The fact that Dijon Duenas had a hand in producing one of 2025’s most anticipated indie-rock releases (Justin Vernon’s two-part Bon Iver opus *SABLE, fABLE*) and most surprising pop-star comeback (Justin Bieber’s *SWAG*) speaks to his singular standing in the contemporary musical landscape. Arriving mere weeks after he became every Belieber’s most popular search term, Dijon’s second full-length, *Baby*, is an open invitation for his recent converts to follow him deeper into his lo-fi underworld—and a reassurance to his longtime fans that he isn’t farming out all his best production ideas to famous guys named Justin. On the conjoined opening tracks “Baby!” and “Another Baby!,” Dijon comes off as part Prince, part Salvador Dali, rendering his sensuous serenades in pitch-shifting surrealist style, like tapes from a late-night “Paisley Park” session left out to melt in the morning sun. And whether he’s indulging in the sound-collage gospel of “HIGHER!,” the distorted dub-soul of “FIRE!,” or the barking dog-assisted folk ballad “loyal & marie,” Dijon’s real superpower is crafting straight-from-the-heart songs and then throwing them delightfully off-balance, perpetually dropping elements in and out of the mix with a “what does this button do?” sense of mischief.
As the frontwoman for pop-punk heroes Paramore, Hayley Williams has spent her entire professional life in the major-label system, having first signed to Atlantic Records in 2003 when she was just 15. But following the worldwide arena tour for Paramore’s 2023 album, *This Is Why*, the contract expired, and she returned to her concurrent solo career as a fully independent artist for the first time, completely unburdened by the weight of commercial expectations—and from any conventional notions of what even constitutes a proper album. In August 2025, she dropped a whopping 17 new tracks online at random, inviting fans to create their own playlist permutations. “I really did want to shirk the responsibility,” she told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe at the time. “I was kind of interested in other people’s perspective, also, because there’s just a point where you’re in the eye of that storm, you’re making things, you’re going through shit, and you can’t possibly have perspective.” However, four weeks after that initial data dump, Williams finalized her own version of the tracklist and officially corralled those songs under the title of *Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party*. You can understand why sequencing these tracks was such a daunting task: *Ego Death* feels a lot like listening to five-disc CD changer stocked with ’90s faves on shuffle mode, bounding between fuzzy Breeders-styled odes to anti-depressants (“Mirtazapine”), No Doubt-like tropical-pop mash notes (“Love Me Different”), and pure Alanis-worthy catharsis (“Hard”); she even works the chorus of Bloodhang Gang’s “The Bad Touch” into the grungy folk dirge “Discovery Channel,” transforming the original’s horndog hook into a raw expression of animalistic lust. But while *Ego Death* draws from a kaleidoscopic pop palette, Williams’ punk-rock heart beats loudly throughout, as she takes side-eyed shots at the Nashville establishment on the deceptively breezy title track, while using the gothic trip-hop backdrop and deadpan Lana-esque vocal of “True Believer” to paint a damning portrait of so-called Christians who “pose in Christmas cards with guns as big as all the children.” As a parting gift, Williams appends *Ego Death*’s original 17 loosies with the previously unreleased “Parachute,” which seamlessly folds Williams’ punk past and alt-pop present into a triumphant closer that sounds like Chappell Roan working up the nerve to stage-dive into the pit at Riot Fest.
Following the widescreen dream pop of 2021’s *Blue Weekend*, Wolf Alice felt some sonic skin shedding was in order for their fourth album. “We were thinking about what we were doing in a much more calculated way,” bassist Theo Ellis tells Apple Music’s Matt Wilkinson. “I don’t know whether it’s age or whether it’s having done this for the fourth time, but less was more with this record.” Recorded in LA with Adele/Paul McCartney producer Greg Kurstin, *The Clearing* finds the North London four-piece stripping back the alt-rock fuzz and shoegazey FX that had characterized their earlier releases for a more classic sound. One with a warm analog glow and rich FM radio-friendly melodies that positions them closer to ’70s soft rock than the 2010s indie scene from which they broke out. Listen closely, and there are nods to that golden era bubbling up throughout *The Clearing*: drummer Joel Amey’s “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover”-cribbing shuffle on “Leaning Against the Wall,” the ELO/Beach Boys chug that drives “Bread Butter Tea Sugar,” and guitarist Joff Oddie switching between breezy strumming, intricate fingerpicking, and searing melodic lines like *Rumours*-era Lindsey Buckingham. Such echoes reflect the band’s listening habits: a stack of records on heavy rotation in the studio that included Fleetwood Mac, George Harrison, and folk-rock outliers Pentangle. “This time, we weren’t afraid to give references. Maybe in the past I felt that I didn’t want to give them because then it would sound like that,” singer Ellie Rowsell says of the band’s touchstones when making *The Clearing*. “But now I felt much braver to say, *this* is my reference. I knew that it was going to sound like us because I understood what we were a bit more.” The wide-open space afforded by *The Clearing*’s musical palette allows Wolf Alice’s finest set of songs to date to shine. Whether it’s “Just Two Girls’” sparkling, disco-flecked pop, Rowsell’s hushed reflections on aging and motherhood on “Play It Out” or “White Horses”—a remarkable interpolation of folk and krautrock that startles without having to turn everything up into the red. “Maybe there are people who are scared of rock music that is soft. ‘Soft rock’ has felt like something I should never say out loud up until now,” reflects Rowsell. “I don’t care. I’m interested in music that you can play live that is energetic and performative without having to be all distortion pedals and shouting and fast and loud. I like that stuff still, but there’s certain songs that we have in our set where I’m like, ‘Why is this an “up” part of the set when it’s just a good acoustic guitar?’ Or, ‘How come I feel like I am giving 100 percent when I’m not stomping around on stage screaming in people’s faces?’”
If the title of Deftones’ 10th album seems provocative, that’s because it’s supposed to. “I like the exclusivity of the name,” vocalist Chino Moreno tells Apple Music. “It feels restricted, maybe naughty. It has all these connotations. But it was the name of the folder on my desktop where I would put stuff while we were working on all the songs.” Written and recorded over two and a half years in Nashville, Joshua Tree, and Rick Rubin’s Shangri-La studio in Malibu, *private music* sees Moreno, guitarist Stephen Carpenter, drummer Abe Cunningham, and keyboardist/turntablist Frank Delgado reteaming with producer Nick Raskulinecz, who helmed their 2010 album *Diamond Eyes* and 2012 album *Koi No Yokan*. The album’s first single and leadoff track, “my mind is a mountain,” came out of a studio jam. “It was one of those songs like ‘Change,’” Carpenter says, referencing the band’s signature tune from 2000’s *White Pony*. “We were just in the room messing around, and it started forming.” “I love the fact that it’s bombastic,” Moreno adds. “There’s a push and pull in that song that I really love. It’s heavy, but the one way that we collectively always describe our band is, no matter what style of music it is, we always like to feel that you can nod your head to it. This song has that head-nod thing.” “i think about you all the time” came out of a quiet moment Moreno had on the beach near Shangri-La. “I remember getting up in the morning, walking down the street, jumping in the ocean, coming back in my swim trunks and sitting there in my bare feet with the guitar and just start playing,” he says. “That night, I made a cup of coffee and said, ‘Nick, let’s record that thing I did this morning.’” “milk of the madonna” is a thunderous Deftones banger, with Moreno’s emotional tenor soaring over the band’s swirling, writhing tempest. “infinite source” was the first song written for the album: Carpenter came up with the original idea in Nashville before he, Moreno, and Cunningham completed it on tour. As Moreno points out, *private music* has staying power. “Nothing feels like it was a snapshot of that time and now we’re in a different place,” he says. “Two and a half years after their inception, the songs still feel very much immediate.”
The Florida-born singer-songwriter’s 2022 debut album, *Preacher’s Daughter*, was not exactly standard pop fare—a Southern Gothic odyssey steeped in themes of original sin and family trauma, whose fictional protagonist (spoiler alert) dies at the end. Nevertheless, the album broke through to the mainstream, even cracking the Top 10 of the Billboard 200 following its vinyl reissue this spring. Her long-awaited second album, January 2025’s *Perverts*, sat somewhere between passion project and provocation; its 90 minutes of eerie ambient collages seemed designed to challenge fans, if not shake them off entirely. Eight months later, Cain’s third album revisits the narrative that began with *Preacher’s Daughter*, whose centerpiece, “A House in Nebraska,” is a melancholy ode to Willoughby Tucker, the protagonist’s first love. *Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You* functions as a *Preacher’s Daughter* prequel—a story of two young, damaged lovers for whom doom is a powerful aphrodisiac. “I can see the end in the beginning of everything,” she sings on the reverb-drenched “Janie” before concluding grimly: “It’s not looking good.” Between sprawling ambient-folk stunners like “Nettles” and “Tempest,” Cain slips in a handful of moody instrumental interludes à la *Perverts* and a pair of fan favorites initially released as demos: “Dust Bowl,” a staple of her live sets for years, and the 15-minute “Waco, Texas,” for those who like their slow-dance numbers with a hearty dose of fatalism and a sprinkle of ’90s cult lore. Fitting for a concept album set in 1986, there’s also “Fuck Me Eyes,” a synth-pop power ballad starring a hell-raising, denim-wearing angel.
Like the so-called slackers of early-’90s alt-rock (Beck, Pavement, etc.), Mac DeMarco’s sleight of hand is to make beautiful music without apparently trying—a chiller so chill he doesn’t write songs so much as wait for them to come snuggle up in his lap. *Guitar* is his most quietly striking album since the landmark *Salad Days*, stripping the slimy synth textures and bubbling drum machines out of his early sound to reveal sparse, paper-thin soft rock whose eerie melodies and gently jazzy chord progressions have more in common with ’40s-era pop like The Ink Spots and The Platters than anything from the underground (“Sweeter,” “Nightmare”). “Miracle, reveal yourself to me,” he sings at the beginning of “Holy,” channeling the meditative stillness of a John Lennon demo or early-’70s Al Green. It might sound wimpy at first. Then you realize a sound so naked and dry leaves him nowhere to hide. That’s strength.
A key theme of The Beths’ fourth album is that linear progression is an illusion. “I feel like there’s a through line of difficult things happening, and the realization that everything \[is\] not going to keep gradually improving, and that life is often a bit more cyclical, or more of an up-and-down that you’re constantly moving through,” vocalist/guitarist Elizabeth Stokes tells Apple Music. “Which sounds like a depressing thought, but it doesn’t feel depressing. It doesn’t feel optimistic either. It’s just what it is.” In the years preceding the album’s creation, Stokes underwent several challenges that reinforced this notion. Having started taking an SSRI to address mental and physical health issues—she’d recently been diagnosed with Graves’ and thyroid eye disease—she found that the medication’s positive impact was countered by a clouding of her ability to write music. “I wasn’t able to write a song,” she explains. “I feel like I lost my internal compass. The SSRI was great for digging me out of the hole I was in, but my writing is so emotionally driven and my gut reactions were so different.” To counter the writer’s block, Stokes read Stephen King’s *On Writing*, *How Big Things Get Done* by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner, and *Working* by Robert A. Caro. At one point, she spent every morning writing 10 pages of stream-of-consciousness material on a typewriter. “I’d write about stuff I don’t normally like to write about because it’s too painful or close to home, or it makes me feel weird,” she says. “So, I was able to approach some of that stuff and ended up using a lot of that material. I’ve always written emotionally and from my own experience, but it feels like it’s going further than that. It’s definitely gone deeper.” Whether addressing the numbing side effects of the SSRI in the ragged, frenzied “No Joy” or Stokes’ complicated relationship with her mother in the fragile “Mother, Pray for Me,” *Straight Line Was a Lie* maintains the New Zealand quartet’s knack for pairing pop-infused melodies with spirited, jangly indie rock. Here, Stokes takes Apple Music through The Beths’ fourth album, track by track. **“Straight Line Was a Lie”** “Once I’d found the through line, I didn’t think we had a song that summed it up. I was on the bus on the way home after a session of working on the album and sang it into my phone. I don’t normally do the thing where the second verse is just the first verse, but it felt appropriate for it to be circular and feel like a journey you go on again.” **“Mosquitoes”** “It’s mostly about Oakley Creek, which during the \[2023\] Auckland Anniversary Weekend floods got wiped out. It’s a very beloved space. It’s now 2025, and it still hasn’t recovered. There are no paths anymore; it’s kind of grown wild a bit and changed a lot. To some extent, it feels like a lot of life is just being eroded, but nature continues on in a way that’s comforting. You can say Oakley Creek got destroyed, but it didn’t. It’s still there—it’s just different.” **“No Joy”** “It’s about not finding joy in the things that you normally find joy in. It’s weird. You’re not sad, but you’re also not able to find happiness. It’s its own weird purgatory. That came out in the song where it’s a very tense, neurotic riff. Nothing’s very high or very low; everything’s in the middle but trying to make it feel fun despite that. You don’t want the song to make you feel nothing.” **“Metal”** “It’s talking about existing in a human body and all the systems and functions that your body needs. It’s very complicated, and it’s kind of a miracle that it exists. But also, I’m going through all this weird health stuff, and I don’t really feel in control of what is happening in my body and my brain. I was trying to learn about what was going on with the human body and just being frustrated that I didn’t understand it, and the song’s kind of ping-ponging between those two perceptions of yourself.” **“Mother, Pray for Me”** “It’s about my relationship with my mother. She is a first-generation immigrant from Indonesia. We moved to New Zealand when I was four. It’s about our relationship and the gulf of understanding that exists between us, where we don’t really understand each other, and our lives growing up were such different experiences, and this feeling of trying to meet in the middle and understand the other.” **“Til My Heart Stops”** “It’s a very yearning song. I quite often feel like I push people away. It’s very easy to isolate yourself, especially if you’re feeling a bit weird and you can put walls up between you and other people: people that I love, people that I know well, people I wish I knew better. But there is this real desire to be a part of the world and be close with other people and to not have that. The euphoria I want to experience is there at the end of the song, but you have to fight to get to it.” **“Take”** “‘Take’ is really fun to play. It’s kind of hectic and driving. It’s about the call of the void of taking something to help you through when you’re struggling, whatever that is for you, whether it’s drinking, which is the national sport of New Zealand and Australia sometimes. The call of it is very strong. It’s just about coping, I guess.” **“Roundabout”** “It’s quite constructed, more so than our other songs, and a lot more spacious than we normally are, which is kind of scary. We always want to fill every inch of space. It’s about people you’ve known for a very long time and how you love all the different versions of them. People that you’ve known since you were different people, and you know that you’re going to be different people again in the future.” **“Ark of the Covenant”** “That’s a reference to Indiana Jones. It’s like, don’t look at the Ark of the Covenant ’cause if you look at it, your face will melt off. Sometimes you feel like there are things in your brain which you don’t want to visit, things about yourself that you don’t want to address, ’cause they feel terrifying. And then, you look at them, and they’re not the Ark of the Covenant. Your face doesn’t actually melt off. It’s fine.” **“Best Laid Plans”** “It’s just a fun song to finish on. It’s about the fantasy of giving up and indulging yourself in that. You know you can’t, you can never give up, you shouldn’t give up. But sometimes, when something’s hard, you’re just like, ‘But what if I just did it?’ What if I just let go and float away?’ It’s just embodying that feeling as an indulgent fantasy, and then afterwards, you can come back to earth and get it done.”
Though 2023’s *Everyone’s Crushed* marked a significant breakthrough for experimental New York pop duo Water From Your Eyes, they didn’t change much in recording its 2025 follow-up, *It’s a Beautiful Place*. The band, which consists of Rachel Brown and Nate Amos, made the album where they have always recorded: in Amos’ bedroom. The homespun feel doesn’t necessarily lend itself to the sound, though, which finds Water From Your Eyes at their sharpest and most daring. “Life Signs” imagines a middle ground between post-punk and Anticon-style abstract rap. “Nights in Armor” bursts with crunching guitars and a pummeling floor tom, an atmosphere that moves to the background as layers of Brown’s vocals fight for space amid the chaos. No sound, no concept, no lyric is off-limits for the duo, and it’s exhilarating to witness just how many disparate ideas they consistently attempt to fit into traditional and non-traditional pop structures.
In the decade since 2015’s *I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside* dropped, Earl Sweatshirt transformed from Odd Future’s mumbly alumnus into one of the most unique hip-hop artists of his generation. The acerbic idiosyncrasies and deceptively lethargic flow that made the ruminative rapper so compelling early on in his run metamorphosed over time to place him in an even less categorizable stratum. More recent work, like 2022’s *SICK!* or the following year’s *VOIR DIRE* with The Alchemist, found him seemingly examining and embracing the possibilities of brevity, doing more by saying less and keeping his projects as concise as they are insular. In line with that apparent methodology, *Live Laugh Love* contains songs that are often quite brief, filling the space provided by his curatorial left-field beat selections with pithy, incisive bars and comparatively looser vocal riffs. Some of these producers have been by his side for a while, namely Black Noi$e and Navy Blue who, respectively, contribute to roughly half the tracks. Apart from a sole instrumental from underground climber Child Actor—the murkily soulful *2 Fast 2 Furious* nod “Heavy Metal aka ejecto seato!”—the remainder come from Theravada, a New York-based artist who Earl’s fans may recall from *SICK!*’s “Tabula Rasa.” The first four songs here benefit from his beats—from the squirmy filter funk of “gsw vs sac” through the percussive jolts of “Gamma (need the <3).” Yet regardless of who happens to be behind the proverbial boards, *Live Laugh Love* is anchored by Earl’s unconventional appeal and discursive proclivities. “INFATUATION” mixes metaphors as if they were recipes, serving up tastily reconstructed wordplay seasoned with heady poetry. Among the longest songs here, “Live” cautiously raises one of the album’s oft-revisited trope dissections—dying on a hill—before spiraling downwards with a beat-flip to match the mood. The slightly redacted “CRISCO” offers up a fractured narrative flecked with graphic imagery, while “WELL DONE!” subversively flexes in different directions than most rappers could even attempt. On the closing “exhaust,” he comments on both work ethic and something far more personal, vacillating between civil splits and parting words of wisdom, albeit with the occasional Erykah Badu interruption.
After years spent grinding on the DIY circuit under aliases like Mother Marcus and Riley on Fire, the Baltimore musician (born Marcus Brown) took on the Nourished by Time moniker in 2019. He broke through with 2023’s *Erotic Probiotic 2*, his first album as Nourished by Time—a swirl of lo-fi synth-pop, post-punk, funk, and R&B that made capitalist critique sound cool. On his second full-length (released on XL Recordings, as was his 2024 *Catching Chickens* EP), Brown simplifies his sound without sacrificing its freewheeling eccentricities and lyrical nuance. Here, songs about love reveal themselves as songs about surviving and finding meaning in an alienated, oppressive modern world. “Know he’s got a purpose/But he’s always working/Tryna beat the system/Manifest a vision,” he sings on “9 2 5,” which transmutes day-job drudgery into piano-house euphoria. Here and there, shimmers of beauty and absurdity shine through the cracks, like a story of a half-baked psychic reading on “Idiot in the Park.”
For their sixth album, hardcore punk collective The Armed purposely started writing without any premeditated ideas. After the conceptual trilogy of their last three albums—2018’s *Only Love*, 2021’s *ULTRAPOP*, and 2023’s *Perfect Saviors*—they decided to focus on urgency over detailed lyrical cohesiveness. “It felt like a new era, like we were leaving something behind,” vocalist and de facto spokesperson Tony Wolski tells Apple Music. “In starting something new, we wanted it to come from a place that was animalistic.” As such, *THE FUTURE IS HERE AND EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE DESTROYED* is brimming with rage—at consumerism, social media, political divisiveness, post-COVID isolationism, and general disappointment with the direction of society. “When you look at the world writ large, I just don’t understand how this would turn around,” Wolski says. “The levers that could change things in any meaningful way are the people who hold all the power, but they have none of the incentive. So, it’s an overtly negative record. But I do think there’s a glimmer of hope at the end—or at least a lack of hopelessness.” Like The Armed’s previous output, the record features a rotating cast of band members and guest musicians including Queens of the Stone Age guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen, ex-Punch vocalist Meghan O’Neil, Michigan hardcore troupe Prostitute, Converge guitarist Kurt Ballou, Rough Francis drummer Urian Hackney, and many more. Below, Wolski comments on each track. **“Well Made Play”** “It’s a very severe opener. We like doing that on all our albums, but the execution is drastically different than our last few openers. I think the band is at its absolute strongest, physically, musically—everything—right now, so I feel like this has added power. Lyrically, it’s about how self-awareness has become the world’s scarcest resource. It’s about the hyper-celebritization of culture, and how that has sort of removed self-awareness from our skills. It’s like we’ve evolved beyond it or something.” **“Purity Drag”** “We wanted to front-load the album with brutality. We’re referencing East Bay hardcore on a lot of these songs, so we just wanted it to feel like one of those albums that we got when we were 14, 15, where it just doesn’t relent. I think this has a chorus you can shout along to, and the song is, I daresay, near danceable. But it has very cynical lyrics about leftist disappointment. It’s about seeing the convictions that you have reduced to social trends. It’s about seeing some of the worst type of people espousing your ideas from wildly sanctimonious perspectives and in very ineffectual ways that will never yield results.” **“Kingbreaker”** “Again, we wanted to front-load the album with rage. My cousin Kenny, who plays bass in the band, this was one of his demos. He originally titled it ‘Optional,’ which was funny because he meant that literally, like, ‘I don’t know if we need to do this.’ It’s basically one bass note shredding for two minutes, and we added a breakdown. Lyrically, the song is about isolation. Post-pandemic, I think we still haven’t pulled out of the fact that everyone lives incredibly siloed lives. The great reintegration that everyone talked about never really happened, at least spiritually.” **“Grace Obscure”** “This is the first bona fide punk song we’ve made in a minute. It’s a just a blistering tempo, a double-time shredder. Meghan O’Neil has been playing with us as a vocalist, and she was the singer of a band called Punch back when we were starting out. I would say that Punch is one of my favorite hardcore bands of all time, and I think that Meghan is probably my favorite hardcore vocalist ever. Her vocals are completely insane. This is one of the first songs that we’ve done with her taking front and center, which is really cool. You can hear some East Bay hardcore here, and the chorus is a not-too-subtle allusion to AFI.” **“Broken Mirror” (feat. Prostitute)** “Similar to ‘Kingbreaker,’ this started as a very primitive, emotionally driven demo. I recorded a super dumb caveman drumbeat. After recording that, I just hit record and made up the chord progression. And I didn’t tune the guitar. Then I came up with the vocals in five or six minutes. The goal was to reduce artistic expression to the most primitive, most immediate version of yourself. Lyrically, it’s very much inspired by a Protomartyr song called ‘Tarpeian Rock’ where they’re just yelling shit that needs to be thrown from the rock. Moe from Prostitute sings on this, and his voice has a lot more gravitas than mine. They’re probably the scariest, most important punk band right now.” **“Sharp Teeth”** “After five brutal songs, to just slam into a Red Hot Chili Peppers-ass song felt hilarious to me. It’s a classic Armed juxtapositional whiplash kind of thing. Urian and Kenny, the rhythm section on this song, hit this unbelievable, heavy groove. In contrast to the grooviness and levity of that instrumental, the lyrics are about the hands-down worst time in my entire life. I don’t want to talk about it, and I wouldn’t have even felt comfortable singing it, but the fact that Cara \[Drolshagen\] is singing this one felt therapeutic. It’s really dark subject matter over a really happy track.” **“I Steal What I Want”** “This one has been around for a long time. I think I wrote this and ‘AN ITERATION,’ which was on *ULTRAPOP*, around the same time. But sometimes we need to get better in order to make a song work. It was almost like a space rock thing originally, but it needed to hit harder. So we made it more rigid, and then Troy \[Van Leeuwen\] recorded those guitar leads that are like equal parts Robert Smith and Adrian Belew, and it just fucking clicked. Lyrically, it’s about trying to enjoy the end of the world and holding on to what you love as everything else falls apart. That idea might be super well-trodden and not particularly original, but holy shit, does it feel authentic to me right now.” **“Local Millionaire”** “I have the distinct memory of Kenny playing me this demo when we were recording the last album and thinking, ‘Oh, man, this song is going to be so fucking sick.’ Everyone needs a song for the haters, and this is our song for the haters. It’s about self-obsession and turning that obsession into hatred for people who you subconsciously see becoming the better version of you. The band METZ was breaking up while we were recording this, so we put those harmonized vocalizations in the background to pay tribute to them. They’re a fucking awesome band, and it feels like something they would do.” **“Gave Up”** “This is probably the most traditional Armed song on the record. I don’t mean that to diminish it, it just feels like it could live on some of our earlier records. It’s a classic Kenny song, and he made the initial prototype of what our compositions sound like. Lyrically, it’s about hollowing yourself out to fit in, which is I think something that every single person alive does and has done to some extent. But it gets out of hand when you turn yourself into an empty vessel for the opinions of others. It touches on rage-bait culture, the clout of consensus, and becoming a human Supreme T-shirt.” **“Heathen”** “I wrote this track, and it took me a minute to be courageous enough to share it with the rest of the band, because there’s a lot of conventional shit in it. But I’m glad I did. Patrick \[Shiroishi\]’s sax playing reminds me of Bowie’s *Blackstar*. Cara and I are both singing dozens of robot harmonies, which makes this weird, fragile, genderless voice. It’s melodramatic as fuck, but I think it’s a really cool moment in the context of this record in particular. On another of our records, it may have blended in more. It’s kind of an emotional soak after all this instantaneous rage.” **“A More Perfect Design”** “We wanted to have a track that just left it all out there. And we wanted to leave no doubt in someone who listened to this that we had given everything we had to it. Converge is one of my favorite bands, and what makes them so unique is the ability to perform in a way that captures that extreme emotion. A lot of extreme music is not successful in that way. It’s extreme, it’s fast, but it’s also clean and technical, and all that stuff can kind of zap the anger or angst. So, this song is very much effect over technique. No one was allowed to tune their instrument before we recorded this. It needed to be catharsis to the point of, like, ‘Oh, shit. Maybe we went too far.’”
In the seven years since Dev Hynes last released an album as Blood Orange, the English musician wasn’t exactly twiddling his thumbs. After 2018’s searching *Negro Swan*, the scene veteran released a mixtape (*Angel’s Pulse*) and an EP (*Four Songs*), composed soundtracks for film and TV, and hopped on records with Lorde, Turnstile, and Vampire Weekend. All the while, he contemplated the future of Blood Orange. “I’m always making music,” Hynes tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. But before he could release it, he had to answer his own questions: “Why should it exist? What’s the point?” Then Hynes’ mother died in 2023, and the direction for the fifth Blood Orange album, *Essex Honey*, became clear. Set in the county outside London that Hynes once called home, it’s a sublime examination of what “home” even means, refracted in the prism of his elegant hybrid of hazy pop, feather-light funk, and ghosts of post-punk and New Wave. Echoes of distant music memories forge pathways into the past: “Regressing back to times you know/Playing songs you forgot you owned/Change a memory, make it 4/3,” Hynes sings on “Westerberg,” its title a nod to The Replacements’ lead singer and its hook a play on the band’s 1987 track “Alex Chilton.” More Easter eggs are buried in the bass grooves, sax solos, distorted guitars, and orchestral swoons—a Durutti Column sample on “The Field,” an Elliott Smith interpolation sung by Lorde on “Mind Loaded,” a line about writer’s block delivered by Zadie Smith on “Vivid Light.” The prevailing mood is liminal, surrendered between past and present, though in Hynes’ hands, purgatory sounds heavenly.
Long before KAYTRANADA was headlining festivals and winning Grammys, he was a child obsessed with JAY-Z’s 2003 record *The Black Album* and its companion documentary *Fade to Black*. Watching prolific producers like Pharrell Williams, Just Blaze, Kanye West, and Rick Rubin build beats from scratch, he went from fan to student, poring over album credits and eventually teaching himself to make beats by reverse-engineering J Dilla tracks. By the early 2010s, the Haitian Canadian producer had fused his love of hip-hop with a growing fascination for house music, emerging from the underground with viral edits of Janet Jackson and Teedra Moses songs, all driven by his signature drum swing. Following in the footsteps of his early heroes, KAYTRANADA became a master collaborator: His first three studio albums featured voices from PinkPantheress and Tinashe to Kali Uchis and even Williams himself. On *AIN’T NO DAMN WAY!*, KAYTRANADA lets his production do all the talking. Stripped back to hypnotic loops, slick rhythms, and far-flung samples, the album is for total dance immersion—the kind that makes time slip away in the club. The chunky retro beat of “SPACE INVADER,” paired with a refrain from Latrelle’s Neptunes-produced “My Life” (“Gotta get away sometimes”), sets an escapist tone. Stutters and glitches ripple through tracks like “CHAMPIONSHIP,” “TARGET JOINT,” and “GOODBYE BITCH!” as if you’re catching him mid-DJ set. His blending of styles and eras transforms the ’80s Afro-boogie of Steve Monite’s “Things Fall Apart” into contemplative poolside house, while rapper Cappadonna’s 1998 song “Black Boy” becomes a resilient disco jaunt. Even the soulfully reassuring croons of “DON’T WORRY BABE / I GOT U BABE” serve as a Trojan horse for a slow-burning banger. The party carries on until the TLC-sampling closer “DO IT (AGAIN!),” both a playful last call and an invitation to run it back all over again.
Despite that Cass McCombs is one of the most enigmatic singer-songwriters of the 21st century, his 11th studio album *Interior Live Oak* is an uncommonly generous offering. With 16 tracks and over an hour in runtime, the record spans the many forms his music has taken across his career and pulls in impressive collaborators like indie rock journeyman Matt Sweeney, former Deerhoof member Chris Cohen, and Papercuts’ Jason Quever—the latter of whom collaborated with McCombs on 2024’s archival release *Seed Cake on Leap Year*. But it’s McCombs’ cryptic wit and preference for shaggy-dog melodies that takes center stage across *Interior Live Oak*, with a stylistic left turn or two to keep longtime listeners on their toes. Witness the spry and organ-led “Juvenile,” which takes on the classic New Zealand indie-pop sound while keeping his haunted, searching perspective intact. Few songwriters sound as uncomplicatedly plaintive as McCombs, and yet after more than 20 years of releasing records, he continues to draw listeners in with the type of lyrical musings and overcast melodies so stretched across the chassis of *Interior Live Oak*.
A lot has changed for guitarist Royel Maddell and vocalist/guitarist Otis Pavlovic—collectively, Sydney duo Royel Otis—since their 2024 debut album, *PRATTS & PAIN*. On the back of that record and viral covers of Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s “Murder on the Dancefloor” and The Cranberries’ “Linger” they were propelled headfirst into a blur of overseas touring, high-profile festivals, and late-night TV appearances. That constant roadwork shaped album number two, *hickey*. “We were definitely more aware of how songs would come across when we played them live,” Maddell tells Apple Music. “We spent so much more time in front of crowds.” The experience, adds Pavlovic, contributed to the “simplicity” of the songs on *hickey*. Simple the songs may be, but sonically the album is a more diverse and textured effort than its predecessor, be it in the lush vocal harmonies of “come on home,” the joyous synths in “who’s your boyfriend,” the ’90s slacker vibe of “moody,” the ’80s-inspired pulse of “say something,” or the sumptuous, floating guitars that color “dancing with myself.” A by-product of what Pavlovic says was a desire to “not have any walls or boundaries with whatever we were trying to make,” the diversity also stems from the rich array of collaborators: Amy Allen (Sabrina Carpenter, Harry Styles); Jungle’s Lydia Kitto and Josh Lloyd-Watson; Omer Fedi (Lil Nas X, Sam Smith); Blake Slatkin (SZA, Justin Bieber); and Julian Bunetta (Teddy Swims, One Direction). Throughout, the duo’s dreamy musical optimism is contrasted by Pavlovic’s melancholy vocals, a neat vehicle for one of the album’s key themes, also inspired by the realities of life on the road. “There’s a few songs about saying goodbyes and missing people,” says Maddell. “I guess we were losing relationships.” Here, Maddell and Pavlovic walk Apple Music through *hickey*, track by track. **“i hate this tune”** Royel Maddell: “We wrote those lyrics for a different song, sitting in a pub drinking Guinness when we were recording *PRATTS & PAIN*. We made this instrumental track in Palm Springs with Blake and Omer and were trying to think of vocals, and then Otis started singing the lyrics we did in the UK.” Otis Pavlovic: “For some reason there’s a few songs, probably for both of us, that come on and remind us of a specific time or person. Can’t listen to it.” RM: “You love the song but you can’t not think of that time or person.” **“moody”** RM: “It’s kind of about a toxic relationship, not a girl in particular. The guy, the person singing, is the moody one as well ’cause they’re constantly saying something negative. We wrote that with Amy Allen.” **“good times”** OP: “That was the first song we did with Josh from Jungle. It just came out of an old demo we had. When you first meet someone and do a session, you’ve got to just break the ice and do something, and it’s the first idea we worked on. It is uplifting but then in the chorus it says, ‘In good times I doubt myself in front of you.’” RM: “It sounds fun but it’s negative.” **“torn jeans”** RM: “We did that with Chris Collins, and it was three guitar lines that I had and we just ended up weaving some vocals and stuff over it.” OP: “Just admiring someone’s torn jeans.” RM: “Just admiring the imperfections.” **“come on home”** RM: “It’s kind of about being far away from someone. Not really having control of where you are or where you could be. That was with Josh and Lydia from Jungle as well. Those harmonies are very Lydia-ish.” **“who’s your boyfriend”** RM: “The chords are really standard but we wanted to make them as least standard as possible, so added a capo to the guitar and tried to play them as weird as possible so it’s hard for people to figure out. Sonically, we were going for a mix between modern Cure and Joy Division. I don’t think we got anywhere close to either but that’s what we were going for.” **“car”** OP: “We did that one with Omer and Blake. We were talking about being with someone and trying to end \[the relationship\], but also not.” RM: “Not wanting the good parts to end.” OP: “\[And\] doing it in cars, which is something we’ve both experienced before, trying to break up in a car.” RM: “It’s weird wanting to break up with someone in a car because it’s claustrophobic and you’re in this small room. Why didn’t you just do it outdoors?” **“shut up”** OP: “We did this one with Blake Slatkin. It was the last song we did on the album. It came as a Hail Mary. That one is saying you don’t want someone to go away. Just shut up, don’t go away.” RM: “It’s also super dreamy, so it’s funny calling it ‘shut up.’” **“dancing with myself”** RM: “We went in wanting a disco Fleetwood Mac.” OP: “We wrote it in sections and you can kind of tell.” RM: “It’s \[about\] letting yourself be free and not worrying about what other people are thinking.” **“say something”** RM: “When we were planning on working with Blake and Omer, they asked what kind of song we want to make and as a joke, I said, ‘Take on Me’ by a-ha. That drumbeat is kind of a reference to ‘Take on Me.’” **“she’s got a gun”** OP: “We were doing it with Josh after working on ‘good times,’ just seeing what happens with it, throwing ideas down over the bassline. And I remember for the chorus we slowed the song down and sung stuff really slow to see what would happen, and the chorus melody came out of it. I don’t think we would have had that without doing that.” **“more to lose”** OP: “We’ve attempted to put melodies over that piano line since the start of the band.” RM: “Five years! We did it with Julian Bunetta and Omer. We were in Julian’s place in Calabasas, having fun making cocktails, and I just started playing it on the piano. Every time I sit at a piano I play it and just pray someone comes up with something. And that’s what happened.” **“jazz burger”** RM: “Jazz burger is a real thing. It’s from Jitlada in LA, this Thai restaurant, and you can get different levels of spiciness. We only went with four out of 10. It was so spicy my chest became mutated. I had this lump on my chest that was like a rhinoceros horn. And then we got ice cream and went back into the studio and made that.” OP: “Royel and I had just come from Sydney and said goodbye to some friends and some relationships.” RM: “It’s probably the realest song \[on the album\] with the fakest name; the most unrelated name.”
Nina Wilson, aka Central Coast-born DJ and producer Ninajirachi, was six or seven songs into writing her debut album when she noticed a through line. “I started to find little points that connected \[them\] being about my childhood, or being about my computer, so that was when I came up with the title,” she tells Apple Music. “From there, it made it really easy to finish the rest of the tracks because that was my scaffold.” With some ideas on the album stretching back to voice memos from 2019, Wilson has spent years methodically building a sonic world that incorporates elements of 2000s electroclash (“London Song”), trance (“Infohazard”), and club (“CSIRAC”) into her melodic dance-music blueprint. Also showing through is the influence of early 2010s Australian dance artists such as PNAU, Empire Of The Sun, and Miami Horror, particularly in songs such as “All I Am” and “iPod Touch.” “I guess that’s the palette or the world, but I also didn’t want to be too reverential,” she says. “That’s the music that was most inspiring to me when I started making music, but I’ve definitely wanted to make my own version of it.” Here, Wilson takes Apple Music through *I Love My Computer*, track by track. **“London Song”** “This was not about anything at first, it was just a voice memo. I wrote the singing part with the extra lyrics, and by that point I had the title of the album and was like, ‘OK, I need to make this about my computer.’ And the way I twisted it was, almost all the places I’ve been overseas is because I made music on a laptop. And that’s what allowed me to go there. So that’s the way I reframed the random voice memo—I would go with you \[to London\], with my computer that has afforded me that luxury.” **“iPod Touch”** “When I was in high school, I got really into electronic music, but also pretty niche SoundCloud electronic music, and I didn’t have any friends that were into it. It felt like all my favorite songs were my secrets, ’cause I didn’t have anyone to share them with. In that song, there’s a reference to a Porter Robinson track from 2012 that was my favorite song when I was 12 or however old I was.” **“F\*\*k My Computer”** “I use Ableton to produce my music. I was using other software before that, and when I landed on Ableton, I felt like it was the first interface I meshed with and I started becoming really fast. Sometimes, I think, ‘How could I get faster? How could I widen the bandwidth even more?’ It’s just a hardware limitation at this point, I just need to insert my brain into the computer. If we were just one entity, I wouldn’t have to lose ideas in translation.” **“CSIRAC”** “CSIRAC is the first computer in the world to ever \[play digital\] music. I felt like the album was missing more of a clubby, drummy, DJ moment, and I thought this could be that.” **“Delete”** “The song is about when you have a crush and you post a photo just for them to see it. It’s a little Gatsby-ish, like you put on this big show for just one person to see it. And then you’re like, ‘Have they seen it? Do they think I’m pretty?’ Then it’s the self-awareness of being like, ‘I’m so embarrassing!’” **“ฅ^•ﻌ•^ฅ”** “It’s a cat symbol. Internally we’ve been calling it ‘Cat Face.’ Or ‘Cat Interlude.’ It’s just an interlude to ‘All I Am.’ Originally, ‘All I Am’ had a long, progressive intro. But when it came to releasing it on its own, it felt too indulgent; it felt too much like two songs in one to work as a single. So I split that intro off to make it its own song.” **“All I Am”** “This was such a special song to make. It was a jam at Ben Lee’s house in LA with Ben, Jenna \[McDougall, aka Hevenshe\], Alex \[Greenwald, Phantom Planet\], and Maz \[DeVita, WAAX\]. We were literally recording anything. Then we had a break, and we had a little bit of a microdose, and had lunch, and then everyone got sleepy. We all got into this meditative state, and I just started looping certain parts of what we’d recorded and added my own elements on top of their audio, and it just built into this dance progression thing. I think a lot of the music I was listening to at the time, like PNAU, really leaked through in that second half of the session where I started working on it on its own.” **“Infohazard”** “I saw this artwork of this girl sitting next to a computer and she was cute, kind of Bratz doll style. And the text said, ‘Help, I’m online and I just saw a beheading.’ And I was like, ‘Oh yeah, that happened to me when I was a cute girl too.’ It just seemed like an interesting way to make light of what is probably a shared trauma amongst people of my generation. If not a beheading they’ve just been scrolling and been like, ‘Oh, I probably wasn’t meant to see that and I can’t forget about it now.’” **“Battery Death”** “I really wanted to have a halftime, more hip-hop-drums track so it wasn’t all just four-to-the-floor dance music. I think I was reading a lot about battery life, but no one was really talking about battery death. It just sounded like a funny title but worked in with the themes of the album.” **“Sing Good”** “It started as a gibberish jam, and I started mumbling, ‘I can’t really sing.’ I thought, that’s kind of funny. I don’t know if I’ve heard someone write about not being able to sing. I was writing music before I was producing it—like I say in the lyrics, I would get the lyric books of my favorite albums and be like, ‘What’s a verse? What’s a chorus? Oh OK, this is the formula,’ and that’s how I wrote about it. I would just write songs about going to the shops and stuff but never really show them to anyone ’cause I wasn’t a good singer.” **“It’s You” (with daine)** “daine was having a really bad day and we were trying to make music but they weren’t feeling super good. I was a little bit pushy—I was very gentle but I was like, ‘Let’s record something.’ So we just did this one little recording, this one gibberish take, and it ended up being the song. Later, when daine was feeling better, we put lyrics to it and rerecorded it. I’m so glad we pushed it that day.” **“All at Once”** “The verse at the end is about, I’m always at my desk in the dark, always working by myself late at night at the computer—that’s where I get the best work done a lot of the time. I wanted to send off the album with the last devotional nod to everything my computer had done for me, good and bad. It’s allowed me to have this crazy career that I wouldn’t have been allowed to have if I didn’t grow up in this decade. It would have been totally different.”
“Ultimately—and I only discovered this after the whole album was written—this album is about opening yourself up to a lover, or a person, or the entire world, giving them every single part of yourself,” Laufey tells Apple Music about her third album, *A Matter of Time*. “It’s about acknowledging that it’s just a matter of time until you find out every single part of me.” She began working on the project while touring behind her breakthrough album *Bewitched* in 2024, inspired by a host of factors—particularly balancing her hectic schedule as an in-demand pop star with falling in love for the first time. Laufey worked on *A Matter of Time* with her longtime collaborator Spencer Stewart and new creative partner Aaron Dessner (of The National and Big Red Machine, and a regular collaborator of Taylor Swift’s). “It was that new experience that I was craving for an album,” she says. “I wanted to be so careful for this album about staying true to myself, and staying true to my roots, and staying true to my philosophy, which is ultimately keeping jazz music and classical music alive through my own music. But I was craving a level of speed and shine and newness for this album, and I knew I had to find one partner to work with who would bring that out in me.”
Watching the pure joy of Glastonbury-goers doing the Woke Macarena to CMAT’s anthem “Take a Sexy Picture of Me” at her 2025 performance might make you think Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson is having an easy time being a pop star. But the story behind her third album, *EURO-COUNTRY*, released two months later, suggests otherwise. “I didn’t think I was going to make another record so quickly, and when all these ideas started landing, I knew I needed to do this before I could do anything else,” CMAT tells Apple Music of the follow-up to 2023’s *Crazymad, for Me*. “It was a very hard album to make for a number of reasons, and it’s a very heavy subject matter. What we were trying to pull off was so difficult that I had a really hard time making it. But that being said, I’m really proud of it,” she says. It’s a big album. While “Take a Sexy Picture of Me” provided the perfect—and well-deserved—pop crossover, complete with viral TikTok dance, CMAT was keen to stay true to her roots and go “full country” on songs like “When a Good Man Cries.” CMAT recorded the album in New York, addressing themes of grief, loss, and “the ambition to be bigger and more important than you currently are,” both in terms of herself and her native Ireland. “In general, I have to work on things on the road when they’re in their infancy,” she says. “But place-wise, I think this album was born of grief and loss and sadness and stuff, and things being put into perspective for me in a way that they hadn’t been before. All of this suffering I endured making it, and now I’m bearing the fruits.” Read on as CMAT talks through *EURO-COUNTRY*, one track at a time. **“Billy Byrne from Ballybrack, the Leader of the Pigeon Convoy”** “I definitely needed something to open up the record that wasn’t my voice. A lot of this album is criticizing Ireland, which is something I love more than anything else in the world. So, I wanted something that captured my love for it and to show people I wasn’t coming from a snotty place. One day, I randomly came across a documentary, and this scene happened. Billy Byrne is about to free a lot of pigeons, and this is a phone call that he makes from a telephone box that’s in the middle of a beach. He sums up everything that I love about Ireland: its weirdness, its beauty, and its warmth.” **“EURO-COUNTRY** “‘EURO-COUNTRY’ is a bit of a Frankenstein song—I wrote bits of this years ago for a completely different thing. I knew the album was going to be called *EURO-COUNTRY* and then I thought, ‘I’d love a title track for this record.’ Usually, it’s the other way around. The line ‘I feel like Kerry Katona’ came because I have a real fascination with beautiful blondes who are destroyed by the press. I’ve written about Princess Diana and Anna Nicole Smith in the past, and I think Kerry is another one of those women that was rinsed by the British press, completely fucking unfairly. I really do admire her, and I think she’s very strong.” **“When a Good Man Cries”** “I’m really glad the way those two songs run into each other. That’s one of the most successful bits of the album. I needed to go full country immediately, so everyone knew what the record was. This is me going in on myself because I made an ex-partner cry. He hadn’t done anything wrong. There’s this thing in third-wave feminism, which is, I feel, now outdated, where women should be like men. Making a man cry is turning a trope on its head. I repeat ‘Kyrie Eleison’ \[‘Lord have mercy’\] over and over again at the end, which is a reference to my favorite song of all time, ‘The Donor’ by Judee Sill, in which she’s begging God for another chance to become a good person.” **“The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station”** “‘The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station’ is a meditation on irrational hatred and intolerance. It’s based around me getting annoyed every time I saw a poster of Jamie Oliver because when we were on tour, we’d eat a lot of sausage rolls from his branded delis. I don’t actually have any beef with Jamie Oliver, so I’m kind of like, ‘Ciara, you need to stop being a bitch. He’s got kids.’ And then there\'s a stream-of-consciousness section in the bridge where I’m going through my own history to try and figure out how I became such a bitch. I think it’s good to be self-critical—I don’t think anyone should ever rest on their laurels when it comes to kindness and their capacity for it. We should all be trying way harder.” **“Tree Six Foive”** “This song has been around for two years, and it used to be called ‘365,’ but there’s a little artist called Charli xcx who released a song with the same name, which is enormous. So, I was like, ‘I can\'t call it that, so I’ll just call it what it is in my phonetic spelling.’ It’s about looking back on my history again and thinking about a time where I made the decision to try and not to be treated badly anymore. I wanted it to be a proper flashback of a song. Even though I don’t have these feelings anymore, it’s a former version of myself that’s doing bad foreshadowing. A stupid song written by a stupid person to illustrate the person that I used to be, I guess.” “Take a Sexy Picture of Me” “If I’m making an album that is so much about capitalism, the cruelty of the modern condition, and how lack of community has made everyone be an asshole, I had to do one song where I was like, ‘I have also been a victim of this.’ The thing that had been rattling around in my head the most was last year, when we were doing festivals, and there were all the comments being nasty to me over my physical appearance and my weight. I remember saying, ‘Let’s make this the most accessible-sounding, biggest, fattest pop song so that loads of people are forced to listen to the most uncomfortable lyrics I’ve ever written.’ Under no circumstances did I think it was going to go anywhere near as big as it did, with Julia Fox doing a little TikTok dance to it, but I knew it would pop off in some way.” **“Ready”** “A lot of people in my life really loved this song, but I didn’t know how I felt about putting it on a record because it felt too optimistic and poppy. And I still don’t really know how I feel about the song, but I really like the place that it occupies in the record. It’s about somebody who is giving up after a period of complete stagnation. I wrote it in a COVID-y time. I’m saying I’m so bored of having depression that I’m going to do something self-destructive but fun because I don’t care anymore.” **“Iceberg”** “This is a song about my best friend Bella. It’s funny, we’ve been best friends since we were 14, and I’m a pop star and she’s a lawyer. She’s the most studious, hardworking person in the world. When she got her job which she’d worked towards her whole entire life, I saw the pressures of this ambition and this full-time work completely beat her down for a while. And she started to go in on herself. I found it really funny that she thought that I wouldn’t know she was suffering. This is the thing in female friendships that I think is so beautiful—you cannot pull the wool over my eyes. I know who you are. There’s a joking line in the beginning of it where I’m like, ‘Where did you go, crazy girl boss?’” **“Coronation St.”** “I wrote bits of this when I was 23. Leaving something to sit and marinate in one form for seven years is something I like doing, so it’s like I’m in collaboration with a former version of myself. It’s about jealousy, being stagnant, and feeling like I didn’t get everything I thought I was owed by life. I wanted to capture that deadness and feeling of having nothing happening in your life and really double down with hindsight just how harrowing it was. I used to do a weird job managing and cleaning apartments in Manchester, and one of them overlooked the set of *Coronation Street*. I found it mad that it was fake buildings. I was like, ‘Wow, even Coronation Street’s not real.’” **“Lord, Let That Tesla Crash”** “Weirdly, this is the least profound song on the record. It’s about loss. My friend died, and I had to write the story of us in it because it was the first time I lost someone I was really close with. You make friends with people without thinking much about it, just enjoying their company. And then, when they’re gone, you realize what the point of them was. I only realized how much he meant to me when he died, and so much about his death annoyed me. I felt quite stupid being a touring musician/pop-star person because I was like, ‘What\'s the point in this?’ And then, I went to see the flat we both lived in together, and there was a charger and a Tesla parked outside it, and I remember being so angry about that.” **“Running/Planning”** “I wasn’t going to bring this song to the studio, but we made a draft of it in one night, which sounds almost exactly the same as it does now. It was so instinctive and so immediate. This is another song about ambition, drive, and the downsides of it. I was thinking about how there’s a treadmill of life that you get on when you’re in a heterosexual relationship. You date for a couple of years and then you get engaged, get married, and then you have a baby and live the rest of life. There’s a transactional element to romantic relationships that muddies something that’s otherwise quite beautiful. And also, societal pressures to conform. With conformity comes the weird prejudices against people who don’t \[conform\]. Carving your own path and going against it makes your life so hard.” “Janis Joplining” “‘Janis Joplining’ is a name I’ve given to being self-destructive. What’s weird is that’s not what the song’s about. I just thought it was a good line. Maybe it’s a bit salacious, but I had a crush on a guy who was married, and I realized a lot of it was born of seeing him and his wife interact with each other. Actually, what I was longing for was the community they had formed and their intimacy. It ends the record because after everything I’ve just spoken about, what I want is this egalitarian relationship and to comfortably talk intimately with everyone in the world, and if I can’t have it, then I self-destruct and go Janis Joplining. I wanted to end on a note that sounds like I think I have a solution to all the problems I’ve just spoken about for 45 minutes.
The Ghanaian singer-songwriter’s third full-length is almost overwhelming at first approach, even when taking into account the big melodic strokes of her instant-classic 2023 record *Fountain Baby*. Unlike that record’s New Wave streaks and effervescent pop cadences, *BLACK STAR* is wall-to-wall dance music that treats the last 40 years of pop like an endless palette. There are sly interpolations of Gucci Mane’s “I Might Be” and, in the case of the slinky “She Is My Drug,” Cher’s deathless anthem “Believe.” Fellow modern pop vanguard PinkPantheress throws in for the satisfying techno pulser “Kiss Me Thru the Phone Pt. 2,” a seeming reference to Soulja Boy’s ringtone-ready 2008 hit, while Naomi Campbell (yes, *the* Naomi Campbell) closes out “ms60” with a solid-gold monologue extoling the virtues of embodying the album’s title.
Born in Lima, Peru, Sofia Kourtesis moved to Germany at 17 with dreams of studying film, and to escape her former home’s conservative views. In a way, the Berlin-based producer approaches her music like a filmmaker, layering textures, field recordings, and emotion into lush songs that move and breathe. Her work blends the political with the personal, as on her 2023 debut *Madres*, which sampled anti-homophobia protest chants and was dedicated to her mother and the surgeon who saved her mother’s life. *Volver* is a statement of joy, defiance, and resistance, as Kourtesis celebrates the LGBT+ communities—especially trans women—who inspire her activism and art. The bittersweet mood of “Corazón,” which laments distance, brightens with “Unidos,” a vivid disco-house collaboration with Daphni (aka Caribou’s Dan Snaith) turned mantra: “You got everything you need/You never let them get you down.” Layers of percussive rhythms keep spirits high on “Ballumbrosio,” its commanding groove and warm vocals conjuring scenes of communal joy, like people dancing around a fire. Kourtesis closes the EP with the bright and sweetly tender “Sisters,” a song about embracing her community, even from an ocean away.
The hesitation to call the liminal, jazz-like blobs of sound on *That Wasn’t a Dream* “ambient music” comes down to detail: Anything so precise and obviously intentional requires—or at least rewards—a little more engagement. Palladino is a fretless bass player with a mile-long resume that includes D’Angelo, Adele, and The Who; Mills is a guitarist and producer whose subtle experimentalism has made him in demand across the underground and mainstream both as a session and live player (Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan) and a producer (Perfume Genius, Japanese Breakfast). Together, they bridge the polite weirdness of fusion and smooth jazz with the hybrids of newer labels like International Anthem, conjuring micro-bits of bossa nova (“I Laugh in the Mouth of the Lion”), funk (“Taka”), and pastoral folk (“That Was a Dream”) that unspool like hold music for interdimensional phone calls—the background, made foreground.
Over the course of two decades, Marissa Nadler has absorbed myriad aesthetics—folk, goth, dream pop, doom metal—into her singular brand of occult Americana. And on 2021’s *The Path of the Clouds*, she executed her most lavish, cinematic, and powerful rendering yet, with the help of special guests like ex-Cocteau Twin Simon Raymonde and harpist Mary Lattimore. However, *New Radiations* sees Nadler going back to old ways, putting the focus squarely on her acoustic guitar-playing and singing. None of these 11 tracks even feature percussion, allowing her double-tracked, self-harmonizing voice to fill the entire canvas of hymns like “It Hits Harder.” No song better encapsulates the album’s uncanny balance of haunted and heavenly than the aptly titled “Bad Dreams Summertime.” And while *New Radiations* features no lack of painterly embellishments from collaborator Milky Burgess—be it the ominous string textures and distorted drones on “Smoke Screen Selene” or the Floydian synth swells on “Weightless Above the Water”—they’re largely used to impressionistic, subliminal effect, representing the turbulent undercurrent of emotions bubbling beneath Nadler’s deceptively serene storytelling.
Three years after their standout collaboration on the 2022 track “Hollow,” singer-songwriter Emma Louise and producer Flume return with a full album that highlights how much the two Australian creators value unpredictable textures and approaches. Flume has built his career on bending the expected contours of big-tent dance music, while Louise dramatically pitched down her vocals for the entirety of her 2018 album *Lilac Everything*. On *DUMB*, the pair embrace such feats of flux in perfect harmony. The opening “All of the Worlds” contrasts Louise’s soft, digitally stuttered vocals with crunchy beats, before leaning into programmed melodies that evoke a rainbow of eight-bit video game sounds. Squelching flourishes and asides punctuate these tracks without overshadowing the sincere emotions behind what Louise is singing. On the beats-bruised piano ballad “Monsoon,” she asks over and over if the song’s subject thinks about her. As she similarly bares her soul on “Brand New,” her quiet confiding is countered with a pulse that grows ever more clubby and insistent with time. Not every track is laced with so much stimuli, however: “Stay” is the most streamlined turn here, with quieter melodic and rhythmic cues hugging close to Louise’s high, breathy pleas to figure things out tonight.