After the stylistic sprawl of 2022’s *Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You*, Big Thief’s sixth album finds the group bringing their increasingly distinctive sound closer to the vest in a literal sense: *Double Infinity* is their first album as a proper trio, following the departure of bassist Max Oleartchik. As a result, these nine songs—woolly, warm, and with frissons of electricity coursing through their veins—capture Big Thief in a state of ragged intimacy, every melodic turn and shift in instrumentation expanding and contracting like a pair of lungs. The rumbling drum fills and strummy framework of “Words” seemingly stretch for miles on end, while the nearly seven-minute “No Fear” carries a faint gothiness in its inky guitar lines that drip around Adrianne Lenker’s bruising vocals. More so than on any other Big Thief album to date, rock music is the name of the game here; even “Grandmother,” which features ambient legend Laraaji lending vocal incantations, bursts and blooms in a manner not unlike what was coming out of the 1970s Laurel Canyon scene. Wild-eyed and positively hot-blooded, *Double Infinity* is the work of a band that never stops evolving, even as they continue to sound singularly like themselves.
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.
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.”
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?’”
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
As one of a few shouty, abrasive, angular bands coalescing around Brixton live venue and rehearsal space The Windmill during the late 2010s, shame found themselves being ushered into a pigeonhole. Alongside the likes of Squid, black midi, and Black Country, New Road, they were heralded as the new wave of post-punk by a UK music press and A&R industry keen to have uncovered the next fertile scene. Wisely, the five-piece did their best to elude those strictures on the follow-ups to 2018 debut *Songs of Praise*. But reflecting on 2021’s *Drunk Tank Pink* and *Food for Worms* (2023), records that benefitted from ideas drawn from psych-rock, folk, jazz, and even singing lessons, shame began to wonder if some of their urgency had been thinned out. As a result, *Cutthroat* arrives with the band’s horizons still broad but their sound revitalized. The title track, with its combustion of riffs and groove, and the agitated polemic of “Cowards Around” captures the bracing, confrontational energy of the band’s live shows. It’s an opening salvo that establishes the vim and efficiency with which they go on to try out rockabilly (“Quiet Life”), the cockeyed but melodic sound of early Pavement (“Plaster”), sing-along indie pop (“Spartak”), and a collision of Portuguese folk, disco, and New Wave (“Lampião”). Against this absorbing backdrop, singer Charlie Steen muses on just how conflicted and paradoxical the human condition is. And he does it with a little more self-assurance and a bit less vulnerability and doubt than before. “Well, you can follow your fashions/You can follow your cliques/And I feel sorry for you/For feeling sorry for me,” he declares on “Spartak.” *Cutthroat* is the sound of shame continuing to explore their sound—and arriving somewhere increasingly unique.
David Byrne’s last album, 2018’s *American Utopia*, wasn’t merely an album: It was a sprawling multimedia work that encompassed music, a stage show, and a film that captured the magic of its performance. In fact, it was so sprawling that its chronology even includes a lengthy period of dormancy, between opening on Broadway at the end of 2019 and restarting in 2021 after COVID restrictions were eased. “During the pandemic, of course, I wanted to write new songs, but I felt like what was happening was bigger than anything I could write about,” Byrne tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe of that unexpected gap. “And I didn’t quite know how to address it.” While the songs that make up his eighth album under his given name, *Who Is the Sky?*, recorded with the musically elastic Ghost Train Orchestra, aren’t directly a product of that time, there are threads and themes that trace back to it. “I realized that some of these new songs are coming out of that,” he adds. The most obvious is probably the ode to his living quarters “My Apartment Is My Friend,” where Byrne ruminates on how intimate that physical space has become. \"So forgive me if I hesitate, if a tear comes now and then,” he sings. “You stood by me when darkness fell/My apartment is my friend.” Byrne has always had a gift for making the specific, and even the fantastical, seem universal. “Moisturizing Thing” plays like a Hollywood sci-fi, starring Byrne himself, in which he tries an anti-aging skin treatment only to turn into a toddler, forcing him to see the world through another’s eyes. He’s constantly asking more of himself in these songs: He questions a smiling religious teacher who’s gorging himself on hors d’oeuvres (“I Met the Buddha at a Downtown Party”); he ponders the place he’s been put in history (“The Avant Garde”); he wonders how his wife just understands things so naturally (“She Explains Things to Me”); he sees life in cycles of happiness and pain, searching and resolution (“Everybody Laughs”). And he does it all with the playfulness, grace, and naked, life-affirming joy of a musical elder statesman who has never lost his curious, creative spark.
With a title taken from a quote about a lethal self-driving Tesla crash, La Dispute’s fifth album revels in observations on modern malaise. The lightning-fast advancement of technology, the chaos of existential uncertainty, the unblinking eye of the surveillance state, the stultifying pressure of societal expectations, and all manner of personal crises take a bow on *No One Was Driving the Car*. The first La Dispute album produced entirely by the band, it’s the result of far-flung writing sessions conducted in the UK, Australia, the Philippines, and the band’s home state of Michigan. Partly inspired by the 2017 Paul Schrader film *First Reformed*, the 14-track album is a post-hardcore epic that revolves around lead vocalist Jordan Dreyer’s angsty narratives about the world we live in.
The members of Parcels had barely graduated high school when they left Byron Bay, Australia for Berlin in 2014, five friends sharing a dream and a cramped one-bedroom apartment. Within a year, they had released their debut EP and signed a label deal; by 2017, they were collaborating with Daft Punk on the band’s single “Overnight,” a track that would become the dance icons’ final production. After two albums—2018’s self-titled debut and 2021’s double LP *Day/Night*—and nearly a decade in motion, Parcels finally took a break in 2023. For six months, they lived their ordinary lives while working on songs individually before reconvening to finish them together. Whereas *Day/Night* was recorded in a single studio and meticulously planned out, their third album *LOVED* was made more loosely, with sessions in Berlin, Byron Bay, Sydney, and Mexico City, and a go-with-the-flow approach that let the album emerge on its own. “It\'s kind of like Parcels back to our most authentic self, in a way,” bassist Noah Hill told Apple Music’s Travis Mills in April 2025. “This one feels a lot more pure and direct, and more to what we naturally have inside of us.” From opener “Tobeloved,” *LOVED* is dotted with moments of laughter and colorful ad-libs that drop listeners right in the booth with them. That joy permeates the production, a vintage blend of peppy keys, hand-claps, chest-swelling crescendos, and funky guitar riffs that beg for a little shimmy. They also bring tenderness: “Ifyoucall” offers unconditional love with the warmth of a long hug, and “Leaveyourlove” is a starry-eyed declaration of devotion. The latter, written in Mexico while watching the sun set over the ocean, became the album’s anchor point. “We were all writing our own individual verses about our own love stories at the time, and wanting to lean into that directness and not being afraid to talk about love so directly,” said Hill. “This track just clicked with all of us instantly.” But *LOVED* also refers to the emotion in the past tense. The disco fizz of “Yougotmefeeling” sugarcoats the realization that a relationship is past saving, and the more delicate “Summerinlove” aches with post-breakup yearning. Other songs like “Safeandsound” and “Finallyover” embrace the unknowable future with optimism, while closer “Iwanttobeyourlightagain” circles back to where it all began: “I remember when we were green/Five people and two sets of keys/Trying so hard to be seen.”
Five years after 2020’s *Freeze, Melt*, Cut Copy has only grown more nuanced and self-reflective, with soft-sung leader Dan Whitford leaning into confiding closeness across *Moments*. That suits the Melbourne band’s warm, tender synth-pop, which can still flash back to their more extroverted past with selectively clubby touches. American singer Kate Bollinger lends dreamy guest vocals amid some weepy steel guitar on “Belong to You,” a track that balances melancholy and motion in a way that feels distinctive to Cut Copy. The like-minded “Still See Love” explores the stark duality between its peppy verse and pensive chorus, while “When This Is Over” taps a poignant choir of children and “Gravity” morphs its way through a slippery, suite-like structure. Yet, even when a song starts off mellow, the band often introduces some engaging new facet near the end, from the vocodered mantra closing the slow-burn title track to the burbling layers coming to a head during the final minute of “More Alive.” This album may be fairly low-key, but Cut Copy still knows how to hypnotize with sneaky hooks and quiet sincerity.
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.”
“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.”
“Heartbreak, gold mine,” Jordan Miller sings at the start of “Touch Myself,” a paean to irrepressible desire that appears partway through The Beaches’ third full-length album. And with those three words, she provides a perfectly succinct snapshot of The Beaches’ trajectory since 2023, when the viral post-breakup anthem “Blame Brett” thrust the Toronto band into the Top 40 pop charts on both sides of the border. With *No Hard Feelings*, The Beaches continue to navigate the emotional minefield of young-adult love with their sense of humor and candor intact. But if their early releases saw them rocking out with ’70s glam swagger, *No Hard Feelings* casts their fine-tuned pop sensibilities in an ’80s goth romanticism, with the shimmering guitars and yearning hooks of tracks like “Touch Myself” and “I Wore You Better” hitting the heretofore untapped sweet spot between Robert Smith and Taylor Swift. And where The Beaches’ breakout single was about trying to move on from a relationship, *No Hard Feelings*’ emotional centerpiece—the synthy soft-rock stunner “Lesbian of the Year”—is a bittersweet account of leaving your past behind completely, with Miller giving voice to keyboardist/guitarist Leandra Earl’s experience of coming out.
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.
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.
Since their first project as Frost Children (2020’s *Aviation Creates Adventurous Beginnings*), the duo of Angel and Lulu Prost have honed their chaotic maximalism while helping to define what exactly the “indie sleaze revival” means—is the trend a sound or a feeling? If the free-wheeling, red-blooded party-rock anthems of the St. Louis-raised, New York-based duo are any indication, it’s the latter—drawing from hyperpop, indie rock, electroclash, and meme mischief, Frost Children’s music is hard to pin down, but easy to dance to. On *SISTER*, the duo wrings every last drop of pathos from a serotonin-heavy blend of scuzzy bloghouse, mid-aughts dance-punk, and festival-core EDM. The spirit of indie sleaze is alive on “ELECTRIC,” with its buzzsaw synths and Rapture-esque vocals, while Kim Petras collab “RADIO” channels sleazy late-2000s electropop. Setting aside their previous work’s occasional tongue-in-cheek humor, the prevailing mood is earnest: On the title track, stripped-down ’90s rock shimmers with a hyperpop sheen as the siblings recall the dandelions and hand-me-downs of their Midwestern upbringing: “The two of us, driving down a roundabout life again/It’s the two of us/Sister.”
Don’t be fooled by the brief burst of Beethoven’s Fifth that caps the introductory track on The Hives’ seventh album—Sweden’s most swaggering garage rockers have not entered their symphonic prog phase. It’s just a mischievous misdirection that thrusts us slam-bang into “Enough Is Enough,” whose buzzsaw guitars and spine-cracking backbeat provide intentionally unsubtle echoes of The Hives’ 2000 signature, “Hate to Say I Told You So” (while proving that even in his late forties, lead singer Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist isn’t about to retire his nickname). Cramming 13 tracks into 33 minutes, *The Hives Forever Forever The Hives* retains the band’s strict adherence to punk’s loud/fast parameters, even as they reformulate their Molotov-rocktail recipe with liberal doses of synth-spiked indie (“Legalize Living”), Clash-of-’77 valor (“Paint a Picture”), and high-voltage AC/DC riffage (“Bad Call”). As a Y2K-era sensation that’s endured past the quarter-century mark, The Hives have more than earned the right to write their own self-celebratory theme song, and with the needling, New Wavey title track, they deliver the sort of shout-it-out chorus that their crowds will still be chanting long after the house lights go up.
When North Carolina indie stalwarts Superchunk emerged from a nine-year hiatus in 2010, they forged a dignified way for pogo-happy indie bands to channel the sprung energy that made sense in their twenties into ideas that make sense in their forties and fifties. On the other side of starting to raise families and pursue other work, the entire notion of what it meant to be in a band at such a big age became both text and subtext and set a gold standard for the second time in their existence. On their fifth album since regrouping, Superchunk continue to find ways to meet the moment while never sounding like anything but themselves. Just as 2018’s *What a Time to Be Alive* mined Trump 1.0-era righteous fury for some of the most urgent music of their career and 2022’s *Wild Loneliness* used the pandemic’s isolation to contemplate environmental, societal, and emotional ruin, *Songs in the Key of Yikes* embraces and embodies the nauseous mix of despair and nihilism and abandon that defines 2025. At first glance, the tracklist reads like a cry for help from singer/guitarist Mac McCaughan (“No Hope,” “Everybody Dies,” “Climb the Walls,” etc.), but the eminently catchy “Care Less” moves past an easy slogan to serve as an operator’s manual for anyone who is both trying to stay informed about the ongoing collapse while trying to find space to tune it out and make use of whatever time is left (“Don’t make me remember/What I can’t forget”). “Is It Making You Feel Something” (which joins the pantheon of question-titled Superchunk songs alongside “Why Do You Have to Put a Date on Everything,” “Does Your Hometown Care?,” “What Do You Look Forward To?,” and “The Question Is How Fast”) feels like an argument for the role of art, any art, amid the spiral. For all of Superchunk’s remarkable longevity and consistency, *Yikes* marks the band’s first on-record personnel change in 34 years with the departure of seemingly omnipresent drummer Jon Wurster and Laura King stepping in to lay down the sickness. Yet even a potentially convulsive change like this barely feels like a ripple in the final product, only reasserting Superchunk’s knack for not just weathering storms but being a refuge from them.
