The wittier-than-thou rapper formerly known as Milo claims, on the second album under his new moniker, to “go a little deeper than the average MC.” To wit: Over *Scriptures*’ warm, blunted jazz beats, R.A.P. Ferreira (that’s Rory Allen Philip, in a mitzvah of hip-hop happenstance) spits deceptively casual tongue-twisters regarding hexadecimal patterns, pythons on leashes, critically acclaimed samurai flicks, and DMT—sorry, dimethyltryptamine. He keeps it calm on the surface, but there’s a madcap giddiness to his wordplay, a master technician bending language to his tripped-out will.
“We\'re all trying to find stories and tales that interlink with our own feelings and our own capacity,” Ben Howard tells Apple Music about his fourth studio LP. “I\'ve always felt I\'ve been a little misguided in trying to explain the time that I live in, but you\'re supposed to; you\'re trying to explain yourself in these little moments.” The British singer-songwriter became obsessed with, in his own words, “the heroes and villains of our time” as he brought life to them—whether it\'s the mysterious death of British businessman and amateur sailor Donald Crowhurst (“Crowhurst\'s Meme”) or the 2018 Horizon Air incident involving a ground service agent who hijacked a commercial plane and crashed (“The Strange Last Flight of Richard Russell”). Working with an outside producer for the first time (The National\'s Aaron Dessner), Howard invited a broad range of collaborators (This Is the Kit\'s Kate Stables, multi-instrumentalist Rob Moose, St. Vincent pianist Thomas Bartlett) to help flesh out his hypnotic blend of ambient folk and electronic flourishes. Here, Howard takes us through a few of the album\'s key songs. **What a Day** “It\'s loosely based on a walk in the countryside with an old friend of mine. We were talking clumsily about existentialism and had a great sort of pain that hung between us, and that\'s really what the song was born from. I\'d always come back to that imagery of the British countryside. It was a really crisp blue sky that only those really remote parts of the world have, when it\'s blindingly white. Ultimately, that\'s what the imagery is based on. I suppose it does document a relationship in a gentle way.” **Finders Keepers** “I love the idea that things at any one time can mean multiple things, even something as physical as a suitcase. The story is a very one-dimensional one of a guy following a suitcase down the river. But it\'s almost about what that suitcase represents for him, and the importance of that thing. It was just one of those where I was playing a lot of guitar through Moog pedals and stuff, and found a really cool lost corner of delays and arpeggiators. This story and this guitar part are married quite nicely at the time, and it gave it the strangeness that the story really is.” **Sorry Kid** “I guess the song is a bit of a whine, I suppose. I was playing around with a lot of beats, and it was really fun to tinker with a sharp little drum machine which was really easy to play to. I thought I\'d just reference a few things that were going on around me, and hope that my beats riffing off the back of it did the talking, really.”
Written after the birth of her first child (and just before the arrival of her second), *Colourgrade* finds London’s Tirzah Mastin taking a more experimental approach, wrapping moments of unadorned beauty in sheets of distortion, noise, woozy synthesizers, and listing guitars. It’s decidedly lo-fi—not the sort of album that actively invites you in. And yet, like its predecessor—her acclaimed 2018 debut LP, *Devotion*—this is naturally intimate music, alt-R&B that offers brief meditations on the coming together of both bodies (“Tectonic”) and collaborators (“Hive Mind,” which, in addition to seal-like background effects, features vocals from touring bandmate and South London artist Coby Sey). Working again alongside longtime friend and collaborator Mica Levi, Mastin sounds free here, at ease even as she obfuscates. On “Beating,” as she sings to her partner over a skittering drum machine and a layer of gaseous hiss, she stops for a moment to clear her throat, as if in quiet conversation late at night. “You got me/I got you,” she sings. “We made life/It’s beating.”
K-house, K-pop, hip-hop, electronic: Call it what you want—Hye Jin Park’s debut ignores those boundaries, anyway. The Korea-born, LA-based producer’s debut album, *Before I Die*, is a personal exploration of everything from living overseas and missing her family to sex, the music industry, and childhood nostalgia. It’s sung, rapped, and spoken, in Korean and English, over a sound that takes elements of hip-hop, techno, house, indie, and lo-fi beats, and creates something new, immersive, and totally unique. Below, Park walks us through each track on her self-produced, self-recorded LP. **“Let’s Sing Let’s Dance”** “In my life, when I’m really sad, I just sing and dance. If there are times when others feel sad, too, I want them to just sing and dance and leave everything behind for a while.” **“I Need You”** “Up to this point, I have endured all of this road alone and survived. I just really needed someone who had my back.” **“Before I Die”** “It’s been so long since I left Korea and last saw my family. I couldn’t get in touch with my family properly, because I was moving around the country on my own and dealing with all of these things that were happening to me. Of course, now, the coronavirus and everything that is happening in the US has affected my ability to see them. Words can never, ever, ever express how much I miss my family.” **“Good Morning Good Night”** “At the beginning of the day, I wanted to tell myself to have a good day. At the end of the day, I wanted to tell myself that I had also worked hard today.” **“Me Trust Me”** “I believe in myself and trust myself. But I wanted to protect myself from people who don’t believe in me or in themselves. They try to take me down like they take themselves down.” **“Where Did I Go”** “I’m thinking back to when I was a kid. I used to draw on the walls of my room. I miss that little kid.” **“Never Give Up”** “I left my country when I was 24, because I thought I did everything I could in Korea to pursue my dream. First, I moved to Melbourne, Australia by myself, because I thought easily get a visa for as a Korean. And then I moved from Australia to the UK and then to Los Angeles, California. I’ve gotten fucked over a lot. Twice in a row, I was seriously fucked over in this industry and by its people. They threatened me and were racist towards me. How many crooks I’ve met, country by country. How many times I’ve had to go through creepy guys, country by country. There’s a lot of people who wanted to try and take me down and be disrespectful towards me. I wanted to show them and tell them that I’ll never give up.” **“Can I Get Your Number”** “When you like someone, you ask them, ‘Can I get your number?’” **“Whatchu Doin Later”** “Then, you could text them and say, ‘Whatchu doin later?’” **“Sex With Me (DEFG)”** “And then, you could tell them, ‘Sex with me.’” **“Where Are You Think”** “I was talking to myself, saying, ‘Wake up. You need to make money.’” **“Never Die”** “I’ll never die.” **“Hey, Hey, Hey”** “Try listening to this song when y’all jogging. It’s gonna hit different.” **“Sunday ASAP”** “I wanted Sunday to come as soon as possible. It’s the only time I can let myself be lazy. I usually pressure myself to work harder than anyone else. So, soothing myself is like candy.” **“i jus wanna be happy”** “Originally, this song was called ‘I Hate Myself.’ But then, I deleted all of the ‘I Hate Myself’ parts I recorded. Instead, I rerecorded ‘i jus wanna be happy’ in Korean.”
박혜진 Park Hye Jin announces her highly-anticipated debut album ‘Before I Die’, set for release on 10th September on Ninja Tune. The album—entirely written, produced and performed by the South Korean-born and now LA-based the producer, rapper, singer, and DJ—follows the release of her hugely successful ‘How can I’ EP and comes on the heels of a string of collaborations, working with the likes of Clams Casino & Take A Daytrip (“Y DON’T U”), Blood Orange (“CALL ME (Freestyle)”) and Nosaj Thing (“CLOUDS”), plus a remix from Galcher Lustwerk (“Can you”). Available now is lead single and opening track ‘Let’s Sing Let’s Dance’, a wistful dance track that places Hye Jin’s mantra-like vocals over piano keys and rumbling bass. Elsewhere on the record she continues to expand her sonic palette, drawing on a range of influences that take in electronic, rap/hip-hop and downtempo sensibilities to present the most complete vision yet of her sound. ‘Before I Die’ is set for release on 10th September on Ninja Tune, with Hye Jin also heading out on a run of North American tour dates later this year which includes a co-headline show at Elsewhere with Shlohmo, 1015 Folsom in San Francisco, III Points Festival in Miami and more. Her debut album follows an incredible few years for the young artist, with a string of releases that have seen her garner strong support from the likes of Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Jezebel, FADER, DAZED, i-D, E!, Resident Advisor, Exclaim!, Hypebeast and many more. She was additionally featured in numerous ‘Best Of 2020’ lists from Billboard, The Guardian, NYLON and others, included in the NME 100 list of ‘Essential emerging artists for 2021’ & V Mag's 'Generation V’ series, and highlighted by British GQ and Stereogum as ‘One to Watch’. The EP’s lead single, ’Like this’—hailed by Mixmag as one of the “best tracks of 2020” and featured on the FIFA 2021 soundtrack—was supported across BBC Radio 1 and 6 Music (where it was playlisted for multiple weeks) with plays from Annie Mac, Clara Amfo, Lauren Laverne, Phil Taggart and many more. In the US the track was #1 of ‘Top Electronic’ in the NACC Charts (North American College and Community Radio), and in the ‘Top 200’ overall, with further support from KEXP, KCRW, SiriusXMU and more.
As Amyl and the Sniffers came off the road in late 2019, they moved into a house together in Melbourne. “It had lime green walls and mice,” frontwoman Amy Taylor tells Apple Music. “Three bedrooms and a shed out back that we took turns sleeping in. We knew we were going to come back for a long period of time to write. We just didn’t know how long.” Months later, as the bushfires gave way to a global pandemic, the Aussie punk outfit found themselves well-prepared for lockdown. “We’ve always kind of just been in each other’s pocket, forever and always,” Taylor says. “We’ve toured everywhere, been housemates, been in a van, and shared hotel rooms. We’re one person.” With all rehearsal studios closed, they rented a nearby storage unit where they could workshop the follow-up to their ARIA-winning, self-titled debut. The acoustics were so harsh and the PA so loud that guitarist Dec Martens says, “I never really heard any of Amy’s lyrics until they were recorded later on. She could’ve been singing about whatever, and I would have gone along with it, really.” And though *Comfort to Me* shows a more serious and personal side—as well as a range of influences that spans hardcore, power pop, and ’70s folk—that’s not necessarily a byproduct of living through a series of catastrophes. “I was pretty depressed,” Taylor says. “It’s hard to know what was the pandemic and what was just my brain. Even though you can’t travel and you can’t see people, life still just happens. I could look through last year and, really, it’s like the same amount of good and bad stuff happened, but in a different way. You’re just always feeling stuff.” Here, Taylor and Martens take us inside some of the album’s key tracks. **“Guided by Angels”** Amy Taylor: “I feel like, as a band, everyone thinks we’re just funny all the time. And we are funny and I love to laugh, but we also are full-spectrum humans who think about serious stuff as well, and I like that one because it’s kind of cryptic and poetic and a bit more dense. It’s not just, like, ‘Yee-haw, let’s punch a wall,’ which there’s plenty of and I also really love. We’re showing our range a little bit.” **“Freaks to the Front”** AT: “We must’ve written that before COVID. That’s absolutely a live-experience song and we’re such a live band—that’s our whole setup. We probably have more skills playing live than we do making music. It’s the energy that is contagious, and that one’s just kind of encouraging all kind of freaks, all kind of people: If you’re rich or poor or smart or fat or ugly or nice or mean, everyone just represent yourself and have a good time.” **“Choices”** Dec Martens: “\[Bassist\] Gus \[Romer\] is really into hardcore at the moment, and he wanted a really animalistic, straight-up hardcore song.” AT: “Growing up, I went to a fair handful of hardcore shows, and I personally liked the aggression of a hardcore show. In the audience, people kind of grabbing each other and chucking each other down, but then also pulling each other up and helping each other. I also just really like music that makes me feel angry. I constantly am getting unsolicited advice—or women, in general, are constantly getting told how to live and what to do. Everybody around the world is, and sometimes it’s really helpful—and I don’t discount that—but other times it’s just like, ‘Let me just fucking figure it out myself, and don’t tell me what kind of choices I can and can’t make, because it’s my flesh sack and I’ll do what I want with it.’” **“Hertz”** AT: “I think I started writing it at the start of 2020, pre-lockdown. But it’s funny now, because currently, being in lockdown again, I’m literally dying. I just want to get to the country and fucking not be in the city. So, the lyrics have really just come to fruition. I was thinking about somebody that I wasn’t really with at the time. It’s that feeling of feeling suffocated—you just want to look at the sky, just be in nature, and just be alive.” **“No More Tears”** DM: “I was really inspired by this ’70s album called *No Other* by Gene Clark, which isn’t very punk or rock. But I just played this at a faster tempo.” AT: “And also inspired heaps by the Sunnyboys, an Australian power pop band. Last year was really tough for me, and that song’s about how much I was struggling with heaps of different shit and trying to, I guess, try and make relationships work. I was just feeling not very lovable, because I’m all fucked in the head, but I’m also trying to make it work. It’s a pretty personal song.” **“Knifey”** AT: “It’s about my experience—and I’m sure lots of other people’s experience—of feeling safe to walk home at night. The world’s different for people like me and chicks and stuff: You can carry a weapon and if somebody does something awful and you react, it comes back to you. I remember when I was a kid, being like, ‘Dad, I want to get a knife,’ and he was like, ‘You can’t get a knife because you’ll kill someone and go to jail.’ But so be it. If somebody wants to have a go, I’m very happy to react negatively. At the start, I was like, ‘I don’t know if I want to do these lyrics. I don’t know if I’d want to play that song live.’ It’s probably the only song that I’ve ever really felt like that about. It hit up the boys in the band in an emotional way. They were like, ‘Fuck, this is powerful. Makes me cry and shit,’ and I was like, ‘That’s pretty dope.’” **“Don’t Need a C\*\*t (Like You to Love Me)”** AT: “It’s a fuck-you song. When I’m saying, ‘Don’t need a c\*\*t like you to love me,’ it’s pretty much just any c\*\*t that I don’t like in general. There could be some fucking piss-weak review of us or if I worked at a job and there was a crap fucking customer—it’s all of that. I wasn’t thinking about a particular bloke, although there’s many that I feel like that about.” **“Snakes”** “A bit of autobiography, an ode to my childhood. I grew up in a small town near the coast—kind of bogan, kind of hippy. I grew up on three acres, and I grew up in a shed with my sister, mom, and dad until I was about nine or 10, and we all shared a bedroom and would use the bath water to wash our clothes and then that same water to water the plants. Dad used to bring us toys home from the tip and we’d go swimming in the storms and there was snakes everywhere. There was snakes, literally, in the bedroom and the chick pens, and there’d be snakes killing the cats and snakes at school—and this song’s about that.”
When a veteran band decides to self-title an album, it’s often a way to reintroduce themselves. After years apart—and eight LPs behind them—My Morning Jacket felt like the moment had arrived. “I’ve always loved that phenomenon,” frontman Jim James tells Apple Music. “I was so excited that we even got to make another record that I was like, ‘This is the time for our self-titled.’ With all the insanity in the world right now, I wanted to do something as simple as we possibly could. Just, ‘Here we are. We’re back.’” Finished days before the pandemic took hold in early 2020, *My Morning Jacket* finds the Kentucky rock outfit luxuriating in one another’s company, feeling out familiar grooves (“Never in the Real World,” “Complex”) while still allowing for wild adventures (“In Color”) and loose experiments (“The Devil’s in the Details”). The hiatus, James says, was not due to any interpersonal drama, but rather the toll that “getting ground up in the machinery of touring” had taken on his health. Being together again lent him a sense of perspective and gratitude that courses through every song. “We weren’t really sure what was going to happen, but we took the time to have it be just the five of us,” he says, “which, I think, was really important for us to be able to get together and be vulnerable and be willing to make mistakes and not be precious about things and just get back to the core of the band. I feel so thankful—it’s almost like another lifetime you got to live. No matter what happens tomorrow, here’s another album. We did another one.” Here, James takes us inside a few songs from the collection. **“Regularly Scheduled Programming”** “It just felt like a natural, funny way to start it off because we had been interrupted and it was like, ‘Now we’re back to your regularly scheduled programming.’ Some songs just have that intro thing to them that feels like a first song in the way it builds. I call it a ramp song, where it starts with nothing and goes all the way up. I had been thinking about it so much before the pandemic, about how much screens have taken a place in our life. Then, obviously, the pandemic hit and we became even more addicted.” **“Love Love Love”** “It came to me on a walk, the rhythm of it. I wanted it to be powerful and propulsive at the same time, to have this weird combination of power and a super-mellow, super-beautiful vocal thing in the choruses. Mainly, it’s from working on myself and going to therapy and realizing how mean I can be to myself. If we walked into a room and heard somebody saying the terrible things we say to ourselves to a friend, we’d get super pissed. The song is really about trying to find a way to love yourself, so you can be more present for other people.” **“In Color”** “I thought it would maybe just be a minute-long acoustic song, really simple, like a nursery rhyme. Then I had a dream where I got the main riff and needed it to be a part of this thing. We started incorporating it and improvising, but something wasn’t right about it, and our drummer Patrick \[Hallahan\] said, ‘Why don’t we just start it acoustic and then go into all this other stuff that we’re doing?’ That’s what I love about the art of learning the recording studio: You find all the parts that really have heart and passion and real magic in them, and if you know how to edit correctly, you weave it into this thing that hopefully feels all of one body.” **“Never in the Real World”** “That was one of my favorite moments on this record, a really fun one in the studio: Through playing it, you just get into these places that you never thought you would get into. It’s about struggling to feel like I belong in this world, feeling so lost so much of the time that I could only find some kind of magic through drugs and alcohol, through altered states. The daytime was often so unmanageable for me because the only way I could find that magic was at night. It’s holding a sacred place for that as well because I think that’s still something that I enjoy. At the same time, just feeling wildly out of balance and trying to deal with that, like I never found magic in the real world, in the way I was supposed to live. The way society tells you to live, what people do, doesn’t make any sense to me.” **“The Devil’s in the Details”** “I got this old Sears drum machine for ten bucks, and it has this really nice pulsating pattern. I would play with it at night, sing over it, and then I put it in a demo box for things that I was going to work on later. I thought I would just do it by myself, because it didn’t really seem like a band song. While we were making the record, one night we went to this weird, really beautiful light show at the Arboretum in LA. The whole time I was walking, ‘The Devil’s in the Details’ kept coming into my head over and over. I was like, ‘Shit, we need to do this tomorrow.’ I brought the drum machine with me, and we just let it go. I showed them the chords, and we just all started improvising to the drum machine, getting hypnotized as we played along.” **“Lucky To Be Alive”** “I’ve had lots of accidents on tour. I’ve been hospitalized, had back surgery and heart trouble. Everybody knows what it feels like to be sick at least, but when you’re super sick, you can get down in this pit where your life starts to feel meaningless or starts to feel too hard, and you start to question, ‘Why am I even here? What am I even doing?’ I feel like after I’d been in several of those, once I got out, there’s a resonance to just feeling lucky to be alive, to having a normal day where I can walk. When simple things are taken away from you, you don’t really realize their value. When I came back and recovered, I was like, ‘Try to remember this feeling of just being grateful to be alive in any capacity, just what a gift it is.’” **“I Never Could Get Enough”** “It’s really just a sweet love song, about that feeling of loving somebody—not being able to get enough of that feeling, feeling so loved and so loving towards somebody that it’s all you can think about and it’s all you want to do. It’s that feeling, if we’re lucky enough to feel it, and it’s such a strange thing to try to manage, because everybody knows that everything changes, and everything ebbs and flows, and nothing lasts forever. It’s just about trying to enjoy that while you have it.”
During the late 2010s, South London’s Goat Girl emerged from the same Brixton-based scene that spawned similarly free-spirited alternative acts such as shame, Sorry, and black midi. With the band all taking on cartoonish stage names—Clottie Cream (lead vocalist and guitarist Lottie Pendlebury), L.E.D. (guitarist Ellie Rose Davies), and Rosy Bones (drummer Rosy Jones)—their 2018 self-titled debut album was a set of surly post-punk that moved with a shadowy menace and punch-drunk lurch. For this follow-up *On All Fours*, Goat Girl has kept that spirit but delivered music with a far wider scope. Propelled by the hypnotic playing of new bassist Holly Mullineaux (aka Holly Hole) and an embrace of electronics, tracks such as “P.T.S.Tea,” with its toy-town synth pop, and the creepily atmospheric “They Bite on You” constantly change direction (often within the space of a single verse). “I think this was always going to be because we’re all just a bit older,” Davies tells Apple Music. “We wrote the first album from ages of 15 to 17. And then Holly joined and that brought a fresh energy.” That progression in the band’s sound is also a reflection of developments in their songwriting processes. “It was a conscious thing,” says Jones. “It felt quite natural to all try and collaboratively write this one in a way that hadn’t happened before.” The resulting songs mark out Goat Girl as one of the preeminent talents in British indie music—and here they talk us through how they did it, track by track. **Pest** Lottie Pendlebury: “We got snowed in the studio, and the snowstorm was being called ‘The Beast From the East.’ There were loads of newspaper articles about it, and we were discussing that that’s a weird title for a snowstorm. It’s almost putting blame on it, like it’s the fault of the people who live in the East. To me, it seemed kind of racist and made me think about the fact that it’s rare with climate change that people actually think about who the blame really lies with. The people who have created this devastation are in the West, it’s the fault of industrialization, colonization, neoliberalism…that’s the true evil. We need to look internally and we need to stop blaming externally.” **Badibaba** Ellie Rose Davies: “That was a jam where we all switched instruments. I was playing bass and Rosy was playing guitar and I think Lottie was playing drums.” Holly Mullineaux: “I can’t remember who came up with \[the ‘badi-badi-ba-ba’ refrain in the chorus\]. I remember us all just chanting it for ages and it being really funny.” ERD: “I was thinking when I was writing it that when we try to do right and save the planet, we try to not be ourselves in our daily lives. There are these factors of what it is to be human that are quite selfish, and it’s about how that is unavoidable to a degree, but that has a knock-on effect for the rest of the planet and the planet’s resources.” **Jazz (In the Supermarket)** LP: “That was written in the studio. It was really hot and the air con wasn’t working and we were sleeping in there. It was all getting a bit insane, so that came from a jam there and it was quite unhinged. Our friend listened to it and was like, ‘That’s so sick!’ so we thought we should include it.” Rosy Jones: “The title came from this idea of jazz where it’s meant to be complex and you’re all virtuosos, but ‘in the supermarket’ was because we thought the synth sounded like a supermarket checkout—beep, beep, beep.” **Once Again** HM: “This came from a really mad, really silly demo. I don’t even think I had anything plugged in. I think I did it just using the computer keyboard. It had these spooky chords and then a really rampant, annoying drum beat, but there was something good about it, and then Ellie wrote a really nice melody over it.” ERD: “I think we called it ‘Reggae Ghost’ for a while because it sounded like a ghost train. Then we called it ‘Greyhound’ because I’d written these lyrics about a dog my mum was looking after. I was really sad when she had to give it back.” **P.T.S.Tea** RJ: “We were on a ferry and I went to get breakfast. I was just there playing a game on my phone, then next thing I know this guy’s tea poured over me. This guy was just walking away and I was like, ‘Was it you?’ And he just looked at me and walked away. I was in loads of pain. It put me out of action for two weeks. I had to go to the burns unit and we had to cancel all our shows. I couldn’t move. The first lyrics were inspired by that, but then it sort of trails off into other experiences I’ve had with obnoxious men thinking they have a right to question me about my sexuality and my gender identity. Just being rude, basically.” **Sad Cowboy** LP: “I was going through different recordings and voice notes on my phone and came across this jam from maybe a year before and there was this really nice guitar line in it. That was what became the main melody of the song, and then it just developed. I wanted it to sound slightly dissonant and strange, so I was messing around with different tunings of the guitar and I wanted the rhythm to have a jittery feel. I was just trying to experiment before I brought it to the band. That was one of the songs that slipped into place quite quickly.” **The Crack** ERD: “I did a demo for that song quite a few years ago and just put it on my personal SoundCloud and didn’t really think anything of it. I think Holly was the one who was like, ‘Oh, this is really good, we should do it.’ It’s changed a lot from how it was originally. I never had a real chorus in my version, I just kept saying, ‘The crack, the crack, the crack,’ which was a bit shit. It’s about an imagined post-apocalyptic world where people leave the Earth to go and find another planet to live on because they’ve just ruined this one.” **Closing In** LP: “I was trying to think about the words and the rhythms and also the images that they conjure up and how anxiety can take different shapes and forms. So the anxiety in me became a ghost that possesses me and controls me, or it’s this boil that I’m staring at on my head and different ideas that allow you to gain some sense of autonomy over the feelings that you can’t really control. It’s funny because the music is quite upbeat and cheerful. It does jar and it confuses you in the way that anxiety does. It’s an embodiment of that as well.” **Anxiety Feels** ERD: “‘Anxiety Feels’ came out of a not very nice time for me where I was having panic attacks two or three times a day. Not really wanting to meet up with anyone socially or even leave the house to go to the shop. I was just feeling so weird and so self-aware from the moment I woke up, my heart would be racing and I’d be just feeling dread. The song was about that and weighing up whether to take anti-anxiety medication, but then knowing quite a few people close to me and their response to medication and basically deciding that I was going to find an alternative route than to be medicated for it.” **They Bite on You** LP: “‘They Bite on You’ was from my experience of having scabies. It was fucking horrible. You can’t stop itching, with bites all over your body. It was two or three years ago; I didn’t know what it was for ages. I thought there was an angry mosquito in my bed. My mum got this cream from the doctors and decided to cover it over my naked body and just layer this shit on and burn all these bugs out of me. I didn’t want the song to just be about me having scabies, though, because that’s gross, so I started to think about the other things that metaphorically bite on you.” **Bang** LP: “I started with the chords for this and I just immediately thought it was a banger. I played it to everyone and I was like, ‘This is quite intense…’ This is very much a pop song, it’s not really like our other stuff in that it was overtly pop, so I was anxious to play it to everyone because it could go two ways—they could’ve been like, ‘Uhh…’ or ‘Whoa!’” **Where Do We Go?** LP: “Lyrically, it’s quite specific. It’s about imagining dissecting Boris Johnson. It was quite objective in that sense. It’s like: What would his insides look like? Is he evil through and through? Would he just be covered in thick sludge? And it’s about the kind of evil that lies in Conservatives. It’s like they’re like lizards or something. It was more of a joke to me when I was writing it. I quite like the way that it’s almost like a rap as well. All the words are in quick succession, and again, it’s got that weird contrast between the lyrics being really heavy and forlorn and dark mixed with this airy-fairy cute vibe sonically.” **A-Men** RJ: “One night, I wanted to try and get this idea for a song that I had down. I don’t really have any recording means at home, so I played it off my laptop and recorded it on my phone with me singing the melody over the top. Then I think I got quite drunk as well. When the others came in the next morning, I was like, ‘Oh yeah, I did this!’ It’s quite sad but quite hopeful. It’s nice because all of the other songs are quite intense and opinionated to some degree and that song feels like there’s something pure about it. It feels softer than the others in a nice way.”
OBTUSE? I COULD HAVE DONE IT? No, I could have. i could have waited and tried and looked for the right files. BUT I WANTED TO DO IT RIGHT NOW? i did. i didnt want to figure out which clappingseal5 fix 6 vox.wav was the right one. it honestly doesnt matter. somebody has to walk the plank. somebody has to be the plank. pretend all music by spawn wimp idiot decorated by travis understood by travis all sounds by shavis wintorp a miracle by god a beautiful glance from A FAR cover painting by Patrick Quinn most of the guitar stuff on headboard by Kora, an angel Recorded between April-July 2021 In my garage next to a stack of board games and 1/700 scale Napoleonic naval fleets stop bothering my friends
\"It\'s sort of a defiant statement, but it\'s also about accountability in moving on from something,\" Tigers Jaw vocalist/guitarist Ben Walsh tells Apple Music. \"You can\'t always control how someone else is going to perceive you.\" While 2017\'s *Spin* featured Walsh and vocalist/keyboardist Brianna Collins splitting writing duties, *I Won\'t Care How You Remember Me* includes newly added members Colin Gorman and Teddy Roberts into the creative process, making the band\'s sixth record their most collaborative and sonically adventurous collection yet, and allowing Tigers Jaw to grow beyond their earlier sound and continue to explore new musical boundaries. \"So many bands\' first one or two records are the ones that smash, and then it\'s tough to live up to that for another 15 years,\" says Roberts. \"How do you do that? You got to be good, I guess.\" Here, Walsh, Roberts, and Collins guide Apple Music through the album\'s 11 tracks. **I Won\'t Care How You Remember Me** Ben Walsh: “It is kind of like a gradual build of a song and then it ends with this really intense sort of, you get this big payoff at the end. And it does really set the tone, it kind of covers a lot of different moods that you see later on in the record.” **Cat\'s Cradle** Brianna Collins: “It\'s about friendship and realizing that not every friendship in your life is going to necessarily last forever, but you need to be able to look back on what happened and be accountable for yourself, and also realizing things about that friendship that maybe you didn\'t see while you were in it is also an important factor.” **Hesitation** BW: “This one definitely has the energy of the earlier Tigers Jaw tracks, but thematically, I think it\'s sort of about when you\'re in a relationship and you are picking up on little things, like a slight hesitation before the person responds to something. And you can tell that something\'s not quite right and it\'s sort of the beginning of the end. So it was definitely inspired by some personal experiences of mine, and, yeah probably one of the more raw and personal songs of mine, lyrically, on this record.” **New Detroit** BW: “This was maybe the song of mine that I was least sure of, and I almost didn\'t bring it to the band. Maybe because it felt like more of a departure from previous Tigers Jaw material. But I showed it to everybody while we were together at Teddy\'s house in Detroit doing some demoing and everybody saw the vision for it.” **Can\'t Wait Forever** BW: “The line ‘I can\'t wait forever’ is part of a lyrical lineage in the Scranton music scene where that line pops up in multiple Tigers Jaw, Menzingers, and Captain, We\'re Sinking songs. We\'ve always, over the years, kind of snuck it into songs sort of like an inside joke. And this song sounds and has the energy of like classic, early Tigers Jaw. It reminds me of the earlier days of the band, and so it felt fitting to kind of put in that little local tribute to the bands we came up with into that song.” **Lemon Mouth** Teddy Roberts: “There is light to all of this; you can always find some positivity in almost anything if you choose to. The song floats around a natural minor key and then you get to the coda of the song—this huge, major feeling. It\'s almost a ray of sunshine that you waited three and a half minutes to get to.” **Body Language** TR: “I feel like the extended outro is a perfect example of when you come see Tigers Jaw live, you\'re going to get the end of \'Body Language\' for an entire set. The spirit of the end of this song is kind of our vibe. That\'s the energy we\'ve channeled by touring for so long and being around each other for so long.” BW: “It feels like the whole song is building towards the release at the end. And it was almost like we didn\'t know how long to extend it on the record and it feels like it could have been selected down or it feels like it could have been five full minutes of it.” **Commit** TR: “I\'m biased because I\'m doing some crazy shit on the drums, it\'s obviously really fun for me to play. It\'s like an earworm kind of tune. Those choruses are just soaring, and it\'s also very deceivingly heavy, especially in the guitar department, it\'s very thick and chunky on a low end, which is a fun look for the back half of the record.” BC: “This might not necessarily have been a song I would have written for myself to sing, because I\'ve never necessarily felt like a lead singer, I think partially because I love harmonies and I love singing harmonies. But writing this allowed me to kind of step up and see what I\'m capable of.” **Never Wanted To** BW: “There\'s sort of like a dual guitar solo at the end that was two different takes, two different guitar solos that were recorded separate from each other that were then kind of blindly added on top of each other. And the idea of that was sort of inspired by my love for Black Sabbath, which you wouldn\'t hear this song and think Black Sabbath, but there\'s a few guitar solos that Tony Iommi does that are multiple guitars layered and sometimes they\'re doing the same thing, sometimes they\'re doing different things and they sort of weave in and out of each other. And so I was trying to capture that aesthetic and just put it in a completely different context.” **Heaven Apart** BC: “It\'s a love song. I\'ve been in a relationship for a very long time, and a lot of it has been spent not in the same place because of touring or school or whatever other obstacles that keep people apart. And it\'s a theme that\'s been sung about so many times, but I wanted to write about it for myself, and I love how the keyboard is the kind of most present instrument, too.” **Anniversary** BW: “This song was one of the later ones that I wrote for the record, and it kind of combines a lot of influences that make up who I am as a songwriter. The kind of chord structures of the chorus and how it\'s played is sort of a nod to my love for Tom Petty.” BC: “I love a record where the last song can end and the first song can begin again and it just feels right.” TR: “I always felt like this song had a closer vibe to it, and I brought it up a couple times here and there, but it felt like a grand finale of sorts. There\'s no other way I can imagine ending this album than with the \'Anniversary\' chorus.”
this album is an ode to the poet bob kaufman the inventor of frink and beat the progenitor of abomunism the chief bomkoff connoisseur of oatmeal cookies take a quick trip to the coffeeshop cafe.rubyyacht.com ciphersnappers&wordbenders only
Building on the momentum of 2008\'s debut LP *Elephant Shell*, the Canadian indie rockers put everything on the line by signing to a larger label and working with hotly tipped producer Rob Schnapf for their second LP. Compared to *Elephant Shell*\'s knotty post-punk rhythms and bookish one-liners, the tempos were slower and the songs got more reflective. Steeped in joy and a tinge of melancholy, lead singer David Monks looks back on old friendships (“Breakneck Speed”) and makes up for lost time “Boots of Danger (Wait Up)” over sleek, streamlined guitar pop. The infectious keyboard lines and bright melodies of “Not Sick” and “Bambi” also highlighted the band at their most comfortable and self-assured. “Less big words and more exclamation marks,” Monks sings alongside chugging riffs on “Big Difference,” fitting words that sum up their bold make-it-or-break-it moment. This 10th anniversary edition adds in some revealing unreleased session tracks and a few inspired remixes (including a fun, synthy rework of “Gone” by Matt and Kim) to show the full scope of the band’s ambitions.
A winding path through the ’80s with five atmospheric pop covers.
“I didn’t know if we were going to be able to recreate the magic,” Tunng’s Mike Lindsay tells Apple Music of returning to LUMP, his collaboration with Laura Marling, following 2018’s acclaimed, eponymous debut. “I was petrified.” It’s not too hard to see why. *LUMP*—on which Marling layered, as she puts it, “essentially free-form nonsense poetry” atop atmospheric electronic folk soundscapes crafted by Lindsay—presented a strangely wonderful meeting of musical minds that few could have predicted. Fortunately, *Animal* proves that it was no one-off. Here, bolstered by their experience of touring together, LUMP takes their sound to bigger, bolder, and more hedonistic places, as the duo explores—like they did on their debut—a space somewhere between sweetness and menace, darkness and light. “That’s what makes it work for me,” says Lindsay. “There’s this creepiness versus cuteness. It needs to grate up against each other to keep it surprising.” And there are plenty of surprises, from gloriously danceable moments (“Animal”) to off-kilter indie pop (“Climb Every Wall,” “We Cannot Resist”) and one thrilling, truly unexpected guitar solo (“Paradise”). Marling—who drew from her study of psychoanalysis and her own dreams for this album’s lyrics—says *Animal* is about “desire and the under-conscious things that are driving us,” as well as our attention deficit, validation, fame (including her own), and cultural shifts. (If any of that sounds impenetrable, it somehow isn’t once you press play.) There is, too, a sense of freedom and playfulness throughout. And for Marling in particular—who worked on *Animal* alongside 2020’s *Song for Our Daughter*—that has always been the beauty of LUMP. “When I was working on *Song for Our Daughter*, I was having problems with my throat. I was struggling to sustain my voice or catch my breath. But in the studio with Mike, I wasn’t experiencing those problems. I think that obviously says a lot about what LUMP was to me at that time, which is just a huge relief. Laura Marling is this very private, stressful experience, whereas LUMP is an energetic force to draw on. There are no bad ideas.” Read on as Marling and Lindsay guide us through their second musical adventure, one track at a time. **“Bloom at Night”** Mike Lindsay: “With the ambient beginning, I feel this song has an element of similarity to the opening track on *LUMP*. But when those beats click in, it’s a shock. It just felt the perfect way to draw you in and then make you wonder, ‘What\'s going to happen on this record? ’Cause I don\'t really know what this is anymore.’” Laura Marling: “The first lyric that I came up with was ‘It took one God seven days to go insane.’ I guess I was trying to describe the feeling of what people have been reduced to in the attention age. The indecency of being reduced, at times, to get your piece of attention in the world, which none of us is above—particularly artists and musicians.” **“Gamma Ray”** ML: “We had the chorus first, but it took a long time to figure out the verse part. Laura went to the kitchen and came back with this amazing set of lyrics—really menacing, covered in attitude. They slotted in perfectly around the stupid timing this song is in (it’s in 7/4). When we layered up that verse at the end of the last chorus, it was like black magic or something. When you hear the words ‘Excuse me, I don’t think we’ve been introduced,’ for me that’s the voice of Lump \[the duo’s yeti-like mascot, who appeared on the cover of their debut\].” **“Animal”** LM: “This was the easiest to decipher from the music Mike had made. And again, lyrically following the theme of desire, and sort of the gross accoutrements of desire.” ML: “We had that riff, and it felt like a kind of ’90s, slowed-down rave riff or something. The first lyrics Laura started singing—‘Dance, dance, this is your last chance’—were a joke, with that overly British voice, just for fun. But for me, it was kind of a eureka moment. And in the breakdown, she started doing this kind of gospel or party animal moment and it blew my mind. What Laura is singing in the middle collapse of the song is the word ‘animal.’ And that\'s why it became the title of the album. I think it\'s such a strong, very simple word that meant a lot to the LUMP project.” **“Climb Every Wall”** ML: “For me, this song is all about the bassline. There was a kind of melancholy and drunkenness at the same time. It felt like a brilliant piece of pop music, which I hadn’t really done in LUMP before. But Laura totally twisted it into something I wasn’t really expecting. It’s dark, foreboding, with almost a Nico-esque voice.” **“Red Snakes”** LM: “This song is similar to stuff I’ve done before, but with LUMP’s slightly wonky imagery. I have a recurring dream of my mother being in a pool of water at night, like a pond, and not being able reach her. In one of the dreams I reached into the water to see what was in there and a huge red snake came and bit my arm and I couldn\'t get it off. That’s obviously a very stark image and a very strong feeling, so it came together quickly. The intimacy of the piano also dictated that.” **“Paradise”** ML: “I wasn’t sure about this track. Partly because it’s in a slightly different key to the other tracks, so I was like, ‘It’s going to ruin my journey, man!’ But I was wrong. It’s one of those tunes that is very creepy mixed with this pure joy. I worried it was just too far beyond what we’ve done before, but I think that was why Laura wanted it on the record. And for me, all that really matters about this song is the badass guitar solo.” LM: “The ‘paradise’ in the context of the song is either that moment near death or the moment near waking when you have a sort of ecstatic experience. The whole fool\'s journey is that we\'re getting back to that state, total bliss, just unachievable. It\'s a fantasy. And then, that was intertwined with me having a dream in which my therapist approached me on the top deck of a London bus, offered me a cucumber sandwich, then asked me out on a date. And that was a disturbing image, as I\'m sure you\'d agree.” **“Hair on the Pillow”** ML: “This whole album is supposed to be one kind of journey. And I think after we’ve had the massive moment of ‘Paradise,’ we needed some time to reflect. What is this world you’ve been put in sonically? It’s also a chance to reflect on some of Laura’s imagery. The words ‘hair on your pillow’ is sampled form ‘Animal’ through a heavily pitched-down vocoder. It’s another example of the voice of Lump the character.” **“We Cannot Resist”** LM: “This song is a pretty well-trodden story: kids on the run, first love, biggest heartbreak, and so on. Then there’s all this quite strange libidinal language about profanity. Desire is quite often something that\'s either really tightly strung or has gone slack. I was just messing around with that and it ended up making it a not straightforward pop song.” ML: “There’s a magic moment at the end of this song when it just dissipates into whispers, which then continues into the flutes of the next song, ‘Oberon,’ which are actually the same flutes from ‘Bloom at Night.’ The whole record has these kinds of in-between tracks, which give a different flavor to the song you just heard. This song is kind of a broken pop song that doesn’t quite know what it’s supposed to be.” **“Oberon”** LM: “Mike had this piece of music and we didn’t have very long to work on it—he was in Margate and I was going home at the end of the day, so we needed to come up with something quickly. I have a continuous run of notebooks—the front is for Laura Marling and the back, flipped around, is for LUMP. I flipped it to the Laura Marling side and found something I had never used. ‘Oberon’ must have been in the mix for *Song for Our Daughter*. We did three takes and I read excerpts of notes that I’d written way back. Then Mike just cut them up and put them in random places, so that their meaning was completely different and obscure. It turned out to be an odd, pleasing listen.” **“Phantom Limb”** LM: “I make a daily habit of underlining things in newspapers and quote some stuff, phrases that I like. This song is just a repository for the funny phrasing I’ve heard in the last few years. Lots of the lyrics are about things that are uncomfortable to think about—slightly disturbing images.” ML: “This song has a rolling time signature that never ends. I could listen to it forever. ‘We have some work to do’ is such a brilliant line to end the whole project on. It can be very open to interpretation as a comment on society. This ending makes me want to go back to the start and retrace my steps, to work out what journey I’ve just listened to.”
File under “things that seem like they should’ve happened years ago, but somehow hadn’t until now”: *Garbology* is the first album-length collaboration between the two underground hip-hop veterans, despite the fact that they’ve known each other since college, and that Aesop’s biggest tracks to date have been Blockhead productions. Here, the latter’s beats are heady as ever; meanwhile, Aes has grown into the role of the curmudgeonly hermit, digging through the landfill of late-capitalist culture with no small amount of despair: “I hate praising net worth over legwork/I hate ceding all power to the extroverts/I find the current social architecture hell on earth,” he spits on “That Is Not a Wizard.” It isn’t easy making existential anguish sound this good.
In January 2019, Royal Blood traveled to LA to record with Josh Homme at the Queens of the Stone Age frontman’s Pink Duck studio. The sessions produced “Boilermaker,” a track from the Sussex rock duo’s third album *Typhoons*, but it was also a trip that generated two important changes for singer/bassist Mike Kerr and drummer Ben Thatcher. Firstly, Kerr stopped drinking. On a weekend break from recording, he headed to Vegas. “I was at a real crescendo,” he tells Apple Music’s Matt Wilkinson. “I was a nutter. I was like Ron Burgundy at the bar, washed up. And I could hear the same old monologue going on. I could see I was bored of my complaints about myself. I had a very clear moment of ‘Something’s got to change. I can’t expect things to get any better if I don’t really take responsibility for this.’” Secondly, Homme encouraged Kerr and Thatcher to worry less about perfection and explore the untapped possibilities for their music. “There’s a lot of wigs, a lot of fancy dress,” says Kerr about Pink Duck. “It’s a place to have fun. He is very good at creating an environment where you feel comfortable putting forward an idea no matter how crazy it might be. I think he says, ‘What if?’ more than anyone I’ve ever met. That mantra got drilled into us and we’ve carried that into the rest of this record.” Both developments resonate through *Typhoons*. Across two previous albums—double-platinum debut *Royal Blood* in 2014 and follow-up *How Did We Get So Dark?* in 2017— the duo minted ferocious, divergent rock from just drums, bass, and effects pedals. Even more free-spirited, *Typhoons* retools their sound for the dance floor, marshaling riffs to four-to-the-floor beats. It’s a limber, swaggering sound they’ve nicknamed “AC Disco”—but factor in the big pop melodies on “Million and One” and “Trouble’s Coming” and you could also call it Black ABBAth. And like all the best disco, *Typhoons* bears plenty of emotional weight, with the songs unflinchingly tracing Kerr’s turbulent path towards sobriety. “It was the only thing I had to write about,” he says. “I got to the point where I *really* understood who I was, and having that kind of genuine confidence is crucial for being creative. It allowed me to trust myself with it rather than second-guessing anything. I felt a little less exposed: It almost felt like the lyrics were a bit disguised because the music was so upbeat and euphoric. I felt amazing and so positive that I was in a much better place, yet the only thing I had to write about was incredibly dark. So it’s a strange duality on the album.” Only at the very end do the music’s rigor and strut drop, when Kerr swaps his bass for a piano on the airy, psychedelic ballad “All We Have Is Now.” “Perhaps it points towards the unknown of where we’re going next,” he says. “It ended up on the record because \[we thought\], ‘That’s really great.’ It doesn’t matter whether it aligns with what we’ve done before or what people say we’re allowed to do. As long as we’re not trying to fight for someone we used to be, or trying to jump too aggressively forwards to be a band we’re not yet, as long as we stay true to who we are in the moment, then we’ll be OK.”
As Middle Kids were recording their second full-length in late 2019, they faced a serious deadline. “I was seven months pregnant,” guitarist-vocalist Hannah Joy tells Apple Music. “I was really on the clock. And it had quite a big impact on what I wrote because I was in a place of general anticipation and thoughtfulness about the next season. There was an urgency there—I felt very impassioned because it felt so important.” On *Today We’re the Greatest*, the Sydney rock outfit—including drummer Harry Day and bassist Tim Fitz, who is also Joy’s husband—dive headlong into difficult questions about who we are and what it is to be alive. Earnest and anthemic, it’s music that was meant to impart wisdom if not inspire—and Joy and Fitz’s son clearly responded to it in utero. “I\'ll be doing the vocal takes and he\'ll start kicking and it would actually trip me out because it wouldn\'t be to the beat,” she says. “I’d say, ‘Your father is a bass player and a drummer—you should have better rhythm.’” Here, Joy guides us through a few of the album’s key songs. **Bad Neighbours** “A lot of these songs are more vulnerable and more personal; and musically, they’re more dynamic and stripped back. That was something we were really excited about, but also a little bit nervous because it\'s something new. I think we were just like, ‘Fuck it, let\'s just really lean into that and have that sort of thing be the opener.’ When I\'m scared of something, I lean into that thing and just expose myself to it to try and get over it.” **Cellophane (Brain)** “It\'s dealing with my noisy brain and the things that are ticking away underneath it all. I remember when I was writing the chorus melody, I was just hitting random notes just to see how that sounded. I really ended up liking it and I didn\'t even think it was going to be the final melody because it really jumps around and I\'m swinging it like an elastic band. It\'s so fun to sing because it\'s loopy and different to usually how I would write.” R U 4 Me? “Tim and I wrote this one together from the ground up, which is a new thing for us. That bit where I laugh in the breakdown, that’s literally from the demo, because I\'m saying something wrong, and we just left it in there because it felt like the spirit of the song was in that. It’s intense but playful. It’s talking about trust issues or people trying to find their place and feeling lonely and not knowing where they belong, but also not taking yourself too seriously.” **Questions** “There\'s a lot of space in the music at the beginning—almost like when you\'re in a tense conversation it feels like there\'s too much space. It\'s painfully present and quiet except for the words. As it slowly builds and grows and then explodes: There\'s a great catharsis in that. I\'m not sure if that\'s symbolic—whether it\'s anger exploding or if it\'s the resolution of something or freedom from something—but musically, I think it really takes you on a journey of like awkwardly navigating intimacy.” **Some People Stay in Our Hearts Forever** “I still look back on experiences from when you were a kid and it\'s just crazy how they can really linger. Writing that chorus was just so from that place, almost like a wolf howling to the moon, ‘I’m sorry.’ I think part of the journey of growing up is learning how to accept who you are and what you\'ve done, and own those things and not let those ghosts haunt you. It’s not even necessarily doing anything that bad, but you\'re just dumb and don\'t know much.” **Stacking Chairs** “Tim really inspired this song. When I was growing up, I was more interested in having a good time and going to the party and then not being the person who stuck around and packed up the party after. Long-term friendship is learning how to walk with someone through life and being there in not just the fun moments, but all the messy moments. Marriage has really taught me about continually showing up every day. And that image of stacking chairs is being that person for other people who\'s going to be there when it\'s a bit shit and it\'s not the fun stuff, but it\'s part of life.” **Today We\'re the Greatest** “This song to me is a great summation of a lot of the things that I\'m singing about and wrestling with. Most of our lives, it\'s pretty mundane and you just do the same shit every day. In amongst that, we all have our pain and our loneliness, but we also have our moments of triumph and beauty. Sometimes they\'re small and sometimes they\'re big. And I feel like when we can hold all of that and live in that, that\'s when we are great—that’s living.”
Don’t let the tongue-in-cheek name Ross From Friends fool you. The Essex-born producer and DJ, real name Felix Clary Weatherall, is no joke. Rather, he has made a name for himself since 2018’s debut LP *Family Portrait* with an ear for dance-floor-focused compositions that bring forth bursts of euphoric movement as much as they delve into the nostalgic resonances of formative musical experiences. For his second studio album, *Tread*, Weatherall coded his own software (called Thresho) to open up his creative process. “I struggle to commit to recording, but Thresho just starts capturing what I’m doing when the audio reaches a certain threshold, and it ended up defining the whole record,” he tells Apple Music. The result is 12 tracks that take on radically open forms, from the melancholic UK garage of “The Daisy” to the ambient tape manipulations of “Morning Sun in a Dusty Room” and the beatless, eternal crescendo of “Run.” All the while, Weatherall was taking emotional inspiration from his studio’s surroundings during the coronavirus lockdowns on London’s Old Kent Road. “There’s so much history here, and I started to see the parallels between Thresho collecting these sounds and me recollecting my memories in London this past decade, absorbing different sounds,” he says. Read on for his thoughts on *Tread*, track by track. **“The Daisy”** “This track had so many different versions. I was writing it early on in March 2020 and I wanted to make something catchy, since I was really missing that feeling of being out and just having your hands in the air to something exciting. I ended up playing a very rough early version at \[London venue\] Printworks, which was the last gig I did before lockdown, and so I always associate the tune with that night out.” **“Love Divide”** “This is paired with ‘The Daisy,’ even though it was the last tune that I finished in February 2021. I had a similar feeling going into both of them of wanting to make something that\'s catchy after having been locked down and deprived of going out. The live show was also a big part of making this track and just picturing how it was going to come across in that setting by making a version that hammered home the big breakdown and drop.” **“Revellers”** “‘Revellers’ is a four-to-the-floor homage to the house music I was first getting into in 2012. I wanted to cover as many musical bases across the whole tune as possible, so that’s why it\'s almost seven minutes long. The drums took ages to get right, and it also took me a while to land on the melodic feel, which was twisted from an initial guitar sample. When I finished the track, I decided to rerecord the entire melodic part as one live take because I wanted it to have the energy of being performed spontaneously.” **“A Brand New Start”** “I wanted this track to be a turning point into a different, soul-sampled sound on the album. It\'s inspired by a Red Bull Music Academy interview with Madlib where he talks about how sometimes the sample is all you need. I wanted to be quite brutal with it, so I recorded a jam using a soul sample, cut out a few minutes of it, and then stuck it straight on the album. I wanted it to be completely straight as it was, rather than overdone.” **“XXX Olympiad”** “This is titled after the Greek name for the 2012 London Olympics, and that was the era I was trying to reference musically. I was digging for some soul samples to put over this future garage, post-dubstep rhythm, since when making this record I was thinking a lot about the last decade I’ve spent going out in London and the different sounds I’ve been drawn to.” **“Grub”** “‘Grub’ flows seamlessly from the last tune, but it’s meant to be this grubby mess, based completely on Thresho. I just threw hundreds of recordings into a Thresho project and then moved them all around. I didn\'t record anything specifically for that track, it was all just sampling these recordings in the software. It\'s essentially loads of mess and dirt put into a tune.” **“Spatter/Splatter”** “This one is a reference to trip-hop, since when I was coding Thresho I was listening to loads of it, as well as Boards of Canada. I wanted it to be a homage to that downtempo, IDM feel. Making music is ultimately a completely solitary thing to me; there\'s no collaboration, it\'s a personal thing that I keep within myself, so all the references come from that space.” **“Morning Sun in a Dusty Room”** “I really wanted this track to be evocative of a specific memory I have. I once woke up at a New Year\'s party way too early and I remember being in this dusty room and seeing all the sunlight streaming through the air. It tripped me out and I didn’t know what was going on. I wanted the track to flow musically from the last tune with similar references to reflect that strange ambience.” **“Run”** “I wanted to make something that is beatless but that is still quite hammering and could be played out, even though there\'s no real kick drum. I had these stabbing chords that build and repeat for a while and I was trying them with drums but this idea worked best. It was probably inspired by Floating Points\' earlier work, where the tunes are really long and have those huge breakdowns.” **“Life in a Mind”** “One of my friends once bought loads of NOS \[nitrous oxide\] balloons and we ended up having so many of them, to the point where I shut my eyes at one point and I felt like I lived an entire life inside my mind. This track is inspired by that repetitive, ongoing experience that existed inside my head. I just felt like this tune just matched up with that memory super well. It also has similar soul samples that are referenced on ‘A Brand New Start.’” **“Thresho\_1.0”** “This is named after the software I built, and like ‘Grub,’ it is another one where the entire thing is composed of tracks dragged from various different sessions into Thresho and then layered and structured, but nothing was recorded specifically for the track. I was just loading it up with samples and seeing where it went.” **“Thresho\_1.1”** “This is a bit of a cheesy reference to me being a new dad. I wanted it to represent how I\'ve lived these past 10 years running around doing stupid shit in London and now this is the next phase in my life. It\'s played on a music box where you stamp in the notes that you want, and I used the melody of ‘Thresho\_1.0’ to wind it up. I thought it was a fitting way to close out the record.”
Andy Stott’s music was never particularly upbeat—on early albums like 2006’s *Merciless* and 2008’s *Unknown Exception*, the Manchester electronic musician bathed Detroit-inspired techno in shadowy reverb—but on 2011’s *Passed Me By*, he plunged definitively into the depths of despair. Slowing the tempo to an agonized crawl, he traded forceful drum programming and clean-lined synths for hazy abstractions and crumpled, lo-fi textures. Ten years later, Stott is still spelunking through the same cavernous murk: *Never the Right Time* opens with plaintive scrapes of post-punk guitar, and the record is awash in similarly suggestive tones, like the expectant crackle of “Don’t know how” or the blown-out pianos of “When It Hits.” But his long-running collaboration with the vocalist Alison Skidmore continues to lead even his most downcast songs toward new forms of grace, balancing out his bruising low end with an air of weightlessness. What’s more, after a decade of dissipation, it sounds like Stott is muscling up again: The drum-driven “Answers,” “Repetitive Strain,” and the title track boast his heaviest rhythms in years.
When Leon Bridges set out to make his third album, he wanted it to be different this time around. “We felt like the only way to unlock a unique sound was to create this immersive experience and find a place that was aesthetically inspiring,” he tells Apple Music. He landed on Gold-Diggers in East Hollywood, a three-in-one bar, hotel, and recording studio that allowed the Texas-bred singer to tap into his sound the way he hears it in his head, free from the expectations of others. “It definitely felt the most liberating to me,” he says of the process. “I was just able to be myself and let go of any inhibitions and create without any boundaries.” The songs born of those sessions—produced by Ricky Reed and Nate Mercereau—became *Gold-Diggers Sound* and some of Bridges’ most refined work. He rose to fame through his ’50s and ’60s soul stylings, but the R&B contained within this album situates its nostalgia in a more modern context, bridging ’80s and ’90s R&B with lush, jazz-inspired live instrumentation. His writing coupled with his voice has long been the centerpiece, but hearing both in this context is to experience them anew. “When you look at *Gold-Diggers Sound*, a lot of these songs were derived from improvisational jams,” Bridges says. “Back to the basics of musicians in a room and creating music from the ground up.” Here he walks through each song on the album. **“Born Again”** “‘Born Again’ is a song that transpired out of the pandemic. Pretty much everything on *Gold-Diggers Sound* was born within the Gold-Diggers space, but this is one that happened after the fact. Basically, Ricky Reed was doing this livestream series where he would produce a song live. He sent me an instrumental, and he wanted me to write something to it and send it in the next day, so I was stressing out like crazy because I just couldn\'t think of what to write about. I woke up that morning and the song came to me. I wanted to make it parallel to the concept of spiritual newness within a gospel context or within the Bible, but I take that concept and just talk about how I felt during the pandemic and how the pandemic was very healing for me. I felt like this song was a great opener for the album, and it totally sets the mood.” **“Motorbike”** “The instrumental of ‘Motorbike’ was already something that my friend Nate Mercereau was working on, and it resonated with me, and everyone else during the session just kind of slept on it. I went out to Puerto Rico for my 30th birthday, and I was able to spend that time with some of my best friends, and there was just so much camaraderie and love in that moment. I wanted to take that feeling of just living in the moment and escaping with someone you love, and so that\'s kind of what \'Motorbike\' is.” **“Steam”** “This is almost reminiscent of a Talking Heads kind of thing. \'Steam\' is one of the first songs that we worked on for this album. It\'s like a vibe of being at the party and the party gets cut short, and you want to prolong the hang, and so the best thing to do is just bring it on back to the hotel for the after-party.” **“Why Don’t You Touch Me”** “Shout-out to the undefeated, badass songwriter Kaydence. This was a tune that we worked on remotely during the pandemic and just felt like it was a cool angle to write about love diminishing in a relationship from a man\'s perspective. And just the crippling feeling of being physically close to someone but emotionally distant. It\'s an angle that you don\'t really hear often from a man\'s perspective, and so that\'s kind of the inspiration behind that.” **“Magnolias”** “I immediately was pigeonholed after my first album, and the more I continue to create, I want to be honest about the music that inspires me. I love the juxtaposition of that beautiful acoustic guitar with the more trap, modern R&B thing. My mother always used to encourage me to write a song about this magnolia tree that was in her backyard. And so I kind of took that and shaped the lyrics around it. In my head, as far as the chorus, it felt like this is how Sade would sing it in terms of that melody. That probably doesn\'t make sense, but it made sense in my head at the time.” **“Gold-Diggers (Junior’s Fanfare)”** “Shout-out to Ricky Reed for curating some really awesome horn players. I mean, you got Josh Johnson and Keyon Harrold, and with the inception of this album, I wanted to do a progressive sound but also keep it rooted with some organic elements. And so I felt it was important to have jazz interwoven throughout all of this album. It\'s a really awesome interlude, and it\'s something that you don\'t really hear a lot within the R&B space.” **“Details”** “‘Details’ is about learning to appreciate the small things. It\'s the little details that paint the big picture.” **“Sho Nuff”** “For ‘Sho Nuff,’ I wanted to take a page out of Houston culture. I love when you look at artists like UGK—I love the fact that those guys incorporated soul music within their songs. And so that guitar part is definitely reminiscent of that. I wanted to have this very minimalistic, soulful guitar and juxtapose that with a sexy vibe.” **“Sweeter”** “Throughout my career, I\'ve always been scrutinized for not making political music, and I\'ve kind of sat with that for a long time. I just didn\'t want to half-ass it. So this is a moment where Terrace Martin jumped off a session with these crazy chords. And for me, the chords or whatever\'s happening in the music always dictates what the song is about. As soon as he started playing that, I knew immediately this was the moment for \'Sweeter.\' We wrote this prior to the situation of George Floyd, but it\'s reflective of the perpetual narrative of Black men dying at the hands of police. We had been sitting on this song for a while, and I was planning to release a tune with my friend Lucky Daye and we kind of put that on the back burner. But after George Floyd, I was totally compelled to just put this out in the world in hopes it would serve as the beacon of light and hope.” **“Don’t Worry”** “‘Don\'t Worry’ is kind of a stream of thoughts to myself, reminiscing about a past lover and who she\'s currently with. Shout-out to my friend Ink, who is the singer-songwriter from Atlanta, and she embodies this country-hood type of vibe. Her energy is so infectious. I mean, she literally walks into the studio every day with cowboy boots and a cowboy hat and then just like brings this really awesome energy to the music—that\'s kind of how \'Don\'t Worry\' came about.” **“Blue Mesas”** “This whole album encapsulates the multifaceted aspects of life. It\'s not serious all the time, but sometimes there are those moments that capture the struggle, and that\'s what it was for me. \'Blue Mesas\' just talks about the moment when I transitioned into fame, and it was honestly hard for me. When you take an insecure person and put them in the limelight, some people can tend to fold or thrive. I\'m grateful that I had great people around me to help me get through those struggles. \'Blue Mesas\' is just like that feeling of the solitude and weight that comes with having a little notoriety and still feeling isolated—even in the midst of people that love you.”
In 2016, Islands recorded two albums—*Taste* and *Should I Remain Here at Sea?*—during a three-week burst and released them simultaneously. But what seemed like a new creative zenith for this indie-pop institution proved to be more of a last gasp. Exhausted by the perpetual tour-record-tour promotional cycle, bandleader Nick Thorburn quietly put the project to rest and leaned into the podcast-soundtrack work that had been piling up ever since he scored the theme to the ubiquitous true-crime saga *Serial* in 2014. But a famously prolific songwriter like Thorburn could never stay idle for too long, and within a few years, the LA-via-Montreal-via-British Columbia artist had accumulated enough new material not just for Islands’ first album in five years, *Islomania*, but also for another companion release to follow in short order. As ever, Islands remains a vessel for Thorburn’s equally whimsical and existential musings. But this time around, he wanted to pull a “George Costanza and do the opposite of everything I did before,” he tells Apple Music. “I wanted this record to be really rhythmic. When I stopped doing Islands, I was just making rap beats at home and not thinking about singing or even melody. So, that’s where this album came from—just trying to get a cool rhythm going.” With a team of collaborators that includes Ratatat’s Mike Stroud and producers Chris Coady and Patrick Ford, Thorburn steers Islands away from the seafaring prog-pop epics of old and toward the neon glow of the discotheque. In the process, he delivers a much-needed euphoric antidote to the tumultuous tenor of life in the early 2020s. But fans of Islands’ more dramatic gestures need not fear—Thorburn promises the follow-up record will be a lot darker. “If *Islomania* is the Saturday night record, then the next one will be the Sunday morning comedown—the ketamine to this album’s cocaine.” Here, Thorburn gives us his track-by-track diagnosis of *Islomania*. **Islomania** “This is kind of our theme song. Music can be like a narcotic—it can really affect your mood. And having come back to making music again after all these years, I needed to remind myself that music can make you feel good, and that I can channel that exuberance and bliss, as opposed to the misery. I have plenty of years left for the misery part!” **(We Like To) Do It With the Lights On** “Before the band came back, I was like, ‘I’m done with Islands, I’m done with being in a rock band, I’m done with touring.… What am I going to do now?’ And I thought, ‘Well, maybe I should try to write pop songs for other people.’ I had this title—‘We Like to Do It With the Lights On’—which seemed like a funny, cheeky song title, so I just tried to write a song around this beat that I composed. And once I started writing it, I was like, ‘This is kind of good—I want to keep this for myself!’ So, this song was one of the early signs that I was coming back. It’s kind of a continuation of the opening theme and that idea of ‘instead of living in the darkness, let’s get close, let’s get vulnerable, let’s look at each other and see each other in these potentially awkward moments, whether it’s dancing or lovemaking.’ It’s this idea of not hiding anymore and being open.” **Carpenter** “My dad was a carpenter, so that’s possibly what I was drawing from here. A lot of times when I’m writing, I’ll just let my subconscious guide me and move me along. But carpenter is such a loaded occupation, and I guess there are some references to religion in there. I don’t know why—I guess I was feeling messianic that day. I was raised Catholic, so it’s definitely seeded in me, as much as I feel nothing from it now.\" **Closed Captioning** “I was watching *True Detective* and could not make out a single word of what Mahershala Ali and Stephen Dorff were saying. There’s this style of prestige acting which is just mumbling—it’s like the sign of good acting is that you barely speak and barely open your mouth. So, I had to turn on the closed captioning to watch it. I was like, ‘This is fucking insane—am I going deaf? I just can’t understand a single word that anyone is saying in their Southern accents.’ And so, I just thought that was a funny conceit for a song, and a good metaphor to use as a jumping-off point.” **Set the Fairlight** “If this record is like a Saturday night where everyone’s feeling good, this is the moment where the bloom starts to come off the rose a little bit. It’s like, ‘Oh, things aren’t as rosy as I thought at the outset.’ Similar to ‘Carpenter,’ there wasn’t a conscious decision to write about anything in particular—it was just this abstract emotional feeling. But clearly, listening back, it sounds like I’m working through that feeling of being in isolation and lockdown, which was the case at that time. It was a really strange and upsetting time, so I guess I was releasing the pressure valve on that.” **A Passionate Age** “Mike from Ratatat was in LA and came by Sunset Sound and played guitar on ‘Closed Captioning.’ It was kind of magical. I was telling him how expensive that studio was, so he invited me up to his studio in the Catskills. A few months after that, I went up there and we made ‘A Passionate Age,’ and it was way too much fun. Mike basically replayed everything from my demo with his magic touch. Again, it was based on that idea of ‘let’s make a record that just fills you with some joy.’ It’s fun to go into the light. Lyrically, the song has kind of a dark edge to it, but it’s a reminder to stop and experience the world instead of trying to talk over it.” **Natural Law Party** “I’m just trying to have a good time and make my version of a party record. But so much of that is also about the physical and the spiritual and the transcendental nature of being human, and this idea of getting outside of your body. With ‘Natural Law Party,’ I just liked the play on words with the ‘party’ idea and the political party that Doug Henning led in Canada. Sometimes I’ll just start with a nice title, and then I can let the writing come from there. I built the song on this interpolation of an Arthur Russell song, ‘Tell You (Today),’ from his side project Loose Joints—this early ’80s disco one-off that he had. So, I basically just wrote on top of that rhythm and let it guide the song.” **Never Let You Down** “I was working with Chris Coady, and so much of working with Chris is just talking about music history, like The Velvet Underground and Depeche Mode. Chris is so full of stories and knowledge, and he hipped me to this documentary I’d never seen by D.A. Pennebaker about Depeche Mode—it\'s called *101*. It’s a tour doc that follows the band and then intercuts with these fans who’d won some radio contest, and they make their way to the Rose Bowl in LA for this big stadium show. It was just really awesome to see Depeche Mode at their prime, and I guess that was twirling around in my head and I tried to channel that a little bit here.” **Marble** “This is definitely a wandering track, where the wheels come off of this exuberant record. The comedown is in effect. This Canadian author Thea Lim wrote a really wonderful novel called *An Ocean of Minutes*—it’s kind of a sci-fi novel about a couple who are separated, and she has to time-travel into the future to save him, but when she gets there, she can’t find him. So, it’s this yearning, wandering, really heartbreaking kind of story. It hit me in a specific way, and I think it was definitely the impetus for this song.” **Gore** “We’re entering the next chapter of Islands with these last two songs. Maybe I was in a pretty cynical, dark mood when I was writing this one. I never try to be overtly political when I’m writing—if you’re trying to have a statement song, it can get pretty cringe pretty quickly. But I was trying to convey a feeling of how I felt the last couple of years. I had been doing a little bit of canvassing for Bernie Sanders here in the US and saw this glimmer of hope and the possibility of a better world for people in this country. And it just turned out to be a dangling carrot, so there was some anger in seeing people with power kind of push everyone else around. I just wanted this wall of guitars and this plodding beat, like a lumbering giant stumbling to the finish line of this record and just barely making it across.”
