The indie-pop band fronted by Michelle Zauner released their third album, 2021’s *Jubilee*, to massive critical acclaim and their first Grammy nomination. After spending five years writing *Crying in H Mart*, her best-selling memoir about grief, Zauner devoted the record to joy and catharsis, all triumphant horns and swooning synths. But for its follow-up, the ambitious polymath found herself drawn to darker, knottier themes—loneliness, desire, contemporary masculinity. She also gravitated to the indie-rock sounds of her past, recruiting producer and guitarist Blake Mills, known for his work with artists like Fiona Apple, Feist, and Weyes Blood. “\[For *Jubilee*\] we wanted to have bombastic, big instrumentation with lots of strings and horns; I wanted this to come back to a more guitar-oriented record,” Zauner tells Apple Music. “I think I’m going back to my roots a little bit more.” When she began to write the band’s fourth record in 2022, Zauner found inspiration in an unlikely literary juxtaposition: Greek mythology, gothic romance classics, and works that she wryly deemed as part of the “incel canon” à la Bret Easton Ellis’ *American Psycho*. From such seemingly disparate sources emerged the gorgeously bleak songs of *For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)*, whose title is presented with an implied wink, acknowledging the many women songwriters whose work is reduced to “sad girl music.” Indeed, the atmosphere on *For Melancholy Brunettes* is less straightforwardly sad, and more…well, it’s complicated. On “Leda,” the story of a strained relationship unfolds by way of Greek myths in which Zeus takes the form of a swan to seduce a Spartan queen. “Little Girl,” a deceptively sweet-sounding ballad about a father estranged from his daughter, opens with a spectacularly abject image: “Pissing in the corner of a hotel suite.” And on the fascinatingly eerie “Mega Circuit,” on which legendary drummer Jim Keltner lays down a mean shuffle, Zauner paints a twisted tableau of modern manhood—muddy ATVs, back-alley blowjobs, “incel eunuchs”—somehow managing to make it all sound achingly poetic with lines like, “Deep in the soft hearts of young boys so pissed off and jaded/Carrying dull prayers of old men cutting holier truths.” The universe Zauner conveys on *For Melancholy Brunettes* is sordid and strange, though not without beauty in the form of sublime guitar sounds or striking turns of phrase. (“I never knew I’d find my way into the arms/Of men in bars,” she sings on the wistful “Men in Bars,” which includes the album’s only feature from…Jeff Bridges?!) As for the title’s bone-dry humor—sardonically zesty castanet and tambourine add extra irony to “Winter in LA,” on which Zauner imagines herself as a happier woman, writing sweet love songs instead of…these.
Noah Lennox used to feel as though his solo work as Panda Bear was, in his words, “disparate and separate” from the music he’d make with Animal Collective. But now, over two decades on, it seems more like one continuous project. “Playing drums in AC, singing in AC, writing songs for AC, doing features, doing remixes, doing this record where I’m collaborating with all these different people or getting these different flavors from different people,” Lennox tells Apple Music, “it all kind of feels like part of the same creative wave.” “This record” is *Sinister Grift*, the first Panda Bear album to feature contributions from all three of his Animal Collective bandmates—David “Avey Tare” Portner, Brian “Geologist” Weitz, and Josh “Deakin” Dibb—not to mention collaborations with Patrick Flegel (aka Cindy Lee) and SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE’s Rivka Ravede. Recorded at his home studio in Lisbon and in his hometown of Baltimore, it’s meant to feel like a contemporary take on an early rock ’n’ roll record, with Lennox opting to illuminate the natural qualities of the music, rather than distort or deliberately obfuscate them, as he did on 2019’s *Buoys*. “It still feels very contemporary, very plug-in, very digital audio workstation to me,” he says. “There’s echoes of older music that I love in there, but there’s no retro-ness to it, I hope. I’m not a big fan of that kind of thing.” Front to back, the album is meant to mirror what Lennox calls the “playful menace” at the heart of its title—an idea he’d had before he’d written a single lyric. Before falling into the abyss of its second half, the music feels effervescent even when the songs themselves are anything but. “‘Sinister grift’ is this lie that we tell ourselves, that if we’re just careful enough or if we’re ‘good people,’ we can somehow avoid suffering or regrets, mistakes, hurting ourselves or people—this very inevitable part of living,” he says. “I like contrast. I feel like the light is lighter when it’s put against darkness, or things are funnier when they’re addressing something really dark. But it really started just because I liked the title. I like how it sounded, I like how it looked on paper. It sounds kind of dumb, but sometimes things start really simply like that.” Here, Lennox takes us inside a few songs from the album. **“Praise”** “It kind of started as a song thinking about my son—the anecdote about him not picking up his phone is very real. But then it became a song more about fatherhood and then a song about parenthood. There’s this fire driving the relationship, where it feels like no matter what the kid does, he’s not calling you back. If he’s maybe being a little difficult or acting up, there’s this sense that there’s an underlying force, that unbreakable thing that drives the relationship.” **“Anywhere but Here”** “I stole pretty wholesale the idea from a \[The\] Louvin Brothers song called ‘Satan Is Real,’ where there’s a vocal refrain, and then he preaches or tells the story for a second. I’m a huge fan of that record, but that song specifically. I thought it would be cool to try to do my own version of that. I think my original idea was to ask my daughter Nadja to do the spoken-word part, which she wrote. But then I asked Dean Blunt to do it, and he was down, but he couldn’t. Ultimately, I was so excited about getting my daughter onto the thing and, lucky for me, she was down to do it eventually—as long as I paid her.” **“Ends Meet”** “This song always reminds me of ‘Monster Mash.’ It’s a song about appreciating life, including the more difficult things. The ‘Monster Mash’-iness comes from the sense that there’s something coming to get you—these difficult things in life are going to happen to you, no matter what you do. But it’s said in this very playful way, which I hoped was fun. I find that telling a joke is a way to enter into a difficult conversation. A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.” **“Just as Well”** “I’m a huge reggae fan, huge dub fan, and I’m always looking for a way to do something that feels reggae without explicitly being reggae, and there’s a couple attempts on this record. I’d say ‘Just as Well’ is one and the other ‘50mg,’ which feels a bit like a cross between a reggae track and a country track to me. I feel like this song is maybe the best attempt I’ve made at doing something that feels like an impression of reggae. It’s something that I feel like is always in me, but doing a version of it that feels genuine is difficult.” **“Ferry Lady”** “There’s a lot of percussion in it, but it’s not actually a drum kit playing, unlike most of the other songs. It feels kind of like the gateway to the second half of the record to me. It’s in between the lightness and the dark, the ferry from one side of the record to the other. It’s about any type of relationship that has ended and hasn’t ended like you thought it would, about people growing apart.” **“Venom’s In”** “‘Venom’s In’ is about having a reality thrust upon you in life and not wanting it. It feels like the character in the song can tell that change is coming and wants to stop it, but knows it’s impossible. So the venom is already in the body, the change is going to happen. It’s a pretty desperate song to me—it feels very low.” **“Elegy for Noah Lou”** “That one represents the original vision for the record, insofar as I thought we were going to do these straight-ahead recordings: guitar, bass, drums, singing, and I would play everything. The original idea was to spend months following the recordings, abstracting those forms or blurring them. But as we worked with the arrangements, we got the structures and the tone of the stuff really right, so a lot of the stuff felt like it was done, like it didn’t need to grow into anything else. So that idea of blurring everything we left behind, except you hear it a little bit in this wasteland section of the record. ‘Elegy for Noah Lou’ is where it kind of feels like the song is sort of there, but it’s muted and more like an impression of the song than a song.” **“Defense”** “I was a huge fan of Patrick \[Flegel\]’s, from Women forward. He had played some shows with the rest of the AC guys at some point, had stayed at Josh’s place coming through Baltimore once or twice. We actually recorded right before *Diamond Jubilee* came out, so I kind of feel like I snuck it in a little bit. It was just one of those things where Patrick was the first person I thought of to do it. I knew Patrick could handle the guitar work and, thankfully and very luckily for me, Patrick was down to do it.”
In following up their 2021 album, *Infinite Granite*, Deafheaven have chased a seismic shift with a melding of strengths. Whereas *Infinite Granite* almost completely abandoned the band’s black-metal roots for clean vocals and a lush shoegaze sound, *Lonely People with Power* combines elements of both. “To me, this is the ultimate Deafheaven album,” vocalist George Clarke tells Apple Music. “I think it harnesses all these disparate ideas that we’ve had over our entire career in the best way that they’ve ever been done. While it does include sonic touchstones from our earlier albums, it also includes some from our more recent material—just done in a way that, I think, is smarter. If we were to stop at this point, I think this is the record that would best explain what it is we do.” Lyrically, *Lonely People with Power* explores exactly what the title implies. “Initially, there was this broad scope that recognized that people who tend to want to amass power, people who tend to seek influence, are also people who tend to lack intimate connections,” Clarke says. “They’re people who are what I keep describing as spiritually vacant. I think there’s a void there that is often wanting to be filled with this sort of ephemeral influence. “As we kept writing and the subject matter got more personal, I was thinking about the idea of what is passed on to us,” he adds. “Life lessons, things that you learn from your parents, things that you learn from your teachers, and how their handicaps and their perspectives shape your own worldview. And how, in a sense, everyone wields a certain amount of power. Everyone, in a sense, is a lonely person with power.” Below, Clarke comments on each track. **“Incidental I”** “The melody in ‘Incidental I’ appears again in ‘Doberman.’ A lot of the incidentals and the way that they function within the album were created by \[guitarist\] Kerry \[McCoy\], who very much likes to conceptualize records by using melodic reprisals. This one of the three is the shortest, but certainly one of the most mood-setting tracks of the record. I really love the way that it came out. It’s quite simple, but effective.” **“Doberman”** “This was the last song we wrote for the album. To me, it was the big single, which we ended up not going with. But in my estimation, it has a lot of our strengths. What I really enjoy about it is that we leaned a little further into Emperor-like qualities in the chorus and used these types of synth textures to enhance the chorus parts. And the bridge is very Aphex Twin-influenced. To me, this is our Emperor/Aphex Twin record, which is fun.” **“Magnolia”** “We decided on this as the first single because we wanted to come out with a haymaker. It’s one of the most to-the-point songs we’ve ever written. I think it’s very interesting and catchy, but in a condensed way that we’ve not yet explored in previous albums. The beginning riff is something that we had been sitting on since 2023; it was our soundcheck riff. Kerry came up with it, and it would often get stuck in our heads. Some of our writing happens on tour in those moments because everyone’s onstage, and we developed it from there.” **“The Garden Route”** “A lot of these songs really benefited from what we had learned on *Infinite Granite* in terms of songwriting and how to structure a song that’s lean and transitions well but still has an emotional punch to it. I think this song is one of those examples. It really couldn’t have been written without having done *Infinite Granite*. And I like that we sometimes do this harsh vocal over a clean guitar, which we first experimented with in 2014 or ’15. At the time, it was almost uncomfortably jarring but has since really become part of our sound.” **“Heathen”** “Again, a song that really could not have been written without *Infinite Granite*. The thing that was interesting with this song is that we had originally thought there would be no clean vocals on this record. But Kerry had this vocal idea for the beginning, and it really stuck with me. It was immediately catchy, and it really fit with the lyrics. After a quick conversation, we decided that the most Deafheaven thing to do is to do what’s natural to us and what we think sounds best. Setting a precedent for ‘no this’ or ‘no that’ was really contradictory to our whole ethos. And I’m glad we did because I think it’s a welcome element once you’ve gotten this far into the record, to hear this variety. It’s one of my favorites lyrically, too.” **“Amethyst”** “As we were writing this, we felt it was going to be the centerpiece of the album. I think it’s the favorite song on the record for a lot of us within the band. It might be my favorite. To me, it’s a fresh take on a very classic Deafheaven sound and structure. It has all the things that I like. And then, lyrically, it’s a centerpiece as well. The album artwork and the photography within the record are based on the lyrics to this song. I think both sonically and thematically, this is maybe the strongest representation of the album.” **“Incidental II” (feat. Jae Matthews)** “This was a lot of fun to put together. We have Jae Matthews from Boy Harsher on the track. We’re big Boy Harsher fans, and we have a lot of mutual friends. I was talking to one of them about what we were working on, and he suggested that we get in touch with Jae. We got on the phone, and I explained the themes of the album, and I sent her a very early version of the song to see if she was interested. She was excited, which I was really happy about. We flew her out to LA and spent a day in the studio. She wrote the lyrics for it after we discussed it. Much like ‘Incidental I,’ it’s such an important mood piece to the album, especially going into ‘Revelator.’ I think the two connect in a really wonderful way.” **“Revelator”** “This song is the bruiser. It’s just a lot of fun, and the credit goes mostly to Kerry. This is where his head was at a lot of the time when we were making this record, just wanting to go fast and write something that was pissed but sort of unhinged. There’s this clean break, and then it goes into this chaos of blast beats, and we layered a thousand guitars. It’s a very high-energy song, and one that I think is really built for our live show as well. A lot of these songs were written with the live show in mind, and I think this one most of all.” **“Body Behavior”** “I love this song. It is, even within our repertoire, a pretty strange one. It was the first song we wrote for the album. The guys were listening to a lot of krautrock, and so the verses come from there. It’s bass- and drum-driven and very cool. Again, that thing happens where this record couldn’t have been written without *Infinite Granite*. The entire bridge section is this *Infinite Granite* by way of \[Radiohead’s\] *In Rainbows* type of beautiful interacting guitars. Overall, I think this song was a little bit of us figuring out what we were going to do next. The first song you write for something new is always a little bit of that.” **“Incidental III” (feat. Paul Banks)** “This was purposely written to go into the next song, ‘Winona.’ They share the same kind of chord and lead structure. We discussed doing a monologue here, and then we agreed that it would be interesting to have someone other than me voice it. Having Jae on ‘Incidental II’ and Paul \[Banks\] from Interpol on this lets our audience more into the broader world of Deafheaven and what we like. To me, it’s obvious that we like Boy Harsher and Interpol, but I don’t think everyone else maybe sees it that way. This gives us an opportunity to show how well-rounded the project is—and to work with people that we really admire.” **“Winona”** “Winona is a 5,000-person town in Mississippi. It’s a town where my grandparents lived. A lot of my family is buried there and is from there. Along with ‘Amethyst,’ this is the other big epic on the record. The coolest thing about this song, for me, is that there’s a choir on it, which repeats throughout the track, and the choir is just a bunch of our friends. It was six men and six women, and Kerry and I conducted them, which we’d never done before. Much of the choir group were producers and musicians with real orchestral experience, so we’d be side-eyeing them, like, ‘Are we doing OK here?’ It was a lot of fun to make.” **“The Marvelous Orange Tree”** “The song is named after a magic trick from the 1830s, and it always felt like the closer. Again, with the clean vocal thing, while we were writing the song, we were just like, ‘This makes sense here. We should embrace this skill set.’ To me, it’s our big Mogwai track or something. It’s a really cool midtempo song that’s focused on density more than anything else. Because of that, it really sets itself apart from the rest of the record. It’s pure heft and no speed. It’s just a nice flavor to round out a record that dabbles in a lot of different things throughout.”
The remarkable thing about Mike Hadreas’ music is how he manages to fit such big feelings into such small, confined spaces. Like 2020’s *Set My Heart on Fire Immediately*, 2025’s *Glory* (also produced by the ever-subtle but ever-engaging Blake Mills) channels the kind of gothic Americana that might soundtrack a David Lynch diner or the atmospheric opening credits of a show about hot werewolves: a little campy, a little dark, a lot of passions deeply felt. The bold moments here are easy to grasp (“It’s a Mirror,” “Me & Angel”), but it’s the quieter ones that make you sit up and listen (“Capezio,” “In a Row”). Once he found beauty in letting go, now he finds it in restraint.
Even listeners familiar with Dan Bejar’s trip can find first encounters with a new album forbidding, a door slammed in your face when you’d shown up looking for a good time. A misty buffet of variety-show pop (“Dan’s Boogie”), Bowie-style glam (“Hydroplaning Off the Edge of the World”), and fake tropical jazz (“Cataract Time”), *Dan’s Boogie* is—like a lot of his albums since 2011’s *Kaputt*—both featherlight and impenetrably dense, filled with chintzy musical touches (the maudlin piano runs on “The Same Thing as Nothing at All”) and lyrical asides so flatly stated that the words strain against their meaning (“The Ignoramus of Love”: “I remix horses”). He’s funny, he’s surprising, he’s (ugh) “literate,” but most of all, you get the sense that he’s always nudging himself toward the unknown—a quality that commands respect when a lazier man would settle for a like.
The thing about desire is it relies on the not-having of the thing you want; then sometimes you get it, and the whole game changes. In the case of Lucy Dacus—the dreamy singer-songwriter and guitarist, best known these days as one-third of indie-rock supergroup boygenius—the conundrum could apply to any number of current-life situations, among them her unexpected success as a Grammy-winning rock god. “I think that through boygenius, it felt like, ‘Well, what else? I don’t want more than this,’” Dacus tells Apple Music. “I feel like I’ve been very career-oriented because I’ve just wanted to play music, satisfy my own drive, and make things that I can be proud of. Getting Grammys and stuff, I’m like, ‘Well, I guess that’s the end of the line. What is my life about?’” On her fourth solo album, *Forever Is a Feeling*, Dacus takes a heartfelt stab at answering that question, and in doing so, opens another desire-related can of worms. While the record explores the intoxicating, confusing, fleeting qualities of romance, it simultaneously functions as a fan-fic-worthy relationship reveal. (She went public with her relationship with boygenius bandmate Julien Baker weeks before the album’s release.) On *Forever*, Dacus dives headfirst into the implied complications, recruiting co-producer Blake Mills for subversive, swooning folk-pop numbers that revel in the mysteries of love, and what precedes it. Dacus’ songwriting has always been vulnerable, though perhaps never this much, nor in this way. “What if we don’t touch?” she begins the super-sexy “Ankles” by proposing—instead, she imagines hypothetical bitten shoulders, pulled hair, crossword puzzles finished together the morning after. (“It’s about not being able to get what you want,” Dacus says of the song. “You want to get them in bed, but you also want to wake up with them in the morning and have sweet, intimate moments, and you can’t. So, you just have to use your imagination about what that might be like.”) She explores the in-between stages of a relationship on the wispy “For Keeps,” takes a quiet road trip through the mountains with her partner on “Talk,” and on “Big Deal,” she wonders to a star-crossed lover if things could ever go back to how it was before, though the climactic final chorus suggests otherwise. Writing *Forever* brought Dacus closer to an answer to the question she posed to herself earlier, and she doesn’t care how cheesy it may sound. “I want my life to be about love,” she explained to Apple Music. “It feels corny to say. But that’s part of what this project is—the idea that talking about love is corny. I don’t think love is all you need, but I do think you need it amongst everything else.”
Ichiko Aoba has come into her own as one of Japan’s most vital artists since debuting at 19 years old, with her boundless curiosity and musical versatility only growing as her career has progressed. On *Luminescent Creatures*, she casts her gaze toward the sea, channeling its moments of tumult and peace into 11 meticulously crafted songs that glow with awe. Ichiko and her chief collaborator, pianist and composer Taro Umebayashi, deftly lead an ensemble through the Kyoto-raised Ichiko’s brief yet complex compositions, on which she shows her precisely honed instincts for employing both airy minimalism and oceanic grandeur. “COLORATURA” rises and falls like waves, its circling flutes and cascading piano propelling her whispered voice into a tangle of strings; on “Lucifèrine,” she creates a mille-feuille of her own voice, bringing to full brightness the “light deep within the soul” marveled over in her lyrics. *Luminescent Creatures* shows how Ichiko has evolved—not just as an artist, but as an observer of the natural world over the last 15 years.
After back-to-back albums focused on their love of horror, experimental hip-hop trio clipping. head into the cybernetic unknown on their sixth, *Dead Channel Sky*. Even as their sound has become progressively more streamlined since the lurching abstractions of their self-titled debut on indie institution Sub Pop back in 2014, co-producers William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes conjure pure and jagged bolts of electricity across these 20 tracks, borrowing equally from the mechanical menace of early house and techno and the kitchen-sink IDM of Squarepusher and Aphex Twin. As with clipping.’s previous records, *Dead Channel Sky* is a highly collaborative affair: Wilco guitarist Nels Cline contributes scorched licks to the inside-out instrumental “Malleus” while indie hip-hop legend Aesop Rock lends his distinctive pipes to “Welcome Home Warrior.” But the speed-demon dexterity that is Daveed Diggs’ rapping skills remain as clipping.’s mainframe; he acrobatically hops across the album’s ones-and-zeroes eruptions like a computer virus avoiding detection, guiding listeners through *Dead Channel Sky*’s corroded landscape with ease.
Released in the wake of his divorce from singer-songwriter Amanda Shires, 2025’s *Foxes in the Snow* is Jason Isbell’s first solo acoustic album, and his first album without The 400 Unit since his 2013 breakthrough *Southeastern*. But don’t let the context color things too much: Isbell’s best writing has a scythelike quality whether backed by a band or not, and relationships born, broken, salvaged, and mourned have been subject matter for him from the get. The lovelorn will no doubt revel in the agony and catharsis of “Eileen,” “Gravelweed,” and “True Believer” (“All your girlfriends say I broke your fucking heart, and I don’t like it”), but allow us to direct you instead to the folksy, John Prine-like wisdom of “Don’t Be Tough”: “Don’t be shitty to the waiter/He’s had a harder day than you,” and, later, “Don’t say ‘love’ unless you mean it/But don’t say ‘sorry’ ’less you’re wrong.” Anyone can cradle their ego, but it takes a gentleman to know when to put it to bed.
Great Grandpa’s third album almost didn’t happen. While working on the follow-up to 2019’s *Four of Arrows*, the five-piece drifted apart, with non-band life taking over and the members scattering from their onetime home base of Seattle to further-flung corners of the globe. But fate intervened, and in 2023 the group threw out what they’d been working on and began creating what would become *Patience, Moonbeam*. The album’s ambitious nature becomes immediately apparent with the opening interlude “Sleep,” a brief yet potent string piece that condenses the story arc of a night’s slumber into less than 40 seconds. But *Patience, Moonbeam* packages its aspirations in a collection that has the surface vibe of slacker-pop, with easygoing rhythms, instantly hummable hooks, and fuzzed-out guitars, making its sudden left turns and emotional peaks hit even harder. Take “Ladybug,” which at its outset meshes Great Grandpa’s chilled-out acoustic guitars with the ultra-processed vocals and buzzy synths that define hyperpop. That segues into a more traditional indie-rock shuffle. Lead vocalist Al Menne’s winsome wail free-associates pop-culture images—Donald Glover on the cover of *GQ*, a line snatched from “All You Need Is Love”—before the digitally refracted voice rises up again: “I wish I could feel that good,” it laments, over and over, the mechanized voice conveying genuine longing for a world that should exist somewhere. It’s a wild combination, but Great Grandpa’s ability to bring together those disparate elements and inject them with full-band emotionalism makes everything come together. *Patience, Moonbeam* is full of moments where Great Grandpa explodes in glorious, and at times heartbreaking, fashion. “Task” shapeshifts from hiccuping chaos into a longing hymn; “Kid” reflects on guitarist Pat Goodwin and bassist Carrie Goodwin losing their first pregnancy, all the while knowing that mourning is something not to be rushed. It’s a record defined by wonder and possibility, and it was made by a band that came back together just in the nick of time.
On their third album, Liverpudlian boys Courting continue to invite favorable comparisons to UK pop-rock phenoms The 1975. They both have an obvious predilection for long album titles, and *Lust for Life*’s bait-and-switch opening tracks—the orchestral place-setting of “Rollback Intro” followed by the rude rave music of “Stealth Rollback”—is practically and lovingly ripped from Matty Healy and George Daniel’s playbook. But pithy comparisons otherwise elude Courting’s delightful multifariousness as they smash a brief interpolation of Belle and Sebastian’s “Get Me Away from Here, I’m Dying” turducken-style into the upbeat jangle of “Namcy” and follow the snarling alt-rock of “After You” with a six-minute odyssey of a title track that includes multiple suites and heavy vocal processing. Courting is the type of band to try anything once and immediately knock it out of the park.
My Morning Jacket leader Jim James will be the first to tell you that the band’s 10th album is, on some fundamental level, more of the same: the same rootsy eclecticism, the same soft-but-chunky ’70s rock (“Squid Ink,” “Die for It”), the same lightly psychedelic insights into the human condition (“Everyday Magic,” “Time Waited”). “Love or hate the band, I think you could agree we try a lot of different things,” he says. “We’re open to any kind of music, any style of music, this or that. And I think this album is kind of the same.” The difference this time was in the approach—namely, the hiring of an outside producer, Brendan O’Brien (Pearl Jam, Bruce Springsteen), for the first time in their 25-plus-year career. The result was a collective shift in which the band was able to free themselves from the minutiae of record-making and relax into being a band—an experience James likened to an athlete connecting with the right coach (and this from a guy who insists he was “never good at sports”). Take “Everyday Magic” and “Time Waited,” highlights that come early in the album but that James wrote deep into the recording process. “It was hilarious because when I started working with Brendan, all these songs kept coming out,” James says. “I email him one song. I’m like, ‘Oh, my God. Check this out.’ No response.” Then another, and another. “‘I wonder if he just missed the email.’” Just when it seemed like he’d reached the end of his efforts, the right ones materialized. “I realized for the first time that I don’t have to take it personally,” he says. “Even when I was trying so hard to micromanage and force everything, at the end of the day, the record makes itself,” he says. *is* is.
On “Slugger,” the first track from SASAMI’s third album, *Blood on the Silver Screen*, the singer stamps out one of the oldest clichés in the book. Over shuffling hi-hats and a rubbery bassline she sings, “Whoever said that it’s better to have loved and to lost/Than to not have loved at all/Should just shut up forever.” Alongside co-producers Rostam and Jenn Decilveo, the LA-based indie rock star takes aim at the lovers and lust-hungry obsessives throughout. On “Love Makes You Do Crazy Things,” guitars screech and shout before SASAMI rolls through with a metal-worthy solo during the introduction. “Bet it all on you, now I gotta leave town,” she sings, exposing the dark underbelly that exists beneath the surface of pop music’s romanticism. The album finds her moving away from the experimental songwriting of previous records like 2022’s *Squeeze*, instead turning in a streamlined and diamond-sharp ode to the parts of love that suck.
The first volume of New Zealand indie heroes Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s all-instrumentals *IC* series leaned into the abstract. The Vietnam-recorded collection from 2018 was skronky and dissonant, landing somewhere between pure punkish exuberance and the looseness of free jazz. Seven years later—and following the alluring, luxurious album *V* from 2023—*IC-02 Bogotá* signals that even when it comes to UMO’s restless, experimental side, their slippery sound continues to mutate. Yes, there’s plenty of knotty and intriguing improv material to get lost in here; the record, recorded in its namesake’s Colombian city and featuring UMO godhead Ruban Nielson alongside his brother Kody, is bookended by two sidelong jams that tone down *IC-01*’s noise in favor of spiraling keyboards and hypnotic, elliptical rhythmic patterns. But the chewy center of *IC-02* also contains some of the band’s poppiest material in a while, from the psychedelic skips of “Earth 5” to the synths that dot the easy beat of “Heaven 7.”
“Play,” the pop-art experimentalist Brian Eno tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, “is a way of exploring things.” On *AURUM*, released exclusively on Apple Music in 2025, the ambient pioneer takes that idea to new frontiers, using sonic texture and his meticulous detailing to create hushed realms and grand landscapes. Collecting tracks that Eno debuted on his Apple Music Chill radio show AMBER, Eno’s first solo full-length since 2022 shows the British innovator at the peak of his powers. On “Gorgeous Night,” synthesized, sustained drones rise up and tangle into one another, creating the aural equivalent of a shimmering, imperceptibly shifting aurora borealis. “Material World” pairs harsh tones that recall an alert tone’s implicit warning with an insistent beat and metallic scrapes, evoking the pulse of a city before it melts into its darkest hours. “Friendly Reactor Near Menacing Forest” echoes the standoff-level tension of its title, its rumbling low end and insistent upper register seemingly at odds as oscillations and shooting-star synth-strings veer into the mix. *AURUM* is available in Spatial Audio, and, as Eno tells Lowe, he’s been working with the idea of making music immersive for years. In the past, he would set up boomboxes around a space and make them play at once. “They weren’t synchronized together—that was the whole point,” Eno says. “But not being synchronized allowed new clusters of sound to appear.” Now listeners can replicate that ideal at home, giving new breadth and depth to songs like the fog-shrouded opener “Fragmented Film” and the windswept “Cascade.” With *AURUM*, he continues to explore his sense of play while creating ambient music, a genre that he’s been instrumental in defining and refining.
If ever a band could seize victory from the jaws of defeat, it’s Doves. Rising, quite literally, from the flames of house outfit Sub Sub after their studio burned down at the end of the ’90s, the Manchester trio—Jimi Goodwin and twin brothers Andy and Jez Williams—alchemized a peculiarly northern strain of melancholy into soaring, atmospheric rock, scoring two Mercury Music Prize nominations in the process. *Constellations for the Lonely* is the group’s sixth album and their second following a decade-long hiatus, which ended with 2020’s *The Universal Want*. However, Goodwin’s issues with addiction and mental health meant that he was unavailable for much of the album’s recording. Rather than sounding like the work of a band in crisis, though, *Constellations for the Lonely* is one of Doves’ best efforts yet. From dystopian, *Blade Runner*-evoking opener “Renegade” and the cinematic, neo-psychedelic sweep of “Cold Dreaming” through the aching, Smiths-like “Last Year’s Man” and closer “Southern Bell,” with its triumphant blaze of glory, Doves sound stronger than ever here. “All the issues outside of the studio were really worrying and we faced a lot of challenges, but the musicmaking itself was really good. I guess the studio was like our safe space,” Andy Williams tells Apple Music. “We had to grab Jimi when we could but there’s a certain chemistry when the three of us are in a room together. There’s a certain chemistry in the way me and Jez work together and in how Jimi works and how we can work on each other’s ideas and songs without there being any ego. Everything goes through the Doves filter.” Read on as the Williams brothers talk us through the making of *Constellations of the Lonely* track by track… **“Renegade”** Andy Williams: “As a vocalist, Jez always brings an authenticity. This was just the rough guide vocal, there’s loads of imperfections on it, but he just nailed the mood of the song. That emotion is a million times more important than anything else. Musically, it feels quite dystopian. We were going for a bit of a Scott Walker vibe. There was a lyric in there about Piccadilly Circus and someone said, ‘Why don’t you change it to \[Manchester park\] Piccadilly Gardens?’ To me, the song is like Scott Walker walking around Manchester in the year 2025.” **“Cold Dreaming”** AW: “We love David Axelrod and Rotary Connection. That was our attempt at creating a song from that era.” Jez Williams: “But hopefully with a modern twist. We’re not interested in replicating the past, we’ve always taken sonics from all sorts of places. There’s always an undercurrent of abstract atmospheres underneath the music moving it.” **“In the Butterfly House”** AW: “This was one that Jez brought in quite early on. I really thought about the lyrical content of the song. The music was suggesting something, but I couldn’t quite grapple with what it was. I’ve always been interested in the history of murder ballads, so I thought of the image of a butterfly house where something had gone on there. I tried to create a little story about somebody coming back at night to this butterfly house and something had happened in there. It’s our subtle attempt at a murder ballad.” **“Strange Weather”** JW: “This was two separate songs until we realized there was a connection between them. There was about 20 different iterations of it until we nailed it. It was an enjoyable nut to crack but it wasn’t easy. The first bit is very spacious and conjures up lots of visual images, I think, then we completely flip it on its head, and it does a complete U-turn for this mad bit at the end. We played it all the way through live, which is the key. You can’t hear the join because there isn’t one!” **“A Drop in the Ocean”** JW: “I brought in that song. It was written in a completely different style, and we did a 180 on it. It was really fast originally, and we did it in half time. It was really important to bring out the soul of the track. If you listen to the production, it’s got that contemporary soul sound to it, that dark soul vibe that we were going for. We had the chorus, and Jimi came in and absolutely nailed the verses.” **“Last Year’s Man”** JW: “I really like this song. It feels quite old time-y to me, it’s got a bit of a Celtic thing going on. Andy brought in the idea and then we put it through the Doves filter. My kids are 17 and 14 and, lyrically, it touches upon those feelings of not wanting them to grow up, wanting to keep them the same but everything always keeps changing.” **“Stupid Schemes”** AW: “Jimi brought this one to the table. The album really needs it at that point. It was perfect. When me and Jez both heard it, it sounded a bit different for us with that psychedelic lead guitar, we don’t normally do that. It’s got this really bright, optimistic feeling to it which is perfect for the record. It’s a break from the intensity.” **“Saint Teresa”** AW: “Saint Teresa was originally going to go on \[previous Doves album\] *The Universal Want* but we thought it would make it a bit overlong. We’ve never been interested in making an album with 20 songs on it that goes on for an hour and a half. It felt right for this one, though. All three of us are lapsed Catholics, so Saint Teresa figures in that. Jimi wrote the verses and I wrote the choruses. Again, Jimi delivers a great vocal here.” **“Orlando”** AW: “This was one of Jimi’s. He brought it in, and we put it through the filter. I really like his vocal on that. It doesn’t directly reference anything, but I feel it’s got a feel of some of the things that he’s been through himself—there’s metaphors in there. I’ve never asked him about the lyrics on this one but to me it feels like his statement about what he’s been through.” **“Southern Bell”** AW: “We’ve read that it sounded a bit like Queen, who have *never* been a reference for us…” JW: “I told you at the time! It’s those bloody BVs. We actually stripped it down, it was way more Queen before, there was like 60 backing vocals on it! We wanted to do a big spaghetti western thing. I sing the first bit and then Jimi comes in and does the second bit. I really wanted to try that because the story’s about two people running out of time, running out of luck, but they’re going to go out in a blaze of glory. It’s almost like a conversation between the two of them. It worked brilliantly. Immediately, I was like, ‘That’s got to be the last song on the record.’ We knew when we did ‘Renegade,’ that was the first track on the record, and we knew when we finished ‘Southern Bell’ that that’s how we were going to go out.”
In his mid-to late twenties, Chicago rapper Saba earned a gold plaque for fan favorite “Photosynthesis,” performed on late-night TV, and made songs with rap greats like Black Thought and J. Cole. So, after a trio of thematically focused solo albums, his record with hip-hop production wizard No ID (Common, JAY-Z, Kanye West) finds him taking a confident, freewheeling approach. “Who is the GOAT, I wanna go toe to toe with it/’Cause I just know I’m not second to no n\*\*\*\*s,” he proclaims on “Woes of the World.” That doesn’t mean that he can’t still hold a subject though: “head.rap” pays homage to Black hair and his own locs, “Crash” romantically invites a woman to stay the night, and “How to Impress God” ponders spiritual fulfillment in light of his success. The synergy with his fellow Chicagoan is undeniable: No ID’s blend of bright piano keys and expertly chopped samples always hits, giving a warm landing place for Saba’s rhymes to land.
Since the early 2010s, the shadowy British collective Snapped Ankles has been raging against 21st-century malaise with harsh electronics and urgent beats. Clad in ghillie suits—outfits designed to resemble moss-covered foliage and other curios of nature—that seem more suited for hiding in a post-apocalyptic landscape than the present day, they create cracked anthems that feel like dispatches from a ruined future. Their fifth album’s title, which is borrowed from a 2010 collection of American author Alice Walker’s poetry, sums up how Snapped Ankles defy what they view as a complacent world. *Hard Times Furious Dancing* is not just their latest manifesto, though; it’s a noisy, up-front invitation to join the group’s pseudonymous members on the dance floor as they bellow big, society-shaping questions like “How we gonna pay the rent?” and “What happened to humanity?” Snapped Ankles combine the fitful rhythms of post-punk with a battery of synths that flutter and strobe, offering a glaring reflection for the confusion and unease outlined in the group’s sloganlike lyrics. At times, they echo their forebears from the ’70s and ’80s, updating the musical tracts of then with added noise and maximized vexation that’s appropriate to the present day. “Personal Responsibilities” tilts a crooked finger toward “very large corporations” amid a clamor that recalls British art-rock legends The Fall, while the grinding arpeggiated synths of the tech-skeptic call “Smart World” bring to mind Tubeway Army’s existentially bothered 1979 single “Are \'Friends\' Electric?” “Hard times require furious dancing,” Walker wrote in the preface to her poetry collection 15 years ago. “Each of us is the proof.” Snapped Ankles bear out that declaration with music that is furious in both intent and execution, fueled by wrath and ready to command an audience to seethe and spit alongside them.
The cover art for the sixth album from indie-pop dynamo George Lewis Jr.—aka Twin Shadow—features the handwritten signature of his father Georgie, who passed away from cancer in 2024. It’s a poignant visual cue for what is undoubtedly the most nakedly personal and reflective album of Twin Shadow’s career. Where so much of his discography exists in a never-ending summer of ’84 where Prince and Springsteen are jostling for the top of the charts, *Georgie* strips Lewis’ songcraft down to the core. The glistening guitars and neon-tinted synth textures remain, but the tracks are almost entirely devoid of drums or beats and left to freely float in a sea of melancholy and simmering resentment—the bittersweet serenade “Good Times” is really a chronicle of the bad ones and an indictment of fair-weather friends who never seem to be around when you need them the most. But on tracks like “You Already Know” and “Permanent Feeling,” Lewis’ intimately soulful voice displays a Bon Iver-esque ability to transform even the most skeletal songs into full-blooded, heart-pumping hymns.
