“That’s always something that I get a kick out of: just shaking up expectations,” Kevin Parker tells Apple Music, and after nearly two decades at the helm of Tame Impala, the Australian auteur has left no expectation unshaken. Throughout his zigzagging career, Parker has played the role of headband-sporting hard rocker, cinematic psychedelic architect, indie-R&B crossover king, Diana Ross’ *Minions* soundtrack dance partner, and Dua Lipa’s go-to studio Houdini, but each pivot has only reinforced his reputation as alt-pop’s premier purveyor of hazy-headed dream-state vibes. While Tame Impala’s fifth album *Deadbeat* initially took shape thousands of miles away from his studio in Perth, it nonetheless represents something of a full-circle move for Parker, embracing the coastal environment, isolationist methodology, and liberating blank-slate ethos that spawned his earliest forays into recording. “The album officially started in Montecito,” explains Parker, who decamped to the Californian coast with his wife and toddlers in tow. “My thing is I get an Airbnb somewhere on the coast—I just find places literally as close to the water as you can get. Staring at the ocean for me just helps me get lost, and there’s a tranquility that comes along with it.” And from that oceanic inspiration, Parker was reminded of an essential truth: The beach is a great place to hold a rave. Parker has, of course, been incorporating electronic textures into his work since 2015’s *Currents*, albeit in a manner that still adapted easily to Tame Impala’s arena-rocking live spectacle. But with *Deadbeat*, he surrenders fully to the spartan, strobe-lit allure of dance music, breaking down his traditionally maximalist approach to the most essential raw materials. The opening “My Old Ways” functions as a microcosm of Parker’s journey up to this point: Beginning with an iPhone recording that sounds like a dusty old John Lennon demo, the track hitches its core piano melody onto a hard-hitting house pulse, seamlessly bridging Parker’s classic-rock roots with his current beatmaking mindset. He spends much of *Deadbeat* savvily toeing the line between pop economy and dance-floor abandon. The cheeky, horror-themed “Dracula” is destined to join Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” in the canon of Halloween electro-disco delights; “Piece of Heaven” gorgeously unfurls like an ’80s synth-pop spin on *Pet Sounds*; and “Afterthought”—an 11th-hour addition recorded while the album was being mastered—is an irresistible New Order-esque earworm that makes it clear why this Aussie outsider has managed to infiltrate pop’s A-list inner sanctum. But *Deadbeat*’s most thrilling moments come on extended out-of-body experiences like “Ethereal Connection” and “End of Summer,” where Parker layers psychedelic synths over tough techno rhythms like fluorescent paint splattered on a concrete wall. And yet, even as he’s traded trippy guitar solos for blitzkrieged beats, Parker’s deeply personal songwriting has retained the wistful, self-interrogating quality that fortifies the emotional bond with his listeners. “I’ve always had a sick satisfaction from being hard on myself in my lyrics,” he says. “For me, it’s freeing to make beautiful music and then put a sticker on it that says, ‘That piece of shit!’ It flips around all those feelings that have followed me around my whole life and gives them purpose.”
In complicated times, a simple pleasure can feel more important than it’s meant to be. Certainly the news that Allison and Katie Crutchfield were going to make their first album together since the demise of P.S. Eliot, the DIY-punk band they’d formed as teenagers, could have been rapturously greeted by a substantial sector of the 21st-century indie-rock fandom. Add to that the revelation that this project was being made in collaboration with MJ Lenderman, contemporary avatar of the loose-limbed guitar-driven rock that the sisters have been helping to keep from falling out of vogue, and Snocaps could have been hailed as conquering heroes. Instead, the existence of the band was a secret until the moment their self-titled (and appropriately candy-themed) debut arrived on Halloween 2025. As surprises go, it’s a modest one, but maybe more welcome than could have been anticipated. The same can be said of the music itself: 12 songs (and a cute album-ending reprise) led by chiming guitars and the twins’ vocals that feel simultaneously low-stakes and vital, logically splitting the difference between the rougher-hewn rock of Allison’s post-P.S. project Swearin’ and Katie’s (Grammy-nominated!) Americana-skewing Waxahatchee. The Crutchfields and Lenderman play all the instruments, along with North Carolina-based producer Brad Cook, who also helmed the last couple of Waxahatchee albums; it would be tempting to float the dreaded “supergroup” label if everything else about the project didn’t resist that kind of portentousness.
“We were feeling really energized, confident, and excited,” The Last Dinner Party singer Abigail Morris tells Apple Music, as she thinks about making their not-very-difficult second album, *From the Pyre*. “There was no pressure from any outside force. It was all coming from us, what was inspiring us and what made us excited in the studio.” After the huge buzz (and BRIT Awards) that followed their debut album, 2024’s *Prelude to Ecstasy*, the band found the follow-up came surprisingly easily. Combining heavy themes and postmortems on past relationships with imagery involving nature, fire, and farming implements, the five-piece still manage to make their lyrics wry and cheeky. “This Is the Killer Speaking” takes them into murder ballad territory, while “Inferno” finds them watching *The Real Housewives* as a way of dealing with their meteoric rise. “The record feels simultaneously a lot darker, more serious, and aware of the state of the world,” says Morris. “Also, I think it’s tongue-in-cheek sometimes and a bit wry, which is the way we approach the world: having that balance of absurdity and deep emotion.” In early 2025, TLDP teamed up with Grammy-winning producer Markus Dravs. “We admired so much of his previous work,” says bassist Georgia Davies. “He’s worked with Florence, Wolf Alice, and Björk and we were like, ‘Tick, tick, tick.’ We didn’t have all the songs fully written like we did with the first album. There were seeds of ideas and skeletons of songs that we built up all together as we were going along, which was a different process. It was really fun as well.” The last step was to name the album, which happened over dinner and sake in Japan. “Having a really evocative title like that is important,” says Morris. “I love the word ‘pyre.’ It’s so medieval. The record’s meant to be a dark *The Canterbury Tales* \[Chaucer’s Middle English pilgrimage collection\].” Read on as Morris and Davies take you through *From the Pyre*, track by track. **“Agnus Dei”** Abigail Morris: “I wrote this in three parts because I had a crush on someone and was imagining being with them. We actually got together, and then I wrote some of it about that, and when we broke up, I finished it. Lyrically, it’s a nice way to set up the record because a lot of the songs are discussing relationships. It’s about the nature of being a musician and having a romantic life, writing about people you date and how you mythologize the other person and make them immortal by turning them into a character in the song. Sometimes you write about someone you only met once or sometimes it’s a relationship. I think it’s just the way we communicate if you choose to date only musicians.” **“Count the Ways”** Georgia Davies: “This was an old song. We were trying to work on it for the first album, so we had the genesis, but took it down a thousand different roads. All of them were dead ends. So we revived her for the second album. We were in America and listening to Arctic Monkeys, and we were like, ‘Oh, it should sound like *AM*.’ So I wrote the intro and the bass guitar line that runs throughout the song. It’s very fun to play, and I feel like people will sing along to it. Then it built up, and we added this choir outro with crazy strings.” **“Second Best”** AM: “This came from Emily \[Roberts, guitarist\] because of a relationship that she went through. That was a really interesting song lyrically because Emily started it and she wrote the choruses. Then, she took it to Lizzie \[Mayland, guitarist\] and Lizzie wrote the intro, and then I wrote the verses. So it was a committee song, which we’ve never done before. Emily was like, ‘This is what the song’s about. Interpret that.’ It’s about feeling inferior and betrayed and frustrated at being let down by someone you love and feeling you’re not their priority. It was a creative writing exercise.” **“This Is the Killer Speaking”** AM: “I was upset, confused, and angry after being ghosted for the first time, so I decided that the way to process it was to write a character song and make it funny. Originally, I wrote it just for myself as a joke. I was listening to a lot of Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Nick Cave and thinking, ‘I want to write a song like that.’ I think it was easy to make light of it instead of getting angry because, obviously, I don’t want to murder anyone.” GD: “This was also the song I think that helped us realize the concept of the album. It’s so character driven and we were thinking about how it sat and what connected this cowboy murder ballad to songs like ‘Agnus Dei’ and ‘Inferno.’ Using the lens of this song helped us to figure out what the whole album was about.” **“Rifle”** GD: “Lizzie wrote the lyrics for this one, and I think that it’s both metaphorical and quite literal because it’s talking about warmongering in general. Obviously, looking at it now, it’s quite clearly about the genocide in Palestine, but it’s also about how it would feel to know and love someone who went on to wage war and the devastation and anger that would cause to a mother. The whole song is quite angry in the choruses, but I think that clouds over this deep sadness and devastation. When the French section in the middle occurs, it feels like a parting of clouds temporarily for this personal address to one another, which is in the two-part harmony.” **“Woman Is a Tree”** AM: “This was another one that came from a place of wanting to do something specific with a song in the same way that ‘Killer’ was a murder ballad, but I wanted to write a folk song about womanhood, female friendships, and how men factor into your circle. I was drawn to this classic metaphor that a lot of folk stories and myths use, which is conflating women in nature. I feel like there’s such a rich well of imagery to draw on, and I wanted to write something more atmospheric. Not about one specific thing, but more of a mood of relating my perception of femininity to my perception of nature.” **“I Hold Your Anger”** AM: “Aurora \[Nishevci, keyboards\] wrote this song late in the process, and we were like, ‘That has to be on the record.’ We’re all in our mid-to-late-twenties, and this is the time when you start thinking about motherhood, family, and what you want from your life and feel intimidated and frightened. If you want children you have to decide, ‘So do I want to do an album or to have a baby?’ I can’t imagine trying to do both at the same time.” GD: “I think that Aurora saw her own parents make so many sacrifices for her. It’s about the expectation as well as the anxiety of ‘Am I capable of being this selfless to give my entire being to another person? What is the expectation of a mother?’” **“Sail Away”** AM: “I wrote this with my boyfriend at the time, maybe four years ago. We had the chorus and lyrics, and, at that time, it wasn’t about our breakup. Then, I started trying to write the verse lyrics when we were still together and nothing really was sticking. I got custody of the song, so when we broke up, I was able to write the verse. The processing of the breakup was tumultuous, so this is me trying to distill every good thing about the relationship into one song. Even if relationships end badly, it’s nice to be able to recognize the good moments. It’s the same person I wrote ‘Nothing Matters’ about, so it’s like this is the circle on the next record. We were in a car and now we’re on a boat.” **“The Scythe”** AM: “I wrote the chorus as part of another song when I was a teenager, and it wasn’t really about anything, because at that age I hadn’t been in a relationship. I found it a few years ago and started writing on top of it with more experience of love, then I realized that I was actually writing about grief. The nature of grief is it takes years and years to realize what’s going on and how deeply it’s affected you. My father passed away when I was 17, and now I’m 25 and still figuring out how to talk about that loss. When I was writing a song about a normal breakup, I realized that I was also writing half from the perspective of me and half from the perspective of my mother.” GD: “I think one of the beautiful things as a result of putting the song out is all of our comment sections on Instagram and YouTube become these places where people come to share their own stories of grief and the way that they respond to it, how it makes them feel held and comforted to hear this beautiful perspective on grief.” **“Inferno”** AM: “‘Inferno’ is my favorite song on the record because it’s the last one I wrote. So it feels the most up-to-date with where I am as a person. I wrote it on a break from touring in Paris—I was walking around and there was an art gallery with a crucifix hanging in the window. It looked so weird and out of place in this really brightly lit, white gallery. The song’s about being in the band and the swirling chaos of how it felt to come up over the last 18 months. There’s a reference to *The Real Housewives* because if we weren’t going out, Georgia and I would sit in our hotel room shellshocked and watch it in silence.”
In the six years since Jay Som’s critically acclaimed sophomore album *Anak Ko*, Melina Duterte has kept the kind of schedule that would strike fainter hearts with exhaustion. There’s been collaborations with Troye Sivan, beabadoobee, and Lucy Dacus; production credits across scores of indie records; a whole album with Palehørse’s El Kempner as Bachelor; and extensive touring as part of boygenius’ live band. With all this palling around, it’s not surprising that her third album as Jay Som features some high-powered collaborations: Jimmy Eat World’s Jim Adkins joins in for the surging emo-pop of “Float,” while the chugging alt-rock anthem “Past Lives” features contributions from Paramore’s Hayley Williams. But *Belong* also finds Duterte picking up exactly where she left off with Jay Som’s recorded catalog, her trademark sense of intimacy and intricate arrangements left fully intact. From the tick-tock guitars of “Casino Stars” to the open-air wistfulness of “Appointments,” Duterte continues to develop her own brand of close-mic’d emotionalism even as her star has grown ever brighter across the 2020s.
“There was basically an urgency to this record. It came out of me in this furious burst,” Florence Welch tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe of Florence + the Machine’s sixth full-length. “And it’s one of those records where if I hadn’t have put it out now, it never would’ve come out because I think how I felt about things is so specific to this moment in time, and this roared out of me. It was made almost like a coping mechanism.” That moment in time began for Welch during the *Dance Fever* tour. “I actually ended up having a ectopic miscarriage onstage that was dangerous, and that I had to be hospitalized for, and I had to have immediate surgery because I had a Coke can of blood in my abdomen,” she explains. Her health crisis and ensuing feelings fueled *Everybody Scream*, which offers a haunting yet cathartic experience for both the singer and those listening. “I felt so out of control of my body, it was interesting,” she says. “I looked into themes of witchcraft, and mysticism, and everywhere that you looked in terms of birth or stories of birth, you came across stories of witchcraft, and folk horror, and myths.” Infusing those elements throughout the album, Welch wails, warbles, belts—and, yes, screams—with emotional clarity and appropriately witchy charisma while getting quality assistance in the form of Mitski, Aaron Dessner, and IDLES guitarist Mark Bowen. The title track muses on fame and pushing through the pain to perform: “But look at me run myself ragged/Blood on the stage/But how can I leave you when you’re screaming my name?” Conjuring up a bacchanalian forest rave, “Witch Dance” casts a spell with its heated pace and Welch’s breathy chants. And for the singer, “Perfume and Milk” helps alleviate her own agony. “It was about healing and having watched seasons change and having watched other things growing and then returning to the earth and a sense that I was also part of that nature and part of that cycle,” she says. *Everybody Scream* ends with the stirring “And Love,” striking a hopeful note: “Peace is coming” she repeats on the ballad. “Let this one be the one that comes true,” she says. “Let this one be the one that is realized in the world. I think the songs are always three steps ahead of me. It’s been that way my whole life.”
There’s nothing lucky about the lottery according to sludgy Philly shoegaze revivalists They Are Gutting a Body of Water. On *LOTTO*, they rage against the circumstances of the modern person, birthed into what is meant to be the most prosperous time in world history but littered with more man-made atrocities and horrors than most sane people can deal with. The music on *LOTTO* is angry, but where They Are Gutting a Body of Water make their mark is in the willingness to persist, a defiance that courses through this record. Amongst the crashing cymbals, monotone screeds against modern capitalism, and thunderous guitar melodies, a stubbornness peeks through like a sliver of sunshine in a thunderstorm. This isn’t optimism, but a desire to fight for those no longer able. On the emo-leaning “american food,” they incorporate turntablism and the scraggly indie rock of early Broken Social Scene as the lyrics scan like the most poetic rest-stop bathroom graffiti imaginable; an indictment of the villainy at America’s core: “The benefit of believing you’re bad/Is that you get somebody to blame.”
Irish quintet Just Mustard had already cut an intriguing figure prior to the release of *WE WERE JUST HERE*, developing a gorgeous squall of friction and angst that allowed them to stand apart from the post-punk sound so thoroughly embraced by many of their contemporaries. On their third album, the group takes their biggest leap yet, incorporating the tricky rhythms of electronic music—the dissonant squelch of industrial, 2step’s unmistakable clip-clop gait—into their already tough-to-pin-down sound. The dusky dubstep environs of “DANDELION” and the propulsive mountain-scaling of “SILVER” suggest superhuman qualities behind Shane Maguire’s drum kit, while he pounds against squalls of noise on “THAT I MIGHT NOT SEE,” sounding as if a storm is beating against the windows of the studio itself. All this elemental wonder is brought down to Earth courtesy of singer Katie Ball, whose eerie, steady vocals resemble standing in the eye of a storm—watching pure chaos unfold in 360 degrees while maintaining a sense of calm.
If 2025, as Charli xcx famously prophesied, gave rise to Turnstile Summer, then Militarie Gun Autumn is surely upon us. Like their Baltimore spiritual brethren, Ian Shelton’s LA-based project-turned-band has been burrowing a path from the circle pit to the festival stage, complementing their innate, jugular-bulging intensity with mass-appeal hooks and an eagerness to crowd-surf beyond the parameters of hardcore. And with their second proper album, *God Save the Gun*, Militarie Gun makes their most concerted swing for the bleachers yet. “We wanted to make a big record; we wanted to make a classic,” Shelton tells Apple Music. “We actually took that moment to step back and be like, ‘How do we actually take this as far as we can?’ I think our producer, Riley MacIntyre, was so emotion-forward, and I would say that we’re a very emotion-forward band.” For Shelton, that meant coming to terms with being a former straight-edge kid who, just as Militarie Gun was taking off, had his first-ever sip of alcohol at age 30 and gradually developed a heavy drinking habit. “I’ve been slipping up,” he admits on the album’s gate-crashing salvo “B A D I D E A,” but the song’s irrepressible energy and cathartic chant-along chorus suggest he isn’t wallowing in misery so much as giving himself a kick in the butt to get his life back on track. “I think a huge part of *God Save the Gun* is that you don’t have to burn your life down to make it better,” Shelton says. “We think that you have to hit this rock bottom, but if you know you’re in a tailspin, you could just go ahead and choose to take yourself out of it.” As such, there’s a sense of uplift to even the album’s most incendiary moments: “Maybe I’ll Burn My Life Down” barrels in on a bruising backbeat caked in distortion, but Shelton’s despairing self-diagnosis—“I feel trapped!”—is delivered on a bed of choral Beach Boys harmonies. And coming out of the blown-out grungy finale of the suicide-themed elegy “I Won’t Murder Your Friend,” the voice of Modest Mouse lead singer Isaac Brock appears on the dreamy interstitial “Isaac’s Song” as if Shelton were being consoled by a guardian angel. But *God Save the Gun* also sees Shelton displaying the confidence to let his melodies shine without feeling the need to rough them up: “Laugh at Me” exudes the jangly sparkle of a ’90s Gin Blossoms nugget, while the acoustic ballad “Daydream” aspires to be nothing less than a “Wonderwall” for the generation aging out of hardcore. “We’ve played in hardcore bands,” Shelton says. “But we are a rock band, and we don’t approach anything from being like, ‘What do people in hardcore think?’ Everything that we do is for self-soothing.”
Before Daniel Avery earned one-to-watch status with the leftfield techno of his 2013 debut *Drone Logic*, he was a teenager playing bass in rock and shoegaze bands. But the London producer never really left them behind. Over the next decade, as he swapped his guitar for synths and DJ decks, he drew their distortions and droning soundscapes into his world. Though the club still thumps through *Tremor*, the noisy textures of his youth push to the surface, shrouding the record in a thick haze that feels both heavy and weightless. *Tremor*’s shape formed almost by accident. A chance run-in with Wolf Alice’s Ellie Rowsell led to a joint studio session; once she hit the mic, he knew he’d found its sound. That song, “Haze”—heaving rock with frayed edges—was one of its first finished tracks, along with “A Silent Shadow,” whose spectral acid creep dissolves into bright piano and sunrise synths. The juxtaposition of light and dark, control and chaos, continues: the whispered intensity of “Greasy off the Racing Line,” swirling serenity swallowed by a fuzzed-out drone on “Until the Moon Starts Shaking.” *Tremor*’s wealth is also in its collaborations. Rowsell joins a wide cast of guests—from friends and contemporary peers Cecile Believe, yunè pinku, and yeule to Avery’s musical heroes Alison Mosshart (The Kills), Walter Schreifels (Gorilla Biscuits, Quicksand), and Andy Bell (Ride, Oasis). Behind the console, he recruited mixers David Wrench (FKA twigs, Frank Ocean) and Alan Moulder (Smashing Pumpkins, Nine Inch Nails). *Tremor* is less a producer’s solo vision than what he calls a “living and breathing collective.”
Six years after Of Monsters and Men’s previous full-length, the Icelandic rockers return with sprawling soundscapes and lush imagery to tackle questions about life, loneliness, longing, and belonging, their atmospheric folk-rock—at times grand, at times intimate—on full display. *All is Love and Pain in the Mouse Parade* takes its name from “Mouse Parade,” a haunting reflection of collective experience. “That song is a little bit of an odd one out,” lead singer Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir tells Apple Music. “It tells the story of these mice in a vacant house that sounds pretty fantastical.” The album also dives poetically into the spectrum of emotions stemming from connecting with others: anxiety (“What a stunt I pulled/The thoughts, they smash against my skull,” Hilmarsdóttir sings on “The Actor”); insecurity (“Sticky from the brine/I thought I’d gone bad/You thought I was fine,” co-vocalist Ragnar Þórhallsson leads on “Tuna in a Can”); and yearning (“I wish I could run to your house/When it gets dark out,” the pair sing on “Ordinary Creature”). “The sense of community, which is kind of sprinkled all over this album,” Hilmarsdóttir says, “it’s a thing that we were really looking deeply at, and I think craving a little bit.”
Helen Ballentine’s musical moniker Skullcrusher suggests a far different kind of music than what she writes. On *And Your Song Is Like a Circle*, the songs sink in like a scalp massage; there’s no physical crushing here. Ballentine’s second album, though, isn’t as light as some of the instrumentals suggest: Inspired by filmmakers like David Lynch and Hayao Miyazaki, Ballentine examines the nature of the human experience—the duality of feeling infinitely alive while knowing that sensation is fleeting. The concept is also reflected in the album title and the riverlike way these songs flow into one another. “Living” features Ballentine’s voice floating disparately against layers of harmonies and abstract synths, before a simple drum groove gives the song forward direction. It eventually concludes right back where it began, though, completing the circle.
Jamie Roberts’ second album as Blawan arrives seven years after the techno workouts of *Wet Will Always Dry*, and after 15 years of establishing himself as one of the most forward-thinking and constantly surprising producers in electronic music. His sound has taken multiple twists and turns since boundary-breaking singles like “Getting Me Down” and “Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage,” and *SickElixir* indeed continues to push his gnarly sound into new and thrilling territory while drawing from personal loss and trauma. “I wrote this record at one of the toughest periods of my life,” Roberts tells Apple Music, explaining that he lost four friends from substance overdoses before making the decision to get sober himself. “This decade-long trip to get clean—losing friends, having family trauma and massive upheavals in my life—led me to write music like this. It was a gift to able to get my life in order.” At first glance, this record might seem intimidating to the uninitiated, at times sounding like a washing machine crammed with dynamite. But as Roberts explains it, the intensity of *SickElixir* is meant to be inviting, as well as a reshaping of what aggression signifies in music. “One of the main things I try to put across is that aggressive music doesn’t come from an evil place,” he says. “It comes from somewhere far more deeper than that.” Indeed, amidst the harshness, *SickElixir* possesses a sneakily catchy grooviness, as bursts of high-pitched melody are emitted like steam around Roberts’ constructions. The end result is a sonic potion that just feels good going down, even as it leaves a mark.
Nine years after 2016’s *The Catastrophist*, Tortoise’s eighth album captures the legendary post-rock outfit operating in literally unfamiliar territory: *Touch* is the first record the quintet—whose members were once resolutely Chicago-based but are now spread across the US—has conceived in multiple settings, its 10 songs resulting from sessions in Los Angeles and Portland as well as their hometown. Despite the new approach, *Touch* showcases the near-mystical interplay and ingenuity that Tortoise has built a reputation on across the last three decades. There’s also a few surprises in tow—the pounding techno of “Elka” and the micro-odyssey of closing track “Night Gang,” which sounds like a lost Beach Boys instrumental from their post-*Pet Sounds* days—alongside moments of blissed-out, vibraphone-laden jazz harmonics that wouldn’t be a hair out of place on their seminal 1998 album *TNT*, driving home the timelessness of Tortoise’s approach, which still feels fresh to this very day.
On their second album, indie-rock punks Spiritual Cramp take you on a spin through the fictional radio station Wild 87 and their “San Francisco rude boy” sound. Led by vocalist Michael Bingham and bassist Mike Fenton, Spiritual Cramp embraces a musical style that references the Ramones (“Go Back Home”), Interpol (“Automatic”), and Devo (“Young Offenders”), among others. *RUDE* is a love letter to their stomping grounds that includes a middle finger to Bingham’s new home of LA on “True Love (Is Hard to Find).” “I Hate the Way I Look” self-loathes in the tongue-in-cheek spirit of Viagra Boys, while “Violence in the Supermarket” goes full dub, and in an unexpected twist, Bingham duets with LA singer-songwriter Sharon Van Etten on the reggae-inflected “You’ve Got My Number.”
*Again* may be the second album from Melbourne indie rockers The Belair Lip Bombs, but it also has the distinction of being the first release by an Australian band on Jack White’s Third Man Records label. Produced by Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever’s vocalist/guitarist Joe White and The Teskey Brothers’ sound engineer Nao Anzai, the album distills the group’s penchant for ragged, tightly wound indie guitar rock and deceptively catchy pop melodies, while introducing dreamy piano to the restrained “Burning Up,” a synth loop to the Kings of Leon-esque “Hey You,” energetic horns to frantic opener “Again and Again,” and a Replacements-like swagger to “If You’ve Got the Time.” Lyrically, vocalist/guitarist Maisie Everett draws inspiration from myriad places. “Don’t Let Them Tell You (It’s Fair)” is a lesson in resilience and believing in yourself, inspired in part by a conversation with fellow songwriter Alex Lahey, who told Everett that you have to make your own luck. The singer puts her emotive voice to heightened use in “Back of My Hand” as she implores a romantic partner to trust in their connection, while “Hey You” is a solemn yet catchy account of complications in a relationship (“I don’t really know where I went wrong/Are you really done turning me on?”). The band take their greatest creative leap in the gentle “Burning Up,” trading white-hot six-strings for piano and waves of atmospheric guitar as Everett combs through the wreckage of a failed romance (“If you ask me, baby/For a second chance/I would hold onto you until my final breath/I never meant to hurt you, baby”).
Since forming in 1995, the brothers David and Stephen Dewaele have spent three decades earning a reputation as one of the 21st century’s most esteemed production duos, building a world of sound that merged rock and electronics, obliterated the distinction between highbrow and lowbrow, and elevated the remix to the level of high art. On *All Systems Are Lying*—their first studio album in seven years, following 2018’s *Essential*—the Belgian duo set out to create a rock album sans electric guitars, channeling the energy of a live band through electronic instruments. Built entirely from modular synths, live drums, tape machines, and processed vocals, its 14 tracks counter the anxiety and paranoia of contemporary life with the occasional burst of creative defiance: “I wanna run free with the music,” they sing on “Run Free.” “Oh, you’ll never slow me down.”
Contrast and consideration remain hallmarks of The Necks on the veteran instrumental trio’s 20th album, a triple set spanning three hours. Improvised live with some later overdubs, the opening “Rapid Eye Movement” starts out quite placidly before finding its flow towards the middle. Pianist and organist Chris Abrahams, drummer Tony Buck, and bassist Lloyd Swanton apply very gradual heat and pressure, with Swanton bowing his bass as the track gathers into a sustained rumble. The 74-minute “Ghost Net” is surprising even by The Necks’ unruly standards, with overlapping (and sometimes diverging) rhythms and bluesy organ flourishes. Buck dons a guitar with dreamy delay for “Causeway,” before raucous bass and drums kick in just ahead of the 10-minute mark and the track eventually interweaves organ and piano on the way to some satisfying soul and psych allusions. The closing “Warm Running Sunlight” is the most traditionally jazz-coded of the four pieces, but we can still rely upon The Necks to pursue some sneaky tangents. For a band that’s been so revered for so long, it’s gratifying to hear how outright playful these three instrumentalists can be across *Disquiet*.
After years of touring the world with *Marchita*, Silvana Estrada was burned out. “I made this album during an incredibly difficult time in my life,” she tells Apple Music of *Vendrán Suaves Lluvias*. “I had toured endlessly and was exhausted. My best friend and his brother passed away, and I felt orphaned from so many things at once. I needed to reconnect with beauty in order to feel okay again.” Produced by Estrada with orchestral arrangements by Owen Pallett, the record feels intimate yet cinematic: delicate acoustic textures brushed by sweeping strings. The melancholy of “Dime,” with echoes of Latin American folk, yields to the lightness of “Como un Pájaro,” guided by a whistled melody. Each track feels handcrafted, led by instinct and honesty rather than perfectionism. The title reaches back to childhood. Estrada and her brother read Ray Bradbury’s *The Martian Chronicles*, which closes on Sara Teasdale’s poem “There Will Come Soft Rains,” written after World War I. “That image of hope amid desolation stayed with me forever,” she recalls. It became an anchor for this work—a metaphor for renewal after devastation. It resurfaces in “No Te Vayas Sin Saber,” one of the album’s most luminous and personal songs. “It’s a calm goodbye—because I know that someday I’ll be okay again, and maybe I’ll see you without the pain,” she says. The path there wasn’t simple. Before this project, Estrada tried to record an album in Texas in 10 days—a creative sprint that left her dissatisfied. “Some of those songs died—they stayed there, on the battlefield,” she admits. “When I can remember that time with gratitude, I’ll listen to them again.” That unfinished chapter shed expectations, clearing space for *Vendrán Suaves Lluvias* to emerge truer and freer. Throughout, Estrada braids Mexican folk roots with expanding curiosity. “I didn’t even like life that much at that point, but I still loved beauty,” she says. “And beauty became a kind of promise—because if it could exist inside a song, then maybe it could exist outside of it, too.” That belief turns *Vendrán Suaves Lluvias* into more than a collection of songs: a meditation on beauty’s persistence in the face of despair. “I’m not religious, but in difficult moments, singing has always felt like a prayer,” she says. “When I’m alone and feeling low, I always start singing to lift myself up a little. Before every show, I ask myself how I can turn it into a ritual, how I can make this moment something that makes life feel a little better, even for a while.”
There’s nothing subtle about cupcakKe’s music, and the Chicago-born rapper delights in how little she leaves to the imagination. After all, her biggest hit to date, “CPR,” is an extended metaphor for oral sex. Her 2025 album *The BakKery* takes things in even more explicit directions. Led by the stunningly titled dance-floor banger “One of My Bedbugs Ate My Pussy,” cupcakKe showcases why no one else in the rap game has her boldness or imagination. While it’s easy to shock, humor propels this album to exciting heights. The way she embraces dance music and the history of house in her hometown of Chicago gives *The BakKery* its electrifying energy, and its one-liners illustrate how thoughtful sex rhymes can really be. As she raps on “Bedbugs,” “It’s givin’ Lady Gaga, standin’ in a shoe/She love tall inches and I do too.”
If you’ve ever seen Bahamas in concert, you’ll know that, on top of being a charismatically laidback singer and dazzling guitar player, Afie Jurvanen delivers stage banter with the deadpan flair of a seasoned stand-up comedian. So, it’s safe to assume he’s being somewhat cheeky in titling his seventh Bahamas record *My Second Last Album*—after all, Jurvanen seems like the sort of lifer who’ll be sharing his witty I-just-wasn’t-made-for-these-times commentary and casually dropping brain-bending guitar solos well into his nursing-home years. *My Second Last Album* is a testament to his resourcefulness: Where his 2023 release, *BOOTCUT*, saw him heading down to Nashville and surrounding himself with a Music City dream team of veteran session players, this time he stayed close to home in rural Nova Scotia, shacking up in producer Joshua Van Tassel’s tiny backyard studio shed, with the two handling all instrumentation. But the results are no less rich and splendorous than any ensemble Bahamas effort: “The Bridge” sets a text-message-based songwriting collaboration with Hiss Golden Messenger’s MC Taylor to a flute-inflected, gospel-gilded funk strut, while the American-culture satire “Dearborn” dresses up its “Son of a Preacher Man” groove with fuzz-tone licks and falsetto hooks. But on the closing slow-motion serenade “In Country,” Jurvanen removes his tongue from cheek to celebrate his Finnish family’s immigrant experience. “We all belong in this country,” he sings and, likewise, Bahamas’ breezy, soft-rockin’ country-soul welcomes all comers with open arms.
