Each Stereolab album functions as a portal to a future we once imagined but never achieved: a world of flying cars, egg chairs, and space-age bachelor pads where the coolest Franco-pop, German psychedelic, and Brazilian jazz records are spinning 24/7. And so it remains on the indie icons’ first new album in 15 years, which begins with a minute-long flourish of oscillating synths that sounds like an old mainframe being rebooted back to life. *Instant Holograms on Metal Film* finds the Stereolab machine in perfect working order after an extended period of inactivity, and, if anything, the group sounds eager to make up for lost time with gloriously overstuffed songs that key in on familiar pleasure points while introducing all manner of shapeshifting surprises. “Immortal Hands” eases you into a laidback loungey groove before hitching itself to a funky drum-machine beat and coasting through a dizzying swirl of brass and flutes; “Electrified Teenybop!” plays like the theme music to some alternate-universe dance show where the kids get down to a frenetic fusion of ping-ponging Kraftwerkian electronics and lustrous disco orchestrations. But, as ever, Stereolab’s splendorous soundworld is built atop a foundation of pointed political commentary addressing our present-day struggles and inequalities: Embedded within the breezy kaleidoscopic pop of “Melodie Is a Wound” is a scathing indictment of social media disinformation and the oppressive elites that manipulate it to their advantage. And yet, when the band returns to their motorik hypno-rock roots for the song’s exhilarating second act, they reassure us that utopia is still within our reach.
Turnstile is hardly the first band raised in a tight-knit DIY hardcore punk scene to graduate to big-tent popularity and grapple with what that success should look like. For the Baltimore-based five-piece, a stint opening for blink-182’s 2023 reunion tour served as a hands-on apprenticeship. “That summer was definitely a master class of existing in that space,” Turnstile bassist Franz Lyons tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “Riding with blink, they’re great people, but also their supporting cast—everything they do behind the scenes is very sharp, and it was cool to be in a situation where you have to learn how to mend your creative way to a different lens.” These lessons all came in handy in the making of their fourth album, *NEVER ENOUGH*, which doubles down on the genre-expanding—and, subsequently, audience-expanding—twists of 2021’s breakthrough *GLOW ON* and throws in an ambitious visual-album component that ties all 14 songs together. Among those songs are not just the tuneful, heavy midtempo anthems like the title track and “DULL” and hopped-up hardcore like “BIRDS” and “SUNSHOWER” that made *GLOW ON* stand out, but even bolder stylistic gambits like “I CARE” and “SEEIN’ STARS,” which channel The Smiths and The Police, respectively. The nearly seven-minute centerpiece “LOOK OUT FOR ME” somehow seems to incorporate bits of all of these at once. For singer Brendan Yates, who also produced the album, this is all part of a more thoughtful, confident, and collaborative approach to songwriting that was certainly helped by the luxury of having more time—and more resources—to let ideas evolve. “If there is a song that’s just very simple and you’re like, ‘This doesn’t sound like anything we’ve ever done, and maybe people are going to hate this, but the intangible is really there for me right now,’” he says. “So it’s like embracing that.” And sometimes trying new and more daring things also means throwing all those away in the end. Yates cites the album-closing “MAGIC MAN” as a song that began as a demo with just himself and a synth, expanded and contracted through many more iterations, and ultimately wound up as…just himself and a synth. Turnstile credits their versatility and trust in one another to having spent half their lives in Baltimore’s punk scene learning instruments on the fly, playing in multiple bands at once, and innately understanding the importance of community. These lessons, too, come in handy as the band begins to find themselves headlining the kinds of venues—possibly with pit-unfriendly seats—where they very recently were guests. What looks from the outside like complex ambition really is, from the band’s vantage point, little more than close friends with shared history indulging one another’s biggest swings. “When trust is your really big element that makes things function easily, that involves people’s happiness, too,” says Yates. “And being able to just be happy to do what you’re doing and be happy looking forward to what you’re about to do, it requires a certain amount of willingness to throw yourself into the deep end.”
What makes the darkness of billy woods’ raps bearable is that you’re always a step or two away from a good joke or decent meal—a real-world, life-goes-on resilience that has been the bedrock of hip-hop from the beginning. That said, *GOLLIWOG* is probably the most out-and-out unsettling album he’s made yet, a smear of synth rumbles, creaky pianos, and horror-movie strings whose dissonances amplify scenes of otherwise ordinary dread, whether it’s the Black artist trying to charm the boardroom of white executives on “Cold Sweat” or prolonged eviction scene of “BLK XMAS.” Now in his mid-forties, woods is confident enough in his critique to make you squirm in it and has a rolodex of some of the best producers in underground rap to back him up, including Kenny Segal, El-P, Conductor Williams, and DJ Haram. Spoiler alert: The real monsters are human.
Soon after The National singer Matt Berninger released his solo debut, *Serpentine Prison*, in the fall of 2020, its name seemed to backfire. After two decades as one of indie rock’s most magnetic lyricists and vocalists, he was trapped inside writer’s block, stuck in a cycle where anything that resembled work or even input induced despair. That trap slowly broke as he and his band began work on 2023’s *First Two Pages of Frankenstein* and its surprise follow-up, *Laugh Track*; their rebuilt rapport slowly revived his lexicon. That same year, Berninger and his family left Los Angeles after a decade, with their country escape to Connecticut recalling scenes of his Ohio childhood. He settled into new rhythms and modes, writing lyrics between the seams of baseballs. *Get Sunk*—a reference to that earlier depressive period and, implicitly, springing out of it—steadily took shape. To make *Get Sunk*, Berninger and longtime engineering partner and producer Sean O’Brien bounced around a Los Angeles studio, building beats and sequences for six hours at a time until Berninger finally found the words that fit. They recruited a sterling support cast, including Hand Habits’ Meg Duffy, session ace Booker T. Jones, and Ronboy leader Julia Laws. They called their dozen or so helpers the “Saturday Musicians.” Berninger’s voice has always been The National’s calling card, the athletic baritone at its center. Wouldn’t a solo album, especially a second, just feel redundant or reductive, an imitation of its more famous setting? But *Get Sunk* is marked by an unexpected versatility. Where he cannily mumbles his way through the textural maze of “Nowhere Special,” he becomes ultimately approachable on “Junk,” a gorgeous and gothic love song that suggests Nick Cave. Where “Frozen Oranges” is a Middle American fever dream about searching for contentment, “No Love” documents the end of personal chemistry, of a relationship that once held meaning now corroding into, at best, niceties. The linchpin, though, is closer “Times of Difficulty,” where that whole big band gathers together to offer an anthem for interdependence, to reaching out for a lift when you get sunk. “Feels like we missed another summer/If we’re not dying, then what are we?” he moans. Getting on, best we can.
A casual listener could be forgiven for not being able to distinguish Foxwarren’s self-titled 2018 debut from the celebrated solo albums that its frontman, Andy Shauf, releases under his own name. Though he’s the sort of singer who rarely raises his voice above a casual-conversation murmur, Shauf can’t help but sound like anyone but himself, thanks to that instantly recognizable folksy twang in his voice and a signature storytelling style that masterfully toes the line between comedy and tragedy. But with the second release from Foxwarren, Shauf’s long-running but sporadically active band with his childhood pals from Saskatchewan, this avowed Randy Newman disciple has started taking notes from GZA. With Foxwarren’s five members spread across four provinces, Shauf turned to sample-heavy ’90s rap classics like *Liquid Swords* for guidance on how to stitch their isolated parts together into a cohesive statement. The result is an album that brilliantly blurs the line between traditional ’70s-singer-songwriter craft and cinematic sound collage. Where a tender serenade like “Dance” could’ve easily been presented as a stripped-down piano ballad, here it’s situated within a splendorous swirl of mutated strings, flute loops, and gently drifting rhythms, like a dreamy remembrance of some bygone Hollywood golden-age musical (an effect enhanced by the snippets of found-sound dialogue threaded throughout the record). And with the mellotron-smeared grooves of “Strange,” the glam-rock swing of “listen2me,” and the disco-house motion of “Wings,” *2* bottles up all the energy and excitement of old friends who’ve discovered new ways of unlocking their creativity. Close listeners of Shauf’s work know that, beneath the sad-sack surface, his writing can be very funny—but, for the first time, it sounds like he’s truly having fun.
Aesop Rock does not talk or tour. He has not been on a stage since 2017 or been interviewed since 2020. Instead, what one of his generation’s most recognizable and masterful voices continues to do as he enters the back half of his forties is rap—four albums since 2020 alone, each filled with his most harrowing or humorous experiences and a seemingly dauntless supply of esoteric or obvious enthusiasms. When he barks, “Anomaly in the algorithm, do the algebralculus/I’m all of Alexandria’s information in aggregate” at the start of “Checkers,” from his sprawling *Black Hole Superette*, it feels like he’s supplying a thesis statement of one—to be one of rap’s great outsiders, his rhymes free to do whatever they want. Would anyone else dare, after all, to spend three minutes chronicling the exponential growth curve of the snail population inside the aquarium he bought for his girlfriend, as he does on the dazzling “Snail Zero”? Or to use his dog’s mutt status and his cat’s tumescence to form a sort of superhero posse, as on “Movie Night”? Aesop Rock gets from Francis Bacon to H Mart, from EPMD to shaving cream and Nautica parkas, from the escape of his childhood hamster to the survival of Lahaina’s banyan tree in a matter of a few rhythmically intricate verses over spring-loaded beats. “Whole worth wrapped in what you can make with your bare hands/When sitting independent of the greater square dance,” he offers at one point, as if sneering at the music industry from the perfect privacy of his own studio. Indeed, no one else sounds or moves like Aesop Rock; on *Black Hole Superette*, he’s perhaps never sounded more like himself. The landmark track here might be “John Something,” where Aesop relays a story from his college days in Massachusetts above a hard-edged piano cut between percolating hand drums. It’s the tale of a visiting artist, possibly named John, who shows up to class to share slides of his photos but mostly just extols the Foreman-versus-Ali documentary *When We Were Kings*. Aesop rushed out to see the film and then felt its rush of excitement for himself, as he understood how vivid and compelling good storytelling might be. The gift of that artist was not his own work, but the enthusiasm he passed along for great work. It is clear that Aesop Rock—who counts Lupe Fiasco, Armand Hammer, and Open Mike Eagle as guests here—has passed that energy along to his successors and peers, even as he has remained on the industry’s outskirts. Thing is, he happens to remain one of the best rappers working too.
The Norwegian art-pop duo (Henriette Motzfeldt and Catharina Stoltenberg) met in high school in their hometown of Oslo, then moved to Copenhagen for school—in Motzfeldt’s case, the Rhythmic Music Conservatory, the incubator for some of the most forward-thinking pop music of the 2020s, from Erika de Casier to ML Buch. Since their 2016 debut EP *Okey*, the pair have entered into something of a creative mind-meld, occasionally writing songs from one another’s perspectives. On *Big city life*, their second studio album (following 2021’s *Believer*), Motzfeldt and Stoltenberg swagger through the cityscape of their own cheeky fantasies, a flirty neon pleasure dome where anything can happen. On “Roll the dice” and “Feisty,” they spit cool, campy bars about making friends in crowded bathroom lines and drunk taxi rides: “’Cause you’re a girl in the city/You just know how it is/You’re a professional, logistics, you just know this business,” they hype themselves up over a minimal drum-synth-piano riff. “You got time and I got money,” with its playfully swooning lyrics and sweeping string arrangements, plays out like the last karaoke number of the night.
With their first two albums, Sports Team captured the frantic, visceral thrills of their live show but they instill a sense of suave order to third effort *Boys These Days*. This is a record where the English indie rockers—who formed in Cambridge in 2016 with a specialism in wry, anthemic observations of Middle Britain—get their groove on by channeling the dapper ’80s stylings of Bryan Ferry and Prefab Sprout. Seeking to make a more intricately crafted studio album without it being anything as dull as that sounds, the six-piece headed to Bergen, Norway to work with girl in red and CMAT producer Matias Tellez. The result is a record that melds the playful thrills and melodious joy of 2020’s *Deep Down Happy* and 2022 follow-up *Gulp!* with a sumptuous, soulful sound that takes in exuberant, sax-assisted indie pop (slick opener “I’m in Love (Subaru)”), Pulp-esque wistfulness (“Maybe When We’re 30”), rollicking fusions of Britpop and Morricone (“Bang Bang Bang”), and freewheeling, melody-heavy sing-alongs (“Condensation”). At their best, they sound like early-’80s Elton John as reworked by *In it for the Money*-era Supergrass. As with their earlier output, though, there is razor-sharp perception lurking within all the cheeky winks to camera, and themes such as the uncertain shift from teenager to adulthood, the weaponization of nostalgia, doom-scrolling, war, and influencers with dogs all crop up over the course of these 10 tracks. In *Boys These Days*, Sports Team have made a grown-up pop record without losing the sense of what made them so exciting in the first place.
Ben Kweller’s seventh studio album is marked by an unimaginable tragedy: the death of his teenage son Dorian in a car crash in 2023. “The last two years have been the hardest times in my life,” Kweller tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “I replay that night over and over again in my head, and I’ve had to relearn how to live.” A month after Dorian’s passing, Kweller discovered a digital trove of music that his late son had been working on, which lit the spark that created *Cover the Mirrors*; the aching ballad “Trapped” draws from a melody Dorian had been working on. “I remember hearing him in his bedroom singing this amazing chorus, and I walked in and I’m like, ‘Dude, this is awesome, keep going,’” Kweller recalls. Even as some of *Cover the Mirrors*—especially the stream-of-consciousness piano-led opener “Going Insane”—emerged from the solitude of grief, the record finds Kweller embracing the warmth of collaboration more than at any previous point in his career, with contributions from Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield (“Dollar Store”), MJ Lenderman (the rollicking and elegiac closer “Oh Dorian”), Jason Schwartzman’s Coconut Records alias (“Depression”), and The Flaming Lips (“Killer Bee”). “The one thing that’s kept me together through this is community,” Kweller says. “I’m usually so protective of my music, and I think most artists are—but I’ve been so cracked open that I’ve really enjoyed and embraced it.”
For more than a decade, the musician born Nat Ćmiel has been exploring what it means to be a 21st-century human (or post-human): On 2022’s *Glitch Princess*, yeule probed the limits of the flesh by way of modulated vocals and decaying Danny L Harle beats; on 2023’s *softscars*, the artist who once identified as a cyborg tiptoed into the corporeal world, inspired by the fuzzy rock music of the late ’90s. Their fourth album, *Evangelic Girl Is a Gun*, takes their glitchy avant-pop even further out of the matrix, eschewing Auto-Tune entirely to showcase their vocals at their rawest and most visceral. Enchantingly abject vignettes about doomed love and ego death play out over sexy-sad soundscapes that draw from ’90s trip-hop and alt-rock, with production from Mura Masa, A. G. Cook, and Clams Casino. Imagine the most morose possible version of a Charli xcx song and you’ve got the title track, on which yeule purrs dispassionately: “Nosebleed on the Sunset Strip/He picks me up in a fast whip/He laces up my leather boots/He wears a blood-stained velvet suit.”
Whether it’s Merrill Garbus’ megaphone vocals, her righteously indignant messaging, or the percussive rhythms thundering beneath them, Tune-Yards have never trafficked in subtlety. But with their sixth album, the creative partnership of Garbus and bass-playing hubby Nate Brenner delivers its most clearly articulated statement to date. *Better Dreaming* is the duo’s fiercely funky response to spending several years cooped up (first with the pandemic, then with a newborn), and a defiantly optimistic affront to a world descending into chaos and rage. Featuring guest giggles from their offspring, “Limelight” is a joyous jam with a pronounced P-Funk vibe, while the clattering disco-house workout “How Big Is the Rainbow” is an instant LGBTQ+ anthem that you can imagine being blasted at Pride parties around the world for years to come. But *Better Dreaming* acknowledges that staying positive in a world mired in negativity requires constant diligence and self-care, and with “Get Through,” Garbus delivers an inspirational soul serenade to keep us racing toward the light: “We don’t know how we get through,” she sings, “but we do.”
“I wanted to make a record that was not going to be anything like what we’d done and something we couldn’t make in Australia,” vocalist/guitarist Caleb Harper tells Apple Music about Spacey Jane’s third album. It’s the sound of a band venturing outside their comfort zone. Such a goal doesn’t come without a little hardship. Relocating to Los Angeles to make the album, some of the issues the West Australian four-piece faced were practical, like figuring out how to get a rental without credit history. Others were artistic, with Harper learning how to work with outside writers such as Sarah Aarons (“Whateverrrr,” “How to Kill Houseplants”) for the first time. “All of those things felt new and foreign and scary,” he says. “I hear it lyrically. I feel this vulnerability and some confusion.” Shepherding the band through the process was producer Mike Crossey (The 1975, Arctic Monkeys), with whom Spacey Jane spent 12 weeks tracking the record. Given that they dedicated 18 months to writing the LP—which incorporates synths (“Falling Apart”) and even a piano-led ballad (“Ily the Most”) into their indie-guitar arsenal—*If That Makes Sense* accounts for roughly two years of the band’s life. “It’s the most work we’ve put into a record,” says Harper. The singer’s upbringing is a recurring lyrical theme and the album’s title is a response to the emotional complexity. “It’s the last line on the last song of the record,” he offers. “It’s representative of this idea of saying all these things and then discounting it with ‘if that makes sense.’” Here, Harper takes Apple Music through *If That Makes Sense*, track by track. **“Intro”** “On ‘Through My Teeth’ there are all these little peddling arpeggio guitars and synths, and we had 20 of them that we whittled down to four or five. Mike was playing around with them one day, just in isolation, and I filmed it with my phone. A month later, I said to Mike, ‘Listen to this, how cool was this on its own?’ So the intro is actually that audio ripped from the iPhone video and then it blends into all those voice memos of me writing the music over the preceding two years.” **“Through My Teeth”** “It’s about the identity crisis I felt when I was 17, 18, and just being a mess and feeling like people don’t know who I am anymore. I’m this person to this new group of people I’ve met and I’m unrecognizable to the people I’m leaving behind, and it’s all through the lens of this fucked-up little kid running around getting drunk, which was essentially me.” **“Whateverrrr”** “Sarah \[Aarons\] and I \[wrote the title\] like that when we were texting back and forth. It’s just stupid, how a kid might write it or say it. That ties into the song—it’s a kid being like, ‘Whatever, but I’ll think of you forever.’ It’s this awful sense of, there’s things that you can’t control that are so far away from you now as an adult that are like the foundation of who you are as a person. It’s like a reflection on family life, and it’s this juxtaposition of running through the sprinklers but something’s dark, something feels fucked up, and when you look back on it you can’t quite balance the two experiences.” **“All the Noise”** “It’s an attempt at \[reflecting on my parents’ split\] without putting any extra research into it. It’s what I’ve heard about what happened and what that may be. This was quite an angry sounding song, but it’s anger at not knowing. It’s not directed at anyone.” **“Impossible to Say”** “Sonically, we were thinking about Beck a bit. None of us are really Beck fans, but Mike was like, ‘Listen to a couple of these songs, that’s a cool direction.’ Having Ashton \[Hardman-Le Cornu, guitarist\] on the acoustic guitar is a rarity, in fact it’s the first time. He might have played a few bits on acoustic \[in the past\] that made their way into songs, but he’s on acoustic that whole song, which feels pretty different, and it’s a really exciting dynamic for us.” **“How to Kill Houseplants”** “It’s the idea that you try and give everything to this plant, this relationship—the right amount of love or sunlight or water or not enough—and it seems like you just keep fucking killing it despite your best intentions.” **“I Can’t Afford to Lose You”** “It’s a pretty simple love song, and \[it’s about\] trying not to screw something up. I wrote it on a tour bus in Denver and basically finished it in a couple of hours when the band were out doing some stuff. There’s not much to unpack there. It is what it is on face value.” **“So Much Taller”** “I’m lucky to be in a place of much better self-love than I was when I was still figuring out life. It’s about that. That kind of sums up the song in a lot of ways, and feeling like you’re constantly succumbing to a darkness and a cloud that is just there.” **“The More That it Hurts”** “I wrote it with Jackson Phillips, who goes by Day Wave, and he loves weird tunings. The guitars are so detuned. We just really liked that chorus. It goes chorus, verse, chorus, and then bridge and chorus, and so the goal was really to make the rest of the song work around those three choruses. Which was really fun.” **“Estimated Delivery”** “That song had a splice sample of what is essentially a breakbeat groove, and then we recreated the drums through 30 different layers. Kieran \[Lama, drummer\] plays a simplified version of it acoustically, and we have two drum machines running two separate loops. Then you slam all that together and run it through a tape machine. It took two days to make that drum beat. That’s the kind of shit you get up to when you have three months.” **“Falling Apart”** “Sometimes there’s a propensity to blame who you are and what you do on things that happened to you in the past, and I hate when people do that. But it’s basically what I’m doing in this song.” **“Ily the Most”** “Way out of my comfort zone. It’s a piano ballad, which we’ve never done before. It’s a hard song for me to sing, it’s pushing my range a lot of the time, and it’s a really raw, pop vocal right at the front. It’s just a love song, tied in with the fear of losing someone. That’s an important part of it. I love you, but fuck, I’m probably going to lose you.” **“August”** “That song is like the closing of a chapter in my life. I started writing it in September 2022, and I didn’t finish the lyrics until March 2024. It spans essentially the whole process of making the record and took on new meanings, from a letter to my family, to then a partner, all these chapters. I was also moving out of my house in LA, I’d packed everything up, I was surrounded by boxes, it was the last day of vocals, of any tracking, and I was just crying in the studio finishing those last lines. It all culminated in this quite emotional moment.”
At this point in his increasingly eclectic career, it seems preposterous to call Ty Segall a garage-rocker, the label that’s stuck to him ever since he blasted out of Laguna Beach in a flurry of fuzz and feedback back in the late 2000s. And while the 10-song/40-minute format of *Possession* may position it as a leaner counterpoint to 2024’s sprawling prog-folk-jazz odyssey *Three Bells*, its compact package belies the amount of structural complexity, textural detail, and melodic ingenuity that Segall crams into each of these tunes. It’s a record built on familiar reference points—acoustic Zeppelin riffs, Bowie/T. Rex pageantry, Plastic Ono Band groove—that’s always taking you to unexpected places, as songs like the strings-’n’-sax-swirled “Shoplifter” and the funky-glam workout “Fantastic Tomb” cycle through multiple sections and accrue more power each step of the way. But even as he plunders the history of British rock with surgical precision, Segall remains an unkempt West Coast punk at heart: He signs off with “Another California Song,” an acerbic Golden State anthem infused with equal amounts of California dreaming and dreading.
You’ll probably recognize the general sounds and styles on Ezra Furman’s 10th album: Beatles-y psych-folk (“Sudden Storm”), quasi-industrial ’90s pop (“Submission”), soft-focus disco (“You Hurt Me I Hate You”), and Springsteen-style garage (“Power of the Moon”). What’s great about Furman is the way she manages to make all these familiar, almost stock forms feel idiosyncratic by pushing them to their expressive limits. Like great karaoke, the key to her performances isn’t the way she pulls things together but the way she falls so joyfully, dramatically, performatively apart, queering the edges of pop tradition until it frays at the seams.
“I’ve been realizing that I really made the album that I needed to heal myself,” Kali Uchis tells Apple Music about *Sincerely,* perhaps her most liberating work yet. The Colombian American singer-songwriter’s catalog has never felt slight or frivolous, whether in English or in Spanish. Yet this full-length follow-up to her 2024 *ORQUÍDEAS* dyad presents as something truly unique, arriving roughly a decade after her promising EP debut *Por Vida*. The majority of the songs here began simply as voice notes, fortuitously captured in inspired moments outside of the confines or pressures of a studio setting. “Messages would just feel like they were directly coming through me, and I just had to get them out,” she says. Given such natural creative origins, it should come as little surprise that the actual process behind the album eschewed industry norms altogether, favoring home recording and unconventional settings. And despite the demonstrated level of guest vocal talent at her fingertips, she opted out of features, too. “When you’re making emotional music, you have to actually dig into difficult subjects,” she says, marking a clear distinction between this piece and its star-powered predecessor. As a result, *Sincerely,* feels disarmingly intimate for what is ostensibly a pop album, even one from as consistently adventurous an artist as Uchis. The evocative moments of opener “Heaven Is a Home…” and closer “ILYSMIH” speak on love in grand and sweeping gestures, the passing of her mother and the birth of her son making understandably profound impacts on the work. Influences like Cocteau Twins and Fiona Apple can be felt in all that comes between those bookends. “There’s a lot of grief, but there’s a lot of joy,” she says, describing what seeps through the veil of “Silk Lingerie,” or the vamps of “Territorial.” Excess punctuation on titles like “Lose My Cool,” and “For: You” hint at the flowing prose of her lyrics as it contributes to an even greater whole. “I think it is a celebration of life in its own way,” she says, “in the sense of finding beauty in the pain and taking the good.”
Certainly, any Pulp fan who caught the long-dormant Britpop legends on their 2024 reunion tour would’ve been completely satisfied with just hearing the ’90s classics we never thought we’d get to hear performed live again. But the surprise inclusion of some new tunes on the set list made it clear Jarvis Cocker and co. were not interested in being a mere nostalgia act. And now, less than a year later, Pulp has gifted us with a new album—and while it arrives 24 years after their last one, *More* actually came together with unprecedented expedience. “The previous two Pulp records \[2001’s *We Love Life* and 1998’s *This Is Hardcore*\] had a bit of a concept for them, and that slowed everything down,” Cocker tells Apple Music. “And this time I just thought, let’s not think about it. Let’s do it. And then you’ve got a lot of time to think about it later. Like the rest of your life, for instance.” With *More*, Pulp carries on as if the first two decades of the 21st century never happened, restoring their singular balance of disco decadence (“Spike Island,” “Got to Have Love”) and string-swept elegance (“Tina,” “Farmers Market”). As the elder black sheep of Britpop, Pulp always possessed a self-deprecating wit and lived-in wisdom that distinguished them from their more brash, lager-swilling peers, and as such, they were always less interested in glorifying youthful hedonism than probing adult relationships. So they can effortlessly reclaim their role as Britain’s shrewdest observers of social manners and misbehavior even as Cocker has crossed the threshold into his sixties. *More* is imbued with the simmering anxieties of a singer who knows he’s not getting any younger: Echoing the streetwise strut of Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger,” the urgent “Grown Ups” finds the guy who once sang “Help the Aged” starting to “stress about wrinkles instead of acne” himself, while the Spector-esque splendor of “Background Noise” closes the curtain on a long-term coupling where familiary has curdled into contempt. But even by the group’s sophisticated standards, piano ballad “The Hymn of the North” (featuring Chilly Gonzales) is a breathtaking display of melancholy and majesty that affirms Pulp is still in a different class all their own.
Listening to *MAD!*—the 28th studio album by Sparks, the fraternal duo of Ron and Russell Mael—it can be difficult to remember that they have been a band for more than half a century, with both brothers now on the doorstep of 80. Pairing aggressive programming and vivid electronic textures with sharp rock-band backing, these 12 songs are edgy, canny, and electrifying, eternal trademarks of Sparks’ music that have only sharpened with time. And that has been intentional, confirms Russell. “When you’ve had 28 albums, you want to impress yourself, that you can still do things that are modern-sounding, not like a band with a 28-album history,” he tells Apple Music. “We work hard at trying to do things that are provocative, lyrically and sonically.” The Maels talk about the process behind and inspiration for each track. **“Do Things My Own Way”** Russell Mael: “‘Do Things My Own Way’ is probably the mantra that Sparks has pursued for our entire career, from day one, when Todd Rundgren was the only person to acknowledge Sparks’ capabilities. We were turned down by a million labels, but he said you should always do things your own way. He said that, even on our very first album, we’d created our own universe, and we should continue on that way.” Ron Mael: “This is really the first song written for the album. We don’t carry over older, unused material onto a new album, so we start from scratch. After we recorded all these songs, it seemed fitting that it be in first place, because it is an overall statement of the album and Sparks.” **“JanSport Backpack”** Ron Mael: “We realize the practical uses of a JanSport, but we were in Tokyo and saw quite a few fashionable young ladies who were wearing JanSport backpacks. That isn’t a luxury brand, but they were wearing it as a style statement. That image stuck with us, and we tried to work backward to see how we could use it in a song. So, there’s a girl who’s breaking up with a guy, and the image he has is her walking away with a JanSport backpack. We have much confidence that, on Apple Music, you won’t find another song about JanSport backpacks.” **“Hit Me, Baby”** Russell Mael: “This is someone hoping it’s a nightmare, but the reality is that they are living this nightmare that we all are. We’re in Paris now, so it’s refreshing to not have “that man” in your face all the time, like when you’re in the States. The song obliquely references the hopelessness of the situation all around, but we didn’t want to be so blatant as to spell it out exactly. It can be about anyone else’s own situation, where they’re having a bad time that they hope goes away.” Ron Mael: “It was written in a more general sense before the election, but it became obvious that, even subconsciously, it had a more specific meaning. We like details in songs, but it’s important for us to have lyrics that don’t only reflect a particular subject, that they have a broader subtext. But it still took on a more specific meaning after the election.” **“Running Up a Tab at the Hotel for the Fab”** Russell Mael: “It’s a guy who is trying to impress his partner by taking her to this fine hotel and running a tab in hopes of swaying her. But the guy doesn’t have the means to pay for the extravagant tastes, so he gets thrown into prison at Rikers Island. But he says it’s all worth it, because he’s hoping she’ll come to visit him there.” Ron Mael: “In the distant past, we only wrote a song, then brought it in to record. We still work that way, but we also have the luxury, since Russell has a studio at his place, of just going into the studio and starting without any kind of preconception. We get a more varied approach, and this is one song that was done from the studio standpoint, then working backwards to figure out a melody and lyrics.” **“My Devotion”** Russell Mael: “Some people have tried to look deeper into it and say, ‘Well, surely it can’t just be a really nice love song.’ But, no, it’s just a really nice love song. We hope that, lyrically, it’s charming, with the guy’s devotion being so strong that he’s written her name on his shoe and is even thinking of getting a tattoo. It’s one of my favorite lines on the album.” **“Don’t Dog It”** Ron Mael: “With the line ‘Shake it thusly and you’ll see the light,’ we like having words from two different worlds. ‘Shake it’ is a cliché in a million songs, but ‘thusly’ is such a formal word. They are in conflict as far as the tone, but it’s a formal way to suggest something carnal. We like butting up together, so to speak, words. It’s a Shakespeare thing applied to hip-hop expression. We’re also encouraging movement as a way to fight. The person is seeking help, and the advice that they’re given isn’t something deep and intellectual. It’s ‘shake it thusly.’” **“In Daylight”** Ron Mael: “For most of us, darkness is more advantageous to our opportunities for romantic advancement, let’s say. In so many of our songs, the instrumentation and singing are very direct, even if it’s musically complex. We often attempt to make songs aggressive, but this one was a little more diffuse. There’s an atmosphere here, and it feels blurred, which is the feeling of being between daylight and darkness.” **“I-405 Rules”** Russell Mael: “There’s some sincerity to the image of the I-405 having a beauty in its own way, especially if you look at it at night, when thousands of cars are bumper to bumper, and you see the red taillights. It’s a sea of red, especially if you’re above the freeway, say, at the Getty Center. Lots of other major cities in the world have this beautiful river—the Seine, the Thames, the Sumida. But we don’t have that, except when, once a year, it rains in LA, when it even starts to look like a river. The I-405 is our contribution to the great rivers of the world. This song is also so sonically in your face that it’s overly dramatic for the subject matter, and we like that it goes counter to what we’re singing about.” **“A Long Red Light”** Russell Mael: “We like this song a lot, because it’s not a typical song structure. It’s a piece that evolves over time with a simple subject—waiting for a red light to hopefully turn green someday. Over time, it shifts musically, and, toward the end of it, you can sense the frustration that the light is still red. It turns into this big chorale, with a lot of voices and orchestral drums coming in. The situation becomes really urgent, and we like that in a song that deals with a small situation, a red light that everyone’s been to. That was challenging for us in a positive way.” **“Drowned in a Sea of Tears”** Russell Mael: “It is a devastating relationship breakup song. There’s been pop songs throughout history that have had the theme of drowning. We wanted to find another way of doing that. This one is really melodic, and, in contrast to ‘A Long Red Light,’ it’s a verse and a chorus kicking in a big way.” **“A Little Bit of Light Banter”** Ron Mael: “We see it as this couple that feels that they’re different from other couples that do need all these in-depth discussions. This couple is happy to do something that’s the opposite of that, and they feel a closeness because they just share this love of light banter. They don’t care what the neighbors think, and hopefully it comes across as charming, for a couple that feels they’re outside of the world of heavy-duty discussions. The advice that we’re given is that we’re supposed to read and discuss Kafka at night, but it’s not always wise advice.” **“Lord Have Mercy”** Russell Mael: “It is another take on a relationship. While this woman is asleep, her partner hears her singing this melody, and it’s so beautiful for him to hear. He’s heard melodies from buskers on the street that were OK. He’s heard melodies from various times and periods. But this melody he’s overhearing from this woman in her sleep becomes something so striking and profound for him.” Ron Mael: “He’s not necessarily a believer, but the beauty of her singing while she’s half-asleep has captivated him so much. He hears what she’s singing not in a lyrical sense about religion and being converted, but he just finds beauty in what she’s singing and hopes it continues forever.”
The central theme running through the beguiling third album by Shura is stripping everything back and starting over, no matter how daunting that feels. *I Got Too Sad for My Friends* marks a complete artistic reset for the London-born, Manchester-raised singer-songwriter, one that grew out of a period of emotional turmoil. Moving away from the sad banger synth-pop of her first two records, 2016’s *Nothing’s Real* and 2019 follow-up *forevher*, it’s a record steeped in an Americana-ish sway and folky reassurance. Shura found that the way out of the gloom that enveloped her during lockdown, where she was increasingly cutting herself off from her inner-circle, was to return to how she’d written songs as a teenager: alone in a room with an acoustic guitar. It gave her a path back, the route that led to the hazy, wistful warmth of *I Got Too Sad for My Friends*. It opened up a dramatic overhaul in how she made music. Working with a new producer (Foals and Depeche Mode collaborator Luke Smith), Shura got down the majority of the record in live takes that were tweaked and honed further down the line, constantly daring herself to try new things. It has taken her to the defining album of her career so far, a record full of rich melodic hooks and a soothing melancholic glow, from the country longing of “Richardson” via the expansive ’80s pop of “Recognise” to doe-eyed campfire ditties (plaintive closer “Bad Kid”). It’s a fresh start in all the best ways, a third album that feels like a startling debut. Her pals would surely agree—it was all worth it in the end.
Dan Mangan has spent so many years drifting away from his formative folky sound—through experiments with electronic beats and post-rock textures—that it’s almost a shock to hear him casually picking on an acoustic guitar at the start of his ninth album. Recorded over six days at a southern Ontario cottage with a seasoned cast of Canadian indie ringers (Zeus’ Mike O’Brien, Ron Sexsmith’s go-to drummer Don Kerr, bassist Jason Haberman), *Natural Light* sees the veteran Vancouver singer-songwriter returning to his rustic roots but singing with the wisdom and worry of a concerned parent wondering what kind of planet his kids will inherit. There’s an ever-present tension between the wood-cabin warmth of the performances and Mangan’s world-weary lyrics: “Diminishing Returns” is a doomscrolling diagnosis of our fragile earth soothed by a string-swept soft-rock groove, while the acoustic elegy “Soapbox” sounds like a state-of-the-union address from the most dejected busker on the block, yielding a slow-burning protest song exuding equal amounts of grit and grace. But *Natural Light*’s weighty topicality is eased by Mangan’s keen self-awareness and dry wit: “This mopey introspection is getting old,” he deadpans on “No Such Thing As Wasted Love,” but with *Natural Light*, Mangan reverts to his old ways with a renewed sense of purpose.
