“I found a crouton underneath a futon,” singer Sebastian Murphy intones over a steady bass throb punctuated by flute accents on “Uno II,” one of the many clever and catchy tunes on the quasi-self-titled *viagr aboys*. “Mama said I couldn’t eat it ’cause all my teeth are gone.” Such is the delightfully absurdist world of Viagra Boys, a Swedish quasi-punk group with an American vocalist and an undying hunger for shrimp and shrimp-related products. The band’s fourth album doubles down on the self-deprecating, society-skewering antics and infectious grooves of 2022’s *Cave World* with gleeful abandon. Powered by slashing guitars and a droning chorus, “Man Made of Meat” offers historical perspective for modern complainers: “I don’t wanna pay for anything/Clothes and food and drugs for free/If it was 1970, I’d have a job at a factory.” Jet-propelled bass boogie “The Bog Body” doubles as a commentary on superficiality that plays out like an inversion of the Demi Moore body-horror flick *The Substance*, complete with a zombielike swamp woman. “Pyramid of Health” simultaneously apes and lampoons Marcy Playground’s grunge-esque ’90s hit “Sex and Candy” before veering into carnival music and electronic noise. Resurrecting a successful template from previous albums, Murphy cuts loose with a hilarious, possibly stream-of-consciousness rant over skronky free jazz on “Best in Show Pt. IV.” With breathy backing vocals and a chiming minor-key organ melody, “Medicine for Horses” is more plaintive, reflective, and—maybe—straight-faced. The same could be said of Murphy’s mournful, wavering vocal on closer “River King,” but who knows? Where Viagra Boys are concerned, it’s anyone’s guess.
Will Toledo’s music as Car Seat Headrest has always *felt* like opera whether he called it that or not—at least, few other indie bands have made the droll monotonies of being an outcast sound so grand. A concept album nominally about a med-school student who discovers her secret powers to heal patients by literally absorbing their pain (yep!), *The Scholars* is both Toledo and his band’s most conventionally “big” album (soaring choruses, dramatic turns, multi-part songs) and its most cryptic, tucking all those big, obvious gestures into the folds of a story that feels just out of reach by design. The short songs hit hardest (“The Catastrophe,” “Devereaux”), but the long ones are where they get to make their weird stadium-sized dreams come true. Case in point, the 19-minute centerpiece “Planet Desperation”: Toldeo howls, “When I get to the pearly gates, will I see you on the inside pointing at me/Mouthing ‘There he is, officer—there’s the prick I warned you about.” Then they get to sound like The Who. Then a little bit like Genesis. Then the hand-drum section comes in.
The buzzing New York band (lead vocalist Cole Haden, drummer Ruben Radlauer, guitarist Jack Wetmore, and bassist Aaron Shapiro) formed in 2016, but broke through with their 2023 full-length debut, *Dogsbody*—a blast of haunted, hedonistic noise-rock that embellished the cool chaos of early aughts dance-punk with musical-theater melodrama. On its follow-up, *Pirouette*, Model/Actriz lean all the way in on those rococo tendencies and embrace their inner prima donnas without losing their grit. “Living in America, while trapped in the body of an operatic diva,” Haden laments in a campy stage whisper on “Diva” between tales of one-night stands in far-flung European locales. The pendulum swings wildly between abandon and control, but there’s a gonzo sensuality that ties it all together. Hence, an eerie acoustic ballad about being jealous of hummingbirds (“Acid Rain”) followed by a throbbing dance-punk jam (“Departures”) that relishes in the beauty of three-syllable words—parasol, silhouette, matinee, vagabond.
At the core of every PUP record is the tension between Stefan Babcock’s brutally self-analytical lyrics and the rapturous communal response that their music elicits. And that contrasting quality has become all the more pronounced as the manic Toronto punks have gradually eased off the gas pedal. After expanding their palette with brass sections and electronics on 2022’s high-concept corporate satire *The Unraveling of Puptheband*, they reemerge on *Who Will Look After the Dogs?* with a sharpened musical and lyrical focus, settling comfortably into a post-emo power-pop style that makes Babcock’s bitterest sentiments sound celebratory. Babcock has a knack for framing universal anxieties—be it breakups or the fear of death—in intimate yet irreverent details: The Weezer-esque chugger “Olive Garden” sees him trying to salvage a broken relationship by revisiting the Italian restaurant chain that’s hosted countless high schoolers’ first dates, while the breezy ’90s alt-pop jangle of “Hallways” reveals the morbid inspiration behind the album’s title, when Babcock talks himself off the ledge by declaring, “I can’t die yet/’Cause who will look after the dog?” (And while cataloging his joyless days and sleepless nights, he manages to slip in winking quotes of Disturbed’s “Down with the Sickness” and Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep.”) But if the entire PUP discography feels like an extended therapy session, then the irresistibly anthemic “Best Revenge” feels like a breakthrough, where the song\'s radiant guitars are matched by an equally sunny outlook: “The best revenge is living well,” Babcock sings, and even if there are days when he can’t fully live up to that promise, he’ll at least have a club full of fans shouting out the song’s ecstatic chorus to keep him on the right path.
Samia’s third album, *Bloodless*, sounds as if someone’s opened a nearby window, allowing for a gush of fresh air to carry Samia Finnerty’s voice into the skies. The 28-year-old Minneapolis-based singer-songwriter’s follow-up to 2023’s *Honey* feels lithe and buoyant even at its most emotionally weighty. At times—the slinky “Lizard,” the echo-laden swell of “Sacred,” the thicket of woodwinds and vocals that run through closing track “Pants”—Samia recalls the ethereal New Wave of British pop-rock phenom The Japanese House, or the timeless bounce of Fleetwood Mac. At the center of such gestures is Samia’s close-to-the-bone lyricism, which continues to convey her pitch-perfect sly humor; atop the stormy strums and electronic frissons of “North Poles,” she wraps her bell-clear voice around evocations of “spyware lipstick” and fistfuls of natural wine before lobbing a grenade of reflection at the listener’s feet: “When you see yourself in someone/How can you look at them?”
What makes the darkness of billy woods’ raps bearable is that you’re always a step or two away from a good joke or decent meal—a real-world, life-goes-on resilience that has been the bedrock of hip-hop from the beginning. That said, *GOLLIWOG* is probably the most out-and-out unsettling album he’s made yet, a smear of synth rumbles, creaky pianos, and horror-movie strings whose dissonances amplify scenes of otherwise ordinary dread, whether it’s the Black artist trying to charm the boardroom of white executives on “Cold Sweat” or prolonged eviction scene of “BLK XMAS.” Now in his mid-forties, woods is confident enough in his critique to make you squirm in it and has a rolodex of some of the best producers in underground rap to back him up, including Kenny Segal, El-P, Conductor Williams, and DJ Haram. Spoiler alert: The real monsters are human.
The Norwegian musician and interdisciplinary artist began unwittingly conceptualizing her ninth album in the solitude of the pandemic, during which she developed a newfound passion for perfume. It was later that Hval gathered that her scent obsession was an answer to that era’s void of intimacy and physicality. This explains the intriguingly lush title, borrowed from a scent of the same name from French perfumer Serge Lutens described as smelling somewhere between cold steel and morning mist. It also explains the record’s ghostly sensuality, rife with sights, smells, and sounds which Hval conjures in their absence—the incandescent buzz of stage lights and scent of spilled beer in rock clubs now shuttered. (“A stage without a show/A hazy silhouette/Around an empty space,” she sings over moody trip-hop on “The artist is absent.”) Here, scent is a portal to another time and place: On “To be a rose,” the smell of cigarettes transports her to her childhood, her mother smoking on the balcony: “Long inhales and long exhales/Performed in choreography/Over our dead-end town.”
After the reception to her 2023 self-titled debut as Blondshell, it’s no surprise that Sabrina Teitelbaum’s follow-up, *If You Asked for a Picture*, came together while she was quite literally on the move. “I was touring a lot, so I was in a lot of new places and just writing about what was going on,” she tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “I didn’t have the intention of making an album, but when I got home, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to start demoing these songs.’” The resulting 12 tracks may have come together casually, but *If You Asked for a Picture* is a fuller and richer evocation of the Blondshell sound, pairing spiky ’90s alternative rock sounds with acerbic couplets. Along with longtime studio collaborator Yves Rothman (Kim Gordon, Yves Tumor), Teitelbaum adds subtle sonic flourishes to her winning sound—peep the Ronettes-recalling backbeat of “23’s a Baby” and the dream pop of closer “Model Rockets”—but her cutting and personal songwriting style remains the project’s hallmark. Who else could write an introspective exploration of living with OCD, as Teitelbaum does on the explosive “Toy,” and sneak in a withering line like, “I’ve been running this ship like the Navy/But it’s more like a Wendy’s”? As Teitelbaum’s songwriting continues to mature, Blondshell’s balance of the devastating and the deeply funny continues on as one of indie rock’s most thrilling high-wire acts.
For over two decades, Natalia Lafourcade’s catalog has showcased her magnificent voice across a variety of styles, both as a stunning soloist and at the helm of skilled ensembles. Reuniting with her *De Todas las Flores* co-producer Adan Jodorowsky, the Veracruz-raised singer-songwriter taps into her home region’s musical history while drawing upon her wider discography for *Cancionera*. Perhaps most impressively, she recorded it entirely in one take, a feat that becomes more and more meaningful as the album persists. After a tone-setting instrumental introduction, she begins to shape the album’s fantastical broad narrative with the title track, portraying herself as an almost supernatural spirit of song. What follows is a series of memorable moments like the rumba-y-mezcal-enhanced “El Palomo y La Negra” and the fragile yet firm “Mascaritas de Cristal,” as well as moving duets like “Como Quisiera Quererte” with El David Aguilar and “Amor Clandestino” with flamenco singer Israel Fernández.
The Oxford-based musician was a virtuoso DJ before he became a producer, pulling off risky transitions of genre and tempo in vinyl-only sets known to flit from hip-hop to drum ’n’ bass to free jazz. Before that, though, the artist born Felix Manuel was something of a child prodigy as a pianist and harpist. On *Under Tangled Silence*, the first Djrum full-length since 2018’s *Portrait with Firewood*, Manuel’s talents as an instrumentalist (piano, harp, and percussion) are foregrounded as much as his electronic production. On “A Tune for Us,” cascading piano gradually gives way to jungle breaks; elsewhere, heady acid house and futuristic dancehall wash up against a blissful, piano-guided ambient meditation. Manuel began the record during the pandemic lockdowns, then rebuilt it from scratch after a catastrophic hard-drive meltdown; the result is a striking, holistic portrait of an artist fully inhabiting himself.
Whether it’s Merrill Garbus’ megaphone vocals, her righteously indignant messaging, or the percussive rhythms thundering beneath them, Tune-Yards have never trafficked in subtlety. But with their sixth album, the creative partnership of Garbus and bass-playing hubby Nate Brenner delivers its most clearly articulated statement to date. *Better Dreaming* is the duo’s fiercely funky response to spending several years cooped up (first with the pandemic, then with a newborn), and a defiantly optimistic affront to a world descending into chaos and rage. Featuring guest giggles from their offspring, “Limelight” is a joyous jam with a pronounced P-Funk vibe, while the clattering disco-house workout “How Big Is the Rainbow” is an instant LGBTQ+ anthem that you can imagine being blasted at Pride parties around the world for years to come. But *Better Dreaming* acknowledges that staying positive in a world mired in negativity requires constant diligence and self-care, and with “Get Through,” Garbus delivers an inspirational soul serenade to keep us racing toward the light: “We don’t know how we get through,” she sings, “but we do.”
Graham Johnson’s music as quickly, quickly has always retained an intimacy even as the project has grown in scope. His homespun brand of psych-infused bedroom pop began evolving with 2021’s *The Long and Short of It*, remixing the DIY spirit of his catchy lo-fi tunes to include technicolor instrumental bursts and some of his clearest vocals to date. On its follow-up, 2025’s *I Heard That Noise*, Johnson imbues these vast soundscapes with moments of spontaneity and experimentation. His voice is more powerful than ever before, and he mirrors the whimsy of his instrumentals with his unpredictable melodic inclinations. Take “Enything,” a guitar-driven, folk-leaning track with spindly guitar melodies and a propulsive drum part. Johnson’s vocals build alongside the groove, which hints at a resolution that never comes. His ability to conjure and resolve tension is effortless and seamless. “Raven,” on the other hand, is an acoustic campfire jam, a track unlike anything else on the album. Here, Johnson performs the role of storyteller, his voice raw and vulnerable, matching the gravitas of the moment—whatever it may call for.
The Irish musician wrote her self-released debut album, 2019’s dreamy, reverb-drenched *All My People*, while living in Dublin and pining for her hometown of Connemara on Ireland’s Atlantic coast. Writing its follow-up, Maria Somerville returned to the rural landscapes of her youth, drawing inspiration from its wild terrain, its weather patterns and various bodies of water, and the Irish folk traditions still cherished by the locals. Between a pair of artist residencies on the nearby island of Inis Oírr, long conversations with her fisherman father, and home recording sessions with a small crew of new collaborators (Henry Earnest, Finn Carraher McDonald, Roisin Berkeley) emerged the ethereal songs of *Luster*, Somerville’s sophomore album and her 4AD debut. Wistful dream-pop numbers like “Garden” and “Projections” channel the woozy romance of Grouper, Mazzy Star, or Cocteau Twins, while evoking Somerville’s misty, windswept surroundings.
What’s in a name? In the case of Yung Lean, what initially registered as a sardonic take on post-ironic internet rap tropes was, in fact, a riff on the Swedish rapper’s given name: Jonatan Leandoer Håstad. In the decade-plus since he broke through with 2013’s “Ginseng Strip 2002,” Lean has evolved past his position as Scandinavia’s foremost cloud-rap interpreter, embracing sincerity, transparency, and, more recently, post-punk. (On 2024’s *Psykos*, his first full-length collaboration with Drain Gang CEO Bladee, they channeled Joy Division and The Cure for songs about psychosis and ego death.) The title of his fifth solo album says it all: *Jonatan* is Lean at his rawest, a homecoming after a long, dark night of the soul. Lead single “Forever Yung” plays out like a funeral for his former self: Phoenixes rise from the ashes, masks are taken off, a rickety one-note bassline rattles ahead. A handful of bruised love songs crackle with manic energy and magical-realist details: On “Paranoid Paparazzi,” he raps about pills and lullabies in a voice that sounds like he’s just rolled out of bed, and “Babyface Maniacs” could be the theme song of a future *Badlands* remake: “Infamous murderous couple ridin’ through the drylands/Sugarcane kisses and shotguns, candy cane violence.” But at the emotional crux of *Jonatan* are heavy yet hopeful ballads that put chaos in the rearview—like “Swan Song,” on which Lean singsongs, “I wanna know what it feels like to come down from the trip of a lifetime.”
“I wanted to make a record that was not going to be anything like what we’d done and something we couldn’t make in Australia,” vocalist/guitarist Caleb Harper tells Apple Music about Spacey Jane’s third album. It’s the sound of a band venturing outside their comfort zone. Such a goal doesn’t come without a little hardship. Relocating to Los Angeles to make the album, some of the issues the West Australian four-piece faced were practical, like figuring out how to get a rental without credit history. Others were artistic, with Harper learning how to work with outside writers such as Sarah Aarons (“Whateverrrr,” “How to Kill Houseplants”) for the first time. “All of those things felt new and foreign and scary,” he says. “I hear it lyrically. I feel this vulnerability and some confusion.” Shepherding the band through the process was producer Mike Crossey (The 1975, Arctic Monkeys), with whom Spacey Jane spent 12 weeks tracking the record. Given that they dedicated 18 months to writing the LP—which incorporates synths (“Falling Apart”) and even a piano-led ballad (“Ily the Most”) into their indie-guitar arsenal—*If That Makes Sense* accounts for roughly two years of the band’s life. “It’s the most work we’ve put into a record,” says Harper. The singer’s upbringing is a recurring lyrical theme and the album’s title is a response to the emotional complexity. “It’s the last line on the last song of the record,” he offers. “It’s representative of this idea of saying all these things and then discounting it with ‘if that makes sense.’” Here, Harper takes Apple Music through *If That Makes Sense*, track by track. **“Intro”** “On ‘Through My Teeth’ there are all these little peddling arpeggio guitars and synths, and we had 20 of them that we whittled down to four or five. Mike was playing around with them one day, just in isolation, and I filmed it with my phone. A month later, I said to Mike, ‘Listen to this, how cool was this on its own?’ So the intro is actually that audio ripped from the iPhone video and then it blends into all those voice memos of me writing the music over the preceding two years.” **“Through My Teeth”** “It’s about the identity crisis I felt when I was 17, 18, and just being a mess and feeling like people don’t know who I am anymore. I’m this person to this new group of people I’ve met and I’m unrecognizable to the people I’m leaving behind, and it’s all through the lens of this fucked-up little kid running around getting drunk, which was essentially me.” **“Whateverrrr”** “Sarah \[Aarons\] and I \[wrote the title\] like that when we were texting back and forth. It’s just stupid, how a kid might write it or say it. That ties into the song—it’s a kid being like, ‘Whatever, but I’ll think of you forever.’ It’s this awful sense of, there’s things that you can’t control that are so far away from you now as an adult that are like the foundation of who you are as a person. It’s like a reflection on family life, and it’s this juxtaposition of running through the sprinklers but something’s dark, something feels fucked up, and when you look back on it you can’t quite balance the two experiences.” **“All the Noise”** “It’s an attempt at \[reflecting on my parents’ split\] without putting any extra research into it. It’s what I’ve heard about what happened and what that may be. This was quite an angry sounding song, but it’s anger at not knowing. It’s not directed at anyone.” **“Impossible to Say”** “Sonically, we were thinking about Beck a bit. None of us are really Beck fans, but Mike was like, ‘Listen to a couple of these songs, that’s a cool direction.’ Having Ashton \[Hardman-Le Cornu, guitarist\] on the acoustic guitar is a rarity, in fact it’s the first time. He might have played a few bits on acoustic \[in the past\] that made their way into songs, but he’s on acoustic that whole song, which feels pretty different, and it’s a really exciting dynamic for us.” **“How to Kill Houseplants”** “It’s the idea that you try and give everything to this plant, this relationship—the right amount of love or sunlight or water or not enough—and it seems like you just keep fucking killing it despite your best intentions.” **“I Can’t Afford to Lose You”** “It’s a pretty simple love song, and \[it’s about\] trying not to screw something up. I wrote it on a tour bus in Denver and basically finished it in a couple of hours when the band were out doing some stuff. There’s not much to unpack there. It is what it is on face value.” **“So Much Taller”** “I’m lucky to be in a place of much better self-love than I was when I was still figuring out life. It’s about that. That kind of sums up the song in a lot of ways, and feeling like you’re constantly succumbing to a darkness and a cloud that is just there.” **“The More That it Hurts”** “I wrote it with Jackson Phillips, who goes by Day Wave, and he loves weird tunings. The guitars are so detuned. We just really liked that chorus. It goes chorus, verse, chorus, and then bridge and chorus, and so the goal was really to make the rest of the song work around those three choruses. Which was really fun.” **“Estimated Delivery”** “That song had a splice sample of what is essentially a breakbeat groove, and then we recreated the drums through 30 different layers. Kieran \[Lama, drummer\] plays a simplified version of it acoustically, and we have two drum machines running two separate loops. Then you slam all that together and run it through a tape machine. It took two days to make that drum beat. That’s the kind of shit you get up to when you have three months.” **“Falling Apart”** “Sometimes there’s a propensity to blame who you are and what you do on things that happened to you in the past, and I hate when people do that. But it’s basically what I’m doing in this song.” **“Ily the Most”** “Way out of my comfort zone. It’s a piano ballad, which we’ve never done before. It’s a hard song for me to sing, it’s pushing my range a lot of the time, and it’s a really raw, pop vocal right at the front. It’s just a love song, tied in with the fear of losing someone. That’s an important part of it. I love you, but fuck, I’m probably going to lose you.” **“August”** “That song is like the closing of a chapter in my life. I started writing it in September 2022, and I didn’t finish the lyrics until March 2024. It spans essentially the whole process of making the record and took on new meanings, from a letter to my family, to then a partner, all these chapters. I was also moving out of my house in LA, I’d packed everything up, I was surrounded by boxes, it was the last day of vocals, of any tracking, and I was just crying in the studio finishing those last lines. It all culminated in this quite emotional moment.”
Long before shoegaze and grunge became the rock music favored by young listeners in the mid-2020s, Doylestown, Pennsylvania, quartet Superheaven were reimagining the ’90s genres for a more modern age. The band quickly built an audience with their 2013 and 2015 albums, *Jar* and *Ours is Chrome*. After a lengthy hiatus, they reemerged with 2025’s self-titled third album, a project that finds them in the middle of a shoegaze renaissance, though with a newfound perspective. “Cruel Times” plays with the crunching guitar fuzz of alt-rock giants like Dinosaur Jr. and Built to Spill, while “Humans for Toys” is a heavy headbanger built around chugging chords mostly heard on metal ballads. As the band’s once-preferred sound became a fan favorite among a new crop of musicians, Superheaven cleverly adjusted their POV, creating a wider landscape of rock stylings than ever before.
William Tyler spent the first 15 years of his solo career bridging the fingerpicky intricacy of post-folk guitarists like John Fahey with the mellow, expansive qualities of ambient and New Age. *Time Indefinite* is both none of that and more. Built on loops made using an old cassette deck rescued from his late grandfather’s office in Jackson, Mississippi, the music here retains all the vernacular Americanness that made Tyler’s early albums feel approachable, but foregrounds texture instead of technique: the crumbling hymn of “Star of Hope,” the pastoral washes of “The Hardest Land to Harvest,” the creaking, almost horror-movie suspense of “Cabin Six” and “A Dream, a Flood.” The sum is music that has more in common with the sound manipulations of Jim O’Rourke or the late-’60s work of a composer like Gavin Bryars, whose stately, droning pieces captured the comfort of folk music within the frame of the avant-garde. He shifted gears—and he pulled it off.
When you have a voice as pure as Cleo Sol’s, you can sing about nearly anything and have it sound otherworldly. Sol, however, doesn’t take lightly the responsibility of her instrument, treating each opportunity—both in and outside of her role as lead vocalist for Sault—as an opportunity to spread joy, foster hope, and offer up praise to the most high. Sault’s mission across *10*—actually their 12th full-length project—lies squarely inside those ramparts, with Sol working alongside the group’s production engine, Inflo, alongside a slew of other collaborators (dancehall singjay Chronixx, legendary bassist Pino Palladino, rising pianist NIJE) to offer a balm for increasingly trying times. The titles alone—“The Healing,” “Know That You Will Survive,” “We Are Living”—telegraph their psalmic intention. So does Sol’s voice, which sails over Ohio funk in “Power,” recalls the radiance of disco queen Donna Summer on “Real Love,” and anchors uptempo jazz on “The Sound of Healing,” breathing life into relentless optimism. Sault has been nothing if not celebrated over the course of their elusive career, but that adulation notwithstanding, *10* reminds us there’s still hope for us all.
“How can I ever write anything again?” That was Self Esteem—aka Rebecca Lucy Taylor’s—first thought when it came to following up her second album, 2021’s *Prioritise Pleasure*, with its five-star reviews and album of the year accolades. But after she followed an exhausting bout of touring in 2023 with almost six months of playing Sally Bowles in West End show *Cabaret*, Taylor packed herself off to Margate and got down to business. The result is *A Complicated Woman*, a massive album full of joy, anger, and humor which is made to be blasted out of stadiums. Except Taylor opted for an intimate theater run in London to showcase it to fans. Complicated, indeed. “I’m proud of how it’s come out,” Taylor tells Apple Music. “It’s dense and it’s complicated, because this time in my life is dense and it’s complicated.” The sound is big and unapologetic. “This is the first time I’ve had access to a proper choir and string arrangement, which was amazing,” she says. “I’m not one of those people who goes into the studio and jams, but if you leave me alone to think I can do it. Back in the day, I would try and write from nine to five, but it doesn’t work like that for me.” *A Complicated Woman* is a collection of songs that stop you in your tracks, from uplifting anthems (“If Not Now, It’s Soon”) to pounding electronica (“69”) and vulnerable confessions (“The Deep Blue Okay”). Eating cheesy chips and rewatching *Gladiator* gave Taylor an unlikely moment of inspiration: “The way he \[Oliver Reed’s character Proximo to Russell Crowe’s Maximus\] goes, ‘Win the crowd and you’ll win your freedom’—with *Prioritise Pleasure* doing how it did, and then that Glastonbury show (her 2022 performance at a packed-out John Peel Stage), that felt like I’d won the crowd. Before that, it always felt like you needed a moment on TikTok or you need this or you need this ad campaign or you need...all these things. Then I was like, ‘Oh, it was all here already. It’s your people.’” A lot of positivity sits alongside the anger on the album and Taylor is conscious she doesn’t have all the answers. “Women are still meant to be this one thing,” she says. “You can have everything, but you have to stay in line. It’s a kind of collection of national anthems for that idea.” Read on as Taylor takes you through it, track by track. **“I Do and I Don’t Care”** “The point of the album is that things are shit, but you have to just keep finding those little pockets of resistance, even if they’re tiny, and then try and be OK. This lyric came when I went home to Sheffield and someone asked how I was and I probably was whinging. But I thought, ‘Of course we’re complaining. What else are we going to do? You would be too if the system wasn’t moving for you in the way that it does.’ I suppose my ethos is I’m a complainer, I’ll always whinge, even when I’ve got what I want. But I’ll always meet it with some action. Whinging and doing nothing about it: bad. Whinging and trying: good.” **“Focus Is Power”** “‘Focus Is Power’ is a bit feel-good and I’m trying to say, ‘Keep going, keep trying, keep your eye on the prize.’ Not in a cheesy way. But I do wonder, ‘Am I a modern-day M People?’ For so long I wanted to be in the middle of the stage with the lights on me, I wanted to wear the clothes and have the shit and be invited to all the things. Then obviously I’ve learned that that’s all bollocks, and the best bit by a mile is helping people and having them go, ‘Oh, I feel like that too.’ I felt so alone until I was 35, and now I get to feel less alone by doing this. People have really responded to this song and been like, ‘Fucking hell, I needed to think like that again.’ And so do I.” **“Mother”** “This isn’t just about men and women, but it’s about the way that in heteronormative relationships it’s so often you teaching the man, and then you break up and some other fucker benefits from them being better dressed and not as much of a twat. It’s just so annoying. A lot of gay men are really responding to the track as well. It’s just relationships, isn’t it? One person is mother. I don’t want to be in control—I would absolutely fucking love to be some swooning, looked-after thing, but it’s not going to happen unless I fundamentally change everything about myself.” **“The Curse”** “I didn’t want to get bogged down in singles but then, for me, ‘The Curse’ could be one. It’s about when I was partying after *Prioritise Pleasure* came out. I was having to go to these red carpet dos and I’ve never had a problem with booze, but it’s the first time I realized I was drinking to be able to do things. Since writing that song, I’ve had a really good relationship with alcohol. I feel like if I’d have heard it a couple of years ago that would have made something click. So again, it’s another song where I’m like, ‘This helped me so it might help you.’” **“Logic, Bitch!” (feat. Sue Tompkins)** “I’m really proud of this song—it’s about realizing just because love is no longer romantic doesn’t mean it’s not valid. I hate hearing and being a woman that’s like, ‘I just can’t find a relationship and that means I’m sad.’ I love watching *Love Island* and *Love Is Blind*, but then I’m like, ‘Why is having a relationship still front and center to everyone’s existence?’ The song features Sue Tompkins from Life Without Buildings, who I think is really cool. We’ve never met, she did it on her phone from Scotland—it started out as a long-form piece but we couldn’t fit it all on there.” **“Cheers to Me”** “This is about skinny indie boys who make women feel crazy and unwanted. I’m worried about people saying, ‘Why are you mentioning body type?’ But it’s about those men who are like, ‘I’m not the problem because I read’ or ‘I watch arthouse films.’ And it’s about how the word ‘lonely’ is overused. Being on your own is fucking brilliant. Alone time is wonderful. But it’s on the tip of people’s tongues to be like, ‘I’m lonely.’ And it’s like, ‘I don’t think you are. You’re having a nice time, but you just don’t have a boyfriend.’” **“If Not Now, It’s Soon”** “You know that Elbow song, ‘One Day Like This’? I wanted to make something like that, with a Team GB feeling. It was definitely a conscious decision to make it feel hopeful, but trying to make a video for it was really hard until I figured it out. It’s basically a very big group hug of women who are like, ‘Same time next week?’ And it’s personal and political, so when I’m at my lowest, it’s a reminder to be patient and persistent. The speech originally comes from Julie Hesmondhalgh \[Coronation Street, *Happy Valley*, and *Mr Bates vs The Post Office* actor\] at an NHS rally saying, ‘Change is in the air’. She and I spoke through it and wrote it together, then she recorded this powerfully rousing speech in her kitchen.” **“In Plain Sight” (with Moonchild Sanelly)** “I hate being like this, but it does feel like women are judged to such a different standard to men. And men’s behavior gets explained away—and so much more easily than women’s. I did feel like a lot of things in my life have been harder because I’m a woman and I didn’t realize it—I grew up not knowing there was any difference. This song is special to me. Moonchild Sanelly wrote the poem in 10 minutes, and what you hear is the first time she read it out loud. She cried, I cried. It was a really special moment in my life. We’d done ‘Big Man’ together and obviously she was comfortable in that space, and I don’t fully know her story and she doesn’t know mine, but it’s that feeling-seen thing.” **“Lies” (feat. Nadine Shah)** “I’ve been a fan of Nadine Shah for years and then met her and we became buddies. And I wanted to start a girl band with her and Florence, but obviously, no one’s got any time. I do have an ambition to make a version of ‘Lies’ with 20 women doing a verse each. It’s one of those songs that has polish, but then you undercut it with the hardcore lyrics. None of the songs are meant to be background music—you can’t work to them, you have to stop and listen. I don’t want to be making music unless it’s like that.” **“69”** “I’d like to write Christina Aguilera’s ‘Dirrty’ for today, but ‘69’ isn’t that. The lyrics just fell out of me. I’d had an idea for ages to do a dance song that is just listing sex positions and rating them out of 10, then it augmented into what you now see before you. A lot of people have been like, ‘Oh, it’s very brave to put that out.’ I was like, ‘I didn’t even notice.’ It’s pretty political to do a sexy song, but it’s instructive and it’s inherently not sexy. I’m saying it without the MO being to turn men on. So many overwhelming responses have been like, ‘Finally, someone said it.’ What else are we mass nodding along to and pretending we like here? Like heels.” **“What Now”** “This is an idea I’ve had in my head for such a long time of getting everything you want and then it still not being all right. Disney created happy ever after and that’s a fallacy. Worse than that, I really do still adhere in my soul to feeling like, ‘Oh, well, when I’ve got that, I’ll be all right. And when my hair’s down to here, it’ll be better.’ And then you realize, you get somewhere and then it’s just more and then you’ll die. So it’s more dense than that. I don’t think the album is all female-based issues, it’s finding the world a bit tough and not getting everything as seemingly as quick as everyone else does, and no one admits it. We’re all still faking it.” **“The Deep Blue Okay”** “This is one of the most important songs I’ve ever written. It had to be the final track on the album, so it might suffer from people not bothering to listen to it. When I was writing this, I thought, ‘What’s my version of LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends”?’ I wrote it in about 10 minutes and it’s insanely emotional. It’s so personal to me, but everyone is finding their own journey in it. I’m conscious that people-pleasing felt like it kept me safe and I’d love to be able to have more conflict and say what I mean more. The songs sound like they do, but in my actual life you wouldn’t believe how scared and shy I am about saying what I want.”
“I’ve been realizing that I really made the album that I needed to heal myself,” Kali Uchis tells Apple Music about *Sincerely,* perhaps her most liberating work yet. The Colombian American singer-songwriter’s catalog has never felt slight or frivolous, whether in English or in Spanish. Yet this full-length follow-up to her 2024 *ORQUÍDEAS* dyad presents as something truly unique, arriving roughly a decade after her promising EP debut *Por Vida*. The majority of the songs here began simply as voice notes, fortuitously captured in inspired moments outside of the confines or pressures of a studio setting. “Messages would just feel like they were directly coming through me, and I just had to get them out,” she says. Given such natural creative origins, it should come as little surprise that the actual process behind the album eschewed industry norms altogether, favoring home recording and unconventional settings. And despite the demonstrated level of guest vocal talent at her fingertips, she opted out of features, too. “When you’re making emotional music, you have to actually dig into difficult subjects,” she says, marking a clear distinction between this piece and its star-powered predecessor. As a result, *Sincerely,* feels disarmingly intimate for what is ostensibly a pop album, even one from as consistently adventurous an artist as Uchis. The evocative moments of opener “Heaven Is a Home…” and closer “ILYSMIH” speak on love in grand and sweeping gestures, the passing of her mother and the birth of her son making understandably profound impacts on the work. Influences like Cocteau Twins and Fiona Apple can be felt in all that comes between those bookends. “There’s a lot of grief, but there’s a lot of joy,” she says, describing what seeps through the veil of “Silk Lingerie,” or the vamps of “Territorial.” Excess punctuation on titles like “Lose My Cool,” and “For: You” hint at the flowing prose of her lyrics as it contributes to an even greater whole. “I think it is a celebration of life in its own way,” she says, “in the sense of finding beauty in the pain and taking the good.”
Lili Trifilio began Beach Bunny as a solo indie-pop project in her bedroom in 2015. A decade later, the Chicago band (now a three-piece with drummer Jon Alvarado and guitarist Anthony Vaccaro) has gone viral on TikTok, rocked huge festival stages, and inspired female-dominated mosh pits with their angsty anthems about broken hearts and bruised egos. Their third album, *Tunnel Vision*, sees the band shifting their focus away from love and towards what some might call a full-blown existential crisis. “The world is changing for the worse,” Trifilio sings bluntly on the deceptively chipper “Mr. Predictable” (whose chorus doesn’t not give “MMMBop,” with all due respect). She’s crying at the DMV on “Clueless,” winkingly extolling the powers of self-delusion on “Big Pink Bubble,” and on “Violence,” she rattles off a list of news items (“Mass extinction, fascists gloating, microplastics in our clothing…”) that are enough to make you want to chuck your phone off of a bridge. The world’s on fire, sure, but Beach Bunny lays it down with enough verve that you may as well mosh anyway.
Gigi Perez pours her life experience into her work. After the viral success of her 2024 single “Sailor Song”—an open plea for queer romantic connection that topped the UK singles chart and went platinum in several other countries—her self-produced debut album plays like unabashed memoir. “Sugar Water” opens with a nod to Perez’s birthplace of Hackensack, New Jersey before recounting schoolyard taunts and even the texture of her childhood Barbie’s hair. Her sister Celene’s death in 2020 sits at the center of “Fable,” with both that song and the closing title track featuring voicemails left by Celene. Perez also unpacks that family tragedy on the darker “Survivor’s Guilt,” while the album’s title was inspired in part by Perez sleeping on the beach after her sister died. The emotive singing and busker-style folk balladry of Perez’s earlier releases is very much at play, though lilting strings interweave with the acoustic guitar on “Crown” and the especially surprising “Twister” adds Auto-Tune and a programmed beat. But again, the lyrics are most often the star here, with the singer-songwriter revisiting her intense religious upbringing alongside love, loss, and other weighty themes.
You’ll probably recognize the general sounds and styles on Ezra Furman’s 10th album: Beatles-y psych-folk (“Sudden Storm”), quasi-industrial ’90s pop (“Submission”), soft-focus disco (“You Hurt Me I Hate You”), and Springsteen-style garage (“Power of the Moon”). What’s great about Furman is the way she manages to make all these familiar, almost stock forms feel idiosyncratic by pushing them to their expressive limits. Like great karaoke, the key to her performances isn’t the way she pulls things together but the way she falls so joyfully, dramatically, performatively apart, queering the edges of pop tradition until it frays at the seams.
“*Golden Wolf* shares a new insight into DOPE LEMON’s life and universe, and we’re really proud of this one,” Angus Stone tells Apple Music. The vocalist and multi-instrumentalist founded DOPE LEMON in 2016 as a solo venture away from his brother-sister indie-pop duo, Angus & Julia Stone. “For us, each album is like peering through a window into a house with different rooms filled with magical ornaments and paintings. Each window marks a chapter as an album of DOPE LEMON, and *Golden Wolf* sits perfectly alongside everything we’ve created.” If 2023 predecessor *Kimosabè* reflected on Stone’s youth and the forces that shaped him, this new chapter looks to the future, wrestling with what may lie ahead. Exhibit A is the title track, a fuzzy, indie-rock meditation on spirituality that considers the afterlife and what, or who, helps the transition from this world to the next. Elsewhere, *Golden Wolf* maintains DOPE LEMON’s commitment to woozy, ethereal indie rock, veering from blissful sun-soaked jams (“She’s All Time” featuring Nina Nesbitt) to smoky nocturnal grooves (“Electric Green Lambo”), with added dashes of hypnotic psychedelia (“Yamasuki – Yama Yama”) and epic jam band excursions (“Dust of a Thousand Stars”). Here, Stone takes Apple Music through DOPE LEMON’s fifth album, track by track. **“John Belushi”** “The only VHS we had growing up was *The Blues Brothers*, and apparently I’d watch it all the time. John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, and all the most incredible artists on Earth, still to this day, I discovered through that film. The song is about someone who gave so much love and burned so bright and, like all things that burn bright, eventually they fall hard. The rise and fall of the greats—great people, or great things that were created. When it hits the chorus it’s about letting that person know that they don’t have to go it alone: ‘I’m going to give you all my love.’” **“Sugarcat”** “‘Sugarcat’ is based on a slinky, jangly, cool little kitty that sneaks in and out of windows and is always in the right place at the right time and has an insatiable appetite for the finer things in life, but has to sometimes pull off a heist to acquire them. He is a lover’s lover and likes staying up late, drinking martinis with his other kitty cat friends and riding spaceships to other galaxies.” **“Electric Green Lambo”** “‘Electric Green Lambo’ is one of those nights where you walk into the casino, you pass the billionaires’ cars—the Lambo or the Ferrari—and all the neon lights, it’s all glowing in this ethereal way. There’s all the beautiful carpets and velvet drapes, and it feels like you’re walking into this alternate universe of energy outside of yourself, and it opens these pathways that can bring out the wilder side of you. The wild side could be good or bad. ‘The wolf in the long grass’ is one of the lyrics that can explain it in a metaphorical way. It’s leaning into that dark side of enjoying those one-off nights.” **“Golden Wolf”** “Conceptually, ‘Golden Wolf’ is talking about our finality and mortality and what happens when we come to the end of what this is here on Earth. When you get to that place, what pulls you through to the other side? What do you take with you, what do you leave behind? Will you pick up the pieces that you think will help you be that better version of yourself? For me, spiritually, the golden wolf is a spirit animal or entity that would take me through to the other side.” **“Yamasuki – Yama Yama”** “I was watching a film \[*The Gentlemen*\] by Guy Ritchie and there was a really dope scene where the original of this song came on, and it was an instrumental. I started singing along while I was watching the film and got in contact with the original writer, and he allowed me to put my take on this beautiful song, which became ‘Yamasuki.’” **“We Solid Gold”** “‘We Solid Gold’ is a love story of a songwriter falling in love with a smalltown coastal girl. When they’re together nothing else matters and they’re solid gold. When it all starts falling downhill, he’ll make sure he’s always there for her. It’s a quintessential fairy-tale sort of song.” **“She’s All Time” (feat. Nina Nesbitt)** “‘She’s All Time’ was recorded at Sugarcane Mountain Studios. There’s a pool with a bar, and it’s one of those places where it can feel like you could be in Jamaica drinking a rum cocktail by the sea. This song is just about kicking back with a good crew and having a fun night together. I’ve always been a big admirer of Nina Nesbitt, so I contacted her to sing on this song, and it worked out really well.” **“Maggie’s Moonshine”** “‘Maggie’s Moonshine’ is about falling into a trance and falling in love with someone in a night. Watching the way they move in the moonlight. Being enamored and almost turned to stone through their charm. I guess it’s one of those, ‘you’re out in the fields sipping on moonshine around the bonfire’ experiences, and there’s a certain sort of *Twin Peaks* spiral that Maggie takes you down. And that, in a way, is moonshine in itself.” **“On the 45”** “‘On the 45’ is a song about a rich girl. She’s always in the right place at the right time, she always gets to hang out, be lazy in the backseat, smoking cigarettes, driving through the desert on the 45 to the next party, and doesn’t have a care in the world. She’s a very lovable character, but everyone is jealous of her free will and how easily things come to her. We love her for that.” **“Dust of a Thousand Stars”** “Writing it was like a psychedelic experience, almost like hopping in an elevator and entering a different level of subconsciousness, almost like \[Apple Original series\] *Severance*. Creating it, we all became lost in what it was that we were doing and the jam went for an hour. We cut it back to seven minutes, and we were so stoned, all I could say at the end was, ‘I’m the dust of a thousand burnt-up stars.’ We’re all made up of stars, and it’s such a beautiful and cool thing to remember that we’re everything and nothing at all.”
After an extremely groovy detour with 2022’s disco-leaning *Second Nature*, Brooklyn indie-pop group Lucius’ self-titled fifth album—their first for the storied record label Fantasy—finds the quartet returning to the pastoral folk-rock sounds that marked their 2018 compilation *Nudes* as well as their recent countrified collaborations with folks like Brandy Clark, The Killers, and Brandi Carlile. The snappy “Gold Rush” is laden with deep-fried guitar licks and swaggering vocals from Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig, while Grammy-nominated West Coast folkie Madison Cunningham throws in on the toe-tapping ray of sunshine that is “Impressions.” As Lucius have become pop’s most able collaborators, Lucius similarly casts a big tent of contributors: indie-rockers like Luke Temple and Dawes’ Taylor Goldsmith lend a hand with instrumentation, while prior collaborator Adam Granduciel of The War on Drugs lends his guitar heroics to the pulse of “Old Tape.” The record is at once a return to what Lucius have done best for the last 15 years and a reflection of their always-surprising journey into new sonic territory.
