Maynard had been playing together in various forms for years, Shaw—a friend and colleague who’s also a visual artist and university lecturer—had no musical background or experience. No matter. “I remember making eye contact with everyone and being like, ‘Whoa,’” Buxton says. “It was a big moment.” After a pair of 2019 EPs comes the foursome’s full-length debut, *New Long Leg*, an hypnotic tangle of shape-shifting guitars, mercurial rhythms, and Shaw’s deadpan (and often devastating) spoken-word delivery. Recorded with longtime PJ Harvey producer John Parish at the historic Rockfield Studios in Wales, it’s a study in chemistry, each song eventually blooming from jams as electric as their very first. Read on as Shaw, Buxton, and Dowse guide us through the album track by track. **“Scratchcard Lanyard”** Nick Buxton: “I was quite attracted to the motorik-pedestrian-ness of the verse riffs. I liked how workmanlike that sounded, almost in a stupid way. It felt almost like the obvious choice to open the album, and then for a while we swayed away from that thinking, because we didn\'t want to do this cliché thing—we were going to be different. And then it becomes very clear to you that maybe it\'s the best thing to do for that very reason.” **“Unsmart Lady”** Florence Shaw: “The chorus is a found piece of text, but it suited what I needed it for, and that\'s what I was grasping at. The rest is really thinking about the years where I did lots and lots of jobs all at the same time—often quite knackering work. It’s about the female experience, and I wanted to use language that\'s usually supposed to be insulting, commenting on the grooming or the intelligence of women. I wanted to use it in a song, and, by doing that, slightly reclaim that kind of language. It’s maybe an attempt at making it prideful rather than something that is supposed to make you feel shame.” **“Strong Feelings”** FS: “It was written as a romantic song, and I always thought of it as something that you\'d hear at a high school dance—the slow one where people have to dance together in a scary way.” **“Leafy”** NB: “All of the songs start as jams that we play all together in the rehearsal room to see what happens. We record it on the phone, and 99 percent of the time you take that away and if it\'s something that you feel is good, you\'ll listen to it and then chop it up into bits, make changes and try loads of other stuff out. Most of the jams we do are like 10 minutes long, but ‘Leafy’ was like this perfect little three-minute segment where we were like, ‘Well, we don\'t need to do anything with that. That\'s it.’” **“Her Hippo”** FS: “I\'m a big believer in not waiting for inspiration and just writing what you\'ve got, even if that means you\'re writing about a sense of nothingness. I think it probably comes from there, that sort of feeling.” **“New Long Leg”** NB: “I\'m really proud of the work on the album that\'s not necessarily the stuff that would jump out of your speakers straight away. ‘New Long Leg’ is a really interesting track because it\'s not a single, yet I think it\'s the strongest song on the album. There\'s something about the quality of what\'s happening there: Four people are all bringing something, in quite an unusual way, all the way around. Often, when you hear music like that, it sounds mental. But when you break it down, there\'s a lot of detail there that I really love getting stuck into.” **“John Wick”** FS: “I’m going to quote Lewis, our bass player: The title ‘John Wick’ refers to the film of the same name, but the song has nothing to do with it.” Tom Dowse: “Giving a song a working title is quite an interesting process, because what you\'re trying to do is very quickly have some kind of onomatopoeia to describe what the song is. ‘Leafy’ just sounded leafy. And ‘John Wick’ sounded like some kind of action cop show. Just that riff—it sounded like crime was happening and it painted a picture straight away. I thought it was difficult to divorce it from that name.” **“More Big Birds”** TD: “One of the things you get good at when you\'re a band and you\'re lucky enough to get enough time to be together is, when someone writes a drum part like that, you sit back. It didn\'t need a complicated guitar part, and sometimes it’s nice to have the opportunity to just hit a chord. I love that—I’ll add some texture and let the drums be. They’re almost melodic.” **“A.L.C”** FS: “It\'s the only track where I wrote all the lyrics in lockdown—all the others were written over a much longer period of time. But that\'s definitely the quickest I\'ve ever written. It\'s daydreaming about being in public and I suppose touches on a weird change of priorities that happened when your world just gets really shrunk down to your little patch. I think there\'s a bit of nostalgia in there, just going a bit loopy and turning into a bit of a monster.” **“Every Day Carry”** FS: “It was one of the last ones we recorded and I was feeling exhausted from trying so fucking hard the whole recording session to get everything I wanted down. I had sheets of paper with different chunks that had already been in the song or were from other songs, and I just pieced it together during the take as a bit of a reward. It can be really fun to do that when you don\'t know what you\'re going to do next, if it\'s going to be crap or if it\'s going to be good. That\'s a fun thing—I felt kind of burnt out, so it was nice to just entertain myself a bit by doing a surprise one.”

“Place and setting have always been really huge in this project,” Katie Crutchfield tells Apple Music of Waxahatchee, which takes its name from a creek in her native Alabama. “It’s always been a big part of the way I write songs, to take people with me to those places.” While previous Waxahatchee releases often evoked a time—the roaring ’90s, and its indie rock—Crutchfield’s fifth LP under the Waxahatchee alias finds Crutchfield finally embracing her roots in sound as well. “Growing up in Birmingham, I always sort of toed the line between having shame about the South and then also having deep love and connection to it,” she says. “As I started to really get into alternative country music and Lucinda \[Williams\], I feel like I accepted that this is actually deeply in my being. This is the music I grew up on—Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, the powerhouse country singers. It’s in my DNA. It’s how I learned to sing. If I just accept and embrace this part of myself, I can make something really powerful and really honest. I feel like I shed a lot of stuff that wasn\'t serving me, both personally and creatively, and it feels like *Saint Cloud*\'s clean and honest. It\'s like this return to form.” Here, Crutchfield draws us a map of *Saint Cloud*, with stories behind the places that inspired its songs—from the Mississippi to the Mediterranean. WEST MEMPHIS, ARKANSAS “Memphis is right between Birmingham and Kansas City, where I live currently. So to drive between the two, you have to go through Memphis, over the Mississippi River, and it\'s epic. That trip brings up all kinds of emotions—it feels sort of romantic and poetic. I was driving over and had this idea for \'**Fire**,\' like a personal pep talk. I recently got sober and there\'s a lot of work I had to do on myself. I thought it would be sweet to have a song written to another person, like a traditional love song, but to have it written from my higher self to my inner child or lower self, the two selves negotiating. I was having that idea right as we were over the river, and the sun was just beating on it and it was just glowing and that lyric came into my head. I wanted to do a little shout-out to West Memphis too because of \[the West Memphis Three\]—that’s an Easter egg and another little layer on the record. I always felt super connected to \[Damien Echols\], watching that movie \[*Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills*\] as a teenager, just being a weird, sort of dark kid from the South. The moment he comes on the screen, I’m immediately just like, ‘Oh my god, that guy is someone I would have been friends with.’ Being a sort of black sheep in the South is especially weird. Maybe that\'s just some self-mythology I have, like it\'s even harder if you\'re from the South. But it binds you together.” BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA “Arkadelphia Road is a real place, a road in Birmingham. It\'s right on the road of this little arts college, and there used to be this gas station where I would buy alcohol when I was younger, so it’s tied to this seediness of my past. A very profound experience happened to me on that road, but out of respect, I shouldn’t give the whole backstory. There is a person in my life who\'s been in my life for a long time, who is still a big part of my life, who is an addict and is in recovery. It got really bad for this person—really, really bad. \[\'**Arkadelphia**\'\] is about when we weren’t in recovery, and an experience that we shared. One of the most intense, personal songs I\'ve ever written. It’s about growing up and being kids and being innocent and watching this whole crazy situation play out while I was also struggling with substances. We now kind of have this shared recovery language, this shared crazy experience, and it\'s one of those things where when we\'re in the same place, we can kind of fit in the corner together and look at the world with this tent, because we\'ve been through what we\'ve been through.” RUBY FALLS, TENNESSEE “It\'s in Chattanooga. A waterfall that\'s in a cave. My sister used to live in Chattanooga, and that drive between Birmingham and Chattanooga, that stretch of land between Alabama, Georgia, into Tennessee, is so meaningful—a lot of my formative time has been spent driving that stretch. You pass a few things. One is Noccalula Falls, which I have a song about on my first album called ‘Noccalula.’ The other is Ruby Falls. \[‘**Ruby Falls**’\] is really dense—there’s a lot going on. It’s about a friend of mine who passed away from a heroin overdose, and it’s for him—my song for all people who struggle with that kind of thing. I sang a song at his funeral when he died. This song is just all about him, about all these different places that we talked about, or that we’d spend so much time at Waxahatchee Creek together. The beginning of the song is sort of meant to be like the high. It starts out in the sky, and that\'s what I\'m describing, as I take flight, up above everybody else. Then the middle part is meant to be like this flashback but it\'s taking place on earth—it’s actually a reference to *Just Kids*, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. It’s written with them in mind, but it\'s just about this infectious, contagious, intimate friendship. And the end of the song is meant to represent death or just being below the surface and being gone, basically.” ST. CLOUD, FLORIDA “It\'s where my dad is from, where he was born and where he grew up. The first part of \[\'**St. Cloud**\'\] is about New York. So I needed a city that was sort of the opposite of New York, in my head. I wasn\'t going to do like middle-of-nowhere somewhere; I really did want it to be a place that felt like a city. But it just wasn’t cosmopolitan. Just anywhere America, and not in a bad way—in a salt-of-the-earth kind of way. As soon as the idea to just call the whole record *Saint Cloud* entered my brain, it didn\'t leave. It had been the name for six months or something, and I had been calling it *Saint Cloud*, but then David Berman died and I was like, ‘Wow, that feels really kismet or something,’ because he changed his middle name to Cloud. He went by David Cloud Berman. I\'m a fan; it feels like a nice way to \[pay tribute\].” BARCELONA, SPAIN “In the beginning of\* \*‘**Oxbow**’ I say ‘Barna in white,’ and ‘Barna’ is what people call Barcelona. And Barcelona is where I quit drinking, so it starts right at the beginning. I like talking about it because when I was really struggling and really trying to get better—and many times before I actually succeeded at that—it was always super helpful for me to read about other musicians and just people I looked up to that were sober. It was during Primavera \[Sound Festival\]. It’s sort of notoriously an insane party. I had been getting close to quitting for a while—like for about a year or two, I would really be not drinking that much and then I would just have a couple nights where it would just be really crazy and I would feel so bad, and it affected all my relationships and how I felt about music and work and everything. I had the most intense bout of that in Barcelona right at the beginning of this tour, and as I was leaving I was going from there to Portugal and I just decided, ‘I\'m just going to not.’ I think in my head I was like, ‘I\'m actually done,’ but I didn\'t say that to everybody. And then that tour went into another tour, and then to the summer, and then before you know it I had been sober six months, and then I was just like, ‘I do not miss that at all.’ I\'ve never felt more like myself and better. It was the site of my great realization.”

Slow builds, skyscraping climaxes, deep melancholy tempered by European grandeur: You pretty much know what you’re getting when you come to a Mogwai album, but rarely have they given it up with such ease as they do on *As the Love Continues*, their 10th LP. For a band whose central theme has remained almost industrially consistent, they’ve built up plenty of variations on it: the sparkling, New Agey electronics of “Dry Fantasy,” the classic indie rock sound of “Ceiling Granny” and “Ritchie Sacramento,” the ’80s dance rhythms of “Supposedly, We Were Nightmares.” Even when they reach for their signature build-and-release (“Midnight Flit”), you get the sense of a band not just marching toward an inevitable climax but relishing in texture, nuance, and note-to-note intricacies that make that climax feel fresh again. And while they’ve always been beautiful, they’ve also seemed to treat that beauty as an intellectual liability, something to be undermined in the name of staying sharp.

Naming an album after yourself usually indicates an artist just starting out or one opening up after a long period of holding back. In the case of *Laura Stevenson*, it’s neither. A folk-leaning indie-rock songwriter raised in the Long Island ska/punk community during the late ’90s, she’s always put a premium on honesty, however raw—one song from 2019’s *The Big Freeze* describes the compulsion to pick at your own skin, and makes it sound pretty, too (“Dermatillomania”). *Laura Stevenson* is, by comparison, shadowier and less disclosing. There are flashes of anger (“State”), and her passion runs like a current throughout, occasionally overflowing (“Wretch”) but more often than not simmering, calm but alert (“Moving Cars”). You can hear the inspiration to artists like Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker: young female songwriters marrying folk diarism with punk intensity. But she’s also carrying the torch from Lucinda Williams and Neko Case, neither of whom cared enough about tradition to keep the lines between folk, punk, country, and rock ’n’ roll drawn. And while her characters teeter perpetually on the edge of crisis, *Laura Stevenson* is ultimately a diagram of how to pull through, however modest and untriumphant. Or as her friend advises on “Sky Blue, Bad News,” “Shutter up, keep your head down, don’t let it strip you bare.”

“I think the idea of sexiness or being calm and collected is a pretty stifling thing as a musician,” Dijon explains to Apple Music. “I\'ve wrestled with why you\'re supposed to make music if you\'re going to do it, and I think just the longer I\'ve been trying, I\'ve gotten pretty disenchanted with sort of the casualness and the informality.” This is the existential question at the heart of *Absolutely*, his debut album. If the prior EPs—2019\'s *Sci Fi 1* and 2020\'s *How Do You Feel About Getting Married?*—were for figuring out who he was as an artist through collages of ideas, then this is about figuring out who he can be, with regard to the expectations leveled at him from outsiders and those he has for himself. Of course, to hear him tell it, the process of creating this music wasn\'t nearly as deep. At the beginning of the pandemic, he visited a friend in Wyoming, where he began tinkering with bits and pieces of demos. He returned to Los Angeles, his home since he relocated from Maryland in 2016, and wrote one song, “Scratching,” and didn’t make anything else for months. That is, until he met fellow singer-songwriter Mk.gee (Michael Gordon) at a studio session. “He and I developed a bizarre language together that sort of spilled into the rest of the record,” he says. “With the pandemic, I just wasn\'t sure if I was going to make a record, how long it would take, or if it was even useful to make music. The records that we made together just sprang out of boredom and out of this kind of conversation—it was just a conversational way to exist.” *Absolutely* is Dijon’s most collaborative release to date, an exercise in surrendering to his own creative impulses as he also makes room for others’. Out of that comes an album that highlights the intimacy of candor, of offering oneself without dressing the parts up. In many of the songs, there’s ambient room noise—people laughing, talking, and reacting to the music—that positions the listener as a kind of fly on the wall for a private jam session. It’s raw and untouched in a way that runs counter to conventional ideas of what a debut album often is or should be. Life that feels as though it\'s coming apart requires music that is the same—the process of deconstruction and rebuilding animated through sound. Which brings us back to his original question. Over the better part of a decade, he\'s earned fans and a profile, and just as that means other people are asking things of him, he\'s asking new things of himself. *Absolutely* is some version of an answer that reimagines his artistry at a time that required he reimagine his life. “It just seems strange that the moment you get a little platform, people start to tidy up a little bit and they start to perfect their lane,” he says. “I just kind of wanted to destroy it and build a new one.” Below, he explains how each of the songs came to be. **“Big Mike’s”** “‘Big Mike\'s’ is the first song that Mk.gee and I made together. He came to the house, I had a drum loop playing, I had a couple of friends milling about. We\'d met a few times but we didn\'t really talk, and he picked up a guitar and he played a little, and it was so natural for us to build the track together. It was a complete freestyle, lyrically and melodically, and we sort of wrapped everything harmonically around it. I played some bass way after that I\'m pretty sure it\'s not the same key as what Mike was playing. And we just listened back, and we just felt like if this is on an album, I\'d want to hear this first because I can decide if I want to be here or not. We wanted it to be hypnotic, and I wanted to be as confrontational as possible.” **“Scratching”** “‘Scratching’ was the first song I actually ever made for the record, and it was a product of me trying to learn piano. I just played a couple of things and wrote a song around a midi piano part that I was just working on. It was super simple. I thought that there was this Springsteen-y thing to it that was an accident, so I was just like, well, how do I kind of pay homage in that way? Everything to me is post-realization—I never really know what I\'m doing when I\'m doing it.” **“Many Times”** “‘Many Times’ was the first time I\'d ever not controlled or been engineering my own session. I went with a very good friend, somebody I respect a lot named Andrew Sarlo—he works with some people I really love. Andrew has a patented recording technique or an exercise that I won\'t reveal, but we were just trying to get over a hump and trying to be productive. A lot of my records are nocturnal, and this was a bright coffee thing. We just wanted to make something that we thought was quite fun—everything is sort of operating with a little bit of humor, and Mike\'s solo exists relative to the intensity and the mania of the song as potentially a little hat tip.” **“Annie”** “I left to go upstate \[New York\] and brought a few friends, and a person I\'ve collaborated with a lot, Jack Karaszewski, ended up being there. We tried for a few nights just to hang out and make music around this table, and ‘Annie’ ended up being this pretty manic campfire thing. I picked up an acoustic guitar, and it was tuned in some really crazy way. I was just kind of sitting at the table and started mumbling and humming a little thing. Then Mike slotted in, picked up a bass, and we just made the song. The Band was always in the back of everybody\'s head. I had never really heard of them until I went to upstate New York and got extremely obsessed. I was trying to make some sort of demented version of a The Band song or something, and it happened really quickly.” **“Noah’s Highlight Reel”** “This is my favorite song on the record. We were sitting at this long dining room table, and our buddy Noah who\'s from Wyoming was there with us. He\'s played slide and occasional guitar on a couple of the songs and he\'s helped with the general vibe and thrown a couple lyrics in on this record. But Mike and I were cranking through super fast, a bunch of ideas per day, when we were in upstate New York. Things calmed down, we had a few beers, and I believe it was Mike\'s idea—he said, ‘Noah, you should write a song.’ I started playing a guitar part, some chords, and Mike slotted in with some bass and some other things, and my buddy Noah actually wrote a song and we asked him to sing it. We sang backup for him. I also lost the file, so that\'s the only version of the song that exists.” **“The Dress”** “I borrowed a drum machine and just laid down this thing, and a friend of mine named John Keek played some chords. He has a very sort of gospelly touch, and it started off as kind of a little gag, but obviously the chords he played were quite inspiring. I was experimenting a lot with noise on this album, and ‘The Dress’ was a way for me to kind of internally be like, can you actually just write a song? Because I didn\'t know if I could. And yeah, there\'s a little bit of an homage to Bonnie Raitt, but it was really an exercise in me trying to push myself out of a comfort zone. You can get really comfortable around like a wall of sonic trickery and fuzz.” **“God in Wilson”** “‘God in Wilson’ is a tough one, because that was a pretty early one. When I was in Wyoming—it\'s referencing Wilson, Wyoming—there was this attempt to kind of explore guilt and shame, and it was an interesting idea that I had. It was a pretty early demo idea that I never really fleshed out and just thought it could provide some sort of contrast on the record, I guess. I was really fascinated with priests and kind of thought about, I don\'t know, a little priest guy. But yeah, it\'s just an exploration, lyrically, of guilt and shame, and I kept it on there just because I thought it sounded pretty.” **“Did You See It?”** “It\'s a modular, like, Eurorack experiment that I was doing, and I wanted to see if I could write a song around it. It\'s about aliens.” **“Talk Down”** “On hip-hop records, you can kind of quote—like JAY-Z quotes Biggie all the time and stuff like that. I never really understood how to do that in more of a singer-songwriter thing, but ‘Talk Down’ was part two of ‘Annie.’ Same day, same table, same people. I was listening to a lot of Gillian Welch—I think I said her name wrong on the record—but a lot of the imagery that floated around the record was really based on the three-day drive from LA to New York. There\'s tension, there\'s excitement, there\'s anger. There\'s also monotony, it\'s a lot of boredom. I heard a chord that my friend John played. And I started freestyling this thing, and I just kept quoting ‘Look at Miss Ohio,’ and that became the basis of the song. It was me listing off songs I was listening to while driving and trying to contrast a little bit. I wanted to do a little homage to Baltimore club. I tried to do a few Baltimore club songs that failed, and this is the closest that we got.” **“Rodeo Clown”** “I was just kind of playing some chords and we were a little burned out after making ‘Big Mike\'s,’ just me, Mike, and Noah. But in effort of stretching what the performer is supposed to sound like, I just wanted to explore R&B melodic stuff. It\'s part of my DNA, but I just wanted to present it in a way that isn\'t clean. I get very frustrated by how cool everybody is, and I wanted to just see what happens if you try to make a song that\'s very earnest. I sort of blacked out a little bit and let it go and then listened back to it the next day, and I was like, \'Yeah, that sounds pretty good.\' I feel like it\'s very boring to think that just because you have a guitar, that you can\'t try to reinterpret how you\'re supposed to perform. I don\'t know if it was a successful experiment, but yeah.” **“End of Record”** “In an effort of making a debut record, you toss and turn a lot of ideas of how you\'re supposed to make it perfect, and ‘End of Record’ was a personal message to myself. It was done in upstate New York, around the table with a lot of people. I think it was on Halloween of \[2020\]. That song specifically—it\'s for me and the people on the record, like a little postcard from a time and all the emotion that was around that house at the time.” **“Credits!”** “I think that I have the tendency to sort of give off this impression that I\'m hyper-serious all the time and the music is emotionally weighty to people, but there\'s a lot of jokes that I think I\'ve been trying to get a little bit more effective at displaying on my music. And ‘Credits!’ is also just kind of another thing for me on there. I thought it was kind of fun. After you hear a lot of these ups and downs on this record, I couldn\'t think of a funnier and I think more obnoxious way to kind of put a bow on all of this weight. There were a lot of different variations of that energy, and ‘Credits!’ just sounded silly enough to be the one.”

“This is the antithesis to our last record—where that was about heartbreak, this album is about freedom, picking yourself up and moving forward,” Jungle producer and multi-instrumentalist Josh Lloyd-Watson tells Apple Music. “It’s an album made for bringing people together; upbeat tunes to set people free.” Lloyd-Watson is one half of Jungle, the London-based production duo, with childhood friend Tom McFarland. Coming to prominence with their Mercury Prize-nominated self-titled debut album in 2014 (and, specifically, its ubiquitous single “Busy Earnin’”), the producers went on to establish themselves as hook-writing maestros, giving the warm mahogany feel of 1960s and ’70s soul a chrome polish with their seven-piece live band performances and intricate arrangements. Their third album, *Loving in Stereo* (succeeding 2018’s *For Ever*), takes their melodies squarely to the dance floor, featuring the thumping drum breakbeats of “Talk About It,” the driving disco-funk of “Keep Moving,” and collaborations from rapper Bas (“Romeo”) and singer Priya Ragu on the jazz-influenced “Goodbye My Love.” Read on for Lloyd-Watson’s thoughts on the album, track by track. **“Dry Your Tears”** “This was originally a middle-eight of a B-side called ‘Don\'t You Cry Now.’ It was one of the last pieces to go on the record, and it’s an overture about not feeling sorry for yourself. The vocals on it are quite airy and dreamlike, as if you\'re waking up from a bad dream, and the strings then ease you into the album but also make you question exactly what it is we\'re about to listen to.” **“Keep Moving”** “Those strings crescendo into ‘Keep Moving,’ which is an archetypal Jungle track. It\'s a song that we\'ve been trying to make ever since ‘Busy Earnin’,’ and it\'s almost like the older sibling to that song. It\'s about moving on and moving through hard times; a mantra to not worry about stuff too much but to be hopeful instead.” **“All of the Time”** “We always envisioned this track as what it would sound like if a band from the 1960s or ’70s had heard future garage rhythms but were playing them on acoustic instruments. It feels like a sample but it\'s not a sample, since we\'ve always been obsessed with things that sound old but are new. It\'s supposed to be a super uplifting track, with this gospel feeling in the chorus, which is just like pure euphoria.” **“Romeo” (feat. Bas)** “We met Bas at a festival on Coney Island a few years ago. He came backstage with such amazing energy and we got talking. We\'re all about features that are personal and that happen because they\'re meant to happen. We were at The Church Studios in Crouch End and he texted that he was in London, so he came through. We make a lot of hip-hop and we\'ve got so many of those sorts of beats, it\'s really great for people to hear that element to us.” **“Lifting You”** “This was a beat that I had made and it wasn\'t really supposed to be on the album. I remember sending it out to a load of artists and they really liked it but nothing happened with it. I sat down one day and wrote a vocal and we sang on it, and it just had a really carefree feeling to it. It\'s inspired by bits of KAYTRANADA, with this Moog One bassline that gives it a slightly clubbier feel. There’s also psychedelic influences and an uplifting vocal chorus, which takes it to a different dimension.” **“Bonnie Hill”** “‘Bonnie Hill’ is the oldest track on the record; it was one that was written during the second album at Bonnie Hill, a place in the hills in Los Angeles. We just had this beat for a while and it came together with this other melody we had lying around. At The Church Studios we had this 12-piece strings and brass section, and we added jazz flute, as well as a saxophone—that set the track alight. We don\'t have many solos in Jungle songs, so this was really exciting.” **“Fire”** “This was one of the first tracks to signify the direction of the album. It\'s this free-flowing piece that was very quick to make, in only around an hour. It\'s more of a sonic experimentation, where we\'d just gotten this new profiling amplifier and started putting loads of synthesizers through it, blurring that line between electronics and a band sound. We like to set our music to things, and this feels like it could soundtrack a car chase or heist in a film. It\'s a bit chaotic, and that\'s what we love about it.” **“Talk About It”** “The producer Inflo was in town when we were recording in LA and we just started jamming and came up with this. The drums have a sense of \[The Jam’s\] \'Town Called Malice\' or The Stone Roses to them. It\'s another one of those songs that feels like it\'s taken something from different eras and then pieced them all together. We wanted to hold on to the drum breakbeat that started it off and we just wouldn\'t let go of it until it was finished, not tweaking it or changing it but allowing it to sit in its original form.” **“No Rules”** “It\'s something that came about that wasn\'t supposed to be on the album, just again a track that got made for the fun of making music. It\'s like a synth odyssey, but it\'s also got this power. It\'s a rebellion against government control and surveillance and the ever-evolving world of *1984* that we\'re living in.” **“Truth”** “This is the most leftfield thing from what Jungle is. We were following the train of thought that you accept whatever happens in the studio, and it came very quickly. We used to listen to a lot of the indie rock that was dominating the charts in the mid-2000s, things like The Thrills and The Strokes and Kings of Leon, and there\'s an element of that to it, which is really nostalgic to us. It\'s a song about realizing that you love somebody and getting over those trust issues in the beginning of a relationship to ultimately realize that you only want to be with them.” **“What D\'You Know About Me?”** “This is ESG-inspired and it\'s the fastest track we\'ve ever done. It embodies the anger and passion that this record has—it’s got a darkness to it that ‘No Rules’ also has, again being about surveillance and people knowing too much about you. We\'re playfully asking, ‘What do you know about me?’ It\'s got this stark swagger to it.” **“Just Fly, Don\'t Worry”** “The previous two tracks are quite intense, so we wanted this to segue you down into the end of the album. This was originally a lot longer, but it plays now like a palate cleanser, just giving you the bits that you need. It\'s got a mixture between dub and funk in the groove and feel. We\'re making this music for the fun of it, and what we liked and what we connected with went on the record, rather than songs that we thought other people would know.” **“Goodbye My Love” (feat. Priya Ragu)** “We had been writing all day on this other song at Guy Chambers\' studio in London, where he has some amazing equipment like a vintage harpsichord and vibraphone. Our time was coming up and we challenged ourselves to see if we could get these sounds down for something new. Priya\'s got such a fantastic voice with such a pure tone, and we wanted to get her melody down in a free flow of consciousness. It wasn\'t intended to be a Jungle track, it was just made for us, but then we felt like it was supposed to be on the record.” **“Can\'t Stop the Stars”** “We try to close with something quite cinematic on our records. I remember hearing these strings back in the studio and they are so overwhelming—even to this day, that last 16 or 32 bars of music is so emotional and it takes us back to this feeling of wanting to be young and free. It\'s about someone in your life telling you you don\'t need to worry about everything, because you can\'t stop the stars from moving, so you can\'t control everything in this life. The more you let go, the more free you\'ll actually be.”

On their endlessly eclectic sophomore album, Bicep considers a musical inquiry most often circled by jazz and jam bands: What if tracks don’t need to be immutable, permanent records, but should instead transform and evolve? Taking inspiration from their first major tour—a two-year trek between festivals and clubs during which they’d regularly rework their tracks from the road—the Northern Irish duo freed themselves from the idea that songs had to be fixed. “Club music has to draw you out,” Matt McBriar tells Apple Music. “Headphone music has to pull you in. More often than not, we’d wind up with six different versions of each song. Eventually it was like, ‘Why do we have to choose?’” As a result, the album versions on *Isles* are simply jumping-off points—the best headphones-inclined versions the pair could cut (dance-floor edits will inevitably materialize when they bring the tracks into clubbier environments). “There’s no straight house or techno on this album; those versions will come later,” Andy Ferguson says. “We wanted to explore home listening to its fullest extent, and then explore the live show to its fullest extent. Rather than try to do both at once, we decided to serve each.” Taking this approach presented an interesting challenge: In order for the songs to be malleable *and* recognizable, they needed to have a strong foundation. “They couldn’t be reliant on a single composition, they had to work in different forms,” McBriar says. “We had to make sure they had strong DNA.” Below, the pair—self-described geeks and gear-heads eager to get technical—take us inside the creative process behind each track. **Atlas** McBriar: “This was the first track we finished after coming back from the tour. We tried to capture the feelings from the peak of the live show, that optimism and euphoria in the room when we performed. It set the tone for the rest of the album in terms of our process. Although we initially recorded several different melodies, the final form came together a few months later in a single afternoon on our modular. This riff was the strongest.” **Cazenove** Ferguson: “This was another early demo, and was sparked by our obsessive interest in ’90s technology—the old MPC controllers that Timbaland and Dilla used. That old equipment doesn’t produce instantly crisp sounds or perfect beats, but that’s where the beauty is. It’s fuzzy and imprecise. We were experimenting with a lot of ’90s lo-fi samplers and bit crushers, and the idea was to build a rhythm by feeding our MPC through a reverse reverb patch on the Lexicon PCM96. From there we just added layer upon layer. We wanted something fast and playful, but with a lot less emphasis on the dance floor.” **Apricots** McBriar: “This actually began as an ambient piece, and the strings sat on our hard drive for a year before we considered some vocals. One day, we picked up an amazing, recently released record called *Beating Heart - Malawi*. The vocals and polyrhythms of ‘Gebede-Gebede Ulendo Wasabwera’ stood out. They were captivating. We pitched snippets of them to our strings before building the rest of the track around them. The second sample is from the 1975 \[Bulgarian folk\] album *Le Mystere Des Voix Bulgares*. We connected with the mysterious chanting, and felt like it had parallels to the Celtic folk we grew up hearing.” **Saku (feat. Clara La San)** McBriar: “This began as a footwork-inspired track with a hang drum melody; we’d been looking into polyrhythms and more interesting drum programming. But when we slowed down the tempo from 150 to 130 BPM, it totally flipped the vibe for us. We experimented with several different vocals samples—including ‘Gebede-Gebede Ulendo Wasabwera’ before it wound up on ‘Apricots’—but ended up sending a stripped-back version to Clara La San, who brought a strong ’90s UKG/R&B vibe. We added some haunting synths at the end to bring contrast and some opposing dark and light elements. It was great to pull so many of our influences into one track.” **Lido** Ferguson: “This track was born from one of our many experiments with granular synthesis. We cut a single piano note from a catalog of 1970s samples and fed it into one of our granular samplers. As we experimented with recording it live, the synthesizer glitches and jumps added all this character and texture. It was pretty disorderly and hard to control, but we loved the madness it produced. There are a ton of layers to this track despite it sounding so simple. And mixing it was a lot of work, trying to get that balance between soothing and subtle chaos.” **X (feat. Clara La San)** McBriar: “This track was built around our Psycox SY-1M Syncussion. We’d been hunting for a Pearl original for years. It has all these uncompromising, metallic fizzes and bleeps that are so difficult to tame, you really need to start with it as the center of the track. Most tracks on the album began on the piano, but not this one. The frantic synth melody was actually improvised one afternoon on our Andromeda A6; it was a single take on a heavily customized and edited patch that we\'ve never been able to replicate. It was just one of those moments when you hit ‘record’ and get it right.” **Rever (feat. Julia Kent)** Ferguson: “We started this track in Bali in 2016. We were on tour and had access to a studio full of local instruments, and knew right away that we wanted to use them. We recorded long sessions of us playing them live, but never ended up using them in one of our finished tracks. Several years later, we were working with Julia Kent, who had recorded the strings for another demo, but it just wasn’t working. She tried some of the Bali instrumentals instead. It sounded really unique. The chopped-up vocal came last, edited and re-pitched to fit, almost like a melody.” **Sundial** McBriar: “One of the simplest tracks on the album, ‘Sundial’ grew from a faulty Jupiter 6 arp recording. Our trigger wasn’t working properly and the arp was randomly skipping notes. This was a small segment taken from a recording of Andy playing around with the arp while we were trying to figure out what was going wrong. We actually loved what it produced and wrote some chords around it, guided by the feeling of that recording.” **Fir** Ferguson: “We have a real soft spot for choral vox synths, and this track was born from an experiment with those. It\'s actually one of the fastest songs we\'ve ever made, and grew purely out of those days in the studio when we just jammed, trying new things. No direction, no preconceived ideas, we just felt it out.” **Hawk (feat. machina)** Ferguson: “The melody on ‘Hawk’ is actually our voices mapped and re-pitched to a granular sampler. We experimented a lot with re-pitching on this album; it brings this unique quality to vocals and melodies. We have a rare-ish Japanese synth, the Kawai SX-240, which creates all those super weird synth noises. Again, this track was the product of lots of experimentation. Machina\'s vocal\'s were actually for another demo which we were struggling on and it just worked perfectly.”

Very few authors, inside of music or out, make the concept of loving a man sound as viable as serpentwithfeet. The Baltimore-originating singer studies them, and takes great pains across his sophomore album *DEACON* to present them in the very best light. “His outfit kinda corny, you know that’s my type/A corny man\'s a healthy man, you know his mind right,” he sings on “Malik.” *DEACON* is titled for one of the Black church’s most steadfast presences and plays as a love letter to the men in the singer\'s life, be they friends or lovers. “I’m thankful for the love I share with my friends,” he sings on “Fellowship,” a song that features contributions from Sampha and Lil Silva. Romance, though, is a constant presence across *DEACON*, and serpent frames the intimacy he enjoys with partners in ways that could make a lonely person writhe with jealousy. “He never played football, but look at how he holds me,” he sings on “Hyacinth.” “He never needed silverware but I\'m his little spoon.” We can’t know how generous serpent has been in his descriptors, but songs like “Heart Storm” (with NAO), “Wood Boy,” and “Derrick’s Beard” paint pictures of individuals and experiences so palpable they’ll leave you pining for dalliances past.

“There were three potential titles for this album,” Rostam Batmanglij tells Apple Music. “One of them referenced gender, another was referencing America and nationality. As I’m saying this, I’m realizing that’s what I like about this title—that it can apply to gender or politics, and yet you might hear this record and not think about either of those things.” Listen to *Changephobia*, the former Vampire Weekend talisman’s second solo record, and plenty of things hit you. To name a few: Americana; unexpected time structures; guitar solos; gorgeous melodies; a lot of sax. “Stylistically, I was seeking to make a clean break from a lot of the music that I’ve made over the last 10 years,” he says. “I wanted to be a bit more abstract. I was thinking about minimalist art, and that was kicking around in the back of my mind in very simple shapes.” Accordingly, there’s a joyful union between a desire to keep things, as he says, to “one or two colors” and Batmanglij’s natural musical curiosity and invention. Let him talk you through the story of his second album, one track at a time. **“These Kids We Knew”** “I was just working on music to get out of my bedroom during lockdown, and then these lyrics started coming out of me. I really didn\'t think it was for the album. But then, as more time passed, I started to realize that it was not only for the album, but eventually that it was track one. I think as a queer musician I identify a little bit more with the younger generation because I relate to their attitudes towards sexuality and gender—it\'s a little bit distinct from people that grew up in the \'90s and early 2000s. That made me think about the generation above mine, and just how each generation has different things that we have to contend with, whether it\'s climate or gender or equality. I kept thinking, ‘Who are these kids?’—and maybe in some ways it’s also me coming to terms with the fact that I\'m not a kid anymore. I\'m fully in my mid-thirties.” **“From the Back of a Cab”** “It started with this drum part without many chords, and it just kicked around on my iPhone but I knew there was something exciting there. One day I started playing this Americana piano along to these drums, and it felt very disconnected from the drum part, because the drum part is in 12/8, which is something that you hear in African music and Iranian music. I\'ve become more interested in trying to use lyrics as the driving force, as opposed to just writing vocal melodies and figuring out what lyrics should go along with.” **“Unfold You”** “This features a sample from Nick Hakim \[2015’s ‘Papas Fritas’\] and features Henry Solomon’s sax playing which I later brought into HAIM’s \'Summer Girl.\' Even though \'Summer Girl\' came out within a few months of us starting to record it, \'Unfold You\' took years. In some ways it had to—because the recording of the song tracks an evolution and a personal change.” **“4Runner”** “I was in a store in Japan when I heard this song, and to this day I haven\'t been able to find it. But I remembered how it sounded in my brain—it had 12-string acoustic guitar and had brush drums, and I just filed that away knowing it was a palette I should try one day. Years later, I was in the studio wanting to realize this idea. I started building it up with 12-string acoustic, drums, and Moog Voyager bass. I made a track that felt fresh and then spent a lot of time just driving around and sitting in my room listening to it, piecing it together what it should be about.” **“Changephobia”** “A few years ago I was sitting at a park bench in Massachusetts and someone told me change is good, and it just stuck with me. No one had ever said to me that change is good. This idea informed the whole album. I’ve also had a fascination with sax that dates back maybe a decade. I knew where I wanted to go musically, and wanted to push myself away from the same chord progressions I’ve used in so many songs. This was a new kind of chord progression for me, inspired by jazz. I asked Henry to play a solo over those chords, and he did about 36 takes. The second take had the magic, so that’s what you hear.” **“Kinney”** “The first day that I worked with Henry, I sang this melody to him—and he played it back on the saxophone. I didn’t think I was able to play it myself on any instruments, but Henry played it back to me, we put the melody on top, and the next thing I knew I had a song written—a sort of crazy 182 BPM drum ’n’ bass song. I was very doubtful on the outro, because it’s fully grunge. I worried there are some places you should never go. Ultimately, though, I’m glad I went here.” **“Bio18”** “I was on tour in Houston years ago and recorded these drums on my iPhone. I’d honestly been hearing the rhythm in my head since I was a kid in D.C. played on buckets on sidewalks. I was curious about where stuff like Charlie Mingus and Charlie Parker, that how that stuff kind of intersects with, like, the French classical composers like Debussy and Ravel. I was curious about the way those things overlap.” **“\[interlude\]”** “I have a rule that I need every song to be at least two minutes, even if it doesn\'t have lyrics. This was supposed to be a song on the album, but I could just never figure out what to sing. I had Henry play sax on it, and originally the sax was supposed to be a solo, and there would be a song on either side of the solo. Eventually I said to myself, ‘I don\'t know exactly what I want to say, but maybe the music is saying what I want to say.’ And so I kept it on. The original version of this album also had two other interludes, and I cut those but I kept this one. I don\'t know why.” **“To Communicate”** “Therapy and psychology are probably a huge part of what was on my mind as I was writing the lyrics of this album. But I think that shouldn\'t be something that\'s too obvious if I did it right. I like the idea that someone might hear the song and feel, ‘This is clearly about psychology.’ And another person might hear it and think, ‘This is clearly about someone that betrayed Rostam or Rostam feeling that he betrayed himself.’ Dave Fridmann mixed this song, and the one thing I told him was I wanted it to sound like The Zombies. His response was, ‘Then maybe you should speed it up about 10 BPM.’ And I think he\'s right. I did experiment with that. But it was too late in the game to speed it up that much. And maybe it\'s good that it doesn\'t sound *too* much like The Zombies. But hopefully it sounds a little bit like The Zombies.” **“Next Thing”** “It wasn\'t supposed to be on this album. I\'d given up on it for a couple years. And then as I was finishing the album, I thought to myself, ‘You\'re going need to have a special bonus track for Japan, or it\'ll be good to have one extra thing.’ But once it was done, I liked it too much. The drums and the piano were recorded live at the same time, they were not recorded with a click track, which, for people who make music, you know that almost everything we hear is steady. And this song is not steady. If you dropped it into one of your DAWs \[digital audio workstations\] like Ableton, Logic, or Pro Tools and tried to line it up, it will constantly infuriate you. But that\'s exactly what I wanted from the song.” **“Starlight”** “Even before I had written the rest of the album, I knew that this was going to be the last song. It started on a bullet train in Japan, so it was originally called ‘Shinkansen.’ I was at a friend\'s wedding and he sang Chet Baker to his wife, which made me think there hasn\'t been a futuristic update of Chet Baker. This is my attempt.”

In spring 2020, Sam Fender had nowhere to go. When the first lockdown descended, an existing health condition required him to isolate and shield inside his home for three months. It was a frustrating turn for a BRIT Award-winning singer-songwriter who’d drawn inspiration for his debut album, 2019’s *Hypersonic Missiles*, from lives and conversations around him in his home of North Shields on England’s northeast coast. When you can’t go out, you eventually look in, and Fender’s songwriting began to dig through memories of his childhood, analyzing his internal wiring and reflecting on behaviors and insecurities that troubled him. “Writing was therapy before I got therapy,” he tells Apple Music. “That was always my starting point. A lot of things that you pass off as insignificant parts of your life end up becoming very significant parts of your character. Therapy gave me the tools to articulate what was going on in my life as a kid and to understand how that has affected me and why I am the way I am in certain situations.” Fender has too much empathy for *Seventeen Going Under* to be entirely introspective, though. The pandemic also exposed the struggles and poverty faced in towns such as North Shields, and his ire at the government’s handling of COVID and Brexit—as well as his dismay at an opposition party that seemed to have abandoned working-class communities—burns through “Aye” and “Long Way Off.” Forthright in message and poetic in delivery, his words are set to a sound that continues to explore Americana and indie rock, funneling everything through big-hearted choruses. “I feel like it is a celebratory record,” he says. “It’s a triumph over adversity. Celebrate the loves and friendships that you have over the journey of your life and celebrate those who aren’t here anymore.” Read on as he talks us through all of the album’s tracks. **“Seventeen Going Under”** “It’s completely autobiographical. When I was 17, my mother was being hounded by the DWP \[Department for Work and Pensions\]. She had fibromyalgia and she was suffering from other ailments and mental health issues. But she got sent to court three times to prove that she wasn’t fit to work. This is a woman who’s worked for 40 years of her life as a nurse. She’s not a liar and she’s not a benefit cheat. She was a hard-working, fantastic, empathetic, incredible woman. And they dragged her through the mud and made her ill. I saw how the government was treating good, honest working-class people who have fallen on their back. They ripped apart every safety net for people in that position. I was old enough to understand what was going on, but I wasn’t old enough to be able to do anything about it.” **“Getting Started”** “I had my outside life as a kid, and then I’d go back home and see my mother in turmoil. ‘Getting Started’ is about a conversation between us, me going like, ‘This is shit, but I need to just be a kid, to go out and live my life. I’ve just turned 18. I want to go out to the pub, to see my mates.’ I needed my escapism. These stories, they’re mine, but that frustration with the DWP—how you’re trapped as a person who’s fallen on a hard time by your government—is a unanimous story for so many millions of people in this country.” **“Aye”** “On the first album, I talked about politics as if I knew what I was talking about, but I realized I don’t. This record, I’m like, ‘I don’t know what I’m talking about, but I fucking hate those bastards over there who’ve got the hedge funds—whose taxes I’m paying, who come after my mum, who come after the disabled, who come after all of these people, plunging them into poverty and plunging kids out onto the streets. Yet they’re getting away with that tax-dodging.’” **“Get You Down”** “It’s about insecurities, how jealousy and feelings of emasculation and low self-worth can really, really destroy a relationship—and had done with my relationships. The worst thing about it was I could see the way I was acting, and I knew why, but I couldn’t stop it. That’s why I started doing therapy. I was coming back home after being started on by a bunch of lads but not doing anything about it because I was on my own. So I’d punch walls and stuff. I used to do that all the time in my early twenties. It’s toxic behavior. You can’t do that. I’m on a path of self-discovery and trying to heal a lot of that.” **“Long Way Off”** “This is about political polarity and how the working classes feel, or how I felt, abandoned by a lot of the left wing. There’s a sect of snooty liberalism in the media world that completely alienates working-class people. Blyth Valley \[a constituency a few miles from North Shields\] went Tory \[in the 2019 general election\]; it’s been a Labour seat since its inception. That’s not good, but we’re in a dangerous, dangerous place, politically. It was the arrogance and incompetence of politicians thinking that they could sail through \[Brexit\]. They’ve fucked the country completely. There should be trials—for the lies, for the deception of a nation. My family members who voted for it voted for it because they thought that they were going to get money for the NHS. They’d seen their mothers pass away in the arms of people who worked for the NHS. They’d seen their family members on wards suffering. And they thought, ‘I’m going to vote for that.’ **“Spit of You”** “It’s about my dad. It’s about our inability to communicate about emotions because of the way we were raised. Our inability to have an argument without wanting to kill each other. It’s toxic masculinity at its finest. But it’s also about how much I love him, how I saw him as a son. My grandmother was a really small woman, and when she was dying, she looked like a child. He kissed her. I was reminded that I’m going to be that person one day—saying goodbye to him, potentially with another young kid behind me looking at me thinking the same thing.” **“Last to Make It Home”** “At the beginning, I’m talking to the Virgin Mary, a Mary pendant. I’m realizing I need to get ahold of myself. In the second half, Mary becomes personified. She becomes just some girl on Instagram. It’s that like desperate, horrible shit line of ‘Hit the ‘like’/In the hopes I’d coax you out of my derelict fantasy.’ In the hopes that I’d be noticed. It’s really an anthem for losers—because we’ve all been a loser once. I’ve been a loser hundreds of times.” **“The Leveller”** “This is about depression and rising out of it. It’s a fighting song. But the leveler is the lockdown itself. It leveled everything.” **“Mantra”** “You find yourself in the company of sociopaths in this business. And you sometimes worry that maybe that means you are too. And I don’t think I’m a sociopath. Got too much empathy for that one. I think I’m a vulnerable narcissist at worst. This song’s about figuring out that you can’t pay so much attention to these people who genuinely don’t care about you and they’re only there to bolster themselves. I’ve had low self-esteem for a long time. I’ve always tried to seek validation from people that aren’t actually that nice.\" **“Paradigms”** “It’s a roundup of all of the things that I’ve thought about in the album. So it’s a self-esteem rock song. People shouldn’t live miserably, they shouldn’t have to. I lost another friend to suicide last year. And I got all of my friends from home, some of them who knew him as well, to sing that last line, ‘No one should feel like this.’ It’s a choir of people from Shields. I think it’s a really powerful moment.” **“The Dying Light”** “This is a sequel to ‘Dead Boys’ \[2018 track examining male suicide\]. It’s in the perspective of somebody who’s actually thinking that they might take their own life. I wanted it to be the triumph over it—in the moment when you decide, ‘No, I’m not going to do this, or I can’t leave those behind.’”

Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith have been through a lot together in their 40-plus years as collaborators. They’ve toured the world countless times in Tears for Fears, the New Wave group they founded in 1981; bounced back from a breakup in the ’90s; and released their sixth album, *Everybody Loves a Happy Ending*, as well as a smattering of singles, in the 2000s. Their 1982 breakout single “Mad World,” “Head Over Heels,” “Shout,” and “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” remain timeless favorites for generations of listeners, and several chart-topping artists, from The Weeknd to Kanye West and Drake, have sampled their hits to elevate their own. With *The Tipping Point*, their seventh studio album and first LP in 18 years, they’re immensely satisfied with what they’ve written together—partly because they took their time to write their way back to each other, and largely because they did so on their own terms. “We spent a lot of time doing all these writing sessions over a bunch of years with a lot of what are considered more modern songwriters, and it didn\'t really work out for us because we felt it was slightly dishonest,” Smith tells Apple Music. “We were left with a lot of things that seemed like attempts at making a modern hit single, and I don\'t think that\'s what we do. We\'re really an album band. We made *The Hurting* before \'Mad World\' was released. We made *Songs From the Big Chair* before \'Everybody\' and \'Shout\' were released. We sat down, just the two of us, with two acoustic guitars, and tried to forge a path forward. It felt more honest, and the material at the end of it was far better, probably because it was more honest.” “No Small Thing,” *The Tipping Point*\'s first track, is a folk-tinged ballad that builds into a sweeping epic, and it\'s one Smith points to as an example of what they hoped to achieve when they reconnected and started writing: “This song is definitely a journey, and albums for us should be a journey.”

Tkay Maidza described the first EP in her Last Year Was Weird trilogy as “daytime,” with the darker and heavier and more introspective *Vol. 2* as “nighttime.” *Vol. 3*, the final chapter, then, could be considered the following day. A year later, this final chapter sees her finding resolve and acceptance, and the confidence to move on. “I believe that by the end of the trilogy, I should understand what I want to do,” she says. “The music I’m making now is more like what I listen to. I wanted my perception and the way I feel to match up.” Musically, *Vol. 3* draws on the strongest moments from each—opener “Eden” is warm and dreamy, while “So Cold” is bright and bouncy, addressed to a former lover who she describes as “a waste of time.” “High Beams,” on the other hand, takes aim at haters and everyone who tried bringing her down, while “Syrup” is gritty and hard-hitting, all pride and bravado: “I just wanna be rich, thick, sweet, sick, syrup,” she raps over a deep, low beat. Final track “Breathe” ends the trilogy with fittingly confident reflection: “They didn’t think that I could see, they underestimated me,” she sings over sparse production, later yearning for her friends and family, and a time when she wasn’t so busy. “Can we just stay here?” she sings over dreamy synths. “I don’t mind at all, I just need you.”

In 2020, Jason Isbell promised fans that he would record an album of Georgia-related cover songs if the state went blue during that year’s presidential election. Isbell, alongside his band the 400 Unit and a stellar lineup of guest musicians, makes good on that offer with *Georgia Blue*, a 13-track collection of classic songs and deep cuts originally by Georgia artists. Isbell and the 400 Unit put their Southern rock stamp on staples by a diverse roster of native music icons like R.E.M., Gladys Knight, and Drivin’ N’ Cryin’, making for an album that’s part ear-candy and part history lesson. Guests include blues singer-songwriter Adia Victoria (“The Truth”), progressive bluegrass virtuosos Béla Fleck and Chris Thile (“Nightswimming”), up-and-coming country artist Brittney Spencer (“It\'s a Man\'s, Man’s, Man’s World,” “Midnight Train to Georgia”), and fellow Alabamian John Paul White (“Midnight Train to Georgia,” “Driver 8”).

In August of 2018, Helado Negro mastermind Roberto Carlos Lange found himself in Berlin, collaborating and performing with more than 150 other artists as part of the PEOPLE festival, a weeklong artist residency founded by Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon and The National’s Bryce and Aaron Dessner. Afterward, on his way home to New York, he spotted multi-instrumentalist and new age pioneer Laraaji seated nearby at the airport. “I don\'t like bugging people like that in public spaces,” Lange tells Apple Music, “but I did it. And then, as I was telling him what we’d been up to in Berlin, he was like, ‘Oh, wow. Far in.’” That expression stayed with him—so much so that it became a title and kind of unifying principle for his full-length follow-up to 2019 breakthrough *This Is How You Smile*. A reaction to what he calls the “implied grooves” of his previous work, *Far In* finds him moving away from the ethereal towards arrangements whose drums and bass are noticeably “present” throughout. Written in Brooklyn and Marfa, Texas—during a stay extended by the pandemic’s first lockdown—it’s a bilingual set of moody, psychedelic folk and pop that even at its dreamiest has a strong sense of place, whether he’s conjuring the fragrant citrus groves of his native South Florida or the spiritual expanse of a desert vista. “What I\'ve tried to do—and I think what I\'ve always tried to do—is make sure each song is its own world,” he says. “*Far In* was the best way for me to describe it, the way for me to talk about how I wanted to express a lot of different places and sounds that I know how to get to, but I maybe haven\'t shared before. I had to just look further in.” Here, he walks us through a number of the album’s songs. **“Wake Up Tomorrow” (feat. Kacy Hill)** “There\'s something about it that is a complete mystery. It feels like it\'s a doorway or it\'s just some kind of path somewhere out in some overgrown, shrubby path that\'s leading you somewhere, to some light. I think a lot of it has to do with Kacy\'s vocals on it, this humming melody that she does. It\'s just haunting.” **“Gemini and Leo”** “I\'m a Leo, my wife is a Gemini. I was working on this really funny loop that I wasn\'t sure was going to go anywhere. And then, the melody just clicked. A lot of times I shape the lyrics phonetically, in terms of trying to find what melodies attach. I don’t know why I was just thinking about us, but ‘her and I’—that was the hook. And then I was like, ‘Shit. Now I’ve got to make a song around this. Let\'s find a way to design a little story that talks about this relationship.’” **“There Must Be a Song Like You”** “There\'s different ways to look at it, and I think one of them is looking at somebody that you don\'t necessarily see eye-to-eye with. But another thing that I was thinking about was, how do you define this person, or how do you define this thing, because ‘you’ doesn\'t really have to be a person. ‘You’ could be you confronting a feeling, trying to describe what that feeling is, and maybe the only place you can find it is in the song.” **“Hometown Dream”** “It was one of the first songs I wrote when I got back to Brooklyn from Marfa, and a lot of those songs were responding to being forced into living somewhere else for six months, and really realizing that the world is beautiful everywhere. In a way, the idea of a hometown is just a dream. This idea of being a native anything. I think it\'s just a fantasy, more than anything, and that\'s kind of the feeling that I\'m trying to convey with this.” **“Outside the Outside”** “That breakdown was a moment of inspiration. I was using this synth that I was really getting into, the OP-Z. And that moment in the song, it\'s one of those happy accidents, where I didn\'t extend some edits and everything had dropped out except for the synth and I was like, ‘Oh, shit.’ It kind of pushed the whole theme of being outside the outside. It\'s almost like the further outside the outside you are, you\'re going far in. Not to put the joke on it, but it\'s true.” **“Brown Fluorescence”** “It\'s an interlude. It\'s a song, too. It’s a field recording I made, of some voices that I was able to record. They’re all chopped up and processed, but there was a glow about it. When I talk about music, it\'s more in colors and shapes and textures. It has nothing to do with synesthesia or anything like that—it’s a vocabulary I use because I didn\'t go to music school or anything. So there was something about this idea of something having a brown fluorescence, and that was the feeling I got when I was making that song. It was like this funny glow, something that was not like a fluorescent light, but almost like if there was a brown rock that was fluorescent and you just found it in nature.” **“Wind Conversation”** “The theme—which is a thread that runs through the whole album—was kind of this feeling towards climate change, towards the earth, being spiritually moved by being in Marfa. I had never really experienced the desert before. But the song’s also going deeper into thinking about not so much impending doom, but impending changes that are going to cause a lot of hardships. It takes place under this tree that my wife Kristi and I would go to sometimes, to have lunch under in this park, essentially, surrounded by the desert. It was just us, laying back, looking out to the cliffs, daydreaming.” **“Thank You For Ever”** “It\'s another play on this idea—it’s not \'thank you forever,\' it\'s \'thank you forever, dot, dot, dot.\' And I think that\'s kind of what the song is about, this expansiveness. I think that\'s the first song I\'ve ever written that really feels like the desert. That one was a dream. I just woke up, went to the studio, and it kind of just ignited out of me. It all happened in one day, in one sitting.” **“La Naranja”** “‘Naranja’ means orange, and it\'s kind of like a cousin to another song on the record, ‘Agosto.’ It’s this abstract idea, thinking about how there used to be all these orange trees around me growing up in South Florida. It was something that we would experience in a life cycle: There would be the blossoms and then there would be the oranges and then the oranges would hit the ground and then they\'d be rotting and then it would stink. There was this abundance, and then it was gone—they cut down all the trees. It’s about this era that we\'ve grown up in, how we\'ve had access to everything, and knowing that it\'s not going to last forever. ‘You and I can stop time. You and I can save the world together’: That\'s what the song says in Spanish.” **“Telescope” (feat. Benamin)** “It\'s a song that I wrote for my mom, this idea of how we\'re Zooming or FaceTiming, but how it’s been like a telescope. You\'re only seeing this person through this way of seeing, and it just doesn\'t feel tangible. It doesn\'t feel like the person you know. You\'re seeing this person as if you\'re reading about them in a book or something.”

Compared to the strutting reggaetón of *KICK ii* and the demonic club experiments of *KicK iii*, *kick iiii* captures Arca at her most serene. The crooning “Xenomorphgirl” is a kind of cyborg lullaby; “Esuna” curls up like a kitten in the soft swirls of Oliver Coates’ strings. But serenity is not the same as docility, and *kick iiii* also features some of Arca’s most coolly triumphant work to date. On the self-empowerment anthem “Queer,” Planningtorock testifies to their “tears of power,” while on “Alien Inside,” Garbage’s Shirley Manson solemnly intones the virtues of Arca’s self-proclaimed “mutant faith” over a shimmering shoegaze backdrop. Most affecting of all is Arca’s own proclamation on “Lost Woman Found”: “I’ve been walking toward the light for years now/And it’s the first time I feel the sun’s warmth on my skin, now that it’s my own/A lost woman, found.” The quest for one’s true identity has long been at the center of Arca’s work, and here at the heart of her sprawling, futuristic bildungsroman, she channels years of trauma into something like peace.

“This whole album is in questions,” Jack Antonoff tells Apple Music about the meaning behind *Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night*, his third album as Bleachers. “I kept going back to these really dark stories that somehow spin you around and you\'re in this character, and you don\'t know why this hope exists. I was trying to access that part of myself.” The much-in-demand singer-songwriter and producer—whose credits in the past year alone include work with Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, Lorde, and St. Vincent—is awash in joy and optimism as he lets things fall into place on these 10 tracks, trading the synth-pop glitz of his previous albums for sweeping, sax-tinged anthems and intimate acoustic confessionals. Antonoff wrote the songs in bits and pieces over the course of four years, though it wasn\'t until early 2020 that he began to record the album—mostly live in a studio with his touring bandmates. “I\'m always writing, and then at some point, an album will form or it won\'t—and when it starts to form, that\'s when I chase it,” he says. “It\'s a window into how I hear music. I don\'t craft records to be instant. I don\'t craft records to be growers. I just craft what I hear and feel in myself.” Here, he tells us the story behind every song on the album. **“91”** “The song, much like a poem, which Zadie Smith helped me write, functions where every lyric is tied to every verse but from a different angle. In the first verse, there’s this child version that can\'t understand what\'s happening. And you only recognize that you\'re here, but you\'re not, through the anxiety of your mother. In the second verse, it\'s a little bit more about anger. You\'re recognizing this part of yourself that you don\'t like through someone else, which is a pretty intense way of understanding it. If you have a feeling that\'s pretty harsh about someone else, there\'s a good chance it\'s really about you. And then, in the third verse, you finally get this unearned hope, and this lightness of actually having all the magic of being alive.” **“Chinatown” (feat. Bruce Springsteen)** “A lot of the music that I love to play sits in that place where it\'s doing two things: There\'s a literal and emotional thing that\'s coming from the same concept. It is going from New York over the George Washington Bridge into New Jersey. Literally and sonically, the song does that. The music sounds a little bit New York-y in the beginning, and then it gets more innate and hopeful and becomes more New Jersey and more suburban. It feels like going home.” **“How Dare You Want More”** “‘How Dare You Want More’ is this feeling I was seeing with friends and family. Everyone\'s going through this big struggle to have more, to ask for more, and to be in control of their life. I saw it was producing so much shame in other people, and therefore, really just myself. Why is it so hard? And I\'m not talking about more square footage. I\'m not talking about more money. I\'m talking about more of who you are so you can not have that strange feeling that keeps you up at night or makes you feel all fucked up in the morning, or makes you not grab at the things you want. It\'s a question that, if you keep asking yourself over and over and over again, can start to sound silly. And that\'s a good thing, because it is silly. It was a hallmark of the album, trying to move past this shame.” **“Big Life”** “It\'s a sibling track to ‘Secret Life.’ It\'s, in the most real and non-cynical way, falling so in love where you want to have a big life. You want to have all the experiences, and you want to take them with you on all these crazy journeys. And ‘Secret Life’ was the opposite, when you want to close every door. It\'s a pretty romantic concept to me. But the song is all about posing these wants. In a funny, funny way, I think it\'s the most vulnerable song on the album, even though it might not come off as it because the music is so confident.” **“Secret Life” (feat. Lana Del Rey)** “I do this thing a few times in the album where you have a feeling and you look at it from two polar-opposite positions. ‘Big Life’ is this ‘let me go out there, let me get burned, and let the world knock me over because I\'m trying to find love,’ right? I want a secret life where you and I can get bored out of our minds. It\'s not a chase. It\'s not running out there to prove something. It\'s a very optimistic song, which is basically when the chemicals wear off and you\'re really in it with someone. At first, maybe I thought it would be a duet with Lana where it could be conversational, but then I realized that if I just put some reverb on her voice and have her kind of crest over the second verse and the chorus, she\'s more like a dream of this person I\'m talking to.” **“Stop Making This Hurt”** “This one is a sibling song to ‘How Dare You Want More.’ ‘Stop Making This Hurt’ is just sort of a more petulant, pissed-off version. There\'s all this joy and hope about the next phase of your life. But then there\'s all this frustration about ‘I can\'t get through this doorway. Whatever I\'m carrying does not let me through.’ I was able to access this rage by talking about other people: my dad, my friends and their kids, the world, and a whole new generation of people that are inheriting so much crap. But at the end of the day, I\'m right in that struggle with all of them.” **“Don’t Go Dark”** “I\'d never written a song like this. It\'s not \'I love you.\' It\'s not \'I hate you.\' It\'s \'you\'ve got to get off my back. You\'ve got to let me go.\' I can\'t be me for new people who I\'m trying to love if I\'m holding your darkness. I can hold you and I can hold our past and all these things, but it can\'t happen. That\'s why the song is so tense. It feels like this plea and this release. I just didn\'t know what else to do besides write that song. It\'s probably the angriest song I\'ve ever written.” **“45”** “There\'s these pieces of us that, to the world, are gone. They\'re not gone—the people we love see them. When you meet someone new, or someone has been in your life for a while, they\'re bringing these pieces that, even if you know this person, you don\'t know and can learn to love them. It\'s exonerating. I can walk back into it in one second, even though no one else can see it.” **“Strange Behavior”** “I wrote the song a long time ago. I wanted to put it on the album because it’s the only song I\'ve ever written in the past that feels like it\'s still in the future for me. And at the time when I wrote it, I made it really loud and bombastic. I think I was a little bit afraid of it. I wanted to reapproach it with the confidence and vulnerability of how I feel now.” **“What’d I Do With All This Faith?”** “It\'s in many ways the most important song in the album, because the past two Bleachers albums I\'ve closed with this idea of being ready to move on. It\'s a literal lyric I\'ve put in the titles. They\'re these sort of ending pieces. And what I really came to is, that\'s it. I don\'t have God. I don\'t have a sureness about certain things in my personal life that I wish I did. But for some reason I\'m spilling over with faith, and I don\'t even know where to put it. That is the biggest question of the album: What do I do with all this faith?”

Towards the end of “Serotonin,” the opening track on girl in red’s debut album, some Norwegian dialogue emerges through the bracing alloy of indie rock and hip-hop. “That recording is where I’m talking to the doctor,” the singer-songwriter born Marie Ulven tells Apple Music. “My friend had to carry me out from a lobby in Bergen while I was making the album because I woke up, thought I had a blood clot in my brain, and was like, ‘I’m about to die.’ I’m like, ‘OK, it felt like my heart stopped beating.’” It’s a moment that exemplifies the album’s remarkable openness—manifested by Ulven’s emotional honesty and her anything-goes approach to making music. “Serotonin” details the Norwegian’s experiences with intrusive thoughts, and across the subsequent 10 tracks, she performs an unflinching internal audit, processing her feelings, anxieties, and behaviors and their effects on herself and her loved ones. It’s all cast in a free-spirited brand of alt-pop that dissolves genre boundaries and shreds the “bedroom indie” tag that accompanied her early DIY EPs. The result is something that she hopes will offer help to anyone who listens. “It would be really cool if I was able to say some shit about their lives, not just mine,” she says. “The best thing about music is when you hear a song where someone is explaining what you felt but you’re not able to say because you haven’t dared to try and figure it out, or haven’t had the time.” Let girl in red take you through the album, track by track. **“Serotonin”** “\[Intrusive thoughts\] can be really scary and make you feel really crazy if you don’t know what they are, where they’re coming from, and how to deal with them. It was so liberating, knowing that I’m not crazy and that I don’t want to do these things, and then I just felt like I was over it almost. Then I wrote the song. It was just a weird journey figuring out the rap parts, but they came really quick. It was not a hard time writing those lyrics. They poured out of me.” **“Did You Come?”** “There’s no proper chorus there. The entire thing is just like a vibe. It’s hooky, and that’s all you need. I started out with the lyrics first: ‘You should know better now to fuck it up and fuck around.’ I was like, ‘Oh, this is cheating. Someone is really fucking angry here, and this is a great way to get out this aggression.’ I started making really fast-paced drums and this guitar and this piano thing. It really made me see a lot of stuff in my head.” **“Body and Mind”** “I’ve experienced a lot of self-hatred this past year, which I’ve never really understood. Realizing that you are a person is really fucking weird. I think a lot of people struggle with accepting mortality. People fixing up their bodies, changing themselves because they just want to avoid the inevitable, which is dying and aging. This is me trying to comfort myself: ‘I’ve had my deepest cries for now/My heart’s out, my guard’s down.’ I’m accepting this shit, and I don’t want to beat myself up for being a person. I think aging as a concept is really beautiful because it just means that you’re alive still.” **“hornylovesickmess”** “It’s a fun, self-aware track about how my life led me to be a jerk to someone a little bit and also being really sad that touring had its toll on my relationship with this person. My favorite line is ‘Maybe on a bus for months straight, shit’s fun but I’m going insane/Like it’s been months since I’ve had sex, I’m just a horny little lovesick mess.’ Just this fun image of me being with 10 sweaty guys on the tour bus, and being in a bunk bed thinking about this one person that I just want to call right now.” **“midnight love”** “I had a friend that would always get a guy over late at night. Then he would leave in the morning and they would never hang out during daytime. It was really getting to her. I was like, ‘Oh, this reminds me of someone.’ I was that dude who would just call someone when I felt like ‘I need this and I know that you are able to give it to me, so therefore I will call you.’ I’d never had any bad intentions. But I was able to realize a few things about myself.” **“You Stupid Bitch”** “The story here is that I had to go and comfort someone because of their broken relationships with other people. But really: ‘I’m here, I could be yours right now and you wouldn’t be going through all of this if you just saw how present I am and how much I want to be with you.’ It’s about being so angry but still comforting someone: ‘I love you but you’re fucking stupid.’ It is a really intense song, but it’s going to go hard live.” **“Rue”** “I’m singing to my sister. I had to sleep in her bed for weeks straight because I’ve just been so scared. Every time I was about to fall asleep, I felt like my heart stopped beating, so I’d want to be in her bed in case I died. I’ve just been completely all over the place. This is singing to my family and loved ones that I want to get better. I’m trying to leave it all behind. I don’t want to make it worse for you guys. It’s also about realizing that you have to do the work. If you want to get better mentally, or if you struggle with depression or anxiety, it’s such a heavy realization figuring out that it’s you who has to do it.” **“Apartment 402”** “I live in Apartment 402. I’m imagining myself lying on the floor because I’ve lost every will to do anything. I’m singing about how shitty things have been for so long; I have a sense of hopelessness. But then I’m seeing the sun come in. You know when you see the sunlight hit dust? The room is opening up for me. I’m turning this place that I’ve had so many bad feelings towards into something beautiful and into a safe place and a good place—not just a place I could die in and nobody would know.” **“.”** “There’s something about the vocal performance that’s just like, ‘Oh, Marie, you really, really know what you’re saying right now.’ That song is really sad and I always want to cry thinking about it. It’s about the one that got away, really. A result of touring and being away a bit too long and not giving enough while being away. And how that can seem like you don’t care, but in reality, in my bubble, I was like, ‘I have absolutely no emotional capacity to be in another country and to give you what I think you need from me right now.’ It just ended up disappearing, and there wasn’t really anything more to say than to just have a full stop.” **“I’ll Call You Mine”** “It’s such a catchy, summery, driving song. It’s about letting someone in and hoping for the best, even though you’ve been fucked over a few times. I’ve had a tendency to think that nothing good could ever last. You know how sometimes you have fun but then we’re like, ‘Oh, something bad is going to happen.’ Two or three years ago, I’d have fun with my friends, and I’d be driving and I’d be like, ‘One of us is going to die first.’ That always happens, a real death element coming in, or ‘someone is going to get hurt’ element.” **“it would feel like this”** “\[The title\] *if i could make it go quiet* is all about the mental noise, all the feelings and thoughts that are so big they just take up your entire mental capacity and take over your entire body. This song feels like ‘If I could make it go quiet, it would feel like this.’ This place of quietness, this beautiful place where I’m able to be OK. I’m taking it all in. It feels like the credits to a movie because the album is so full, you could get to like, ‘Holy cow, what did I just listen to?’ There’s no words. You don’t need any. I’ve just poured my heart out in all of these songs.”