“I know that my world is grown old,” Robert Smith says in “And Nothing Is Forever,” one of the many standout tracks on The Cure’s 14th studio album and first in 16 years. *Songs of a Lost World* deals almost exclusively in death, dying, and the relentless march of time; the songs move slowly, and many go on for minutes before Smith opens his mouth. There’s no pop hits, no hooks, and—let’s face it—no fun. It’s also some of the band’s most engrossing work, a statement that, like most great Cure songs, can’t be taken lightly. The glacially paced opener and lead single, “Alone,” is majestic and mournful, with string swells and apocalyptic lyrics about birds falling out of the sky. But mostly it’s about dying alone, the shattered pieces of a regret-filled life, and the forgone conclusion that is our mutual demise: “This is the end of every song that we sing.” On “A Fragile Thing,” a plinking piano gives way to a thudding bassline as Smith sings of heartbreak, distance, and fait accompli. It might be the closest the album comes to vintage ’80s Cure, but now the 65-year-old Smith’s customarily downbeat lyrics come with the weight of lived wisdom and cruel inevitability. “Warsong” twists the screws with a churning, droning meditation on domestic battles and bitter regret; at a bit over four minutes, it’s also the shortest song on the album. “Drone:Nodrone” is the catchiest and most upbeat of the bunch—musically speaking, anyway. Smith’s lyrics are no picnic, of course. They’re not a completely hopeless death spiral, but they certainly acknowledge a tumultuous relationship: “The answers that I have are not the answers that you want” and “I can’t anymore/If I ever really could.” The track also features squalling guitar leads from former Tin Machine/David Bowie sideman Reeves Gabrels, who joined The Cure in 2012 but makes his first studio appearance with the band here. “I Can Never Say Goodbye” laments the death of Smith’s brother Richard with the refrain “Something wicked this way comes,” a phrase popularized by the title of Ray Bradbury’s influential 1962 novel. (The Cure debuted the song in concert in 2022 in Poland, where Richard Smith apparently lived for many years.) Like much of *Lost World*, it’s a tearjerker. With all this loss and mortality, *Songs of a Lost World* recalls Bowie’s 2016 swan song, *Blackstar*. Finishing an album about death with a sprawling, gorgeous track called “Endsong” isn’t necessarily ominous, but who knows? For what it’s worth, Smith is already promising a follow-up to *Songs of a Lost World*. Hopefully, it won’t take 16 years.
“I wanted the album to feel really fun,” Amyl and The Sniffers vocalist Amy Taylor tells Apple Music of *Cartoon Darkness*, the Australian quartet’s third full-length. That goal does, however, come with a caveat: “I wanted it to feel fun without putting up the blinkers and being like, everything’s sweet, all good. Things are really weird and things are pretty bad and there’s a lot of things to be stressed about, but there’s the balance of it. Not to encourage people to ignore the bad, but to try and find more of a balance.” So while *Cartoon Darkness* finds Taylor confronting issues such as body positivity, the ills of social media, the climate crisis, and capitalism’s impact on society and people’s wellbeing, she does so with an unrelenting lust for life and an indefatigable spirit that, on songs such as “Jerkin’” and “Motorbike Song,” adheres to the adage that life is for the living. Recorded with Nick Launay (Midnight Oil, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds) at Dave Grohl’s Studio 606, which boasts the same mixing desk on which Nirvana recorded *Nevermind* and Fleetwood Mac did *Rumours* (“I really didn’t want to spill anything on it,” laughs Taylor), the band approached *Cartoon Darkness* with a specific sonic goal in mind. “Bryce \[Wilson, drums\] and Declan \[Martens, guitar\] were really keen to try and explore different sounds and make it feel a bit more like a studio album,” says Taylor. Adds Martens: “In the past we’ve tried to see how everything would relate to when we perform it live. And even though a lot of these songs will be included in the set, I think we just wanted to make sure the focus was on making the best listening experience at home rather than making the best songs to be taken live.” A typically fiery slice of raw punk rock, albeit one that takes a breather on the gentler “Big Dreams” and “Bailing on Me,” the end result is what Taylor calls “the first album we feel really proud of from the get go.” Here, Taylor and Martens walk Apple Music through *Cartoon Darkness*, track by track. **“Jerkin’”** Amy Taylor: “It’s a tongue-in-cheek poke at keyboard warriors, at the haters in general. It’s just a fuck you to anyone who’s down to accept it.” Declan Martens: “This was conceived earlier than the intense writing period. We came up with it in the early half of 2023. It has a good intensity. Despite this being our attempt at a studio album it does replicate what we do live, which is straightaway energy.” AT: “I really wanted to write a song that big-upped yourself while bringing down the haters. I wanted it to be like, ‘I’m sick, you’re shit.’” **“Chewing Gum”** AT: “So much of life is just a carrot dangled in front of your head, like you’re just around the corner from being able to take a break, or the goodness is always just around the corner. And it’s so much hard work. Under capitalism you’re just constantly working for goals you can never seem to hit. I feel that robs people of themselves and robs people of happiness and joy. Something else that robs people of those things is criticism and judgment. I think with social media, a lot of people are constantly bombarded with how they should be and what they could do and what they might be and how bad they are. I feel that robs people of the joy of making mistakes, and making mistakes is so important for growing up. I want to make the wrong decision sometimes, and I want to have fun and I want to feel love even if that’s a wrong decision, even if that’s a dumb decision, because what else is the point?” **“Tiny Bikini”** AT: “I always try and consciously surround myself with women, but sometimes it doesn’t work out. Even in the studio I was the only lady of maybe eight dudes in the room. So I was just channeling that energy going, ‘Yeah it’s technically my space, but I’m the only one here in a bikini.’ I think a lot of my experience in life is being the only lady, and I feel like, for me, I love expressing myself in slutty ways. The world is a boring place, and to dress up or to be scantily clad or just be interesting is something I value, so that song is going, ‘That’s what I like.’” **“Big Dreams”** DM: “I write a whole scope of heavy and soft songs, and finding the softer songs’ place in Amyl and The Sniffers has always been a challenge; I’ve had a fear of doing it. So I showed it to Amy and she really enjoyed it and encouraged it. I think a lot of the misconception is that it’s experimenting, but I feel like these sorts of songs have always been in us. I prefer to refer to it as exploring rather than experimenting.” AT: “A lot of people in my life have really big dreams and they are really talented, and they are trying to make something of themselves. The world is a harsh place, and even if they’re super talented, it’s really difficult because of the cost of living and the oversaturation of everything. And it’s like we’re all getting older and a lot of people’s dreams may not happen, but that internal energy, it’s still swirling inside you.” **“It’s Mine”** DM: “The guitar \[has\] a really odd tuning that I’d never used before. Me and Nick \[Launay\] had worked to get this really direct, harsh, aggressive guitar sound, and that’s what makes it unique—it makes it sound like you’ve just stuck your head in a bucket of bees swarming.” AT: “Lyrically, it’s a subconscious dump trying to explore lots of different themes—the pressures of bodies to be perfect, and it’s saying it might not be perfect but it’s mine. And dipping into the confusion of consumerism and getting swept up and wanting to buy stuff. It’s a big mix of that.” **“Motorbike Song”** AT: “It’s a yearning for freedom. Life can be so stuffy, especially with screens and technology, so much of it is sitting still and looking at a screen for hours. I just saw a motorbike driving along and I wanted to embody the motorbike. I don’t want to ride it, I want to be the motorbike.” DM: “When we were working it out it felt like a So-Cal, ’80s punk song and it developed into more of a Motörhead-type thing. It’s fun, it’s got my most guitar solos on one song ever.” **“Doing in Me Head”** DM: “I was trying to write a disco song. I wanted it to be like The Gap Band. But I guess when you bring it to some Australian punks it comes out as ‘Doing in Me Head.’” AT: “This song kind of embodies the whole of *Cartoon Darkness*. Like it touches on the fact we all use our phones and social media, and they favor outrage, and subconsciously the system floods us with negative emotions and then it profits off that. It kind of dictates our life, not the other way around. You have to favor the algorithm, it won’t favor you. And talking about how spoon-fed our generation especially is and the lack of critical thinking.” **“Pigs”** AT: “Sometimes people are like, I know more so, therefore, I’m better than you and you’re an idiot. I don’t agree with that, because I’ve been on both sides of knowing stuff and not knowing stuff, and being an idiot and being a legend. So this song is saying, ‘We’re all pigs, you’re not better than me, we’re all just pigs in the mud.’” DM: “I’m really fond of the chorus. It’s a recycled riff that I wrote before our self-titled album that we jammed on but never became a song. Now, with my new knowledge in music, five or six years on, I found a way to make it interesting. I remember seeing that excitement in Amy’s face when I first started playing it differently.” **“Bailing on Me”** AT: “I was really struggling to write lyrics to it and figure out what to say and Declan was like, ‘I think it’s a sexy song, try and make it horny.’ I was trying to do that but was like, ‘I really don’t get that vibe from this song.’ So I ended up making it a heartbreak song.” DM: “I think it’s interesting that my intention was horny and Amy interprets heartbreak. I think that’s a funny way of looking at it.” **“U Should Not Be Doing That”** AT: “So much of my experience in the music world has been people trying to hold me back with their negativity and their limitations. Because they’ve made limitations for themselves that I don’t subscribe to. They might be saying you shouldn’t be doing that and I can’t believe you’re doing that, but I am doing it, and you’re not. I’m over here experiencing this with the choices that I’ve made, and you’re down in Melbourne having a bitch while you’re doing lines at 4am with other 50-year-olds, bitching about a 24-year-old. There are Facebook groups with old rockers being like, ‘I don’t like that band, she’s crap.’ Kiss my arse!” **“Do It Do It”** AT: “For some reason I always imagine some random athlete trying to listen to this to gee up, so that’s what it’s about. Someone being like, ‘Yeah I’ll fuckin’ get up and run.’” DM: “This was the last riff I came up with before moving to the US. The working title for it was ‘Pornhub Awards’ because, the night before, I found a free ticket to the Pornhub Awards. I didn’t win anything.” **“Going Somewhere”** AT: “Anyone can find dirt, but it takes hard work to find gold. It’s the easiest thing in the world to criticize. People are just lazy, and they’re not trying hard enough to find the good in stuff. There’s no perfect world and there’s not going to be utopia, because utopia would be dystopia anyway. It’s just saying I’m going to go somewhere, hopefully you can come there too.” **“Me and The Girls”** DM: “Amy sent me this hip-hop song that had like an Eddie Van Halen sort of guitar sample in it, and I was like, ‘I’ve got a riff that’s super repetitive, almost like a sample, a loop, and I wrote it when I was 21. It’s called ‘Fry Pan Fingers,’ because I used to stick my fingers on the frying pan to callous them before gigs when I was young.’ So I was like, ‘All right, Amy, here’s this repetitive \[riff\], like a hip-hop loop that I’ve got.’” AT: “I needed a lyric for the chorus, so I was like, ‘Declan, now’s your chance, do you want to do a duet?’ I said, ‘Me and the girls are drunk at the airport,’ and he’s like, ‘I can’t believe that it’s an open bar,’ and I loved it, but everyone else was like, this is a bit weird. We’d been listening to a lot of Beastie Boys so we were like, let’s add in the vocoder \[on his voice\] and make it sound like that.”
“How long is too long to be stuck in a memory?” That eternally unquantifiable question defines Sophie Allison’s fourth album as Soccer Mommy, a record marked by loss and grief. *Evergreen* marks a perspective shift from Allison’s 2022 album *Sometimes, Forever*. “When I started writing songs for this album, I was very clearly in a completely different headspace and wanted to write something that felt more intimate and up front, and not kind of shrouded by having all this fun making it,” Allison tells Apple Music. “The feelings that I was expressing on this album were a lot about loss and grief, because that’s what I was going through at the time—a lot of changes. It was scary and different, and everything felt kind of sudden. So I was just grappling with all of that.” The result is a richly melodic work that, with the production touch of Ben H. Allen (Animal Collective, Belle and Sebastian), feels cavernous in its scope while retaining intimacy. There are moments when Allison cranks up the volume and rips into the riffage—witness the chunky chords on “Driver,” or the shape-shifting guitar lines that stretch across “Salt in Wound”—but elsewhere Allison achieves a magic trick of making nuanced, close-to-the-vest songwriting sound one million miles wide. The closing title track is draped in stretches of strings not unlike generational counterpart beabadoobee’s work, while on “M” she laments, “I hear your voice in all my favorite songs.” It’s a raw admission on an album full of them.
Druids. Headless chickens. Drinking. These are just some of the topics fearless Pixies leader Black Francis sings about on the band’s ninth album (and fifth since re-forming sans Kim Deal). But the overarching theme, if there is one, is right there in the title: zombies. Both the *Night of the Living Dead* variety (“Jane \[The Night the Zombies Came\]”) and the *Dawn of the Dead* shopping mall variety (“You’re So Impatient”) make an appearance, as do zombie movies themselves (“Chicken”). Not that it’s a concept album or anything—the driving punk of “Oyster Beds” references Black Francis’ painting hobby, while “Johnny Good Man,” “Ernest Evans,” and “Kings of the Prairie” offer snapshots of life on the road. Elsewhere, guitarist Joey Santiago takes a lyrical bow with “Hypnotised,” a clever pop tune written in a Middle Ages poetic form called the sestina, and new bassist Emma Richardson (ex-Band of Skulls) lends her instrumental talents and understated backing vocals to tracks like “Motoroller,” which bounces like a *Doolittle*-era classic.
Perfume connoisseurs will recognize the title of the shadowy singer-songwriter’s third album: the mythic word for the earthy scent that accompanies the first rain after a long dry spell. For 070 Shake, the smell reminds her of her childhood in New Jersey; her mother would point it out after a heavy rain. After breaking through in 2018 with a handful of deeply felt features on songs from Pusha T and Ye, Shake’s haunting blend of rap and R&B wallowed in romantic anguish. On *Petrichor*, the 27-year-old musician gets vulnerable, stripping down her sound and falling headfirst into love. With the help of two longtime collaborators, composer Johan Lenox and producer Dave Hamelin, the ultra-private musician departs from the foggy synths and heavy vocal processing of past work, embracing guitar, piano, and lovestruck lyrics that leave it all on the table. Still, moodiness and mystery abound, from the dark ’80s power-pop of “Elephant,” an ode to uneasy mornings after long nights, to “Vagabond,” which channels old spaghetti westerns for a song about giving up your wild ways for a more domestic life. The tight guest list is made up of iconoclastic divas only (like an inspired cover of Tim Buckley’s “Song to the Siren” with none other than Courtney Love), but the best cameo comes from Shake’s partner Lily-Rose Depp, who delivers a raw spoken-word poem touching on aliens, Joan Baez, and mutual masochism.
Steven Ellison, who has performed under the Flying Lotus moniker for nearly 20 years, emerged from a *Twin Peaks* binge inspired to explore the outer reaches of his imagination, returning to the studio to work as a solo recording artist for the first time in a half decade. Letting David Lynch\'s murky netherworld spill out his subconscious, Ellison conjured “Garmonbozia,” a single that creeps forward on waves of chilly synths and tense bass—a sound that threatens to veer into darkness yet never quite does. Flying Lotus chooses the light throughout *Spirit Box*, populating the EP with playful excursions into house and neo-R&B, teaming with Dawn Richard on the shimmering “Let Me Cook” and Indian singer Sid Sriram on “The Lost Girls.” The bustling nocturnal vibe of the latter teams nicely with the subdued crawl of “Ajhussi” and the insistent pulse of “Ingo Swann,” each lending *Spirit Box* a sweep that feels vivid and cinematic.
Reconfiguring St. Vincent’s self-produced *All Born Screaming* for a Spanish-speaking audience may not have been an obvious choice. Then again, when has the modern-day guitar god Annie Clark done what’s expected of her or taken a conventional route? Converting the lyrics and rerecording her vocals account for the overt changes present on *Todos Nacen Gritando*, which otherwise maintains the track order and runtime of the English-language original. Much like a faithful literary translation for a Latin American audience, the integrity of the material remains intact, the robust riffage on “Hombre Roto” and sonic swells of “La Fruta Mas Dulce” hitting reliably hard. Dave Grohl’s drums still shatter on the “Pulga” chorus, Clark’s earnestly possessive chorus just as evocative as before. If nothing else, these versions simply make the songs more accessible to those who might have missed some of the meanings and sentiments behind them.
