Alex G’s cryptic, heartfelt indie rock has earned him friends in interesting places: He contributed guitar and arrangements to Frank Ocean’s *Endless* and *Blonde*, he co-wrote and produced about half of Halsey’s *The Great Impersonator*, he’s toured with Foo Fighters, and he soundtracked Jane Schoenbrun’s 2024 movie *I Saw the TV Glow*—a movie that, like G’s music, seemed almost instantly destined to be a cult classic, playing with nostalgia for early-’90s pop culture in ways that felt both comforting and deeply unsettling. He’s not a household name, but he touches a nerve. His first major-label album (whatever that really means in 2025), *Headlights*, isn’t different from his run of Domino albums (2015’s *Beach Music* to 2022’s *God Save the Animals*) in kind so much as in degree. “Every couple weeks, I’d have a new song and just start working on it,” he tells Apple Music. “And then, at the end of a couple of years, I guess I had these 12 songs that were good.” The conventional tracks are more straightforward (the early Wilco stomp of “Logan Hotel”), the experiments are both bolder and catchier (the Auto-Tuned hyperpop of “Bounce Boy”). For an artist who can pull deep feeling out of vague stretches of sound, he’s gotten incredibly good at knowing how to use detail and when: Just listen to the accordion that seeps into “June Guitar” or the girls’ chorus that drifts in and out of the alien-abduction/high-school-football story (yes) “Beam Me Up”—touches that feel both unexpected and irreplaceable. The result is an album that feels less like a collection of indie-rock songs than a dream about collections of indie-rock songs—vivid but patchy, intimate but abstract, emotionally deep but totally indirect. In some ways, he’s just another point on the continuum of artists like Pavement or The Velvet Underground, both of whom managed to balance directness with abstraction, shadow with light. In others, he feels perfectly made for his moment, an enigmatically normal-seeming guy whose gift for melody and cool fragments of sound work as well as background vibes for chill times as hermetic texts left to be parsed by comment-section scholars. There’s a reason his fans latch on so tight: Like a good dream, Alex G points toward mystery.
Love, Davina McCall, and making more tunes to play live: Wet Leg’s inspiration for their second album sounds like it came easily, but they had to shift into new territory on *moisturizer*. Their debut—2022’s *Wet Leg*—provided 36 minutes of lo-fi hooks, wit, and twentysomething confessions to catapult them into a BRIT- and Grammy-winning swirl of well-deserved hype. After a relentless but enjoyable touring schedule, they decided to escape to a seaside town for two weeks at a time to turn their attention to album number two. “I think we’re really fortunate we can write in that traditional band setup,” Rhian Teasdale tells Apple Music’s Matt Wilkinson. “When we stopped touring, we were like, ‘OK, what are we going to play when we go on tour again? Let’s make some tunes.’” So the band decamped to a house in Southwold, Suffolk and got to work. “There was a kid’s playroom with some LEGO around, so we took the majority of the stuff out and put all of our gear in it,” says guitarist Joshua Mobaraki. “Some days we were like, ‘OK, let’s start at this time and put a shift in.’ And then other times, it was 1 am and all of a sudden we were writing again. It was really cool.” *moisturizer* finds the band once again teaming up with producer Dan Carey and repeatedly nailing the perfect three-minute song on 12 tight tracks. They admit they give away more of themselves than they did on *Wet Leg*. While “catch these fists” has a strong message about reclaiming personal space, they stray into more romantic territory elsewhere. Hester Chambers wrote “don’t speak” for Mobaraki, who’s also her partner, but she subverted the idea. “She wrote me a song from me to her, which is really cheeky,” he says. “CPR” captures the feeling of infatuation, while “davina mccall” and “11: 21” sum up more secure, longer-term love, which are themes Teasdale had avoided before this album. “I’d never even attempted writing any kind of lyrics that were to do with love,” she says. “I had this rule when I was younger to just not even use the word ‘love.’ I was really hesitant because I felt like there were so many love songs out there. Also, it didn’t feel very authentic. When I was younger, I don’t think I really did know love, so I was just pulling out cliche after cliche.” On *moisturizer*, Wet Leg sound as vital and adventurous as they did on their debut—but there’s a new assurance creeping in too. “Our position as a band is to just constantly be surprised that people still want to listen to it,” says Mobaraki. “I don’t know if the imposter syndrome goes or it’s like you turn it into something else. It’s a way of not being like, ‘Everyone’s telling us that we’re amazing. That means that we are amazing.’ Instead, it’s just like, ‘Huh, let’s do another song. I like that one. Let’s do another one.’ I think we’ve developed and grown and we’re different now. We’re giving ourselves permission to take up space.”
Nilüfer Yanya’s third album, 2024’s *My Method Actor*, found the London singer-songwriter in an existential quandary. “It’s a weird one making a third album, because it’s like: ‘What is pushing me to do this?’” she told Apple Music at the time of its release. “Where is that desire coming from? Where am I going with this? Where am I going to be on the other side of this?” In writing the LP, she found some of those answers: “It’s a journey, but you don’t really know where it’s going,” she said. “But it’s about not worrying too much about the outcome; it’s learning to trust myself, to really listen to myself.” A few songs were abandoned in the process, which she undertook with her songwriting partner Wilma Archer. But upon returning from touring *My Method Actor*, Yanya found that some of those ideas deserved revisiting, and they form the *Dancing Shoes* EP. The title might be a little tongue-in-cheek—these four tracks don’t quite suit the club floor—but it does perhaps suggest a desire to dance the blues away. And like all of Yanya’s prior albums, she finds a springy tension between laidback rockers that mask pain with compelling grooves (“Kneel,” “Cold Heart”) and equally affecting, soul-baring pop ballads (“Where to Look,” “Treason”).
Lord Huron’s reverb-soaked, sepia-toned Americana has worn several faces over the years: the wide-eyed pioneer (*Strange Trails*), the lovelorn drifter (*Vide Noir*), the wistful cowboy just looking for a cold beer and place to hang up his spurs (*Long Lost*). As its title suggests, *The Cosmic Selector* leans into the spacier side of their sound, channeling moody, Lynchian atmospheres (“Looking Back”), ’50s ballads (“It All Comes Back”), and front-porch hymns (“Looking Back”) with the kind of gauzy, interstellar remove of late-’90s bands like Mercury Rev and Sparklehorse. Part of the project’s charm is that it never tries to sound too earnest or authentic in the moods it captures, instead embracing them for the cinematic archetypes they are, whether it’s the lonesome highway of “Who Laughs Last” (narrated by the incomparable Kristen Stewart) or the washed-up performer longing to see their name in lights one last time (“The Comedian”).
Indie rock songwriter Indigo De Souza finds the deep mysteries of the unknown equal parts intriguing and terrifying on her fourth album, *Precipice*. She walks up to the edge and neither leaps nor retreats, but rather looks with a curiosity that moves from fascinated to morbid at a moment’s notice. Throughout *Precipice*, De Souza gazes at the future and gives its uncertainty her full attention. Take “Crying Over Nothing,” a playful shuffle that dazzles with shimmering synths and De Souza’s near falsetto. On the track, she recalls taking all day to respond to texts, the pain in moving on from a relationship, the physical ache that comes alongside the dissolution of love. She’s in limbo. Elsewhere, she urges herself towards some sort of equilibrium on standout cut “Be Like the Water.” Over handclaps, DIY percussion, and Rhodes piano chords, De Souza encourages her subject to move through this world with joy and adaptability, leaning on deceptively simple advice: “Be like the water/Go where you’re going.”
Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band’s *New Threats from the Soul* is the kind of funny, rambling, junk-shop-scouring, bumper-sticker-talking, dollar-draft-guzzling daydream on which minor indie legends are born. The songs here unfurl with the workmanlike self-pity of ’90s country (“New Threats from the Soul”) or Springsteen anthems on salaries not yet adjusted for inflation (“Monte Carlo / No Limits”), dappled with Casio flutes and drum machines whose not-quite prime-time textures only go to fill in the blanks where Davis’ walls of lyrics drop off. His characters are hopeless wrecks redeemed only (and then only occasionally) by their insistence to get up off their dumb asses and try again, and yet reveal in that dumbass insistence something beautiful, or at least true. “The Spanish moss, it weeps in mourning of/Not only personal but also planetary loss/Not just for the bloodshed, but, by god, for what the Bloody Marys cost,” he sings on the opening of “Mutilation Springs.” Then there’s eight more minutes. Call it busy doin’ nothing.
Tyler Childers has never been one to play it safe, crafting traditionally informed, bluegrass-tinged country music with an expansive sense of what the genre can be. On this seventh full-length studio album from the Lawrence County, KY, native, Childers goes even bigger and bolder, recruiting superproducer and noted spiritual seeker Rick Rubin to helm a kaleidoscopic collection of wild, weird songs. *Snipe Hunter* opens with “Eatin’ Big Time,” a freewheeling rocker that takes its title from a phrase Childers and his band The Food Stamps deploy to mark milestones and celebrate successes. With a lyric as wild as his wailing vocal—there’s a verse about shooting and then skinning a man in a “motherfucking mansion”—it’s a fitting entry into this new world Childers built. “Bitin’ List” gets right to the point, opening with the line “To put it plain, I just don’t like you” while The Food Stamps sink their teeth into an old-time-adjacent arrangement. “Tirtha Yatra” pairs spiritual musings with a swinging beat, as Childers waxes poetic on the Bhagavad Gita. And longtime fan favorite “Oneida,” a staple of Childers’ live sets since 2017, gets its long-awaited studio treatment, bridging the gap between the burgeoning days of his career and this obvious high point.
Between Comedy Central’s *The New Negroes*, his Stony Island Audio podcast fiefdom, and countless hours of livestreaming, Open Mike Eagle has got plenty of media experience. For *Neighborhood Gods Unlimited*, he proffers a conceptually inventive take on imagined cable network Dark Comedy Television, with barely enough budget for an hour’s worth of programming. That translates to one of the indie-rap mainstay’s more diverse offerings thematically and, with help from underground producers like Child Actor and Ialive, sonically. On the sitcom-esque “me and aquil stealing stuff from work,” he and his buddy AQ both toil and loaf around like quintessential mall rats. His unabashedly nerdy tastes come through as he nods to *Adventure Time*’s wintry wizard on “contraband (the plug has bags of me)” and non-canonically mixes heterogenous comic book and cartoon lore on “michigan j. wonder.” Longtime cohorts R.A.P. Ferreira and Previous Industries’ Video Dave appear as fourth-wall-winking guest stars in sweeps-week fashion, but nobody upstages Mr. Number 1 on the Call Sheet.
“I found myself in a new world of touring and chaos so quickly that I built a separation between myself as Josh and Barry on stage to deal with it,” Josh Mainnie tells Apple Music. “But when it came to writing this album, I knew it had to be for me as Josh. I wanted to bring those two parts back together.” As DJ and producer Barry Can’t Swim, Mainnie has had a meteoric rise since the release of his 2021 debut EP *Amor Fati* and 2023 album *When Will We Land?*. Blending emotive melody with thumping electronic percussion and expertly chopped vocal samples, Mainnie’s signature has become a feel-good dance-floor communion. For his second album, *Loner*, Mainnie turns inwards to explore his rise to fame, moving from the spoken-word soul-searching of “The Person You’d Like to Be” to the trance synths of “About to Begin” and soulful horn fanfares of “Childhood,” all while keeping his introspection anchored in the joy that has become his calling card. “Once I started, it all came together quickly,” he says. “It’s an authentic side of me that needed to come out for everyone to hear.” Read on for Mainnie’s in-depth thoughts on the album, track by track. **“The Person You’d Like to Be”** “This is a collaboration with a good friend of mine, the poet Séamus. I’ve known him since university and always wanted to work together. We finally managed to make it happen and he came up with these lyrics that set the tone for the themes of the album really well. It’s about having two voices of conflict and duality—myself and Barry. I then put his vocal through an AI voice generator, so that it starts AI and becomes more and more Séamus as the track continues.” **“Different”** “I loved the lyric of ‘everybody different’ in this vocal sample I found and ended up building the entire track around it. I was also really inspired by the track ‘Church of Nonsense’ by Daniele Papini, which I’ve played in DJ sets for years, since it has this incredible rising bassline that I wanted to emulate here. It’s minimalistic and the synth that comes in two thirds of the way through wasn’t originally in there but when I brought it to rehearsals for the live show my keys player Jakes \[UK producer/artist Hannah Jacobs\] added it in and so it stayed!” **“Kimpton” (with O’Flynn)** “‘Kimpton’ is one of the earliest songs I wrote for the album. I wasn’t sure where to begin, so I went round to \[London DJ/producer\] O’Flynn’s house, since he lives around the corner from me, and we just began mucking about. He started this tune himself when he was on tour with Bonobo and I liked the vocal a lot but wanted to simplify it and build a different chord progression and texture around it. It developed as a jigsaw from there and I’m really happy with how it turned out.” **“All My Friends”** “This is another early one, probably written in November or December 2023. I found the vocal sample first and loved it so much I decided to keep it as it was and not overdo it with too much extra instrumentation. I’m generally quite quick in the studio, playing most of the instrumentation live myself and working on ideas until they’re finished rather than multiple things at once.” **“About to Begin”** “I wrote this while I was staying at my parents’ house on the day I delivered the finished album. I didn’t have anything to do, so I decided to quickly make something fresh to keep busy. I picked this vocal from a sample pack and it sounded pretty cheesy and American but I liked the energy of it. I put it through an AI voice generator, which added another persona to the themes of the record, and it’s since become a huge tune in the live show, so it had to go on the record.” **“Still Riding”** “This is one of my favorite tunes I’ve made and it was written a few years ago when I got back from touring in America for the first time. It’s been finished for a while but I couldn’t get the Kali Uchis vocal sample cleared until I think my own profile got bigger and they finally agreed. I’m so pleased because I love the track.” **“Cars Pass by Like Childhood Sweethearts”** “I was listening to a lot of \[French DJ/producer\] Pepe Bradock and his tune ‘Deep Burnt’ when I made this because I love the warmth and texture of the strings loop he uses. I started writing strings inspired by that and built all the other parts around it. It was originally just an instrumental but I spent a couple of weeks digging through samples and eventually found this vocal that works really well with the vibe of the tune.” **“Machine Noise for a Quiet Daydream” (feat. Séamus)** “This is a good place to have a bit of breathing space in the record. Séamus just sent me a poem he was working on one day, and I thought I’d see how it sounded on an instrumental I’d already finished and I loved the energy of it. I didn’t do much else, and none of it is really in time but I fell in love with his delivery on the phone voice note he sent through, so that’s what we kept.” **“Like It’s Part of the Dance”** “I don’t often write tracks for my live show but this is one that found its way into the show very quickly. I’ve been playing it for six or seven months and it always goes off—even when I sent the album to friends and the people I trust, a lot of people picked it out as their favorite. It’s all about the build and drop and energy.” **“Childhood”** “I was in Lisbon on holiday with my partner and I smuggled a keyboard along with me, which is what I ended up writing this one on. I started with the horns and vocal sample and then it was a case of finding a chord progression that led nicely into a sense of release. I felt like the track had a feeling of innocence to it, which comes with childhood, hence the title.” **“Marriage”** “‘Marriage’ ended up having a strange Russian doll process to it, since I wrote the vocal and had someone sing it live over an existing instrumental. Then I realized I didn’t like that instrumental, so I changed it before realizing I didn’t like the vocal anymore either so had to change that too! We got there in the end, and I love that it’s built around the lyric ‘My heart is closed for the season.’” **“Wandering Mt. Moon”** “I was in the toilet of an Indian restaurant in Brick Lane and suddenly heard the strings part of an amazing Bollywood track play through the speakers. I immediately Shazamed it and once I got home, wrote my own part inspired by it. It’s definitely become one of my favorites on the album since it’s such a lush and textured ending to have. The title also comes from a Game Boy *Pokémon* level, where you’re exploring a dark cave with only a ray of light, which is what this felt like to me.”
Kae Tempest says that *Self Titled* is a record borne out of synchronicity. The South Londoner is a master of many arts—he’s a rapper, poet, spoken word act, novelist, and more—but something didn’t feel right as he approached making what he thought would be his fifth solo album. Seeking an outside take on it, Tempest played some of the songs to Fraser T. Smith, with whom he’d collaborated on the Dave and Adele producer’s Future Utopia project, and Smith’s feedback opened up a whole new way forward. “He just said, ‘This isn’t right for right now, this just isn’t quite it, there’s something else I think that needs to come out of you right now,’” Tempest tells Apple Music. “He said, ‘Why don’t you just park this and come into the studio and let’s see what happens?’” What happened is *Self Titled*, a career peak that takes in menacing hip-hop grooves, jubilant, expansive pop, jagged beats, and bombastic soundscapes. By some margin, it is Tempest’s most ambitious musical work to date. Working with Smith unlocked something. “It brought out the bigness of my sound, my intentionality around songwriting, wanting to be more concise, more driven, wanting bigger sound,” Tempest says. “Fraser is a big songwriter.” The process of making the record, he explains, felt like being swept up in a strong current. “We were just going with it, and the minute we tried to lead and not flow, it wouldn’t quite work. If I tried to get something to happen, it just wouldn’t happen.” *Self Titled* is very much the album that Kae Tempest was meant to make right now. Let Tempest guide you through it, track by track. **“I Stand on the Line”** “This is a statement piece. It’s huge. The orchestral instrumentation, the expansiveness of the sound and the production. This was that moment when I said to Fraser, ‘I want big sound. I want to make big songs,’ and this was his response. Lyrically, Fraser was encouraging me to tell my story. My natural place when I’m writing lyrics is to write from character perspectives or zoom in on one very specific thing but retain some kind of abstract relationship with the object of the poem or the lyric. But with this, Fraser was encouraging me to tell my story. I realized this is what appeals to me in songs, when you get this insight into somebody’s truth.” **“Statue in the Square”** “I was wondering whether to follow ‘I Stand on the Line’ with this because, in some ways, they tread some of the same ground lyrically, but in other ways, it’s a one-two punch that is so satisfying. I played Fraser Megan Thee Stallion’s ‘HISS’ and Run The Jewels. I was like, ‘I just want something so simple, but I want it to be so big, but so clear in each of its parts.’ I liked the idea of creating something on the piano that felt like an old loop but we’re just playing it now in the room. Lyrically, the first draft went on for ages and ages. The verses were really long, but the chorus jumped out and I thought, ‘OK, I know what this song wants me to do now, I just have to minimize and reduce and distill what I’m saying.’” **“Know Yourself”** “In my late teenage years, I was going through some heavy stuff, I felt at a bit of a crossroads. What I understood to be my older self came into my head and basically instructed my younger self to keep writing, to focus on creativity rather than destruction, and to know myself. That older self was what I understood my lyrics were coming from. Each time I wrote lyrics, it was advice I was getting from my older self. As I got older, I was like, ‘Well, it wasn’t me, I haven’t gone back, so who the fuck was that?’ Writing ‘Know Yourself,’ I was like, ‘This is the moment, this is when I went back,’ and it’s because that kid did what they did, that I can do what I’m doing. Fraser said, ‘Oh, that’s crazy,’ because he wrote this beat with Tom Rowlands from The Chemical Brothers. They went to school together but they didn’t see each other for 30 years. Tom went to Fraser’s house, they talked about their lives for about 10 minutes, then Fraser picks up a guitar, Tom’s on a drum machine. He said it was like, ‘Suddenly we’re 15 again.’ So lyrically, I’m talking to my younger self, musically, Fraser’s talking to his younger self.” **“Sunshine on Catford”** “I feel very strongly about dynamic and pace and gradient, I love to position albums and live shows, the journey of it all is very important. The idea is that once you know yourself, then you can know love and then in comes this beautiful love song, it’s like a thank you. It’s just a little gratitude prayer to a beautiful moment. We were blessed with the vocal of the fairy godfather of the album who came and sprinkled a bit of magic Pet Shop Boys dust on the record \[Neil Tennant is a guest vocalist on the track\]. This is a hymn of thanks to the small moments when you are trying to make a life with someone, when things just feel great.” **“Bless the Bold Future”** “The lyric began years ago. I always set myself this rule that I mustn’t write backwards because I thought if I ever went back, I wouldn’t be able to go forwards. I always went into the studio with a blank notebook and started from wherever I was at. After writing ‘Know Yourself’ and going back and sampling \[an\] old lyric, I was like, ‘Actually, maybe this is the moment where I can go back into older material with this new perspective.’ This lyric had been floating around and I couldn’t let go of it. There was something about it that I thought was interesting. It never quite found its home before, then we found this fucking absolutely rolling monster beat. It was beautiful.” **“Everything All Together”** “In my live show, I like to take a line from each of the songs at some point in the set and weave them all together and start repeating things that people have heard before. It gives this cumulative trance-like power to the whole experience. As the album was finished, I was saying to Fraser, ‘I want to make this kind of master poem,’ so I took a line from each of the songs and wove them together. We got all the session files up and took the horn line from that song, the snare from that song, one little piano part from that song, so there’s something from every single song and we put it on a grid almost like it was artwork rather than music work. We did it by eye rather than listening to it and then pressed play on that loop. It’s like the soul of the album speaking. It tells you everything that you’ve just heard and everything you’re about to hear.” **“Prayers to Whisper”** “This came out of me experimenting with form, four lines and the repeated fifth line three times. Obviously, it’s about something that’s close to my heart, the death of a friend. The chords Fraser found for it were quite somber. I was like, ‘No, no, no, no.’ Lyrically and musically, if the two things are going the same way, it’s death. We need uplift in the music. We need celebration. Fraser found these beautiful chords and it felt massive. It felt anthemic, which is how you want it to feel. It’s tough to feel optimistic in the face of somebody leaving, but there is this push and pull, if you lose somebody to something where they were suffering, to illness, to something painful, then there is some sense of release. I wanted the music to embody that and then it became this huge ballad, big pop song.” **“Diagnoses”** “I wanted to make something playful, celebratory, a summer banger about fucking antipsychotics and HRT. Why the fuck not? That’s your life. You still want to fucking dance. You’re still dancing. It’s another example of the lyric and the music pushing against each other. That’s what creates the good feeling. That’s what I like. It’s like, if this is your life, it’s no big deal. It’s a massive deal. You’re fucked. Life is just mental, of course. But at the same time, it’s just your life. And we are all just dealing with the fallout of what we’re in.” **“Hyperdistillation”** “I loved the beat but I was struggling to find the lyrical shape. It’s a love song to London, to my city, and there were these little hooky moments and I was like, ‘I need something in that hook.’ I went to Raven Bush, the string player from Speakers Corner Quartet, and said, ‘Can you write me a violin line that almost sounds like a soaring melody, like a vocal hook?’ He wrote this beautiful string part. It’s amazing, but it wasn’t enough. I wanted more of an uplift. Then I remembered \[singer-songwriter\] Connie Constance, who I’d bumped into a few times backstage and who I just love. She came down to the studio and wrote this amazing part. These fractured pieces suddenly came together in this perfect moment, which is what the song’s about.” **“Forever”** “This started as a love song about the uncertainty of a relationship and having this idea that let’s just fucking enjoy this for all that it is. And then Fraser was saying, ‘I know I was encouraging you to tell your story, but actually I feel like now the album needs more of your outward perspective.’ I totally agreed but I’d grown attached to that hook. If I tried to write a song about the world, I would never have written a hook so tender. The way that hook is addressed to a lover enables it to be more honest and truthful about the world, you escape the narrative trap of ‘I’m going to write a song about everything, which means you can write a song about nothing.’” **“Breathe”** “This is when I knew that the album wanted to be born. This was when Fraser had said to me, ‘Tell your story.’ I loved the beat, I wrote it, scribbled it out, went in the studio. This is the first time I did it. I could barely read the paper, my hands were shaking, and it is like a freestyle, wrote it, rapped it, that’s it. I haven’t quite got my head around what it is that I’m even trying to say, but the rush of that feeling, it is irreplaceable. Getting Young Fathers on there was amazing because within the world of that song I’m talking about, when *Everybody Down* \[Tempest’s 2014 Mercury-nominated debut\] came out, they were there, we were labelmates. They’ve been a part of this journey and it felt like a massive blessing to have them there on this song.” **“Till Morning”** “I wanted it to feel like the morning was coming, the sun was coming out, it was getting warmer, it’s getting brighter. When the chords come in at the end, it’s like the light. By the time we’d got our heads around that arrangement, it was two in the morning. I went in to put the vocal on it and I’d been metabolizing the lyric quite a lot and the take that I did was quite angry. Fraser said there was a tenderness in the original guide vocal because I was being very tentative with it. Sometimes, when something’s really new, you don’t even dare to say it, so I went back in and I did it like that. More gentle, more optimistic, more hopeful, more loving, less raging—and what you get is this very beautiful song about survival and about what comes after, about the possibility, a declaration of love. I thought, ‘How lucky I am to have met Fraser and to be in this relationship with somebody who can give a note like that, that can just shine a light on your performance?’”
Folk Bitch Trio’s debut album contains several very distinct through lines. “The songs are us experiencing things that we mostly experienced together or with real-life narration of, ‘This is what’s happening in my life,’” guitarist/vocalist Jeanie Pilkington tells Apple Music. “They’re songs that come from our shared brain and heart, and individual brains and hearts.” Given that some were composed during the Melbourne band’s extensive national and overseas touring, adjusting to life on the road is another clear theme, particularly in songs such as “Mary’s Playing the Harp.” “A few of them were written in that transition between \[touring\] not being a part of our lives and starting to tour, and starting to make sense of going to weird places to perform and how that feels,” says Pilkington. Adds guitarist/vocalist Heide Peverelle: “I write a lot on the road and a lot of the songs reference feelings of being on tour.” It was during one of those tours, supporting English songwriter Ben Howard on an Australian and New Zealand run in 2024, that the trio stopped by Auckland’s Roundhead Studios to record “God’s a Different Sword” with producer Tom Healy, who would go on to helm the full record. They were drawn to the studio for its equipment. “They have a tape machine, and we had decided we wanted to work on tape for this record,” says Peverelle. The analog recording accentuates the trio’s astonishingly warm vocal harmonies (all recorded live), which sit atop their dreamy, pastoral folk and occasional flourishes of lo-fi electric guitar. “It’s us on a plate,” says Peverelle. “It feels like our hearts are very open.” Here, Pilkington, Peverelle, and vocalist/guitarist Gracie Sinclair take Apple Music through *Now Would Be a Good Time*, track by track. **“God’s a Different Sword”** Heide Peverelle: “When I brought that to the group to arrange and tweak, it felt like an introduction to how we wanted to go sonically. It’s just about the euphoria and optimism you feel \[at\] the end of a breakup, starting afresh.” Gracie Sinclair: “It signifies that feeling of having your own hands back on the wheel. And you’re like, I’m driving my life now.” **“Hotel TV”** Jeanie Pilkington: “It’s about a relationship going bad. Gracie wrote the hook when we were in a hotel in Brisbane, our first time staying out of Melbourne to do music, needing some rest. We needed a fucking break. It really resonated with the rest of the song, ’cause that’s what I was trying to say—I needed to step away, because I was in this suffocated environment that is that hotel room, but also that relationship.” **“The Actor”** HP: “The story is very true; it’s quite a literal song. When you start dating someone, and even if you’ve been married to someone, \[you can\] still not really know them. I think it’s about that and the mask you wear when you’re in a relationship, and if shit gets hard and it crumbles.” JP: “It’s short and it’s punchy. I think it represents a downward spiral that happens very quickly, before you can even catch yourself.” **“Moth Song”** JP: “People think it’s me talking to my bandmates.” GS: “It’s me talking to myself. I’m Gracie and I’m singing, so I say my own name. ‘Moth Song’ is about losing the plot. It’s about wanting more from the relationships that you have around you and feeling very heartbroken and very alone in that. I was sitting on the train feeling very sorry for myself for some reason, and daydreaming and imagining all these moths filling the train carriage, and that’s what I’m talking about in the chorus—I was imagining the train doors opening and all these moths going up into the sky like confetti. That’s a nice release.” **“I’ll Find a Way (To Carry It All)”** GS: “It’s the closer to the A-side of the record.” JP: “It’s like a breathing point. Originally, we were going to open the record with this because, for a long time, we opened our set with it when we played live—it’s a great way to shut up the room. But it felt a little bit somber to open \[the album\] like that. Now, it’s this really nice point where, if you’re listening on vinyl, it closes out the first side. The B-side of the record is a bit darker and rocks a bit harder.” **“Cathode Ray”** GS: “This was the last song on the record to get finished. It’s about frustration in a relationship, and when you love someone and you feel like you just can’t get through to them. And you really want to and you want to see them come undone.” **“Foreign Bird”** JP: “\[It’s about\] trying to force yourself to do something and then stopping to realize, hang on, why the hell am I doing this, I don’t want to? And just trying to pull yourself out of your own habits.” **“That’s All She Wrote”** HP: “I spent a lot of time in Northeast Victoria and I was really picturing that part of the world when I was writing it. Each verse and chorus feels like it has a time stamp for me—the first verse is a few years ago, and the middle is more recently and again with the last verse. There’s a clear picture in my mind of each scenario \[and\] specific relationships I had.” **“Sarah”** HP: “It’s a breakup song. We really went back and forth about whether it would be on the record ’cause it felt overly earnest. We wanted to really try and bring down the earnestness with the more rocky guitar vibe.” **“Mary’s Playing the Harp”** JP: “It’s a song about being on tour and being heartbroken, and watching a Mary Lattimore set at a festival in Thirroul and thinking about someone I was going to have to see that I really missed, but also was really dreading what that was going to feel like. We did this superlong tour a couple of years ago through regional Australia and it was a real time of peaks and valleys. Some weird experiences, some bad experiences, just trying to figure out how to live on the road and how isolating that can be. A weird thing to experience as a very young woman or femme person, and all those things came into play.”
When it comes to The Swell Season, a group whose legacy was cemented not strictly by their music but by the 2007 feature film *Once*, which starred the band’s two principal songwriters as struggling Dublin musicians, it’s hard not to look back. The fact that those leads—Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová—became a real-life romantic couple, broke up, and have continued to make music together for nearly two decades only further enriches The Swell Season’s backstory. *Forward*, not surprisingly, attempts to write a new chapter. And deservedly so, as plenty has happened in the 16 years following their previous album, 2009’s *Strict Joy*. Irglová and Hansard have moved to different places, released a number of solo albums, had children, and gotten on with life, all while remaining close friends and collaborators. The songs here are as tender and sincere as ever: “Factory Street Bells” is Hansard’s promise to his young son that he’ll always return home. On “I Leave Everything to You,” Irglová lays all her cards on the table for her loved ones. And others deal with themes of regret, reconciliation, and the challenges of just facing the world each day. But no matter how much the desire to move on exists, Hansard and Irglová can’t help but reflect on the past, whether on the comforting “People We Used to Be” or in lines like “I tried to move forward, but I’m stuck in reverse.”
“It is because of my faith that I’m sitting here with you right now,” Malice tells Apple Music’s Ebro Darden about reforming Clipse with Pusha T. “That is the only reason that I get to sit here with my brother.” Brethren both in blood and in song, the Thorntons made up one of the most vital rap duos of the 2000s. Signed back in the day to The Neptunes’ Star Trak imprint, the Virginia Beach pair spat intricate yet gratifying narco bars over cutting-edge production. Yet despite dropping three essential, consequential albums over the course of that decade, an apparent crisis of Christian values appeared to prompt a creative split. Not long after the late-2009 release of *Til the Casket Drops*, a hiatus commenced as both members explored solo careers with distinct differences. Pusha T continued his coke-rap ascent within the GOOD Music roster, while Malice purposefully rebranded himself a Christian artist under the subtly adjusted moniker No Malice. Thankfully, their bond could never be broken. A momentous 2019 appearance by both brothers on Kanye West’s *Jesus Is King* suggested a greater musical reconciliation. Yet it took the return of longtime collaborator Pharrell Williams, a core architect of the classic Clipse sound, to produce *Let God Sort Em Out*, their first new album in some 15 years. “It just felt like a real good family setting,” Malice says of the studio sessions in Paris that yielded these tracks. “The creative aspect, the same as it’s always been from yay high.” “We get caught up in the feeling of certain records,” Pusha T adds. “You got to realize that before we even get to the process of hooks and writing, man, we’re so entranced by the beat.” Considering the triumphant sound of Pharrell’s production on the first single, “Ace Trumpets,” it’s hard not to believe the sincerity of that statement. Reunited at last, their chemistry feels as potent as ever beginning with “The Birds Don’t Sing” where, with a little help from John Legend, they pay respect to their departed parents with their respective verses. “The framework of the song was my last conversation with my mom and his last conversation with my dad,” Pusha T says. “It was therapeutic, but it was the hardest record to make. That’s why it actually starts the album.” Notorious for taking out his foes with acutely pointed bars, Pusha T once again wields his surgical summer skill set with incisive precision on “So Be It Pt. II.” It’s little wonder they invited the like-minded Kendrick Lamar to join in on the fun with a euphorically acrimonious verse on “Chains & Whips.” And while the album boasts a handful of choice rap features by everyone from Neptunes superfan Tyler, The Creator to Griselda affiliate Stove God Cooks, one of the biggest moments comes from an artist who preceded and inspired Clipse. “I was like, ‘Man, this, this piece right here is made for Nas,’” Pusha T says of the title track’s guest appearance, adding that the Queensbridge legend was originally meant to rap on his 2022 solo album, *It’s Almost Dry*. “His excitement was through the roof.” For Malice, it was his younger sibling’s enthusiasm towards the new music that lit a proverbial fire underneath him. “It just reminds me of how it was when we started,” he says. “We ain’t felt like this in a while.” That feeling comes through in a major way with every single verse from the rejuvenated elder brother, slipping a stunning blend of religious imagery and key memories into tracks like “P.O.V.” and “So Far Ahead.” Aglow with gospel vibes and synth swells, the latter of these succinctly sums up the spiritual dilemma that kept Malice away from Clipse for so long with one crucial insular line: “I done been both Mason Bethas.” “It is in the suffering when you start looking for answers,” he says. “Nothing is going to help you until you get into that word of God. That’s where I get all my peace from.”
Since busting out of Dundas, Ontario, in the late 2000s, The Dirty Nil has never wavered in their mission to hit all of your favorite rock ’n’ roll pleasure points—grungy noise, punky energy, power-pop hooks—all at once. However, “Rock N’ Roll Band”—a Weezer-esque highlight from their fifth album, *The Lash*—is less a celebration of their chosen vocation than a cautionary tale of dedicating your life to criss-crossing the continent in a beat-up van for poverty wages while “all your loved ones are worried sick” and “someone else is getting rich, not you.” That sobering perspective permeates *The Lash*: While the album hardly skimps on the in-the-red riffs and shout-it-out choruses on which the Nil built their brand (check the pop-punk piledriver “Do You Want Me?”), there’s less of an audible smirk in Luke Bentham’s delivery, lending the self-defeatist anthem “Fail in Time” and jangly “Spider Dream” a palpable sense of melancholy. And never before have we heard him sound as naked and vulnerable as on “This Is Me Warning Ya,” a haunting mid-album ballad that replaces the Nil’s power-trio roar with minimalist guitar lines and foreboding strings.
Kokoroko’s charmed ascendency continues on *Tuff Times Never Last*, the follow-up to their 2022 debut album *Could We Be More*. The record finds the London-based septet in an enviable position, having garnered both critical acclaim for their distinct fusion of jazz, Afrobeats, and highlife music and a formidable reputation as live musicians. *Tuff Times Never Last* maintains the group’s core identity as champions of the West African sounds that serve as inspiration for their own compositions while weaving and layering new textures and influences into their artistic fabric. Drawing on elements from a litany of genres from funk and neo-soul to UK R&B, band leaders Onome Edgeworth and Sheila Maurice-Grey direct the group through 11 unique variations on the main theme of togetherness, with shades of love and romance shining the brightest. “Just Can’t Wait” leans into the delight of anticipating a flirtatious rendezvous with a smooth bassline and reverent harmonies, while the hypnotic melodies of “Closer to Me” play off “Sweetie”—feather-light and bubbly—to contrast infatuation at two different intensities.
