Few artists have done more for carrying the banner of guitar rock proudly into the 21st century than St. Vincent. A notorious shredder, she cut her teeth as a member of Sufjan Stevens’ touring band before releasing her debut album *Marry Me* in 2007. Since then, her reputation as a six-string samurai has been cemented in the wake of a run of critically acclaimed albums and collaborations (she co-wrote Taylor Swift’s No 1. single “Cruel Summer”). A shape-shifter of the highest order, St. Vincent, aka Annie Clark, has always put visual language on equal footing with her sonic output. Most recently, she released 2021’s *Daddy’s Home*, a conceptual period piece that pulled inspiration from ’70s soul and glam set in New York City. That project marked the end of an era visually—gone are the bleach-blonde wigs and oversized Times Square-ready trench coats—as well as creatively. With *All Born Screaming*, she bids adieu to frequent collaborator Jack Antonoff, who produced *Daddy’s Home*, and instead steps behind the boards for the first time to produce the project herself. “For me, this record was spending a lot of time alone in my studio, trying to find a new language for myself,” Clark tells Apple Music’s Hanuman Welch. “I co-produced all my other records, but this one was very much my fingerprints on every single thing. And a lot of the impetus of the record was like, ‘Okay: I\'m in the studio and everything has to start with chaos.’” For Clark, harnessing that chaos began by distilling the elemental components of what makes her sound like, well, her. Guitar players, in many respects, are some of the last musicians defined by the analog. Pedal boards, guitar strings, and pass-throughs are all manipulated to create a specific tone. It’s tactile, specialized, and at times, yes, chaotic. “What I mean by chaos,” Clark says, “is electricity actually moving through circuitry. Whether it\'s modular synths or drum machines, just playing with sound in a way that was harnessing chaos. I\'ve got six seconds of this three-hour jam, but that six seconds is lightning in a bottle and so exciting, and truly something that could only have happened once and only happened in a very tactile way. And then I wrote entire songs around that.” Those songs cover the spectrum from sludgy, teeth-vibrating offerings like “Flea” all the way to the lush album cut (and ode to late electronic producer SOPHIE) “Sweetest Fruit.” Clark relished in balancing these light and dark sounds and sentiments—and she didn’t do so alone. “I got to explore and play and paint,” she says. “And I also luckily had just great friends who came in to play on the record and brought their amazing energy to it.” *All Born Screaming* features appearances from Dave Grohl, Warpaint’s Stella Mozgawa, and Welsh artist Cate Le Bon, among others. Le Bon pulled double duty on the album by performing on the title track as well as offering clarity for some of the murkier production moments. “I was finding myself a little bit in the weeds, as everyone who self-produces does,” Clark says. “And so I just called Cate and was like, ‘I need you to just come hold my hand for a second.’ She came in and was a very stabilizing force, I think, at a time in the making of the record when I needed someone to sort of hold my hand and pat my head and give me a beer, like, ‘It\'s going to be okay.’” With *All Born Screaming*, Clark manages to capture the bloody nature of the human experience—including the uncertainty and every lightning-in-a-bottle moment—but still manages to make it hum along like a Saturday morning cartoon. “The album, to me, is a bit of a season in hell,” she says. “You are a little bit walking on your knees through some broken glass—but in a fun way, kids. We end with this sort of, ‘Yes, life is difficult, but it\'s so worth living and we\'ve got to live it. Can\'t go over it, can\'t go under it, might as well go through it.’ It\'s black and white and the colors of a fire. That, to me, is sonically what the record is.”
It was instant bromance when Xavier de Rosnay and Gaspard Augé met at a house party in early-2000s Paris: two young French graphic designers who loved good old American rock ’n’ roll. What they lacked in technical expertise, they made up for in taste—and not exactly the “good taste” of the French artists du jour. “When we started, French house music was really about precision, and we arrived and had no idea what we were doing,” de Rosnay tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. To the world of groovy French filter house, the duo known as Justice brought AC/DC energy, punishing distortion, and a giant neon cross that towered over Marshall speaker stacks at their famously wild live shows. Three studio albums, three live albums, and two Grammys later, the Justice boys have traded their skintight leather jackets for sharply tailored suits, but though the songs on their fourth album, *Hyperdrama*, are generally less punishing than early eardrum-destroyers like “Waters of Nazareth” or “Stress,” the duo have yet to lose their edge. Eight years after their last studio release, 2016’s unprecedentedly tender *Woman*, Augé and de Rosnay return to the tensions that animated their 2007 debut. “\[Contrast\] has been the motor of what we do since the beginning, because there is some kind of radicality and violence that we love in electronic music, and we are also blue-eyed soul and yacht rock fans.” On *Hyperdrama*, saccharine disco and blistering electronics don’t just coexist—they duke it out, often within the same track, as on “One Night/All Night,” whose stomping beat tugs against plaintive vocals from Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker. “Generator” nods to the brutalism of their early hits, the sax-forward “Moonlight Rendez-vous” evokes the camp of George Michael’s “Careless Whisper,” and “Dear Alan” (named for French electronic legend Alan Braxe) is the kind of blissful filter house they once stood out from like two leather-clad sore thumbs. The duo’s songwriting has aged like fine French wine, but as always, they lead with their gut. “Really often we find that decisions in production and engineering are on the side of style and sensation more than, ‘Does it sound perfect by the standards of hi-fi?’” Augé explains. “If the good thing is that thing that was ripped 10 times and is so downgraded that it has this sort of bitcrush and glow to it, then we should go for that.”
Few genres feel as inherently collaborative as jazz, and even fewer contemporary artists embody that spirit quite like Kamasi Washington. After bringing a whole new generation of listeners to jazz through his albums *The Epic* and *Heaven and Earth*, as well as his collaborations with Kendrick Lamar, the Los Angeles native and saxophonist amassed an impressively eclectic set of guests to join his forthcoming bandleader project *Fearless Movement*. Among the guests were Los Angeles rapper D Smoke and funk legend George Clinton, who joined him for “Get Lit.” “That was definitely a beautiful moment,” Washington tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “The sessions were magical; it was like being in a studio with just geniuses.” Originally written by Washington’s longtime drummer Ronald Bruner Jr. (also known as the brother of bass virtuoso Thundercat), “Get Lit” sat around for a bit before the divine inspiration struck to invite Clinton and D Smoke to build upon it. After Washington attended the former’s art exhibition and the latter’s Hollywood Bowl concert in Los Angeles, it couldn’t have been clearer to him who the band needed to make the song shine. Washington compares Clinton’s involvement to magic, marveling in the studio at just how the Parliament-Funkadelic icon operates. “It\'s like we\'re listening to it and he\'s living in it,” he says, conveying how natural it felt having him participate. “When he decides to add something to some music, it\'s like water.” As for D Smoke, Washington was so impressed by the two-time Grammy nominee’s sense of musicality. “He plays keys, he understands harmony, and all that other stuff. He just knew exactly what to do.” As implied by “Get Lit,” the contributors on *Fearless Movement* come from varied backgrounds and scenes, from the modern R&B styles of singer BJ the Chicago Kid to the shape-shifting sounds of Washington’s *To Pimp a Butterfly* peer Terrace Martin. Still, the name that will stand out for many listeners is André 3000, who locked in with the band on the improvisational piece “Dream State.” The Outkast rapper turned critically acclaimed flautist arrived with a veritable arsenal of flutes, inspiring all the players present. “André has one of the most powerful creative spirits that I\'ve ever experienced,” Washington says. “We just created that whole song in the moment together without knowing where we was going.” Allowing himself to give in to the uncertainty and promise of that particular moment succinctly encapsulates the wider ethos behind all of *Fearless Movement*. “A lot of times, I feel like you can get stuck holding on to what you have because you\'re unwilling to let it go,” he says. “This album is really speaking on that idea of just being comfortable in what you are and where you want to go.”
As important as it is to foreground the Tuareg/Nigerien heritage of Mdou Moctar’s scorching psychedelic rock, it’s just as important to note its connection to the American underground. After all, *Funeral for Justice* isn’t “folk music” in any touristic or anthropological sense, and it’s probably as (if not more) likely to appeal to fans of strictly American weirdos like Ty Segall or Thee Oh Sees as anything out of West Africa. Still, anyone unfamiliar with the stutter-step rhythm of Tuareg music should visit “Imajighen” and the lullaby-like hush of “Modern Slaves” immediately, and it pleases the heart to imagine a borderless future in which moody teenage guitarists might study stuff like “Sousoume Tamacheq” the way Moctar himself studied Eddie Van Halen. As with 2021’s breakthrough *Afrique Victime*, the intensity is astonishing, the sustain hypnotic, and the combination of the two an experience most listeners probably haven’t had before.
For their third album, Kentucky hardcore troupe Knocked Loose chose a title that resonated deeply with vocalist Bryan Garris. During an airplane takeoff that triggered Garris’ fear of flying, the woman seated next to him offered the comforting words, “You won’t go before you’re supposed to.” “The line struck him so strongly that it immediately occurred to him that it should be the title,” Knocked Loose guitarist Isaac Hale tells Apple Music. “It also became a lyric in the last song, ‘Sit & Mourn.’ Like the rest of our records, this is a collection of stuff from Bryan’s personal struggles dealing with anger and loss and depression and sadness. It’s a reminder to him—and all of us—that we’re still here. We made it through all the hardships that came with the past four years of writing this.” Musically speaking, Knocked Loose entered the writing sessions for *You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To* with a very different mindset than the one that drove their 2019 breakthrough *A Different Shade of Blue* and revered 2021 concept EP *A Tear in the Fabric of Life*. “There was just way more pressure, and we had way more experience,” Hale says. “Some people view the third album as a make-or-break record. We had pressure from the fans and the outside world, but more so pressure from ourselves. We thought, ‘How can we possibly outdo what we’ve done before?’ It was tough, but I think we were able to come up with a record where every song accomplishes something unique.” Below, he discusses each track. **“Thirst”** “This was written in the first session that we ever had for this record. It was written before *A Tear in the Fabric of Life* even came out. It came from a jam session we were having where we wanted to create a really difficult song on drums to challenge our drummer Pacsun. We wanted something super short, super intense, and we just made it as complex as we could. And to start the record, it’s something we’ve never done before—a super in-your-face jump scare.” **“Piece by Piece”** “This was our attempt at doing kind of a Hatebreed-esque banger. It has a hook to it, but the hook is one of the mosh parts in the song, akin to \[Hatebreed’s\] ‘Perseverance.’ One of the things we wanted to accomplish on this record was to create stuff that was hooky and catchy, but at the same time crazy heavy. In many ways, I think that it’s the most hardcore song on the record, and that’s what we love about it. It’s our version of a catchy hardcore track that can really connect with people.” **“Suffocate” (feat. Poppy)** “We wrote this song after we thought we had a finished record. Before we went to record, Poppy slid into Bryan’s DMs asking if we would be interested in collaborating on some music. Me and Bryan are huge Poppy fans, so of course we said yes automatically. That same day, Bryan called me like, ‘Hey, man—I’m coming over. We need to write another song.’ We wrote the track the next day, and it was one of the smoothest writing experiences on the record because we wrote it knowing Poppy was going to be a part of it. And because of that, we were able to do some sassy parts that maybe we wouldn’t put on a normal Knocked Loose song but that really work with her voice. I think it’s one of the most special songs we’ve ever written.” **“Don’t Reach for Me”** “This was our attempt at writing a song with a more rock- or pop-oriented structure. It’s different from stuff that we\'ve done before because it has a slightly melodic chorus with a hook. It has a soft bridge with a jam part and some cleaner guitar. And a lot of it is midtempo, besides the very beginning. It only gets fast very briefly. That’s very new for us. There’s like seven mosh parts, so we needed to balance those. It took a long time to figure out, but I think the final product really succeeds in that juxtaposition.” **“Moss Covers All”** “This was written in the second writing session that we did for this record, up in Michigan. We woke up one morning, started jamming, and we were just not coming up with a lot of stuff we liked. We were pretty much just throwing paint at the wall and getting aggravated. When we took a break, I had an idea and basically wrote this entire song in my head in about a minute. I voice memo’d it briefly on my phone and then immediately started putting it down without telling the guys. When they came back, I played it for them—and what I played is pretty much exactly what’s on the record. It’s short, sweet, and super heavy, with a breakdown and a spooky lead that goes directly into the next song.” **“Take Me Home”** “‘Moss Covers All’ and ‘Take Me Home’ are very much connected songs. ‘Moss Covers All’ was written first, but then we really felt the need to have a song on here that’s meant to scare you. We didn’t worry about a mosh part or any sort of heaviness. We just wanted a scary track that’s uncomfortable and throws the listener off guard. When we were thinking about what shape that could take, I immediately thought of that spooky lead from ‘Moss Covers All,’ which we ended up looping as the blueprint for this track.” **“Slaughterhouse 2” (feat. Chris Motionless)** “This song started as an inside joke because Motionless in White was kind enough to reach out to Bryan and have him collaborate on one of their songs, ’Slaughterhouse,’ a very heavy, politically charged track. We’re all huge Motionless in White fans, so of course he accepted. And then we were able to tour with them. As soon as Bryan did that track, we were joking that we should do a song called ‘Slaughterhouse 2.’ We were just kind of laughing about it for a while, but then we thought we were kind of shooting ourselves in the foot if we didn’t do it. Chris was down from the beginning, and his voice is amazing on this. It was a challenge to match the theme and vibe of the original song, but I think we were able to create something that’s not just a great sequel, but that really stands on its own as a highlight of the record.” **“The Calm That Keeps You Awake”** “The funny thing about this one is that the song totally revolves around the huge breakdown at the end. That part was written first, as part of another thing that was written before *A Tear in the Fabric* had even come out. So, like four years ago, we needed to write new parts because the rest of the song we’d written wasn’t up to par, but that breakdown was super necessary. In doing so, we created this really cool, Meshuggah-esque, kind of Sepultura-auxiliary-percussion vibe that’s one of the most unique parts of the record.” **“Blinding Faith”** “We definitely have some jabs at religious hypocrisy throughout the Knocked Loose discography, and this is just kind of an update on that situation. We hadn\'t done one in a while, and it was something that was feeling close to home for Bryan at the time. To me, this sounds like a mix of some of our greatest riffs that we’d written over the course of a year—it’s kind of a riff-salad song. In some ways, it’s one of the heaviest and scariest songs on the record, so we put it out as a single to say, ‘If you thought we were going to get any softer, absolutely not. And here’s proof.’” **“Sit & Mourn”** “This one revolves around the melodic lead and the kind of ambient post-rock breakdown at the end. We wrote that in the first writing session in Joshua Tree, and it took us a while to come up with more parts that we felt were that good. But the song is very, very anthemic. It sounds very dark and melancholic, but at the same time, the lyrics are positive in a way. Thematically, it’s kind of a title track in the way that the lyrics relate to the name of the record. I know it was a very cathartic song for Bryan. In many ways, it’s the saddest song on the record, but in other ways it’s the most positive. And it’s mentally exhausting from start to finish. It ends with a sound clip that I won’t disclose, but it’ll take you by surprise.”
Where the ’60s-ish folk singer Jessica Pratt’s first few albums had the insular feel of music transmitted from deep within someone’s psyche, *Here in the Pitch* is open and ready—cautiously, gently—to be heard. The sounds aren’t any bigger, nor are they jockeying any harder for your attention. (There is no jockeying here, this is a jockey-free space.) But they do take up a little more room, or at least seem more comfortable in their quiet grandeur—whether it’s the lonesome western-movie percussion of “Life Is” or the way the featherlight *sha-la-la*s of “Better Hate” drift like a dazzled girl out for a walk among the bright city lights. This isn’t private-press psychedelia anymore, it’s *Pet Sounds* by The Beach Boys and the rainy-day ballads of Burt Bacharach—music whose restraint and sophistication concealed a sense of yearning rock ’n’ roll couldn’t quite express (“World on a String”). And should you worry that her head is in the clouds, she levels nine blows in a tidy, professional 27 minutes. They don’t make them like they used to—except that she does.
When A. G. Cook announced the closing of his beloved PC Music label in 2023—a project synonymous with the giddy, synthetic sound sometimes known as hyperpop—it was the end of one chapter and the beginning of another. Like his 2020 debut *7G*, 2024’s *Britpop* has the rangy feel of an artist good at writing songs (the warped doo-wop of “Greatly”; the gorgeous, melancholic “Serenade”) but even better at expressing atmospheres and ideas, whether it’s contrasting the gabber thump of “Out of Time” with sparkling ambience or how “Luddite Factory Operator” turns its chilly glitches into something you could take home to mom and dad. His central argument—that pop can be weird and still be pop—has been proven by clients and collaborators from Charli XCX to Beyoncé, but if you want to drink from the source, it’s here.
Cage the Elephant’s *Neon Pill* arrives five years after their 2019 Grammy-winning global breakthrough *Social Cues*. Brothers and bandleaders Matt and Brad Shultz lost their father in the interim, the group mourned the death of friends, and Matt spent time in the hospital with severe depression. This tragedy, fight, spirit, and resolve is messily and triumphantly wrapped into *Neon Pill*, an album that finds the band forging their own sound devoid of outside influence, channeling their rollicking live show into a meditation on life, death, and music’s healing power. Take the psych-folk-leaning title track, which tells the story of Matt’s battle with mental illness, looking for answers but only finding more questions. As the band so often does, they mask dark and searching lyrics with melodic candy, making these philosophical queries go down more easily. On the track, Matt sings: “It\'s a hit and run, oh no/Double-crossed by a neon pill/Like a loaded gun, my love/I lost control of the wheel/Double-crossed by a neon pill.” Just like the story of the band over the past five years, the track includes a phoenix-like resurgence: “Knocked down, not out, let\'s roll.”
Charley Crockett is a rare talent. His voice is one of country music’s finest, a rich baritone with a natural ache and emotion-wringing agility. That he pairs such a voice with an equally powerful flair for storytelling lands him among the ranks of the genre’s new saviors, like Tyler Childers or Sturgill Simpson, but with a style and sound all his own. That sound owes a lot to Crockett’s home state of Texas, which often serves as a character in his narrative-driven songs. On *$10 Cowboy*, Crockett found inspiration on the road, writing much of the album while touring in support of its predecessor, 2022’s concept record *The Man From Waco*. That journeyman’s perspective brings us stories of hitting rock bottom (“Gettin’ Tired Again”), chasing Lady Luck (“Ain’t Done Losing Yet”), and hanging on to love while “empire…rule\[s\] the world” (“Diamond in the Rough”). A can’t-miss tune on the record is “America,” a plainspoken, heart-wrenching lament of a fearsome, unforgiving country. Crockett cut *$10 Cowboy* live to tape at Austin’s Arlyn Studios with his longtime band and a string of ringers, with Billy Horton co-producing.
Charlotte Day Wilson’s second album opens with “My Way”—which is not a cover of the Sinatra standard, but it’s a no less emphatic statement of purpose for the Toronto singer. Beginning as a Tropicália-tinged folk reverie before blossoming into a soulful, piano-pounding slow jam, the song is a testament to Wilson’s refusal to be boxed in by the parameters of genre, while still epitomizing the untouchably cool attitude and straight-talkin’ candor we demand from our R&B queens. Where past signatures like “Work” and “Doubt” were carefully plotted exercises in slow-building tension and rapturous release, with *Cyan Blue*, Wilson sounds more comfortable with allowing her songs to unspool in unpredictable ways. “Forever”—a collaboration with Swedish sensation Snoh Aalegra—rolls in with a heavenly chorus hook that you expect to tee up a big beat, but Wilson is happy to just let the song float away on a cloud bed of drifting piano chords. And while “Canopy” fills out its minimalist guitar-plucked/finger-snapped production with sassy kiss-off quips like some bygone Y2K-era *TRL* smash, it’s followed by a wistful, piano-led (actual) cover of “Over the Rainbow” embedded with field recordings of children playing in the background, as if Wilson was lost in her own blissful midsummer daydream. But with the closing “Walk With Me,” Wilson’s dual affinities for in-your-face lyrics and in-your-head atmospheres coalesce to glorious effect. “Just walk with me,” she pleads in a song that documents a difficult conversation between two lovers drifting apart, but saunters about like a late-afternoon stroll, threading the needle between ’70s psychedelic soul, ’90s R&B, and 21st-century bedroom-indie aesthetics—a perfect portrait of Wilson doing it her way.
Hana Vu’s 2024 album *Romanticism* finds the singer stuck between two worlds, eager to embrace maturity and adulthood while wishing the relative simplicity of childhood was still available to her. It‘s a thread that weaves throughout her guitar-driven fourth album, which is built around infectious melodies, incisive lyrics, and moments of solace and triumph that comfortably intermingle. On the project’s first single “Care,” Vu’s opening refrain is an almost audible sigh. She sings: “I\'m waking up to the sun and I find it all too much/Oh, here we go, another day, another name I can\'t bring up.” On “22,” acoustic guitars build against Vu’s powerful voice as she yearns for simpler times. The nostalgia is nearly palpable, but it’s never saccharine. She croons: “At the bar and they\'re playing our song/It sounds like summer and white guitars.” The chorus is deceptively emblematic of the entire album, stuck between the joy of growing and the lingering impostor syndrome that comes with it. “I\'m just getting old/I\'m just 22,” she adds.
“I have to write about how I feel,” Rachel Chinouriri tells Apple Music. “If I don’t feel it or can’t relate to it, I can’t write about it.” Since breaking out in 2022 with viral track “So My Darling,” the South London singer-songwriter has done just that, penning bittersweet indie bops and devastating ballads that have been fueled, most often, by stories of heartache. You’ll find plenty of that on this debut album, but Chinouriri also goes deeper, with songs about self-contempt, loss, grief, and feeling like you don’t belong right when you’re supposed to be killing it (see “The Hills,” her cathartic exhale about a five-week songwriting trip to LA, which left her feeling lonely, under pressure, and creatively stumped). For Chinouriri, *What a Devastating Turn of Events* was shaped by “the journey of being in your early twenties. You finally leave home and then you are kind of becoming an adult, but you don’t really feel like an adult,” she says. “You’re still looking at the grown-ups to give you advice, but you are the grown-up. It is a weird journey of trying to discover yourself. Being able to feel and then turn it into song—it’s a privilege to have that as a gift.” But *What a Devastating Turn of Events* also feels rooted in much more than just a bumpy life transition, and Chinouriri’s lyricism is laced with far more wisdom than most people can apply to those chaotic early-twenties years. Either way, the singer-songwriter wanted her debut to capture what it’s like to be shattered by a sudden event. And so, the record opens with sharp-witted, mostly upbeat indie-pop moments (plus some “wonky” bits, as Chinouriri puts it), before the crushing title track—written after the singer-songwriter’s cousin tragically took her own life—shifts this album, and its creator, on its axis. What follows are some of Chinouriri’s most raw, arresting songs yet. “When death happens, it does turn your entire world upside down,” she says. “It might not even be death, it might just be something that happens. And sometimes you don’t realize how much you have until something major happens. Then you realize, ‘Damn, I’ve wasted so much time bothering about stuff that doesn’t matter.’ Turning points can either make or break people.” This album ends on Chinouriri’s own turning point: “Pocket,” a sweet song about new, better love that Chinouriri promised she’d give to the person who finally allowed her to feel it, followed by her acoustic version of “So My Darling,” the song that started this wild ride in the first place. Here, Chinouriri takes us through her debut, track by track. **“Garden of Eden”** “I wrote this after my big LA trip feeling like, ‘This \[the UK\] is home for me.’ I’m just adamant I want a house in the countryside. Where I grew up in Croydon isn’t that, but it was quiet, and I would always hear birds and see fields and grass. We were in a room \[in a studio in the UK countryside, where Chinouriri went after LA\] and would always have the recording on, and the birds were that loud. I was like, ‘Let’s just maybe make it a soundscape where you’re just falling into this situation.’ It’s setting the scene.” **“The Hills”** “We’ve left the Garden of Eden now and I’m like, ‘Right, I don’t belong here.’ The music video shows \[me\], a Black woman, walking across some flags, and people have said, ‘Oh, she’s talking about how she doesn’t belong in the UK,’ but I’m actually talking about how much I *do* belong. It’s almost seeing those street parties where they’ve got all the flags and being like, ‘I’m as English as you guys, so I belong here and I’ll be staying here whether you like it or not.’ The song is definitely a headbanging, screaming moment—it has a bit of an American-boy-band-in-a-basement, kids-in-a-garage vibe. It felt like a relief to have something after a trip where we didn’t have much, especially after five weeks.” **“Never Need Me”** “After I wrote this, I didn’t even send it to the label. A few days later, I was at a festival and my manager came to me and said, ‘Why didn’t you send us this song? Oli \[Bayston, one of the song’s co-writers\] sent it to us.’ I said, ‘I don’t like it, I think it’s a terrible song.’ I think it was because of its meaning. And in the session, I was just so angry and annoyed and in such an agitated mood. I felt uninspired. But later, I said, ‘If I can do it however I want, I’ll finish the song.’ So I went to \[songwriter\] Glen Roberts and changed all the production—I was thinking Kings of Leon and heavy guitars.” **“My Everything”** “This song is about giving your all to everyone. My project before this album, *Four° in Winter*, was very experimental and wonky. I knew I was hitting some pop territories with this album, but I think there are still wonky elements to me. I really love Ladysmith Black Mambazo and how they use their voice almost as the instruments. I just liked being in the studio and coming up with weird sounds with my voice. I don’t even want to know how many vocal tracks are on that—but it was a lot! I don’t know if people will like it, but I wanted to show all the different parts of who I am.” **“All I Ever Asked”** “Again, I didn’t want it on the album. But now I realize this song is important and a way people discovered me \[it was a single in 2022\]. I think I’m actually quite a dark person because I’m a Scorpio. Whether you believe in star signs or not, I’ve always gravitated towards dark lyrics to a point where I don’t think sad lyrics really hit me anymore. But there’s also a degree of making light of situations. Because as much as \[what inspired this song\] is sad, it’s also like, ‘You’ll live. He was an asshole. There are plenty more people you can meet in this world.’ There’s light that can come to those situations.” **“It Is What It Is”** “When I was doing \[the speak-singing here\], I was like, ‘Maybe I’m going to sound a bit like a loser.’ I’m not really rapping, I’m talking, and then obviously I have this English accent. I don’t want to say I have a boring voice, but when I’m speaking, I think I sound quite monotone. But what I’m saying is, ‘You are a fucking arsehole.’ This one’s for my girls and boys who have definitely felt this multiple times. Mae Muller is on this track. She is that person who will be like, ‘Absolutely not.’ I’ll go out and look at someone slightly questionable and be like, ‘I fancy him.’ She’ll go to the bathroom and be like, ‘Rachel, love you so much. No, no, you’re not doing that.’ And I’ll be like, ‘OK.’” **“Dumb Bitch Juice”** “This was very much Amy Winehouse-inspired—I know it’s not Amy Winehouse at all, but she had this ability to sing in quite a free and melodic way, but you can hear every single thing she says. When I wrote this, I was like, ‘I’m here to insult today.’ Not just insulting someone else—insulting myself too. Because sometimes men are terrible, but there’s also a degree of ‘You have allowed someone to treat you like that.’ Of course I’ve been heartbroken by an absolute idiot because I’m drinking dumb bitch juice!” **“What a Devastating Turn of Events”** “All my siblings were born in Africa, I’m the only one who was born in the UK. There’s a set of relatives who know I exist, but I’ve not met most of them—I have no clue who they are, but my siblings grew up with them. And when she \[Chinouriri’s cousin, the subject of this song\] died, my siblings were devastated. I was sad about someone I didn’t know. I constantly thought about it and wondered how it had happened. I had gone through something similar; being able to write about it has been kind of helpful for me to understand my own situation and stuff that I’ve gone through. Sonically, I never thought we needed a big chorus. It’s a different verse and different chorus every single time. Then there’s just this kind of chanting thing—I think that’s maybe where my African influence is coming, the marching and the pace of the drum and everyone singing as a group. We all sat in the studio with a mic and just screamed, ‘What a devastating turn of events.’ I think there’s a degree of sorrow that comes along, kind of trudging through this very sad story. This is a very important one.” **“My Blood”** “I wanted a song where there’s not necessarily continuation, but which speaks about things which people might do as a cry for help. You should always watch when things like that happen to people. I went through a phase where I was pulling out my own hair—it was a stress thing. It started making me think about when I was younger and there was self-harm things. It was visualizing looking in a mirror and being like, ‘Why am I doing this to myself?’ But it’s also these invisible wounds. The strings here add so much to the song—the cinematic-ness of it is definitely influenced by Daughter. I wanted to get people to feel. It sounds very sad from top to bottom, but I hope people listen to it and think, ‘Wow.’” **“Robbed”** “There was a baby in our family who passed away, and I felt like I was robbed of them. I was a bit more poetic in this song, but it’s almost considering people I’d not met that had such a massive effect on me. You can be robbed of time sometimes, with people or family. When stuff like that happens, the people around you are always like, ‘It’ll be OK. I’m sorry that happened.’ And actually, sometimes it’s OK to just be like, ‘That was fucking shit. That was horrible and this is unfair.’ That was the kind of emotion I wanted to translate in these songs.” **“Cold Call”** “I was really inspired by Coldplay’s ‘Politik.’ It’s just mind-blowing. I’m quite obsessed with Coldplay and I asked my team to show them the song. I know that they liked it—it meant a lot. They are my inspiration for a lot of things. I think it feels like a universal song. It’s kind of like, ‘I’ve had enough of this now, I’m not doing that anymore.’” **“I Hate Myself”** “I like how this ends with me reflecting on the positive. I’ve felt some very negative things, which I’ve been lucky enough to stop in their tracks. I mean, ‘a victim of your mind’ is one of the lyrics here. I wrote this with \[producer and songwriter\] Jonah Summerfield and he was like, ‘Oh, this is pretty deep.’ But sometimes when you put your thoughts on paper, you can read it back and think, ‘That was ridiculous.’ I looked back at this and thought, ‘That was a really stupid thing for me to even put myself through.’ You have to learn to love yourself—and hope that as a society we can really unlearn the treatment of people for being different sizes. Being able to write music has been a combination of me unlearning and learning so much about myself. And I think I can see how my self-esteem really skyrocketed the song in many ways.” **“Pocket”** “When I wrote this, I’d gone through all my phases of being like, ‘Men are trash, men are toxic.’ Then I was kind of like, ‘Well that’s just BS. I was just choosing terrible men. And there are actually nice ones if you allow yourself to be loved. So I’m going to write a song about how I would like to be loved.’ I thought, ‘When I find someone, I’m going to give them this song.’ And when I started dating my boyfriend, I said, ‘There’s this song I have.’” **“So My Darling (Acoustic)”** “The song is like six years old, so it’s a nostalgic way to end the album. You’ve gone through this journey of \[mostly\] new songs, and then you get thrown back into one that everyone knows. I wanted the whole album to sound and feel nostalgic for being a Black Brit, so to end on something nostalgic for the fans was really important. I think the whole album is very nostalgic of maybe my home life, but for the fans, it’s nostalgic for them.”
Orville Peck brings together a handful of his most talented friends on this first installment of *Stampede*, a duets collection from the enigmatic masked country singer-songwriter. The record opens with a Willie Nelson-assisted cover of Ned Sublette’s clever, queer 1981 song “Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other,” which Nelson famously recorded in 2006. Elton John joins Peck for a spirited take on the former’s 1973 hit “Saturday Night’s Alright (For Fighting),” with Peck’s Roy Orbison-esque croon a dramatic counterpoint to John’s masterful belt. Peck and Allison Russell make formidable partners on “Chemical Sunset,” with a loose, jazzy arrangement that’s one of the project’s better grooves. Midland, Noah Cyrus, Bu Cuaron, and Nathaniel Rateliff round out the guest list on the star-studded project.
Twenty-five years or so after they picked up their banjos and decided to turn off their amps (at least for a little while), The Avett Brothers make the album you kinda always figured they would. Having graduated from the lowercase charm of their early music but likewise from the more stadium-sized sentiments of albums like 2019’s *Closer Than Together*, they ruminate on the simple pleasures that (of course) turn out to be not so simple after all (“Cheap Coffee”). They also indulge in folksy wisdom while taking enough shots at themselves to make that wisdom feel real (“Country Kid”). And no matter how earnest they get, they always remember to exercise the good, old-fashioned American humility that got them here in the first place (“2020 Regret”).
Jordan Rakei’s dreamily delicate voice is as poised as ever on his fifth album, even on tracks where more than 40 people might be contributing. Those sheer numbers are thanks to robust string and horn sections and a smaller choir, lending scope to *The Loop*’s self-produced majesty. Yet for all of the bravura flourishes here, Rakei sounds every bit as intimate as he did when he was cutting tracks in his humble bedroom. “Hopes and Dreams” especially hinges on his confiding vocals, unfolding against a sparse backdrop featuring no drums. It’s one of several songs inspired by Rakei settling into fatherhood, and even the album title comes from the idea that his son may someday have children of his own. Elsewhere, the Brisbane-raised, London-based multi-instrumentalist takes notes from classic soul of several eras, from Marvin Gaye to D’Angelo and beyond. The arrangements are impeccable throughout, whether it’s the warmly dusty breakbeats on opener “Flowers” or the rustling loops and handclaps on “Cages.” There’s a live-in-the-room quality to it all, even when a track like “Everything Everything” bolsters Rakei’s heavenly vocal flutter and a cool rhythmic snap with lively tides of celestial layering. As he meditates on the subtle complexities of parenthood and friendship alike, the instrumentation remains transfixing right alongside his words of wisdom.
