One summer night in 2022, during a break from shooting *The Crow* reboot in Prague, FKA twigs found her way outside the city to a warehouse rave, where hundreds of strangers were dancing to loud, immersive techno. The experience snapped the English polymath (singer, dancer, songwriter, actor, force of nature) out of the intense brain fog she’d been stuck inside for years—so much so that she was moved to invent a word to describe the transcendent clarity, a portmanteau of “sex” and “euphoria” (which also sounds a bit like the Greek word used to celebrate a discovery: eureka!). *EUSEXUA*, twigs’ third studio album (and her first full-length release since her adventurous 2022 mixtape, *Caprisongs*), is not explicitly a dance record—more a love letter to dance music’s emancipating powers, channeled through the auteur’s heady, haunting signature style. The throbbing percussion from that fateful warehouse rave pulses through the record, warping according to the mood: slinky, subterranean trip-hop on the hedonistic “Girl Feels Good,” or big-room melodrama on the strobing “Room of Fools.” On the cyborgian “Drums of Death” (produced by Koreless, who worked closely alongside twigs and appears on every track), twigs evokes a short-circuiting sexbot at an after-hours rave in the Matrix, channeling sensations of hot flesh against cold metal as she implores you to “Crash the system...Serve cunt/Serve violence.” Intriguing strangers emerge from *EUSEXUA*’s sea of fog, all of them seeking the same thing twigs is—sticky, sweaty, ego-killing, rapturous catharsis.
Squid entered into sessions for a third album keen to switch things up. The quintet’s second record *O Monolith*, released in 2023, was a dizzying blur of jerky art rock, prog-tinged folk, and eerie, experimentalist jazz, but things settle down a little on the startling *Cowards*. “We did want to simplify some aspects of this record,” says drummer and vocalist Ollie Judge. “That was kind of a springboard to focus a bit more on classic-y songwriting.” It has resulted in a record that feels like one the band has been building up to since they first emerged in the latter half of the last decade, where the thrilling alchemy of their playing locks into something more mesmeric. In streamlining their sound, Squid sound more powerful than ever with *Cowards* taking in hypnotic, motorik grooves, choral folk, epic bursts of strings, and propulsive, minor-chord rock. It is the work of a band realizing that less is more. “Doing something slightly more melodic and expansive was definitely something we had in mind,” adds guitarist Louis Borlase. “\[During the songwriting process\] we were kind of riding the wave and we didn’t have to stop and look around as much to make active decisions on how to let a certain idea come and go. It did feel like stuff was happening by itself. I think it’s the best record we’ve made.” Let Judge, Borlase, and bassist Laurie Nankivell guide you through *Cowards*, track by track. **“Crispy Skin”** Laurie Nankivell: “The working title for this was ‘Glass’ because we talked about how the opening keyboard lines had this slightly classic minimalist feel of a two-hand counterpoint that I think a lot of us are inspired \[by\] from the work of Philip Glass.” Ollie Judge: “I think this track shows the more chamber kind of feel to the record, with piano and acoustic instruments looking to set the stage. Lyrically, it’s just the same old dark stuff. It’s about cannibalism and an alternate reality where evil acts like that are normalized—and whether or not anyone could have such a strong moral compass not to indulge in things that are so widely normalized.” **“Building 650”** Louis Borlase: “This is one of the only tracks we’ve released which is under four minutes and that’s representative of the fact we wrote it quite quickly. It’d be nice if that happened more regularly. Sadly, it’s not the case.” OJ: “I remember we were doing some writing at our friend’s studio in Bristol and Jim Barr, who was Portishead’s touring bassist and is a man of few words, came in and said that ‘Building 650’ sounded like the bastard love child of Sonic Youth and Led Zeppelin. I see where he’s coming from.” **“Blood on the Boulders”** LN: “We started writing in a really nice cosy studio in really far-out East London called Arcus Sounds, run by two really nice friends. It’s a nice immersive room and you forget about your industrial surroundings and you can be in there for a long time and not get sick of it. It felt like that was quite a turning point in understanding the album in terms of how it was evolving sonically into something that we weren’t particularly worried about, the nakedness of sound. It’s probably the track where the parts are most out in the open on their own, at least for the first half of the song. We were really happy early on with the simplicity of the groove and how the vocals found their way into it. We were feeling good about how it didn’t feel like it needed any complicated or all-encompassing soundworld to take over the scene. Very importantly, it’s our first track where a little ‘E’ for explicit comes up on Apple Music.” **“Fieldworks I”** OJ: “Anton \[Pearson, guitarist\] described this as the problem child of the album. The first idea for the track was written in 2021 and I think we finished the final structure for it maybe a week before we went into the studio. It was originally all one track but got separated into two because it has two quite distinct sections. This was the one that set the tone for the record, I think, because it had just been with us for that long.” **“Fieldworks II”** LN: “We were quite keen early on to try out with \[producer\] Marta Salogni, seeing what it feels like to do a track or two with a producer we’ve never worked with before. We went up to The Church \[Studios\] in Crouch End and met Marta and came into this new space and said, ‘We’ve got this track that we know isn’t finished yet and we can’t make a decision on how the second half of it is going to end up but let’s record it anyway.’ The harpsichord that we made for the first half that you hear, that ostinato going through it like a thread, that was originally parts that me and Anton played on guitar that we really liked the harmonic feel of. But something didn’t quite sit with the idea of using guitars to do that. It marks quite a big turning point again to have this moment where we replace something that’s always been so central as a guitar, making it be played by another instrument, letting go of what you assume to be your go-to instrument.” OJ: “Yeah, it sounded a bit too like U2 with the guitars. It sounded too much like The Edge, so we had to take The Edge off.” **“Cro - Magnon Man”** LN: “Halfway through writing the album, it became really noticeable that we were talking about people more than places and caricatures. I’d come across this book in a charity shop, one of those quite dated 1970s picture books from science, and I was really struck by this outdated idea aesthetically of a figurehead of humankind and modernity that is…well you can’t ascribe the word tacky to it because we’re humans and Cro-Magnon people were the first early modern humans in Europe. It’s this idea of exploring a story of a pathetic self, a kind of hopeless case but for something that we’re also genetically based on, exploring the idea of the cave that the Cro-Magnon man lives in. Caves are always referred to and explored by psychologists as being representative of our mind, what we repress and what we can’t deal with.” **“Cowards”** LB: “This was the first track we wrote. There was a simplicity to it that felt like it struck quite true \[to\] what we wanted to achieve from the record.” OJ: “This is one of my favorite tracks on the record because if you dropped into the middle of the track and showed it to a Squid fan, they might not think it’s Squid. That’s always a really exciting prospect for anyone listening to a band that they’re a fan of.” **“Showtime!”** OJ: “The middle section of this one, where it gets a bit electronic and glitchy, was quite a task because there was just so much going on and it was hard to pin down what that section really was. We threw everything at it. There’s the string quartet, there’s drum machines, there’s synths, Arthur \[Leadbetter\] sampled some timpanis, which became quite a laborious process for him. It’s about Andy Warhol and how he was maybe quite an exploitative figure in the art world. I listened to a podcast about him. It was quite a trashy podcast, but it was reevaluating how he’s seen in popular culture.” **“Well Met (Fingers Through the Fence)”** LB: “There’s a hopeful but also somber feeling to the end of this song, which felt representative and nice to be like, ‘What’s next?’ as an end to the album.” OJ: “It’s got \[Copenhagen-based singer-songwriter\] Clarissa Connelly singing the lead in the first half. It was great to work with her. We hadn’t heard of her before we decided to record with her, it was a recommendation from \[Squid’s label\] Warp and we thought it was a perfect fit. She’s got a kind of ethereal, incredible range in her voice that goes so deep in the track.”
Horsegirl were in high school when they recorded their debut LP *Versions of Modern Performance*, an eye-opening, words-blurring blend of ’90s indie rock that was meant to feel live and loud. But the Chicago trio—Nora Cheng, Penelope Lowenstein, Gigi Reece—became a New York trio as they began working on its deeply personal follow-up, *Phonetics On and On*, an album of coming-of-age guitar pop written during Lowenstein and Cheng’s first year at NYU. “There is a loneliness and instability to moving that the three of us really experienced together,” Lowenstein tells Apple Music. “It brought us very close, having this shared experience of becoming a professional band really young, touring, then moving somewhere new—we started to lean on each other in a familial way. There\'s something overwhelming about this period in your life.” All of that—the intensity, “the intimacy, the ‘Where is home?’ sort of feeling,” as Lowenstein describes it—made its way into the minimalist pop of *Phonetics On and On*, recorded with Welsh singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon at The Loft, Wilco’s famed Chicago studio space. If before they’d turned to the noise and post-punk angles of Sonic Youth and This Heat for inspiration, here they found themselves discovering (and embracing) the immediacy of classic records from Al Green and The Velvet Underground. They realized they wanted to be vulnerable and direct, without sacrificing a sense of play or their sense of humor. “I got to college and I discovered The Velvet Underground beyond *White Light/White Heat*,” she says. “I heard *Loaded* and I was like, ‘Oh, wow: accessible, emotional songs that make me feel like I’ve felt this way before.’ As a songwriter, I was like, ‘What if I wrote as a way of reflecting on my own life,’ which was not really something that I had approached as a kid. Then it was more like, ‘How do I write music to just feel powerful?’” Here, Lowenstein takes us inside a few songs on the album. **“Where’d You Go?”** “Not to talk too highly of my own band, but we felt like there were songs on the record that could have been singles that weren’t. And we thought it was cool to open with a song like that to show that all the songs stood on their own in a cool way.” **“Rock City”** “That title was us just goofing around. Sometimes, the titles will become too joke-y and then we have to tone it down. That’s how you end up with songs like “Homage to Birdnoculars” or “Dirtbag Transformation (Still Dirty)” on the record. No one needed to do that. We tried to pare it down, but ‘Rock City’ made it through in terms of joke titles.” **“2468”** “I thought that song was a really shocking choice for us to make, and that’s part of why I’m proud of it. It just came together in the studio in a really playful, different way for us, and it felt like we unlocked this really new dimension to our band.” **“Julie”** “I originally wrote that song on an acoustic guitar, and we spent months trying to crack it, trying a million arrangements with an electric guitar and the full band. But it felt like something was lost from the song. In the studio, there was this freak accident where the engineer turned my guitar completely off—and then you only heard the arrangements that my bandmates had written to complement me. At the same time, I was just singing what, for me, is a really vulnerable vocal, but with the confidence as if I was playing guitar. That was a really intimate moment, and a metaphor for my bandmates listening to me, and something that ended up being stronger than what I had originally written.” **“Frontrunner”** “Nora and I live together, and basically I had just had a really terrible, emotional day. I was a complete mess. And it was at the weekend, and I hadn\'t gone anywhere, and Nora and I were like, ‘OK, we should just play guitar today, you need to do *something*.’ And we wrote that song together, like we had played guitar from dawn until dusk together in our apartment.”
Bartees Strange’s third album finds the Washington, D.C. singer-songwriter stretching his sonic limbs further than ever before—an achievement, to be sure, since Strange’s first two records (2020’s *Live Forever* and 2022’s critical breakthrough *Farm to Table*) cemented his ability to effortlessly hop between anthemic rock, dusky blues, and rap cadences within just a few minutes. With a slightly darker sound befitting its namesake, *Horror* adds a few impressive guises to Strange’s genre menagerie: There’s the explicitly Fleetwood Mac-esque jangle of “Sober,” the melancholic trip-hop skitter of “Doomsday Buttercup,” and the lucious house thump of “Lovers,” which might count as Strange’s starkest left turn to date. Across these 12 tracks, Strange also fine-tunes his winning formula of countrified balladry and propulsive riffs, both of which are given a big-ticket pop spit-shine courtesy of contributions from studio wizards Yves and Lawrence Rothman as well as the ever-ubiquitous Jack Antonoff. Don’t mistake big names for unnecessary flashiness, though: *Horror* retains the down-to-earth POV that’s made Strange an increasingly powerful presence in indie, even as his ambitions grow.
JPEGMAFIA has become one of music’s most trusted collaborators, working with artists ranging from Danny Brown and Kanye West to Kimbra and indie rocker Helena Deland. Despite his sterling stature, the Air Force veteran returns to his experimental, boundary-pushing roots on his fifth solo album, *I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU*. Mixing punk, noise, industrial music, and more into a chaotic cacophony, JPEGMAFIA has proven that success certainly did not change his pursuit of musical freedom. On opener “i scream this in the mirror before i interact with anyone,” JPEG spits over free-jazz drums and metal guitars that explode into screeching solos. He lays out a manifesto of sorts for his perspective, rapping, “When they can’t read you like a book/They gon’ try to attack what you stand on/I’ma take off even if I land wrong/And take everything I can get my hands on.” On “don’t rely on other men,” JPEG leans into his experimental roots and examines his decision to occasionally make a mainstream leap, though he certainly doesn’t do that here. Over a beat from a chopped vocal and blown-out drums, the rapper asks a simple question, wondering at what cost he’s willing to suffer for his art: “Wanna cry on the bus or the Maybach?”
The Wombats—Matthew “Murph” Murphy, Tord Øverland Knudsen, and drummer Dan Haggis—are widely associated with the British indie-rock revival from the early 2000s. As they’ve matured in the ensuing years, though, their sound has evolved beyond the scope of that world. On their sixth studio album, 2025’s *Oh! The Ocean*, they update the band’s geographic influence, too. After Murphy moved to LA, the band recorded in the city’s Echo Park neighborhood. Though the album title suggests a cheery, awestruck disposition, Murphy’s writing is as biting as ever. He takes aim at “see and be seen culture” on opener “Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come” and wades into the murky anxiety of modern politics on “I Love America and She Hates Me.” The cultural, though, is balanced by plenty of introspective moments, like on “My Head Is Not My Friend,” in which Murphy dives into the ecstatic highs, crippling lows, and run-of-the-mill mundanities that animate the band’s best work.
Though Jason Singer has been making music under the Michigander moniker since 2014, the Kalamazoo-bred songwriter’s self-titled effort from 2025 marks his first full-length endeavor. Early releases like 2018’s *Midland* EP and “Misery” from the following year helped establish Singer’s emo-leaning folk compositions. His songs center his passionate, yearning vocal performances against hard-charging drum grooves and shredding guitar melodies. It’s a style he updates on his first full-length, presenting his sound in its most polished state yet. “Breaker Box” is built around a morose piano line that accents Singer’s longing lyrics and drum fills that reverberate against the swelling string runs. Elsewhere, on “Episode,” the band lightens the mood, incorporating playful vibraslaps and hand percussion that neatly juxtapose Singer’s declaration that all might not end well: “I think I know/How this is gonna go,” he sings.
“This has been a healing album to make,” Chris Davids tells Apple Music. “It’s a collection of hopeful music made from a dark place.” For Davids and Liam Ivory, the British production duo better known as Maribou State, the road leading to their third album, *Hallucinating Love*, has indeed been a dark and tricky one. First coming to prominence with the emotive melodies and electronic warmth of 2015’s debut album *Portraits*, the duo went on to make their trademark a distinct blend of soulful vocals and dance-floor-filling songwriting. Yet, in 2021, following a triumphant European tour for second album *Kingdoms in Colour*, Davids’ physical health began to decline, culminating in a serious operation for a rare brain condition in 2023. As he awaited his procedure and during his recovery, *Hallucinating Love* took shape, resulting in 10 tracks of resolute optimism that traverse everything from the swelling strings melody of opener “Blackoak” to the cabin folk stylings of “Peace Talk” and the driving electronic drum groove of “Eko’s.” “The experience of making the record was one of overcoming hopelessness,” Ivory says. “The music projects a brighter future.” Read on for Maribou State’s in-depth thoughts on the album, track by track. **“Blackoak”** Chris Davids: “This is one of the first tracks we finished for the record and it became a benchmark for what we wanted the rest of the album to be. It began when we went on a writing retreat to Somerset and decided to make demos in two hours only, so we wouldn’t overthink the process. One day, we came up with this idea on a little Casio with our bassist Jonjo Williams, we sampled an Andreya Triana vocal that we loved and had the form of the track really quickly.” Liam Ivory: “We wrote it in a day and then it took something like a year and 25 demos to finish! Andreya thankfully tweaked and changed some of the vocals on a later session and then it was perfect.” **“Otherside” (with Holly Walker)** LI: “We came up with this idea on the same day as ‘Blackoak.’ We made a basic loop that we loved and then struggled to find a vocal that would work with it. Initially, it was a pop vocal sample as the hook but when we revisited the idea two years later on another writing trip, we took a vocal that the incredible singer Holly Walker had laid down for a song that didn’t make the cut on *Kingdoms in Colour* and that seemed to fit much better.” CD: “Two weeks before we had to hand the album in, I reworked the take of that vocal with Holly and then it all came together. It’s a beautiful last-minute addition.” **“II Remember”** CD: “When we were coming up with ideas for the album, we recorded lots of drum breaks on to tape with our drummer, and one of them became the basis for this track. A month later, I found a vocal sample that sat perfectly over the beat and that’s also when the middle eight came to me, which is actually just the reversed string part from ‘Peace Talk’—a track that comes later in the album.” LI: “The finishing touches came from some field recordings we made while walking around our local area in Walthamstow. You can hear someone talking from the market there before the middle eight comes in.” **“All I Need”** LI: “Another thing we did at the start of the album is a ‘sound harvest,’ where we went into the studio and recorded as many experimental and unique sounds we could to add texture to future tracks. One of the sounds we recorded was an Omnichord, and it formed the basis for ‘All I Need.’ Initially, we paired the track with the same Andreya Triana vocal sample from ‘Blackoak’ until we recorded with Andreya the following year and she laid down this perfect new part.” **“Dance on the World” (with North Downs)** LI: “This is the ultimate Frankenstein tune on the record! It spans the entire three years that we were working on the album, since it started on our first writing trip to Somerset as a piano-led bluesy track, then we took it to New York and it became a track that ended up feeling really out of place with our sound, so we admitted defeat. Later, though, we discovered another demo Chris had made that was more electronic and along the lines of a track like ‘Turnmills’ from our second record. Ultimately, we mashed them up together, rewrote the vocals and it all came together.” **“Bloom” (with Gaidaa)** CD: “We had a vocal session with the amazing singer Gaidaa in Amsterdam, and I chopped up one of the tracks we came up with to form the vocal melody for ‘Bloom.’ We were unsure if it should go on the record, though, until the end of the writing process when we scrapped quite a few tracks last minute and this idea resurfaced. We went back into the studio, rerecorded the parts and suddenly it was working really well.” **“Peace Talk” (with Holly Walker)** CD: “This first came from an idea that didn’t make it on to *Kingdoms in Colour* but that we always had an affinity for. We sent it to Holly Walker, and she put down the first vocal idea that came up and me and Liam loved it. It’s one of our favorite tracks she’s done with us. The incredible strings arranger Matt Kelly then recorded the strings parts and we fleshed out the end of the song with an experimental Aphex Twin synth part on the Moog Matriarch. We both really love the track because it merges lots of our favorite genres like folk, electronics, and heavy distorted guitar. It feels like the most original or accomplished track on the album.” **“Passing Clouds”** LI: “In the studio, while we waited to get set up in the live room, we played around on a Hammond B3 and piano and really liked what we spontaneously came up with. We then went on to make versions where we built the track up, or we left it as a quiet interlude, but finally we decided to go for something in between. It’s a moment to breathe on the record and the only idea on it that we played fully live and together.” **“Eko’s”** CD: “This was probably the first thing we wrote for the album back in 2020. We had just gotten some new bits of kit like a drum machine and laid down this idea, but then we didn’t work on it for three years until we started finishing the album and our drummer recorded the final drum part. It’s the first track I’ve ever sung on that we have used on a project.” LI: “Before ‘Blackoak’ this was the benchmark for the album, since as a demo it felt so forward-thinking and fresh compared to *Kingdoms in Colour*. It still stands out on the album.” **“Rolling Stone”** CD: “We began ‘Rolling Stone’ at the end of 2021 and it was completely different. It was fast-paced, like a lo-fi IDM, Burial-type track with vocals and when I showed it to Liam he was sure it should be the last track on the album. We hit a brick wall when it came to finishing it, though, until we worked with the producer North Downs and he said it felt much more like a tune for sitting around the campfire. As soon as he said that it made total sense, so we went away and slowed it down, put new drums on and got a choir of 20 of our friends involved to give it that campfire feel. It creates a lovely energy to end the album on.”
As a college student in the early 2000s, Kelela Mizanekristos used to rent a car and make the four-hour drive from D.C. to see Amel Larrieux sing at the Blue Note Jazz Club in NYC’s West Village. She’d tape the set on her recorder, then study it on the drive home. Two decades later, in May 2024, she told the story from the iconic venue’s stage, where she and her band performed unplugged selections from her catalog. Since her debut mixtape, 2013’s *Cut 4 Me*, Kelela has stood at the vanguard of the intersection between R&B and forward-thinking electronic music. But on *In the Blue Light*, captured during her Blue Note showcase, she translates futuristic cuts like “Bankhead” and “Take Me Apart” into timeless-sounding jazz and neo-soul numbers. Alongside tracks from *Cut 4 Me*, 2015’s *Hallucinogen* EP, and her two studio albums (2017’s *Take Me Apart* and 2022’s *Raven*), she throws a curveball—an ethereal cover of Joni Mitchell’s “Furry Sings the Blues.”
Björk, the Icelandic avant-garde musician known for her boundary-pushing sound and theatrical performances, takes us on a journey through her catalog during an exclusive show in Lisbon. While the performance leans heavily on *Utopia*, her ambitious 2017 project about healing and new beginnings, she also performs vivid early-career compositions like “Isobel” and “Hidden Place.” The set list was arranged to celebrate a lifetime of creative innovation, performed in front of a live audience, and mixed and mastered in Spatial Audio.
When Biig Piig, aka Irish pop dynamo Jess Smyth, listens back to her debut album, she hears a record that reflects how much music is a friend to her. These songs are where Smyth has channeled her emotions over the past few years, where she’s tried to make sense of the turmoil. “Within the chaos, the only thing that really keeps me together is music and being able to make it, and expressing through lyrics and melodies and storytelling—just to be able to talk to something and get my feelings out,” she tells Apple Music. “When I listened back to it, I was like, ‘Fucking hell!’ There was so many moments that I really needed a friend and music was that for me.” *11:11*, the follow-up to her excellent 2023 mixtape *Bubblegum*, marks the arrival of a striking new voice in modern music. The music deftly shapeshifts from one song to the next, an exhilarating ride through strobing electronic pop, minimalist, melodic techno, downbeat balladry, atmospheric trip-hop, and synth-disco anthems. One thing, says Smyth, unites them. “There’s a lot of sad bangers on this fucking record!” she hoots. “If you can’t celebrate it, what are you going to do, if you can’t get a little dance on whilst you’re crying?” Dab down your tears and head towards the dance floor: Biig Piig is here to take you through *11:11*, track by track. **“4AM”** “When I started ‘4AM,’ I knew I wanted it to be the first track because the way it starts is, ‘You could’ve hit me with the bad news first.’ And I was like, ‘I want that to be the opening line because I know that where we’re going with every other track, and the way we’re weaving through this relationship and diving into those things.’ I’m like, ‘Fucking hell, I wish I knew that it was going to hurt, diving in.’ It sparked something in me where I was like, ‘Oh fuck, I really want to delve deeper with it.’” **“Ponytail”** “This was made with Lloyd MacDonald \[aka producer/artist Mac Wetha\], who I really like because he’s so integral to everything for as an artist. I wouldn’t have released music without him so I really wanted to make sure that he was on this record. Lloyd is the OG, the first producer that I just ever felt comfortable enough to show music to and he was so encouraging with bringing things out. ‘Ponytail’ is a sad banger. It’s basically about a toxic relationship and trying to navigate how hard it is when you’re so attached to something that’s not good for you but you’re like, ‘Fuck, I just can’t really picture my life without it because it’s become such a pattern now that I need you, even if it’s killing me.’” **“Cynical”** “For this, I thought about walking through a city, flicking my hair, and being like, ‘Do you know what? I’m going to go to the bar, I’m going to have a good time.’ It’s when you’re a bit over it—all the fights and everything else with this partner, or with this person. You’re romanticizing your life, and then you run into him, and you’re a bit like, ‘Oh.’ It feels a bit more play-by-play of how that works, and the romanticization to get yourself out of that headspace. It’s about that and about city girls, and how everyone chats, and how it just gets around, summing up what it’s like to be a girl in the city, heartbroken.” **“Favourite Girl”** “‘Favourite Girl’ is a little pop banger. We love her. She’s so fun. I made her with Maverick Sabre and Zach Nahome, who are two longtime collaborators of mine that I love working with. We did ‘Kerosene’ before, the three of us. ‘Favourite Girl’ is tongue-in-cheek, it’s a flirty little track.” **“I Keep Losing Sleep”** “‘I Keep Losing Sleep’ took ages to get done. We had a loop that went on for about six hours, it was this big jam that we did in Paris with me, Zach, and Mav. ‘I Keep Losing Sleep’ was literally a 30-second clip of that jam and we worked off that little part of it and built it out. Lyrically, for me, it’s that point where you’re pretending you’re fine in the record, you’re like, ‘Everything’s good, I’m good, I’m coming back.’ But you’re not taking care of yourself and you’re like, ‘I keep losing sleep over this thing and it’s not helping.’” **“9-5”** “We wrote this in Montmartre, Paris in the studio. You can’t not want to make music there. It used to be Philippe Zdar’s studio, and it’s super small, everyone that works there has worked there forever. It’s super, it just brings something else out of you. Writing this, I was away from my partner at the time and I was missing him. It’s a love song, that kind of ‘I’ll go anywhere for you. I’ll do anything for you because I love you.’ That’s a part in the relationship where everything feels more romantic because you’re in love.” **“Decimal”** “This is a track also made in Montmartre with \[producer\] Andrew Wells. We were just having fun at this point, in a really good writing space. He was like, ‘What do you want this one to feel like?’ and I said, ‘Do you know what? Let me strut.’ He brought in this whole idea of a dance element that we get with the synths and this expanding bit and it just ended up happening. It’s quite a sexy tune. It’s just about finding someone, meeting them across the room, and being drawn to them, and losing inhibitions, and diving into that desire.” **“Silhouette”** “‘Silhouette’ is the opposite to ‘9-5.’ They’re like day and night. It’s one we also wrote in Paris at a different point in the year when things weren’t going so well. But it’s also an important for the story of the album, we’re exploring all sides of a relationship. This one is getting to a point where it’s ‘You know that it hurts me, why do you do it?’ and coming face to face with the pain of that and the loss of trust and the self-destructive thing comes into that a lot as well. I feel like a casualty in the fucking records that I made. It’s a heartbreak song.” **“Stay Home”** “This is about falling for someone, that point where everything’s a bit soft and sweet. Then I was like, ‘Do you know what? My family and my friends have been so important to me through everything and they’re really what represents love to me, there’s no chance I’m making my first record and not having them on it.’ I was like, ‘Let’s do it, let’s go to the pub and we’ll get everyone down with some drinks, and we’ll do a recording of the chorus.’ So we did that, which is so cute, so messy but so cute. Through relationships, through everything, through different points in your life, who do you look to as real love? That’s family and friends for me.” **“One Way Ticket”** “This is a sad one, about someone that I lost in my life. So many things are happening now and, \[in\] the last couple of years have been happening—and it’s sad that he’s not here to see them. He’s someone that I wish I could share that with and so this is a love letter to him a little bit, just to let him know what’s going on, and to be like, ‘Wow, you always said this would happen and now you’re not here to see it, but you’re here.’” **“Brighter Day”** “‘Brighter Day’ is the overarching moment where you look back on everything that’s happened, and you go, ‘Fucking hell, it’s mad!’—and watching someone go and accepting that that’s what’s happened and where you are in your life. It’s appreciating every moment for what it has been and being hopeful for the next round.”
