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.”
Strings and other orchestral elements add a soaring sense of adventure to prolific Melbourne ensemble King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard’s 27th studio album. Recorded concurrently with 2024’s *Flight b741*, *Phantom Island* was made in collaboration with composer Chad Kelly and a full orchestra. Yet, there’s plenty of room for loving forays into psych, boogie rock, and other fertile territory. The opening title track even flirts with cinematic jazz in the manner of Quincy Jones or David Axelrod, before “Deadstick” leans into the interplay between guitars and horns as singer Stu Mackenzie nails some particularly pleasing falsetto. Taking flight is a recurring theme on the album, as heard on “Aerodynamic” and “Grow Wings and Fly.” Layered vocals make “Eternal Return” especially lush, with the lyrics saluting the touring life while still longing for the gum leaves and unpredictable weather of Melbourne. And between warm hand drums and funky guitar flourishes, “Panpsych” feels like the sonic equivalent of comfort food. Having played together across so many albums and tours, it’s only natural that the band members are beautifully in harmony as Kelly’s agile arrangements guide these jammy songs skyward.
Even though HAIM named their fourth studio album—and first since 2020’s *Women in Music, Pt. III*—*I quit*, the trio of sisters aren’t quitters. “Quitting can be looked at as giving up in normal circumstances,” bassist/vocalist Este Haim tells Apple Music. “We look at it as a new beginning and betting on yourself. We quit things that don’t serve us anymore.” The follow-up to their Grammy-nominated opus takes its name from a scene in 1996’s *That Thing You Do!* where the band’s leader announces his departure by snapping his fingers and sing-talking the words “I quit”—a move the women use regularly as an inside joke. “One day, we were checking the mic and we did it again,” Este adds. “We were like, ‘Wait, should we name our album *I quit*? Say that again.’ ‘Wait a minute. Should we?’ It took on a life of its own.” Produced by Rostam and lead vocalist/guitarist Danielle Haim, the band’s latest takes parting shots at the people in their lives who have seemingly done them wrong. (And with single artwork inspired by paparazzi pics—most famously for “Relationships,” a cheeky take on the iconic post-divorce Nicole Kidman photo—the Haims aren’t just speaking to their romantic follies but the celebrity and industry machine at large.) Appropriately, the opening track “Gone” samples the George Michael smash “Freedom! ’90,” setting the tone for the album’s message: liberation from anything and everything that may have restrained them. “I’ll do whatever I want/I’ll see who I wanna see/I’ll fuck off whenever I want/I’ll be whatever I need,” Danielle intones. Their songs range from groovy (“Down to be wrong”) to nostalgic (“Take me back”), dreamy (“Lucky stars”), and bluesy (“Blood on the street”). “All over me” feels straight out of a ’90s rom-com montage, and “The farm” gives off a Sheryl Crow-infused vibe. The contemplative “Everybody’s trying to figure me out”—co-written by Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon—also offers a meditation on self-acceptance: “Everybody’s got their own decisions, and I know that I’ve got mine/And I’ll be fine.” Ultimately, though, the sibling rockers see their new work as fit for the stage, and that’s important to how they create their music, Este explains: “We always think about our live show when we are writing songs, because that’s really where our heart is—playing live.”
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.
In the two and a half years since 2022’s *NO THANK YOU*, Little Simz attempted to write its follow-up four times, to no avail. From the outside, the London native was at the top of her game. Since 2021’s game-changing fourth album, *Sometimes I Might Be Introvert*, she’d won a Mercury Prize, owned the Glastonbury stage, and earned a spot among the power players of UK rap. But privately, her personal life was imploding. In 2025, word spread of the lawsuit Simz had filed against Inflo, the childhood friend and longtime collaborator who’d produced her last three albums, for allegedly failing to repay a 1.7-million-pound loan. The betrayal left the rapper at a loss, as she recounts on “Lonely”: “Sitting in the studio with my head in my hands/Thinking what am I to do with this music I can’t write?” From this turmoil, the 31-year-old musician arrived at a breakthrough that manifests on her sixth album, *Lotus*—named for the flower that thrives in muddy waters. Here Simz pulls no punches on the topic of her former friend, snarling her way through the bluesy opener “Thief” (“This person I’ve known my whole life, coming like the devil in disguise”) and the eerie “Flood,” produced by Miles Clinton James with cameos from Nigerian British pop star Obongjayar and South Africa’s Moonchild Sanelly. But the mood lifts on tracks like “Young,” a bit of post-punk method rapping on being dumb, broke, and alive (“A bottle of Rio and some chicken and chips/In my fuck-me-up pumps and my Winehouse quiff”), and on “Free,” a jazzy boom-bap meditation on love versus fear, on which Simz reaches a cathartic conclusion: “Love is every time I put pen to the page.”
*Raspberry Moon* begins exactly how you’d expect a Hotline TNT album to begin: with another melancholic missive from singer/guitarist Will Anderson wrapped in candy-coated distortion. But just when you think the opening “Was I Wrong?” is about to fade into the fuzz, it takes an unexpected detour into an extended, synth-washed ambient fadeout that goes on for so long, it earns its own track-title distinction (“Transition Lens”). And while that left turn doesn’t exactly portend Hotline TNT taking a *Kid A*-sized leap into the electronic unknown, it is nonetheless emblematic of a band in the midst of an exciting evolutionary phase. *Raspberry Moon* marks the first time Anderson has recorded with his touring band, and you instantly sense the difference in both density and depth on “The Scene,” a psychedelic sludgefeast that harkens back to Dinosaur Jr.’s SST era. But the sonic upgrade is as much about enhancing nuance as amplifying noise: When they’re not consistently striking the shoegaze/power-pop sweet spot on Teenage Fanclub flashbacks like “Letter to Heaven” and “Candle,” Hotline TNT bring graceful acoustic textures to the fore on “Dance the Night Away” and “Lawnmower,” putting the focus squarely on Anderson’s gleaming melodies. And with the rousing “na na na na” hook of “Julia’s War,” Anderson confirms his former DIY project is ready to conquer festival stages.
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.
The real surprise about the historically artier Meg Remy embracing the ordinary comforts of folk, country, gospel, and soul is how right it sounds, a *Dusty in Memphis* or early Aretha album for listeners cautiously merging the life of the mind with the achingly normal ups and downs of regular adulthood. Remy has said it has at least something to do with her own growth as a person: Nearing 40 and a mother of two, the high-concept stuff just doesn’t hit the way it used to. Still, to familiar forms she brings her funky, left-field mind: the deep-soul surrealism of “Walking Song” (“You had boots on/I had bare feet/It was a natural conspiracy”), the love-letter-as-feminist-critique of “Dear Patti,” the way she uses her bluesy lament (“Emptying the Jimador”) to offer metaphors about being a shoplifter amid the gifts of language. Over a band she reportedly directed to play like they were from Tennessee, she sings her weird heart out, never dull, just growing up.
In July 2024, Queens of the Stone Age descended underneath Paris for a unique unplugged performance to an audience of six million...corpses. Founder Joshua Homme says his interest in the city’s famous catacombs began in childhood and it became a dream to play there. “Obviously, in the simplest terms, there’s a bunch of bodies and they’re stacked in a certain manner,” he tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. Recording in a subterranean cemetery filled with over six million skeletal remains proved challenging, but Homme had a “desire for it to have this improv element to it.” Ultimately, the morbid setting helped turn their hard rock anthems into haunting, acoustic balladry. “It’s very ASMR in there,” he says. “When you’re playing something that’s stripped down to the bones, and I guess in front of people that are stripped to the bones too, it just felt intuitively like this should be \[like\] there’s almost nothing being performed. Everything is more important somehow. When you’re doing that, the ceiling’s dripping and the camera people were walking and it’s crunching on the ground, it becomes part of the performance.” The songs on the EP date back from 2005’s *Lullabies to Paralyze* (“I Never Came”) to 2023’s *In Times New Roman...* (“Paper Machete”), befitting a catalog that, over the course of nearly three decades, has had no shortage of songs that would lend themselves to sparse funeral dirges. (For reasons only Homme can explain, 2002’s “Song for the Dead” is not among them.) In place of loud guitars and drums are mournful strings and understated percussion; Homme’s soulful wail, however, needs no reinvention for the venue. But in this instance, the music itself isn’t the main draw for Homme. “The bigger truth is that the catacombs is so the protagonist,” he says. “It’s so overwhelming that we’re also there and we’re playing, but it felt like at all times that we were just serving this audience, which really deserved attention. People are viewing it a bit like a zoo in a way, but this was like, ‘I brung something for you. I got you this thing, and can I show it to you?’ It felt like we were having this moment together.”
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.
Perpetually operating in a wondrous and woozy space for some two decades, Black Moth Super Rainbow serves as an essential part of the independent psychedelic music underground. Though sometimes their trips take darker turns, as on 2018’s *Panic Blooms*, the Pennsylvania-based act’s seventh album *Soft New Magic Dream* returns to a more blissed-out environment. Here, lead vocalist Thomas Fec, also known as Tobacco, returns from making left-field hip-hop with Aesop Rock as Malibu Ken and composing video game soundtracks with a brand-new love burrowing into his frontal lobe. The results always feel structurally damaged and actively decaying. As such, even the poppiest songs on the record seem capable of collapsing into themselves. “The Eyes in Season” and “Unknown Potion” nearly lose their inherent boom-bap structure in acidic, synthy gobs and heartfelt yet vocoded lyrics. Two of the more rock-oriented cuts, “Brain Waster” and “Wet Spot Dare,” cling to drums and basslines for dear life, the alternative being a chance to truly let oneself go and see what happens.
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.”
Lifeguard’s *Ripped and Torn* is an impressive and indelible debut in a long legacy of rock bands making noise sound like an energizing good time—from British post-punk greats Wire and American legends Sonic Youth to 2010s lo-fi heroes like Women and Male Bonding. The Chicago trio of Asher Case, Isaac Lowenstein, and Kai Slater (who also makes music as the buzzy indie-pop project Sharp Pins) have been making music together since junior high, and *Ripped and Torn* sounds suitably locked-in even as its creators channel brash, challenging avant-rock sounds that equally recall the 1980s NYC no-wave scene and post-rock forebears This Heat. If that sounds intimidating, rest assured: Lifeguard is as tuneful as they are tormented-sounding, as evidenced by the peppy and caffeinated punk rock of “It Will Get Worse”—a song title that’s droll, cheeky, and the exact opposite of what to expect from these upstarts as they continue their ascent.
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.
When a rock band releases a remix album, it’s often treated like an afterthought, with execs enlisting high-profile dance producers to slap new beats onto old singles and promoting them to club audiences who wouldn’t typically buy rock albums. This has never been the case for The Cure’s remix albums. Ever since their first—1990’s *Mixed Up*, which yielded the Balearic classic “Lullaby (Extended Mix)”—the band’s singer and principal songwriter, Robert Smith, has had a close hand in the process, doing many of the mixes himself. The tracks rarely veer into proper club-music territory. Instead, certain motifs are teased out and built upon, and are occasionally augmented with new instruments or lengthened for more languid DJ sets. The band’s third remix album generally hews to that ethos. Even a towering name like Paul Oakenfold (who previously remixed “Close to Me” on *Mixed Up*) treats “I Can Never Say Goodbye” with a light touch, delicately accentuating its majestic vibe, while Orbital gives the downcast “Endsong” just a dab of industrial grit. Daniel Avery seems to even tone down the aggressive guitars and drums of “Drone:Nodrone” for his slightly more propulsive version. There is, of course, a lot of variation across these 24 remixes (each of *Mixes of a Lost World*’s eight tracks gets three), and it comes most notably in the form of more traditional dance remixes. But rather than seeming like a crass attempt to gain favor in other musical spheres, Smith’s list of respected electronic music producers here indicates just how deeply his tastes run. Germans Anja Schneider, Gregor Thresher, and Âme manage to turn Smith’s tunes into restrained and elegant techno and house cuts, while Four Tet gives “Alone\" some of his signature garage-y shuffle.
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.
In the course of making his fourth album, Loyle Carner came to the conclusion that perhaps it was time to lighten up a little. “I needed to not take myself so seriously,” he tells Apple Music. “I think I’m learning how to do that slowly.” One thing that has undoubtedly helped iron out that furrowed brow is just how much the South London rapper, songwriter, spoken-word artist, and now actor, born Ben Coyle-Larner, is reveling in fatherhood. “My son was in the studio so much, we were just in a place of living in the moment,” he explains. “When you’re around kids, that’s the only thing that exists to them. There’s no present or past or future or whatever.” That sense of savoring the here and now runs right through *hopefully !*. It’s an album that shakes off the contemplative turmoil of 2022’s *hugo*, where he explored his relationship with his own father, with these songs possessing a reassuring warmth. An airy, elegant hip-hop record from an artist who sounds totally at ease with himself, *hopefully !* has a cover that serves as the perfect snapshot for its themes of paternal love. “It always happens that my son just decides to draw on my face,” he says. “My partner captured the moment. What’s so nice is you can’t tell in that photo if he’s supporting me or comforting me or if I’m comforting him. I think that’s true of our relationship. It’s quite ambiguous, who’s looking after who?” Let Loyle Carner guide through the soothing sounds of *hopefully !*, track by track. **“feel at home”** “This was made with a friend of mine called Zach Nahome. I went to his house and we made it quite quickly. I was trying really hard to not write too many words down. Then, when I brought it back to the studio with my friends that I was working on the rest of the album with, I played them a little voice note I had on my phone of my son playing wind chimes in the park and it just happened to be in the perfect key with the song. Literally, he was kind of playing along with the song. It had to be at the start of the song and everyone around me was like, ‘It has to be the opener.’” **“in my mind”** “If ‘feel at home’ is the opening credits then ‘in my mind’ is the first scene. This was actually the first song we made together as a band and the first song for this album. We were in the studio in between sessions on tour and we had two days in the studio. It was a totally clean slate. I was listening to a lot more music from my childhood, The Smiths, The Cure, Bob Dylan, Stevie Smith, Elliott Smith—a lot of Smiths!—and new stuff too like Fontaines D.C.. Trying to get back to the stuff I listened to before I was told what I should listen to. That was feeding into it a lot.” **“all i need”** “This is one of my favorites. I wrote it in the car park of a Big Yellow Self Storage in East London. I was struck with how many things people keep, all the stuff that they hold onto. I wish that we had less stuff as people. I was thinking about all the emotional baggage that you don’t see that people carry around. I wish you could put that in a Big Yellow Self Storage instead.” **“lyin”** “This was written just before my daughter was born. It was about not being sure if she was going to make it or not. Birth and pregnancy is so complicated, and it doesn’t always work out. I was thinking about who she would be and hoping that she makes it. Also, putting my son to bed and thinking about how that’s my favorite time and how scared I was the first time around I was having a kid and how light and chill I was the second time because I knew it was easier than I thought.” **“time to go”** “‘time to go’’s days were numbered on the album for a long time. I was trying to get it to fit into the palette of the rest of the music, it was cool but it sounded so big and I wanted it to feel small. Then we went around the houses, tried to take everything away from it and, in the end, we decided that it was meant to be what it was and we couldn’t change it. We left it how it was and gave it a chance. We knew that there was something about it that made us feel good. We were like, ‘Look, if we can’t figure out how to change it, but we want it to come out, it’s going to have to be what it is.’” **“horcrux”** “I was thinking about my son and my daughter. In Harry Potter, Voldemort has the Horcruxes, where he takes a piece of his soul and puts it somewhere else. Someone had said to me, ‘You only get out of life alive through your kids. They’re the ones who get you out of life alive.’ I thought it was such a funny saying but I thought about it a lot because all of the best bits of me, I’ve taken them and tried to put them into my kids.” **“strangers”** “I made this with the intention of passing it over to someone I’m a big fan of: Adrianne Lenker. I really wanted her to sing it. I thought she could sing better than me, but she wasn’t around or whatever, so it fell back to me. At first, I was going to put it in the bin, and then I was like, ‘Actually, maybe this has got a chance.’ Other people started saying to me, ‘Please don’t lose this song. I really love it,’ so I gave it a shot, and here it is. Singing is fucking scary, if I’m honest. I didn’t think it through until it was too late. Obviously, it’s easy in front of no one. Then, the more people who started to come into touch with it and start to listen to it, it’s been a bit more scary. I’m trying to roll with it, trying to brave it.” **“hopefully” (with Benjamin Zephaniah)** “This features Benjamin Zephaniah. I was trying to be a little bit more coded in my language and be abstract a bit more to protect my kids, it’s so hard to express my love for them, literally. The echo you can hear is me and my son underneath a bridge on our bike. Every time we cycle underneath a bridge, he says, ‘Echo,’ because he likes the way it sounds, and so do I. I’ve recorded loads of those. Then, Benjamin Zephaniah, at the end, I had watched this documentary the day before and I heard that excerpt, and I was like, ‘That sums up what I’m saying in a more literal and pointed way.’” **“purpose” (with Navy Blue)** “This features Navy Blue. That was a dream come true, to collab with him. It came about really easily. We had been texting a bit. I texted him on a whim and was like, ‘I made this song, I think you’ll like it.’ He was sat on a beach in Jamaica and he wrote to it then and there and sent it back the next day.” **“don’t fix it” (with Nick Hakim)** “This is me and the main man, Nick Hakim. It was the last song we made for the album. It was in the studio at his in New York. It was quite a profound day for me to watch him. I’m a big fan of Nick Hakim. He wasn’t singing because obviously it’s a hard thing to part with when it’s so special to you. Then he got hunched up into the corner, put the mic to his lips, and spoke this little chorus into the mic. It was a privilege to watch someone do the thing they’re meant to do in your presence.” **“about time”** “It had to be at the end of the album because of my son, ’cause it sounds like he’s telling me to stop making music and focus on being a dad. I wanted it to be quite close to the beginning so it didn’t get lost but then it couldn’t be anywhere else. It was made to be there.”
