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.
Taiwanese indie band Sunset Rollercoaster have had a busy five years since the release of *SOFT STORM*. The five-piece was named Best Band at the Golden Melody Awards on the back of that LP and followed that up with a date at Coachella, a critically acclaimed collaborative album *AAA* with Korean indie band HYUKOH and a major tour. So it’s tempting to read the title of 2025’s *QUIT QUIETLY* as a reaction to that non-stop roller coaster ride. “Call it a farewell to particular stage and a gradual transition to a state of less talk, more writing,” lead singer and songwriter Tseng Kuo Hung tells Apple Music. “This album feels a little like a diary or chit-chat, with sketches of everyday life and fragments of ideas.” Chock full of the band’s hallmark jazz, Britpop and psychedelia in the service of catchy pop tunes, the LP represents a back-to-basics approach to songwriting. Where Tseng demos in the past tended to be fully fleshed out with drum, synth and bass parts, he’s come to appreciate the value of limitations and wrote with only an acoustic guitar to solidify his ideas. “Styles and arrangements weren’t really planned out in advance this time,” he says. “They were determined by the songs themselves. For some, I had a basic framework over the completed melody and lyrics, but others were arranged naturally and organically in the studio with the band.” The same goes for the band’s collaborators, which include Oh Hyuk of HYUKOH and indie artist Anpu. “With some of the songs, we passed them to friends when they were still at the work tape stage, so things happened naturally,” Tseng says. Taking up the gauntlet thrown by the album title, opener “Wind of Tomorrow” turns a reassuring Japanese aphorism into a Britpop dream of moving on, sentiments echoed in the hypnotic crescendo of “Mistakes”. Tseng also finds philosophical comedy in the quirks of daily life, mining the nerve-racking wait on a negative test result for “Humor Tumor” and singing a sweet jazz ballad from the perspective of an Italian greyhound on “Piccolo Amore”. The band also revisit the cosmic themes of 2019 EP *VANILLA VILLA* on “Satellite”, a chamber-pop lament for space dog Laika with harmonies from Leah Dou, and “Grow”, an extraterrestrial love song inspired by a Ketagalan origin myth, with the indigenous BDC choir sweetening the track’s country sound. And “Charon’s Gone”, a space-rock jam co-written with drummer Tsun Lung Lo, depicts the hot-and-cold relationship between Pluto and its moon. But whether high-flying or Earth-bound, Tseng’s English-language lyrics are characteristically allusive and impressionistic. “I have a habit of writing down keywords during high-stress travel,” he says. “Then I’ll ponder over them to keep that inspiration sharp and eventually, in the still of the night, I’ll write them into a song.” Far from announcing that they’re quiet quitting, Sunset Rollercoaster is merely ready to move into new territory. “In Taiwan, the band’s popularity has always been limited to the scene, for those who know,” Tseng says. “We’re still going to be ourselves, though. Compared to our previous flamboyance, there’s a sense of maturity here that’s surfaced over time. But I hope we still have some romance within that cool.”
Alison Goldfrapp was already in her thirties when she and multi-instrumentalist Will Gregory formed the London duo Goldfrapp. So it made sense that their subdued, lush, theatrical, early-2000s albums cemented them as masters of a sensual but grown-up strain of electro-pop: music made more for moody reflection than dance-floor abandon. Twenty-five years later, Goldfrapp’s namesake vocalist has turned the project into a solo endeavor and, by default, a creative vehicle for her personal growth. Her second album under her legal name opens with “Hey Hi Hello,” a breezy, spring-loaded tune in which she wonders, breathily: “So long, so low/Can I let it go?/Who will I dare to be?/The one I couldn\'t see.” There’s a theme of self-discovery that runs through so many of the songs to come—“Sound & Light,” “UltraSky,” “Strange Things Happen\"—and no matter whether the tone feels bright or a little melancholic, nothing can cloud Goldfrapp’s mature, positive outlook on life. Suitably, the vibe is laid-back, but with Richard X—the king of the 2000s bootleg/mash-up phenomenon—helming a good portion of the production, the album still thrums with a neon vibrancy despite its easy tempo. It\'s most effective on “Find Xanadu” and “Reverberotic,” two tracks that find Goldfrapp basking in the glow of an ethereal energy.
San Francisco-raised songwriter Wisp has become the face of the shoegaze revival that has infiltrated the rock world in the mid-2020s. It’s easy to see why: Her catchy melodies are buried beneath layers and layers of guitar, the drums boom and crash, the basslines keep the ship afloat. Though she’s been compared to genre icons of yore like Slowdive and The Jesus and Mary Chain, she views herself more in the realm of dream-pop bands. “I love all those bands for sure, but I think the bands that I take the most influence from are definitely more dream-poppy bands,” she tells Apple Music. “So I grew up listening to a lot of Beach House, Cocteau Twins, and I definitely take inspiration from them, especially vocal-wise and how I sing in my music.” Cacophonies of melodious noise surrounds Wisp on *If Not Winter*, and her voice manages to pierce through and rise to the top. Take “After dark,” which buzzes with crisp guitar lines and sloshing hi-hats. Her vocals move through the composition like a fever dream, yearning for something she can’t quite reach. This emphasis on emotion and lyrical prowess was a focal point for Wisp while creating the album. “I try to put as much emotion as I can into my own music, and I always try to write about something that is true to me and something that I\'m feeling,” she says. “And that way it doesn\'t feel faked or it doesn\'t feel ingenuine to my sound.”
Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith’s steady evolution from the neo-New Age of albums like 2016’s *EARS* to the flirty effusions of 2025’s *Gush* actually makes a lot of sense: In every case, Smith comes off as a composer preoccupied with the bodily possibilities of synthetic sound, never mind whether that body is upright on the stationary bike, seated on the meditation mat, or supine on linen sheets. The clublike psychedelia of “Gush” and “Both” feel new for her, spurts of romantic attraction that coalesce into the pulse of something like love, but it’s her sense of play—of the celebratory, almost childlike possibilities behind her high-tech sound—that holds it all together (“Lay Down,” “The World Just Got a Little More Big”).
*Soak*, the fourth studio album from indie four-piece Black Honey finds their forthright frontwoman Izzy Bee Phillips newly sober and combing through the tangles of the tumultuous two-year period that preceded the record with unflinching honesty. Set against a backdrop of cinematic, scene-setting production, *Soak* invites you into a muzzy sonic interpretation of Phillips’ experience with addiction and her clear-eyed observations from outside of that sphere of reference. “Have you ever kissed a psycho?” she quips on lead single “Psycho,” and it’s unclear whether the question is being posed to the audience, an unknown third party or Phillips herself. These ambiguous framings recur throughout *Soak*, as on the title track which rails against the projection of false confidence or “Carroll Avenue,” a sneering swipe at the voyeuristic downsides of fame set to ominous, inevitable guitar chords—exactly who is being railed against and sneered at is up for interpretation. At other times, subject and narrative are more clear. The “English boy in a bucket hat” that the distorted groove of lovelorn midtempo “Sad Sun” revolves around, for example. The scattered inner monologue that spills out on album closer, “Medication,” which builds into a cacophony of echoing harmonies, for another. For all its thematic uncertainty, *Soak* is artistically self-assured, capturing a snapshot of one of the UK’s most fascinating independent bands at the point they start to really hit their stride.
Manhattan’s own indie-sleaze poster boy Harrison Smith blew up with 2022’s “Girls,” a hedonistic nod to dance-punk’s mid-aughts salad days—but also for his semi-regular Freakquencies parties, which The Dare would DJ alongside fellow party-starters (Doss, Danny L Harle, Frost Children). Since “Girls,” the DJ, producer, and one-man electroclash band has released his debut full-length (2024’s *What’s Wrong With New York?*), performed “Guess” with Charli xcx live on the Grammys stage, and brought Freakquencies to clubs across the globe. On *Freakquencies: Volume 1*, the bon vivant briefly steps out from his role as band frontperson for four tracks of house for the heads, from the acid groove of “Kick” to the Ed Banger-esque euphoria of “Exhilaration.”
Noah Weinman’s second proper album as Runnner—a bold, bright, and supercharged take on the indie-rock sound that he’s established the project on—initially emerged out of necessity. “The last record felt really small, and it was a challenge to bring it to the stage,” he tells Apple Music, gesturing towards the homespun sound of 2023’s *like dying stars, we’re reaching out*. While touring behind that record, Weinman reconnected with the full-bodied studio sound of late-’90s and early-2000s rock records, which led him to yearn for something that was, in his words, “live-sounding, bigger, and shinier.” “It felt like when you’re a kid, and you film yourself for the first time on a camera, and then you play it on the family TV,” he explains on how it felt to self-produce the “dream sound” captured on *A Welcome Kind of Weakness*. “You see yourself in a space that you only thought other people could live in.” Several personal setbacks, including a breakup and a tearing of Weinman’s Achilles tendon that forced the cancellation of tour dates, also factored into the slightly bruised and fully reflective mood that *A Welcome Kind of Weakness* exudes. “All of a sudden, everything that was on my calendar was getting blown up, and I was stuck spiraling about it,” he recalls. “I blamed myself a lot for the injury. It felt like everything around me was falling down, and it was such a strange feeling because nothing felt real.” Such personal rancor led Weinman to craft a record in which the clarity of purpose is unmistakable: “I felt the need to be responsible in my depiction of everything, rather than leading with just the emotions.” Below, Weinman tells the stories behind the songs on *A Welcome Kind of Weakness*. **“A Welcome”** “I was writing this album at the same time that I was producing my instrumental release *starsdust*, so I wanted to have an album opener that picked up where that album left off. In my mind, it’s an overture. There’s at least one piece from every single song from this album in this song, the same way that stardust was made from stems of like dying stars, we’re reaching out. I tried to make sure that every song was represented, even if it was in a way that only I’d be able to point out. I took the vocal sample specifically from ‘Get Real Sleep.’” **“Achilles And”** “There aren’t that many peppy, upbeat Runnner songs. There’s been songs that are maybe a little more groovy, but they’re all a little bit sad. So, I wanted something that just slammed in, sonically. I started writing this song in the week between when I got injured and when I had surgery. That was definitely the worst week of the whole experience. Once I had the surgery, all I had to do was recover. I wrote like a couple of songs called ‘Achilles,’ and then I wrote one called ‘Achilles and Achilles and Achilles and Achilles,’ but this was the one that I settled on for the album. Lyrically, it’s conveying this feeling of being so sedentary and not actually going anywhere. There was this looming fear of being alone with my thoughts, and everything was this swirling, hazy nightmare.“ **“Spackle”** “The narrative of this song is my last day in what had been our shared apartment. She’d already left, and I was getting the last box and spackling the holes. I sat on the floor and looked around the apartment, and I had this rush of memories. With emotional songs that have so much to pull from, I try to distill it down to the smallest moment—which, in this song, is me sitting in the apartment, waiting for the spackle to dry on the wall.” **“Chamomile”** “This one is an early Runnner song that I tried to record so many different ways but never got it right. With this record, I knew that this would be my best shot at getting it right, because when we’ve played it live, people were always saying it was their favorite song, even though it wasn’t properly released. After years of people saying that, and me not being able to make a version that I liked, the pressure made me put it away for a while. While in bed, I dug this one back up, and it felt like it was finally time to have it see the light of day.” **“Claritin”** “It was this little chord progression I’d been kicking around, and I also became obsessed with the drum sound on Boards of Canada’s ‘Dayvan Cowboy.’ Those were the only two pieces of the equation that I had. I was playing around with this idea for a lead-guitar sound, and I used my car keys—which made it sound really bad, but in a good way. Lyrically, the song states its question out loud: Is it better to feel things or to avoid feeling them? Is numbness preferable to pain? Is it better to sleep from drowsy allergy medication or be awake with allergies?” **“PVD”** “This was the last song that was written for the album, when we were on tour after I’d been injured. I wanted something really noisy, because I thought it’d be fun to make. A lot of these songs are so thoroughly written that they don’t leave a lot of room for studio experimentation, so I wanted to write a tiny song that we could put a lot of stuff in. The song is two distinct sections: There\'s the build, and then halfway through, it breaks into this loud, noisy, punishing caveman rock.” **“Coinstar”** “A spiraling song. I was about to turn 30, and I was thinking about how having a family was always something that I said I wanted to do. But I never really realized that I’d been making absolutely zero moves in that direction. I was down a relationship, without a steady job. It’s about existential placelessness, which is in conversation with older Runnner songs. You’re given all this fantastic freedom in your adult life, but because of that, every choice that you make feels unfathomably heavy.” **“Get Real Sleep”** “I’ve never been that good of a sleeper, which became relevant when I was injured, because I rely so much on exercise during the day to make me tired enough to sleep. There was no difference between my days and my nights, because I was just in bed—so, it felt like a relevant song to return to. I’ve also never done a song with a groove like this—something that feels like that traditional indie rock—so that felt like extremely new territory, even if the song wasn’t that new. The title of the song was a lyric in an earlier version of the song, which was a very happy coincidence. Uncertainty was giving way into a welcomed time for self-reflection and rest, which I don’t always afford myself unless forced to.” **“Split”** “This song is actually older than Runnner is. When we were on a previous tour and thinking about what would be fun to play live, I realized that there isn’t a Runnner song at a BPM that sounds like a real burner. So, I updated the original version, which had lyrics that I didn’t really like, and all of these extremely convoluted math rock-inspired sections that represented me at like age 20 trying to be impressive but not actually making something that musically fun. I wrote a bunch of new lyrics structured around the breakup and this idea that, throughout the breakup process, I became aware of these two sides of myself: the part of me that wants to stay with this person, and the part of me that knows that I need to not be with them anymore.” **“Sublets”** “On the first Runnner EP, there’s a song called ‘Sublet.’ This was originally slated to be the last song on that EP, and then it got kicked down the road a little bit after I wrote ‘New Sublet’ and ‘Another Sublet.’ So, this song is the actual final chapter of ‘The Sublet Series.’ When I catch myself writing a song about that impermanent, transient, lost feeling, I usually decide to either make it part of that or take it out completely. But this song’s lyrics pull from other songs in that series, and it becomes a reflection on distance, which was really nice to record after the breakup and injury.“ **“Untitled October Song”** “October was the first time that my ex and I saw each other since we broke up. I usually try to stick to narrative and keep things even-keeled. But in these songs, I was able to admit a certain kind of weakness about myself that I hadn’t been able to previously—because of personal embarrassment or not being ready to admit that to myself. In this song, I was able to articulate that I didn’t like the person I was in the relationship—but I don’t blame my partner for making me into that person. I just lost my sense of self, and it took me a while to reclaim it. It felt really vulnerable to put that into a song—so much so that producing it in any kind of way felt unnatural. There was a time where I was trying to get it to sound right as an iPhone memo, but I ended up going to my friend’s studio and recording it live to tape. It needed to be a really plain, open-mouthed breath of a song, as raw as possible.”
“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.