Scowl levels up in incredible fashion on their second full-length *Are We All Angels*, a West Coast rock record packed with the type of hooks that most bands only dream of cooking up. The leap achieved by these Santa Cruz screamers is all the more impressive when taking into account the rawness of their breakout debut, *How Flowers Grow* from 2021—a speedy and pummeling hardcore record in which vocalist Kat Moss growled in a bile-spitting low register over songs that rarely made it past the two-minute mark. On *Are We All Angels*, Moss and the gang bolster their ferocious sound with an assist from producer Will Yip (Code Orange, Turnstile) and a newfound sense of tunefulness that recalls fellow Californians The Distillers’ chipped-tooth 2003 classic *Coral Fang*. But even at their most radio-ready moments—the chugging “Celebrity Skin”-recalling guitars of “Fantasy”; “Suffer the Fool (How High Are You?)”’s indelible, miles-long chorus—Scowl never loses an ounce of grit that gained them prominence in the always-crowded hardcore scene, making for a record that transcends mere genre-crossover gestures.
“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.”
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.
The secret to Aya Sinclair’s uneasy mix of harsh noise and club music is its intimacy: No matter how blown out or mechanistic it gets, you always feel the presence of a regular old person behind it. The product of a teenage diet of Aphex Twin and Autechre on one hand and screamo and nu metal on the other, *hexed!* is, first and foremost, a therapeutic endeavor, fragile and balladic here (“droplets”), ragey there (“I am the pipe I hit myself with”), beautiful (“peach”) and spooky (“Time at the Bar”), and above all, extreme. And for music Sinclair has said was in some respects about her sobriety, it’s refreshingly funny (“off to the ESSO”). She isn’t reflecting on her nightmarish bad times—she’s bringing them back to life with clarity and power.
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.
*Te Whare Tīwekaweka* translates as “the messy house” from te reo Māori, the native Māori language in which Aotearoa artist Marlon Williams sings on his fourth solo album. It describes his headspace going into making the record: “The seed of creativity can be very confusing until it turns into something, then things start to make their own mark on the world and the chaos gets put into some sort of orderly life,” he tells Apple Music. “That speaks to that first inception of creativity that comes out of absolute disorder.” The album is the realization of Williams’ long-held desire to write and sing in te reo Māori. Though he learned the language in school, his proficiency declined over the years. “I couldn’t have done this without a really good mentor and collaborator and co-writer in my friend KOMMI \[Kommi Tamati-Elliffe\], who’s a lecturer in te reo Māori, and a fluent speaker and songwriter,” he says. “I’m still very humbly at the beginning of the hill.” Writing in te reo Māori opened new creative avenues for the singer-songwriter. “It allowed me to talk about place in a way that was very difficult to do in English,” he offers. “When you use a place name in a song in English it’s got this weird weight to it. Whereas talking about place is so central to Māori music, so it was great to start rattling off names of places in songs.” While the album offered Williams the opportunity to incorporate traditional te reo Māori elements such as kapa haka group singing, he was careful not to stray too far from his trademark mix of country, soul, bluegrass, and pop. “I just wanted to follow my natural musical nose and not try and necessarily exist in a Māori musical space, but just make a record that spoke to me musically,” he says. “I wanted it to just be a Marlon Williams record that happened to be in Māori.” Here, Williams walks Apple Music through *Te Whare Tīwekaweka*, track by track. **“E Mawehe Ana Au”** “A real drawcard of singing in Māori is that it’s a really beautiful language to sing in. I knew that however this album was going to turn out, it was going to be led by the vocals. I vomited a lot of ideas and anxieties out into that song lyrically—it’s a very confessional and, in a classical sense, apologetic song. An apology and an explanation in the old sense of just getting something out there that felt necessary.” **“Kei Te Mārama”** “It’s a breakup song—that thing with a relationship where you can throw it all on the other person, no matter the complexity of the situation. You’re like, ‘Well, if that’s the way you feel...’ It’s a way of escaping your own need to make any decisions in some sense.” **“Aua Atu Rā”** “There’s a saying in Māori: ‘We’re all in the same boat.’ Communalism and being bound to the people around you is very central to the Māori world, which is something I love about Māori culture. But it’s something I find terrifying as a sort of existentially suffering artist. I feel very much an individual alone in the world a lot of the time, so it’s just acknowledging that we owe to each other a terrible loyalty, but at the same time, it’s hard to feel that you can rely on the existence of other people.” **“Me Uaua Kē”** “This is the song I was really thinking about in terms of using geography strongly. It’s talking about the backdrop to some missed illicit liaison, referring to the island in the middle of Banks Peninsula. It’s also a nod to the earthquakes. Te Poho o Tamatea is the mountain that sits behind the town, and it starts talking about Tamatea’s chest trembling, and the crying of the mountain, and how it’s a rare thing to see Tamatea crying. It’s quite a dense song. But it’s also a silly love song.” **“Korero Māori”** “Another thread of traditional Māori music is women using music to address social issues—music was a structure on which they were able to express themselves emotionally. I wanted to write a tongue-in-cheek song to myself on some level and be able to use kapa haka as this driving force to give myself a slap around the head and come back into the fold in some way.” **“Ko Tēnā Ua”** “One thing I love about Māori is there’s lots of subtle variations and terms for natural events in nature. Ko tēnā ua is a light drizzle, so the song is saying the rain that you’re standing in is not a light drizzle, it’s the kind that’s going to do you some damage. Then it talks about a pou, which is a carved figure that stands sentry outside a village. So it’s just saying, ‘You don’t have to stand out there, you’re not a pou, come back in from the rain.’ It’s a loving song.” **“Whakamaettia Mai”** “This was written as a nod to a thread of wartime battalion singing. The Māori battalion were a very famed and feared battalion in the Second World War. But they wrote a lot of incredible songs, making fun of Hitler or full of Māori humor. That song is written in the spirit of those old songs.” **“Ngā Ara Aroha”** “This is an out and out love song. The first line \[translates to\], ‘You don’t want to stand in the way of a mountain on the move,’ and that’s a nod to Mount Taranaki, which is one of our biggest mountains in New Zealand. Taranaki wandered around the landscape looking for its lover before it finally ended up where it’s resting now, so that’s a nod to that. In the sweeping tradition of Leonard Cohen love songs it makes a grand statement, but in the end it’s just a song about the difficulties of the compelling nature of love.” **“Huri te Whenua” (feat. KOMMI)** “‘Huri te Whenua’ is a song that I didn’t contribute any of the lyrics to, it’s all KOMMI. It started off as a full rap for KOMMI, and when they gave it to me I was like, ‘What if we turn it into this sort of gospel song?’ so it ended up where it ended up. I haven’t fully squared with KOMMI what the intentionality of the lyrics is, but for me it’s a song about race relations in New Zealand. There’s a real thread of bitter sarcasm throughout, especially that rap.” **“Kuru Pounamu”** “My interpretation is that KOMMI is addressing themselves. Something in KOMMI’s writing that I really like is the god figure sort of castigating the mortal and holding them to account in this song. There’s a sarcastic god looking down on its frail creation and offering, by way of hollow congratulations, a reprimand. I feel that in this song.” **“Kāhore He Manu E” (feat. Lorde)** “I love singing with Ella \[Yelich-O’Connor, aka Lorde\]. I’d sung on her EP *Te Ao Mārama*, which is all in te reo Māori, so it was only fitting she join me on this record. Her voice really wrote the song, there was something in the qualities of how she sings that pushed the melody around just so. It was one of those songs that fell out very naturally. I then took it to KOMMI and they helped me shape the te reo a little better, but it was a very easy labor.” **“Pānaki”** “This is a personal favorite. It’s another where I didn’t write any of the lyrics, KOMMI gave them to me. It’s a personal love song I think for KOMMI. It’s a song addressing certain regional words for wind, talking about different types of wind and hinting at who the song’s for using geography and regional dialect. Without wanting to speak out of turn for KOMMI there’s some very signaling language in that song.” **“Rere Mai Ngā Rau”** “It’s a song about intergenerational relationships and the importance of children and grandparents and parents having understanding and charity towards each other. Another hallmark of Māori culture is that you’re around many generations at once, and I think it’s something we’ve managed to pay off in the Western world, expecting children to go out into the world and just work things out for themselves. Whereas in Māori culture that’s a fool’s errand. The song is really using the tree as a metaphor: to the grandparents, be the pool that fosters the roots that make the branches grow that make the leaves fall that foster the pool. The cycle.” **“Pōkaia Rā te Marama”** “Julian \[Wilcox, lyricist\] is an incredible broadcaster and proponent of Māori language, and it turns out an incredible lyric writer. I wasn’t fully across his creative talents until he, unprompted, sent me these lyrics. The poeticism of it and the strength of the message in the song made sense to have it be the closing statement on the record. I’m paraphrasing, but it’s a song about being in a state of darkness so that new knowledge can be gathered before the light comes back. It’s making a stand for grabbing hold of Māori language and going back out into the light with new creations.”
It takes a certain amount of gumption to name a track “Your New Favorite Song,” but LA alt-pop trio Wallows possess just the right combination of humble charm and outsized confidence to pull it off. On the one hand, it’s an intimate breakup serenade about a guy trying to win back his girl by writing her a pretty tune; on the other hand, the sax-sweetened, flute-speckled, bongo-grooved track is emblematic of a band that’s become ever more adept at hitting myriad pop-song pleasure points simultaneously. Coming on the heels of 2024’s John Congleton-produced *Model*, *More* is a seven-song EP overflowing with a double album’s worth of ideas: “Not Alone” blossoms from a bedroom synth-pop sketch into a skyscraping, drum-pounding anthem, while “Coffin Change” angles for retroactive placement on your 2009 Indie Bops playlist sandwiched between Phoenix and Vampire Weekend. But the two appearances of “Deep Dive”—first as a lush ’70s soft-rock flashback and then as a summer-vibed pool-party soundtrack—provide the clearest view of Wallows’ ever-expanding talent for updating classic pop craftsmanship with contemporary indie aesthetics.
The New York-based band Florist make music that captures both the naive sweetness of indie folk and the cosmic abstraction of ambient and New Age. Fuller than *Emily Alone* and more cohesive than the documentarylike *Florist*, 2025’s *Jellywish* feels, in some ways, like the album they have been approaching for years: simple, porchy songs glittering with unexpected bits of processed sound. The childlike voice of Emily Sprague delivers thoughts on death (“Started to Glow”), redemption (“Have Heaven”), and other less-than-childlike things. This is music that feels modest and ordinary but is always reaching quietly into the unknown. The tension between their folksy side and their cosmic one turns out to resolve easily: In both cases, they are looking for the beauty they know is right in front of them.
The freak-folk mavericks venture boldly into an even newer, weirder America on their eighth studio album, the sister duo’s first full-length since 2020’s *Put the Shine On*. Now 20-plus years into their collaborative career, Bianca and Sierra Casady sound as whimsically baroque and more-than-slightly creepy as ever on *Little Death Wishes*, wondering exactly whose dream they’re living in on existential synth-pop jam “Cut Stitch Scar,” and tinkering with children’s toys on the grisly “Yesterday.” (The duo also deserve some credit for their hand in pioneering the folksy affect known as “cursive singing,” which has permeated the past 15 years of pop vocals.) There’s an unexpected cameo from Chance the Rapper on the sickly-sweet “Girl in Town,” but the highlight is “Least I Have You,” a celebration of the sisters’ enduring bond: “If no one in the world understands, at least I have you.”
Following 2022’s ARIA-nominated *Heroine*, Thornhill’s third studio album finds the Melbourne quartet doubling down on stark contrasts and adventurous dynamics. On the single “Nerv,” Jacob Charlton contributes some of his most soaring vocals to date while still punctuating the track with cathartic bouts of screaming. Then, the following “Obsession” applies fluid layering around Nick Sjögren’s prominently distorted basslines, only for “Crush” to explore warped keyboard melodies and soft, distant singing in a manner closer to alt-R&B than alt-metal. That’s just one section of seesawing modes here, all delivered with a dreamy depth of field that evokes shoegaze at times. There are more pronounced electronic elements on “Silver Swarm”—one of several songs about the toll of an unhealthy relationship—but the players still come in hard and heavy when the time is right. Likewise, Charlton’s singing on the album ranges from rap-like tightness to more melodic expression and a gnarled roar as needed. That makes *Bodies* an engrossing showcase for Thornhill’s range and intensity alike.
Though Becca Harvey rose to alt-pop fame with her 2022 debut album, *When I’m Alone*, she felt as if she were working in the shadow of her collaborators, writing along to their melodies. For its follow-up, the Atlanta singer-songwriter rethought her creative approach, trusting her own lyrical and melodic instincts. The resulting songs are bittersweet and raw (despite the album’s deceptively sweet title), telling the story of a four-year relationship and its aftermath in bleary vignettes. On “I Just Do!” she draws the blackout curtains and sleeps through a flight in the arms of a new crush; next thing you know, she’s looking at old photo-booth strips, wondering how it all went wrong. The 26-year-old’s lyrics are wide-open and bemused, countering her grief with a shrug or a wink; on “Windows,” she slips in a knowing reference to Fleetwood Mac’s iconic breakup banger: “You are my silver spring/No matter what you do/You will always hear me sing.”
Trousdale is one of the more delightfully uncategorizable acts to break into country music in recent memory. Composed of friends-turned-collaborators Quinn D’Andrea, Georgia Greene, and Lauren Jones, the Southern California-based trio first found acclaim posting an eclectic assortment of cover videos online, attracting fans with unorthodox takes on songs by the Eagles, ABBA, and everyone in between. On this sophomore outing, the group shows off their songwriting and arranging chops across a dozen tracks, crafting a sound that lands somewhere between HAIM and The Chicks. The album opens with its title track, a rollicking two-stepper with harmonies for days. On “Over and Over,” the trio experiments with singing in unison, pulling off that deceptively tough feat with brightness and joy. The soaring harmonies of “Death Grip” recall Little Big Town or Nickel Creek, while “Don’t Tell Me” once again finds the group singing as a unit, this time adding subtle harmonies that create texture and depth. Trousdale co-produced *Growing Pains* with John Mark Nelson and recorded the bulk of the collection live in an effort to mirror their electric onstage performances.
Whatever conversation remains ongoing about Goose’s taxonomical classification as a jam band or just a really excellent and adventurous pop-rock one should end with *Everything Must Go*. Shaggy enough for the tapers (“Iguana Song”) and emotionally direct enough for a movie montage (“Give It Time”), they cover a huge amount of musical ground while always sounding like themselves. There’s the irrepressible ’80s funk pop of “Animal” and “Feel It Now” (which are somehow both Michael Jackson and Talking Heads) alongside the woodland epic of “Silver Rising”—poles of the same spectrum the Dead and Phish spent decades reconciling. But if you really want to know why this so-called jam band succeeds on record, it’s because they carefully choreograph each point in their long-ish songs to lead organically to the next—in that sense, they barely jam at all.