Indieheads Best of 2023

You’ll be hard-pressed to find a description of boygenius that doesn’t contain the word “supergroup,” but it somehow doesn’t quite sit right. Blame decades of hoary prog-rock baggage, blame the misbegotten notion that bigger and more must be better, blame a culture that is rightfully circumspect about anything that feels like overpromising, blame Chickenfoot and Audioslave. But the sentiment certainly fits: Teaming three generational talents at the height of their powers on a project that is somehow more than the sum of its considerable parts sounds like it was dreamed up in a boardroom, but would never work if it had been. In fall 2018, Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker released a self-titled six-song EP as boygenius that felt a bit like a lark—three of indie’s brightest, most charismatic artists at their loosest. Since then, each has released a career-peak album (*Punisher*, *Home Video*, and *Little Oblivions*, respectively) that transcended whatever indie means now and placed them in the pantheon of American songwriters, full stop. These parallel concurrent experiences raise the stakes of a kinship and a friendship; only the other two could truly understand what each was going through, only the other two could mount any true creative challenge or inspiration. Stepping away from their ascendant solo paths to commit to this so fully is as much a musical statement as it is one about how they want to use this lightning-in-a-bottle moment. If *boygenius* was a lark, *the record* is a flex. Opening track “Without You Without Them” features all three voices harmonizing a cappella and feels like a statement of intent. While Bridgers’ profile may be demonstrably higher than Dacus’ or Baker’s, no one is out in front here or taking up extra oxygen; this is a proper three-headed hydra. It doesn’t sound like any of their own albums but does sound like an album only the three of them could make. Hallmarks of each’s songwriting style abound: There’s the slow-building climactic refrain of “Not Strong Enough” (“Always an angel, never a god”) which recalls the high drama of Baker’s “Sour Breath” and “Turn Out the Lights.” On “Emily I’m Sorry,” “Revolution 0,” and “Letter to an Old Poet,” Bridgers delivers characteristically devastating lines in a hushed voice that belies its venom. Dacus draws “Leonard Cohen” so dense with detail in less than two minutes that you feel like you’re on the road trip with her and her closest friends, so lost in one another that you don’t mind missing your exit. As with the EP, most songs feature one of the three taking the lead, but *the record* is at its most fully realized when they play off each other, trading verses and ideas within the same song. The subdued, acoustic “Cool About It” offers three different takes on having to see an ex; “Not Strong Enough” is breezy power-pop that serves as a repudiation of Sheryl Crow’s confidence (“I’m not strong enough to be your man”). “Satanist” is the heaviest song on the album, sonically, if not emotionally; over a riff with solid Toadies “Possum Kingdom” vibes, Baker, Bridgers, and Dacus take turns singing the praises of satanism, anarchy, and nihilism, and it’s just fun. Despite a long tradition of high-wattage full-length star team-ups in pop history, there’s no real analogue for what boygenius pulls off here. The closest might be Crosby, Stills & Nash—the EP’s couchbound cover photo is a wink to their 1969 debut—but that name doesn’t exactly evoke feelings of friendship and fellowship more than 50 years later. (It does, however, evoke that time Bridgers called David Crosby a “little bitch” on Twitter after he chastised her for smashing her guitar on *SNL*.) Their genuine closeness is deeply relatable, but their chemistry and talent simply aren’t. It’s nearly impossible for a collaboration like this to not feel cynical or calculated or tossed off for laughs. If three established artists excelling at what they are great at, together, without sacrificing a single bit of themselves, were so easy to do, more would try.

The music of Dylan Brady and Laura Les is what you might get if you took the trashiest tropes of early-2000s pop and slurred them together so violently it sounded almost avant-garde. It’s not that they treat their rap metal (“Dumbest Girl Alive,” “Billy Knows Jamie”), mall-punk (“Hollywood Baby”), and movie-trailer ska (“Frog on the Floor,” “I Got My Tooth Removed”) as means to a grander artistic end—if anything, *10,000 gecs* puts you in the mind of kids so excited to share their excitement that they spit out five ideas at once. And while modern listeners will be reminded of our perpetually scatterbrained digital lives, the music also calls back to the sense of novelty and goofiness that have propelled pop music since the chipmunk squeals of doo-wop and beyond. Sing it with them now: “Put emojis on my grave/I’m the dumbest girl alive.”

For the last two decades, Sufjan Stevens’ music has taken on two distinct forms. On one end, you have the ornate, orchestral, and positively stuffed style that he’s excelled at since the conceptual fantasias of 2003’s star-making *Michigan*. On the other, there’s the sparse and close-to-the-bone narrative folk-pop songwriting that’s marked some of his most well-known singles and albums, first fully realized on the stark and revelatory *Seven Swans* from 2004. His 10th studio full-length, *Javelin*, represents the fullest and richest merging of those two approaches that Stevens has achieved to date. Even as it’s been billed as his first proper “songwriter’s album” since 2015’s autobiographical and devastating *Carrie & Lowell*, *Javelin* is a kaleidoscopic distillation of everything Stevens has achieved in his career so far, resulting in some of the most emotionally affecting and grandiose-sounding music he’s ever made. *Javelin* is Stevens’ first solo record of vocal-based music since 2020’s *The Ascension*, and it’s relatively straightforward compared to its predecessor’s complexity. Featuring contributions from vocalists and frequent collaborators like Nedelle Torrisi, adrienne maree brown, Hannah Cohen, and The National’s Bryce Dessner (who adds his guitar skills to the heart-bursting epic “Shit Talk”), the record certainly sounds like a full-group effort in opposition to the angsty isolation that streaked *The Ascension*. But at the heart of *Javelin* is Stevens’ vocals, the intimacy of which makes listeners feel as if they’re mere feet away from him. There’s callbacks to Stevens’ discography throughout, from the *Age of Adz*-esque digital dissolve that closes out “Genuflecting Ghost” to the rustic Flannery O’Connor evocations of “Everything That Rises,” recalling *Seven Swans*’ inspirational cues from the late fiction writer. Ultimately, though, *Javelin* finds Stevens emerging from the depressive cloud of *The Ascension* armed with pleas for peace and a distinct yearning to belong and be embraced—powerful messages delivered on high, from one of the 21st century’s most empathetic songwriters.

“You can feel a lot of motion and energy,” Caroline Polachek tells Apple Music of her second solo studio album. “And chaos. I definitely leaned into that chaos.” Written and recorded during a pandemic and in stolen moments while Polachek toured with Dua Lipa in 2022, *Desire, I Want to Turn Into You* is Polachek’s self-described “maximalist” album, and it weaponizes everything in her kaleidoscopic arsenal. “I set out with an interest in making a more uptempo record,” she says. “Songs like ‘Bunny Is a Rider,’ ‘Welcome to My Island,’ and ‘Smoke’ came onto the plate first and felt more hot-blooded and urgent than anything I’d done before. But of course, life happened, the pandemic happened, I evolved as a person, and I can’t really deny that a lunar, wistful side of my writing can never be kept out of the house. So it ended up being quite a wide constellation of songs.” Polachek cites artists including Massive Attack, SOPHIE, Donna Lewis, Enya, Madonna, The Beach Boys, Timbaland, Suzanne Vega, Ennio Morricone, and Matia Bazar as inspirations, but this broad church only really hints at *Desire…*’s palette. Across its 12 songs we get trip-hop, bagpipes, Spanish guitars, psychedelic folk, ’60s reverb, spoken word, breakbeats, a children’s choir, and actual Dido—all anchored by Polachek’s unteachable way around a hook and disregard for low-hanging pop hits. This is imperial-era Caroline Polachek. “The album’s medium is feeling,” she says. “It’s about character and movement and dynamics, while dealing with catharsis and vitality. It refuses literal interpretation on purpose.” Read on for Polachek’s track-by-track guide. **“Welcome to My Island”** “‘Welcome to My Island’ was the first song written on this album. And it definitely sets the tone. The opening, which is this minute-long non-lyrical wail, came out of a feeling of a frustration with the tidiness of lyrics and wanting to just express something kind of more primal and urgent. The song is also very funny. We snap right down from that Tarzan moment down to this bitchy, bratty spoken verse that really becomes the main personality of this song. It’s really about ego at its core—about being trapped in your own head and forcing everyone else in there with you, rather than capitulating or compromising. In that sense, it\'s both commanding and totally pathetic. The bridge addresses my father \[James Polachek died in 2020 from COVID-19\], who never really approved of my music. He wanted me to be making stuff that was more political, intellectual, and radical. But also, at the same time, he wasn’t good at living his own life. The song establishes that there is a recognition of my own stupidity and flaws on this album, that it’s funny and also that we\'re not holding back at all—we’re going in at a hundred percent.” **“Pretty in Possible”** “If ‘Welcome to My Island’ is the insane overture, ‘Pretty in Possible’ finds me at street level, just daydreaming. I wanted to do something with as little structure as possible where you just enter a song vocally and just flow and there\'s no discernible verses or choruses. It’s actually a surprisingly difficult memo to stick to because it\'s so easy to get into these little patterns and want to bring them back. I managed to refuse the repetition of stuff—except for, of course, the opening vocals, which are a nod to Suzanne Vega, definitely. It’s my favorite song on the album, mostly because I got to be so free inside of it. It’s a very simple song, outside a beautiful string section inspired by Massive Attack’s ‘Unfinished Sympathy.’ Those dark, dense strings give this song a sadness and depth that come out of nowhere. These orchestral swells at the end of songs became a compositional motif on the album.” **“Bunny Is a Rider”** “A spicy little summer song about being unavailable, which includes my favorite bassline of the album—this quite minimal funk bassline. Structurally on this one, I really wanted it to flow without people having a sense of the traditional dynamics between verses and choruses. Timbaland was a massive influence on that song—especially around how the beat essentially doesn\'t change the whole song. You just enter it and flow. ‘Bunny Is a Rider’ was a set of words that just flowed out without me thinking too much about it. And the next thing I know, we made ‘Bunny Is a Rider’ thongs. I love getting occasional Instagram tags of people in their ‘Bunny Is a Rider’ thongs. An endless source of happiness for me.” **“Sunset”** “This was a song I began writing with Sega Bodega in 2020. It sounded completely nothing like the others. It had a folk feel, it was gypsy Spanish, Italian, Greek feel to it. It completely made me look at the album differently—and start to see a visual world for them that was a bit more folk, but living very much in the swirl of city life, having this connection to a secret, underground level of antiquity and the universalities of art. It was written right around a month or two after Ennio Morricone passed away, so I\'d been thinking a lot about this epic tone of his work, and about how sunsets are the biggest film clichés in spaghetti westerns. We were laughing about how it felt really flamenco and Spanish—not knowing that a few months later, I was going to find myself kicked out of the UK because I\'d overstayed my visa without realizing it, and so I moved my sessions with Sega to Barcelona. It felt like the song had been a bit of a premonition that that chapter-writing was going to happen. We ended up getting this incredible Spanish guitarist, Marc Lopez, to play the part.” **“Crude Drawing of an Angel”** “‘Crude Drawing of an Angel’ was born, in some ways, out of me thinking about jokingly having invented the word ‘scorny’—which is scary and horny at the same time. I have a playlist of scorny music that I\'m still working on and I realized that it was a tone that I\'d never actually explored. I was also reading John Berger\'s book on drawing \[2005’s *Berger on Drawing*\] and thinking about trace-leaving as a form of drawing, and as an extremely beautiful way of looking at sensuality. This song is set in a hotel room in which the word ‘drawing’ takes on six different meanings. It imagines watching someone wake up, not realizing they\'re being observed, whilst drawing them, knowing that\'s probably the last time you\'re going to see them.” **“I Believe”** “‘I Believe’ is a real dedication to a tone. I was in Italy midway through the pandemic and heard this song called ‘Ti Sento’ by Matia Bazar at a house party that blew my mind. It was the way she was singing that blew me away—that she was pushing her voice absolutely to the limit, and underneath were these incredible key changes where every chorus would completely catch you off guard. But she would kind of propel herself right through the center of it. And it got me thinking about the archetype of the diva vocally—about how really it\'s very womanly that it’s a woman\'s voice and not a girl\'s voice. That there’s a sense of authority and a sense of passion and also an acknowledgment of either your power to heal or your power to destroy. At the same time, I was processing the loss of my friend SOPHIE and was thinking about her actually as a form of diva archetype; a lot of our shared taste in music, especially ’80s music, kind of lined up with a lot of those attitudes. So I wanted to dedicate these lyrics to her.” **“Fly to You” (feat. Grimes and Dido)** “A very simple song at its core. It\'s about this sense of resolution that can come with finally seeing someone after being separated from them for a while. And when a lot of misunderstanding and distrust can seep in with that distance, the kind of miraculous feeling of clearing that murk to find that sort of miraculous resolution and clarity. And so in this song, Grimes, Dido, and I kind of find our different version of that. But more so than anything literal, this song is really about beauty, I think, about all of us just leaning into this kind of euphoric, forward-flowing movement in our singing and flying over these crystalline tiny drum and bass breaks that are accompanied by these big Ibiza guitar solos and kind of Nintendo flutes, and finding this place where very detailed electronic music and very pure singing can meet in the middle. And I think it\'s something that, it\'s a kind of feeling that all of us have done different versions of in our music and now we get to together.” **“Blood and Butter”** “This was written as a bit of a challenge between me and Danny L Harle where we tried to contain an entire song to two chords, which of course we do fail at, but only just. It’s a pastoral, it\'s a psychedelic folk song. It imagines itself set in England in the summer, in June. It\'s also a love letter to a lot of the music I listened to growing up—these very trance-like, mantra-like songs, like Donna Lewis’ ‘I Love You Always Forever,’ a lot of Madonna’s *Ray of Light* album, Savage Garden—that really pulsing, tantric electronic music that has a quite sweet and folksy edge to it. The solo is played by a hugely talented and brilliant bagpipe player named Brighde Chaimbeul, whose album *The Reeling* I\'d found in 2022 and became quite obsessed with.” **“Hopedrunk Everasking”** “I couldn\'t really decide if this song needed to be about death or about being deeply, deeply in love. I then had this revelation around the idea of tunneling, this idea of retreating into the tunnel, which I think I feel sometimes when I\'m very deeply in love. The feeling of wanting to retreat from the rest of the world and block the whole rest of the world out just to be around someone and go into this place that only they and I know. And then simultaneously in my very few relationships with losing someone, I did feel some this sense of retreat, of someone going into their own body and away from the world. And the song feels so deeply primal to me. The melody and chords of it were written with Danny L Harle, ironically during the Dua Lipa tour—when I had never been in more of a pop atmosphere in my entire life.” **“Butterfly Net”** “‘Butterfly Net’ is maybe the most narrative storyteller moment on the whole album. And also, palette-wise, deviates from the more hybrid electronic palette that we\'ve been in to go fully into this 1960s drum reverb band atmosphere. I\'m playing an organ solo. I was listening to a lot of ’60s Italian music, and the way they use reverbs as a holder of the voice and space and very minimal arrangements to such incredible effect. It\'s set in three parts, which was somewhat inspired by this triptych of songs called ‘Chansons de Bilitis’ by Claude Debussy that I had learned to sing with my opera teacher. I really liked that structure of the finding someone falling in love, the deepening of it, and then the tragedy at the end. It uses the metaphor of the butterfly net to speak about the inability to keep memories, to keep love, to keep the feeling of someone\'s presence. The children\'s choir \[London\'s Trinity Choir\] we hear on ‘Billions’ comes in again—they get their beautiful feature at the end where their voices actually become the stand-in for the light of the world being onto me.” **“Smoke”** “It was, most importantly, the first song for the album written with a breakbeat, which inspired me to carry on down that path. It’s about catharsis. The opening line is about pretending that something isn\'t catastrophic when it obviously is. It\'s about denial. It\'s about pretending that the situation or your feelings for someone aren\'t tectonic, but of course they are. And then, of course, in the chorus, everything pours right out. But tonally it feels like I\'m at home base with ‘Smoke.’ It has links to songs like \[2019’s\] ‘Pang,’ which, for me, have this windswept feeling of being quite out of control, but are also very soulful and carried by the music. We\'re getting a much more nocturnal, clattery, chaotic picture.” **“Billions”** “‘Billions’ is last for all the same reasons that \'Welcome to My Island’ is first. It dissolves into total selflessness, whereas the album opens with total selfishness. The Beach Boys’ ‘Surf’s Up’ is one of my favorite songs of all time. I cannot listen to it without sobbing. But the nonlinear, spiritual, tumbling, open quality of that song was something that I wanted to bring into the song. But \'Billions\' is really about pure sensuality, about all agenda falling away and just the gorgeous sensuality of existing in this world that\'s so full of abundance, and so full of contradictions, humor, and eroticism. It’s a cheeky sailboat trip through all these feelings. You know that feeling of when you\'re driving a car to the beach, that first moment when you turn the corner and see the ocean spreading out in front of you? That\'s what I wanted the ending of this album to feel like: The song goes very quiet all of a sudden, and then you see the water and the children\'s choir comes in.”

Part of what makes Danny Brown and JPEGMAFIA such a natural pair is that they stick out in similar ways. They’re too weird for the mainstream but too confrontational for the subtle or self-consciously progressive set. And while neither of them would be mistaken for traditionalists, the sample-scrambling chaos of tracks like “Burfict!” and “Shut Yo Bitch Ass Up/Muddy Waters” situate them in a lineage of Black music that runs through the comedic ultraviolence of the Wu-Tang Clan back through the Bomb Squad to Funkadelic, who proved just because you were trippy didn’t mean you couldn’t be militant, too.

Forget the mumbled vocals and air of perpetual dislocation—Archy Marshall is a traditionalist, albeit a subtle one. Like all King Krule albums, *Space Heavy* has its jagged moments (“Pink Shell,” the back half of the title track). But as a father on the cusp of 30, he seems evermore in touch with the quiet contentments that make our perceived miseries endurable: a long walk on a chilly beach, a full moon seen from a clean bed. His ballads feel like doo-wop without exactly sounding like them (“Our Vacuum”), and the broken sweetness of his guitars are both ’90s indie-rock and the sleepy jazz of an after-hours lounge (“That Is My Life, That Is Yours”). New approach, same old beauty.

A brand new album of unreleased material from Black Country, New Road, recorded at the historic music venue Bush Hall, in London at a series of unique shows at the end of December 2022. Mixed by John Parish and mastered by Christian Wright at Abbey Road, the new album and material marks a new chapter for the band as a six-piece. Fresh from the success of ‘Ants From Up There’ and with a full touring schedule ahead of them in 2022, Black Country, New Road aka Lewis Evans, May Kershaw, Georgia Ellery, Luke Mark, Tyler Hyde and Charlie Wayne, wrote an entire new set of material to perform. Playing to swelling crowds at festivals, including triumphant performances at Primavera, Green Man and Fuji Rock, they entered a new musical phase as they navigated and developed songs that were just weeks old. They also toured the US and headlined two sold-out shows in New York. These new performances have seen the band garner widespread support from across the board with Rolling Stone UK describing their Green Man set as "unmissable", and the Guardian going on to say that they were "greeted by something close to rapture." These performances have also attracted a profile from the NY Times, multiple glowing live reviews, and a nomination for Best Live Performer at the AIM Independent Music Awards 2022. NME **** "a marvellous return from one of our greatest bands” Gigwise **** “truly cements them as one of the greats of our generation.”

Australia’s most dependable shape-shifters slip into full-bodied thrash on their 24th album. It’s King Gizz’s second proper foray into the propulsive metal subgenre—after 2019’s *Infest the Rats’ Nest*—and once again dire themes of environmental collapse rise to the fore. That imagery is even stronger here, with Godzilla-style creatures wreaking havoc in the lyrics. Meanwhile, the songs are longer and heavier than on that previous outing, with the juddering “Dragon” nearly hitting the 10-minute mark. Repetition remains key, whether it’s droning vocal phrases, entrancing percussion, muscled riffage, or precise lashings of lead guitar. That all makes for a particularly vigorous addition to the band’s deep catalog.

As the headquarters of a producer/songwriter who’s won Grammys for his work with Adele, Beck, Foo Fighters, and more, Greg Kurstin’s LA studio is well appointed. “It’s a museum of ’80s synths and weird instruments,” Kurstin tells Apple Music. “Everything’s patched in and ready to go.” Damon Albarn discovered as much when he arrived during a trip to meet prospective producers for the eighth Gorillaz album. Tired and, by his own admission, uncertain about recruiting a “pop” producer, Albarn quietly explored the equipment, occasionally unfurling melodies on the piano which Kurstin would join in with on his Mellotron—two musicians feeling each other out, seeking moments of creative accord. After two or three hours, Kurstin felt happy enough, but Albarn’s manager was concerned. “She goes, ‘Damon just likes to float around. He’s not going to tell you to start doing something, you should just start recording,’” says Kurstin. “That gave me a kick to get down to business.” He opened up the input and added drums while Albarn built a synth part. Before the day was done, they had “Silent Running.” “Damon seemed energized,” says Kurstin. “He was excited about how the song progressed from the demo. I was thrilled too. He gave me a big hug and that was it: We were off and running.” Discovering a mutual love for The Clash, The Specials, De La Soul, and ’80s synth-pop, the pair took just 11 days during early 2022 to craft an album from Albarn’s iPad demos (give or take Bad Bunny collaboration “Tormenta,” which had already been recorded with long-standing Gorillaz producer Remi Kabaka Jr.). They valued spontaneity over preplanning and discussion, forging hydraulic disco-funk (the Thundercat-starring “Cracker Island”) and yearning synth-pop (“Oil” with Stevie Nicks), plus—in the short space of “Skinny Ape”—folk, electro, and punk. As with so much of Albarn’s best music, it’s all anchored to absorbing wistfulness. “I gravitate towards the melancholy, even in a fun song,” says Kurstin. “And Damon really brings that in his ideas. When I first heard Gorillaz, I was thinking, ‘Oh, he gets me and all the music that I love.’ I always felt that connection. It’s what you look for—your people.” Here, Kurstin talks us through several of the songs they created together. **“Cracker Island” (feat. Thundercat)** “Bringing in Thundercat was a really fun flavor to bring to the album. This wild, sort of uptempo disco song. I had just been working with Thundercat and we had become friends. I texted him and he said, ‘Yes, definitely, I’ll do it.’ It was very fun to watch him work on it and to hear him write his melody parts. He sang a lot of what Damon sang and then added his own thing and the harmonies. It’s always fun to witness him play, because he’s absolutely amazing on the bass.” **“Oil” (feat. Stevie Nicks)** “That contrast of hearing Stevie’s voice over a Gorillaz track is amazing. I think my wife, who’s also my manager, had come up with the idea. We’d have these conversations with Damon: Who could we bring in to this project? Who does he know? Who do I know? I had been working with Stevie and become really good friends with her. Damon was very excited, he couldn’t even believe that was a possibility. I think Stevie was just very moved by it. She loved the lyrics and she took it very seriously, really wanted to do the best job. Stevie’s just so cool. She’s always listening to new music, she’s in touch with everything that’s happening and just so brilliant as a person. I love her dearly.” **“Silent Running” (feat. Adeleye Omotayo)** “‘Silent Running’ really was the North Star for me, might’ve been for Damon, too. It just started the whole process for us: ‘Here’s the bar, this is what we can do, and let’s try to see if we can even beat it.’ I think we knocked out ‘Silent Running’ in two or three hours. That was the fun part about it, just this whirlwind of throwing things against the wall and then recording them—and I’m kind of mixing as I’m going as well. By the end of the day, it sounded like the finished product did.” **“New Gold” (feat. Bootie Brown & Tame Impala)** “Kevin Parker’s just great. I was really excited to be involved with something that he was involved with. Damon had started this with Kevin and was a bit stuck, mostly because it was in an odd time signature, this kind of 6/4. It’s a little bit of a twisted and lopsided groove. It was sort of put off forever and maybe nothing was going to happen with it. It needed Damon to get in there and get excited about it. I think he liked how it was started, but finishing it was just too overwhelming. I thought, ‘OK, let me just try to piece this together in the form of a song that is very clear.’ That sort of started the ball rolling again. Damon heard it and then he worked on it a bit and evened out the time signature.” **“Baby Queen”** “Only Damon could come up with such a wild concept for a song. \[In Bangkok in 1997, Albarn met a crown princess who crowd-surfed at a Blur gig; while writing songs for *Cracker Island*, he dreamed about meeting her as she is today.\] When I heard the demo, it was just brilliant. I loved it. As a producer, I was just trying to bring in this kind of dreamy feel to the track. It has a floating quality, and that’s something I was leaning into, trying to put a soundtrack to that dream.” **“Skinny Ape”** “There’s something mad and crazy about ‘Skinny Ape,’ how it took shape. I felt on the edge of my seat, out of control. I didn’t know what was happening and how it was going to evolve. It was a lot of happy accidents, like throwing the weirdest, wildest sound at the track and then muting four other things and then all of a sudden, ‘Wow, that’s a cool texture.’ Playing drums in that sort of double-time punk rock section was really fun, and Damon was excited watching me play that part. That feeling of being out of control when I’m working is exciting because it’s very unpredictable and brings out things of myself I never would have imagined I would’ve done.” **“Possession Island” (feat. Beck)** “I feel like the best of me when I work with Beck, and I feel the same with Damon. I feel pushed by their presence and their body of work, searching into places that I never looked before—deep, dark corners, sonically. What can I do that’s different than I might do with most people? It’s very easy to fall into comfort zones and what’s easy when you’re making music. Working with Damon really awakened some creative part of my brain that was sleeping a little bit. I need to work with these people to keep these things going. Damon had been playing that piano part during his shows \[*The Nearer the Fountain, More Pure the Stream Flows* tour\]. That melody was something he would play every time he’d sit down. I started playing the nylon string guitar, and then it became a little bit more of a flamenco influence, and even a mariachi sound with the Mellotron trumpet. I love hearing Damon and Beck singing and interacting with each other that way, these Walker Brothers-sounding harmonies.”

Slowdive’s self-titled 2017 comeback album—their first since 1995’s *Pygmalion*—had been propelled by the sense of momentum generated by the band’s live reunion, which began at 2014’s Primavera Sound festival in Spain. But when it was time to make a follow-up, it felt very much like starting all over again for the shoegazing pioneers who formed in Reading in England’s Thames Valley during the late ’80s. “With this one, it was more like, ‘Well, do we want to do a record? Do we need to do a record?’” singer and guitarist Neil Halstead tells Apple Music. “We had to get the momentum going again and figure out what kind of record we wanted to make. The last one was a bit more instinctive. Part of the process on this one was trying to remain just the five of us and be in the moment with it and make something that we were all into. It took a while to get to that point.” Pieced together from a foundation of electronic demos that Halstead had in 2019 sent to his bandmates—co-vocalist and guitarist Rachel Goswell, guitarist Christian Savill, bassist Nick Chaplin, and drummer Simon Scott—*everything is alive* feels both expansive and intimate at once, with chiming indie pop intertwining with hazy dream-pop ballads and atmospheric soundscapes. “It showcases some of the different sides to Slowdive,” says Halstead. “It’s very much like the first few EPs we put out, which would always have what we thought of as a pop song on the A-side and a much more experimental or instrumental track on the B-side, the two points between which the band operated.” Exploring themes of getting older, looking both back and forward, and relationships, *everything is alive* is a mesmeric listen. Read on for Halstead’s track-by-track guide. **“shanty”** “This is probably one of the first tunes we worked on. I sent a bunch of electronic music through and this was one of them. There was a eureka moment with this track, where I was trying to keep it very electronic and then we ended up just putting some very noisy guitars on and it was a bit like, ‘Oh, OK, that works.’ I remember Rachel saying when I sent her the demo that she was listening to it a lot, and she said she was getting really excited about going in and recording with the band again. It was the first tune in terms of thinking about getting into the studio and recording again.” **“prayer remembered”** “I wrote this three days after my son Albert was born. I came home from the hospital one night and sat down at a keyboard and started playing this thing. I ended up bringing it into the Slowdive sessions quite late on just because there was something I felt we needed on the record. I had Nick and Christian and Simon play along with my original synth part, and then I took the synth out of the equation altogether. We pulled it out of the mix and added a few more bits to what was left.” **“alife”** “This started off as a very krautrock, very electronic thing. We did a version with the band and I was playing it around the house and Ingrid, my partner, started singing along to part of the song and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s really good. We should record that.’ The first demo has Ingrid singing the part that Rachel sings now. She has a writing credit on this—it’s the only Slowdive song where someone outside the band has a writing credit. I always thought of it as like a proper pop song—as much as Slowdive ever do pop songs. We sent it to Shawn Everett to mix and basically said, ‘Look, if you could make this sound like a cross between The Smiths and Fleetwood Mac, that would be amazing.’ I don’t know if we got there, but he was really excited about that direction.” **“andalucia plays”** “I’d written this as an acoustic tune that I was going to put on a solo record back in 2012. It’s talking about a relationship and thinking about the things that were important in that first year of that relationship. I came back to it while we were working on the Slowdive record and replayed it on an organ and then we worked on it from that point. It has an element of The Cure about it with the keyboards. Rachel didn’t want to sing on it; she was like, ‘It’s too intimate, I feel like this is a real personal song.’ I had to ask her a few times. The vocals are treated slightly different on the recording than we would normally do, they’re much closer-sounding. I think it’s nice to have it as part of a Slowdive record.” **“kisses”** “I demoed this and shied away from it for a long time because it seemed very poppy and maybe not in our world. It was, again, much more electronic. It almost sounded like a Kraftwerk song. It had the lyric ‘kisses’ in it, the only recognizable lyric. Every time I tried to sit down and write lyrics for the song, I couldn’t get away from the ‘kisses’ part. I was thinking it was a bit too light, too frivolous, but the tune just stuck around. We did so many different versions of it that didn’t quite work, and in the end we did this version. We all ended up thinking it’s a really nice addition to the record. It’s got a shiny, pop, kind of New Order-y thing happening, which we don’t do very often.” **“skin in the game”** “This is kind of a Frankenstein. It’s got a bit of another song in there and then there’s another song welded onto it, so it was a few different ideas thrown together. I liked the lyric ‘Skin in the game.’ I don’t know where I read it, I was probably reading something about investing or something stupid. I like the slightly wobbly feel to this tune, which I think is partly because some of it was taken from a very badly recorded demo on a proper four-track tape machine. Old school. It gives it a nice wobbly character.” **“chained to a cloud”** “This was called ‘Chimey One’ for three years and was one that we struggled to make sense of for a long time. I think at some point we were like, ‘Let’s forget about the verse and just work on the chorus.’ It’s a really simple idea, this song, but it hangs together around this arpeggiating keyboard riff that I think is inspired by ‘Smalltown Boy’ by Bronski Beat. It always reminded me of that.” **“the slab”** “This was always quite heavy and dense and it took a while for us to figure out how to mix it, and I think in the end Shawn did a really good job with it. Again, it’s got almost a Cure-type vibe to it. The drums came from a different song and it was originally just a big slab of keyboards, hence the title. It remains true to its roots; it’s still got that big slab-ish kind of feel to it. I always thought the record would open with ‘shanty’ and I always thought it would end with ‘the slab.’ They felt like good bookends for the rest of the tracks.”

In Rainbows by Radiohead recreated using N64 sounds. Mostly Super Mario 64

The deskbound among us might first interpret the title of Queens of the Stone Age’s eighth album as a reference to the font, but a few minutes with the music and you’ll realize that what Josh Homme refers to is a sense of decadence so total it ends with the city on fire. They remain, as ever, the hardest hard-rock band for listeners who don’t necessarily subscribe to the culture or traditions of hard rock, channeling Bowie (“Emotion Sickness”), cabaret (“Made to Parade”), and the collars-up slickness of British synth-pop (“Time & Place”) alongside the motorcycle-ready stuff you might you might expect—which they still do with more style than most (“Obscenery”). And like ZZ Top, they can rip and wink at the same time. But *In Times New Roman...* plumbs deeper personal territory than prior records. Homme has weathered the deaths of friends, the dissolution of his marriage, and other painful developments since the release of 2017’s Villains, and the album touches on all that—but he also wants to be clear about assumptions listeners could make from his lyrics. “I would never say anything about the mother of my kids or anything like that,” he tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “But also, by the same token, you must write about your life, and I think I\'m soundtracking my life. These songs and the words that go with them are an emotional snapshot where you stop the film, you pull out one frame. One song it\'s like, \'I\'m lost.\' And another one, \'I\'m angry.\' They need to be these distilled versions of that, because one drop of true reality is enough flavor. I think the hatred and adoration of strangers is like the flip side of a coin. But when you\'re not doing it for the money, that currency is worthless. I can\'t get involved in what the people say. In a way, it\'s none of my fucking business.” For Homme, the breakthrough of *In Times New Roman...* came *because* he was unflinchingly honest with himself while he was writing through some of his darkest moments. “At the end of the day, the record is completely about acceptance,” Homme says. “That\'s the key. My friends have passed. Relationships have ended. Difficult situations have arisen. I\'ve had my own physical and health things go on and things like that, but I\'m okay now. I\'m 100 percent responsible for 50 percent of what\'s going on, you know what I mean? But in the last seven years, I\'ve been through a lot of situations where it doesn\'t matter if you like it or not, it\'s happening to you. And so I\'ve been forced to say, yeah, I don\'t like this, I need to figure out where I\'m at fault here or I\'m responsible here or accountable here. And also, I need to also accept it for what it is. This is the reality. Even if I don\'t like it, it would be a shame to hold on too tight to something that\'s slipping through your hands and not just accept it for what it is.”

More than 25 years into their existence, Animal Collective is riding the momentum of 2022’s rejuvenating *Time Skiffs*, marking the quickest turnaround of new material since their ultra-prolific 2000s streak. There’s flickers of prior Animal Collective eras to be found here beyond the material’s direct connection to *Time Skiffs*, as many of these songs were written and workshopped during that album’s recording. Noah “Panda Bear” Lennox’s splashy drums recall the darkly shaded ecstasy of 2005’s *Feels*, while the proggy electricity that runs through these nine songs is not unlike the stridency of *Centipede Hz* from 2012. But despite these callbacks to the past, *Isn’t It Now?* feels like new territory for the ever-evolving Animal Collective once again, further cementing them as one of the century’s most iconoclastic and singular indie acts. Whereas its predecessor was the first time Lennox, Brian “Geologist” Weitz, Dave “Avey Tare” Portner, and Josh “Deakin” Dibb put together an album remotely, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, *Isn’t It Now?* marks a return to traditional studio confines for Animal Collective—and the result is a rich and lived-in feel that sounds as if you’re sitting in on a celestial jam session. The swirling epic centerpiece “Defeat”—at nearly 22 minutes, the longest song the group’s put forth on a proper record—builds to an all-in-it chorus before dissolving into a lovely morass of rumbling bass and Portner’s echo-laden vocals. Of course, the left turns are in abundance as well: Witness the thumping “All the Clubs Are Broken,” which sounds like their own take on MGMT’s paranoid psych-pop, or the squeals of classic guitar near the end of the nine-minute shape-shifter “Magicians From Baltimore.”

“As I got older I learned I’m a drinker/Sometimes a drink feels like family,” Mitski confides with disarming honesty on “Bug Like an Angel,” the strummy, slow-build opening salvo from her seventh studio album that also serves as its lead single. Moments later, the song breaks open into its expansive chorus: a convergence of cooed harmonies and acoustic guitar. There’s more cracked-heart vulnerability and sonic contradiction where that came from—no surprise considering that Mitski has become one of the finest practitioners of confessional, deeply textured indie rock. Recorded between studios in Los Angeles and her recently adopted home city of Nashville, *The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We* mostly leaves behind the giddy synth-pop experiments of her last release, 2022’s *Laurel Hell*, for something more intimate and dreamlike: “Buffalo Replaced” dabbles in a domestic poetry of mosquitoes, moonlight, and “fireflies zooming through the yard like highway cars”; the swooning lullaby “Heaven,” drenched in fluttering strings and slide guitar, revels in the heady pleasures of new love. The similarly swaying “I Don’t Like My Mind” pithily explores the daily anxiety of being alive (sometimes you have to eat a whole cake just to get by). The pretty syncopations of “The Deal” build to a thrilling clatter of drums and vocals, while “When Memories Snow” ropes an entire cacophonous orchestra—French horn, woodwinds, cello—into its vivid winter metaphors, and the languid balladry of “My Love Mine All Mine” makes romantic possessiveness sound like a gift. The album’s fuzzed-up closer, “I Love Me After You,” paints a different kind of picture, either postcoital or defiantly post-relationship: “Stride through the house naked/Don’t even care that the curtains are open/Let the darkness see me… How I love me after you.” Mitski has seen the darkness, and on *The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We*, she stares right back into the void.

Live at Red Rocks Amphitheatre, Morrison, CO, USA, Oct 10, Oct 11 and Nov 2 2022

The wistful, slightly uncertain feeling you get from a Yo La Tengo album isn’t just one of the most reliable pleasures in indie rock; it practically defines the form. Their 17th studio album was recorded nearly 40 years after husband and wife Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley decided that, hey, maybe they could do it, too. *This Stupid World*’s sweet ballads (“Aselestine,” “Apology Letter”) and steady, psychedelic drones (“This Stupid World,” “Sinatra Drive Breakdown”) call back to the band’s classic mid-’90s period of *Painful* and *Electr-O-Pura*, whose domestications of garage rock and Velvet Underground-style noise helped bring the punk ethic to the most bookish and unpunk among us. Confident and capable as they are, you still get the sense that they don’t totally know what they’re doing, or at least entertain enough uncertainty to keep them human—a quality that not only gives the music its lived-in greatness, but also makes them the kind of band you want to root for, which their fans do with a low-key fidelity few other bands can claim.

Coming February 10: the most live-sounding Yo La Tengo album in years, This Stupid World. Times have changed for Yo La Tengo as much as they have for everyone else. In the past, the band has often worked with outside producers and mixers. In their latest effort, the first full-length in five years, This Stupid World was created all by themselves. And their time-tested judgment is both sturdy enough to keep things to the band’s high standards, and nimble enough to make things new. At the base of nearly every track is the trio playing all at once, giving everything a right-now feel. There’s an immediacy to the music, as if the distance between the first pass and the final product has become more direct. Available on standard black vinyl, CD and on limited blue vinyl.

Originally, Ruban Nielson thought his fifth album under the Unknown Mortal Orchestra name would be a “really happy, really cheesy” one, an “Eye of the Tiger”-inspired break from the nocturnal, often introspective psych and funk for which he’s become known. “I was worried that the music that I made before the pandemic was so weird and reflective that the pandemic could push me too far,” he tells Apple Music. “I wanted to create something that wasn’t so much an expression of the time as it was an antidote for it—music that would help you escape.” But in navigating a series of family-related traumas—including a terminal diagnosis for his maternal uncle in his mother’s native Hawaii—Nielson was reminded that life is rarely that simple. In further connecting with his family heritage and history—and working alongside his brother and former Mint Chicks bandmate, Kody—he realized that everything he was writing couldn’t help but braid together elements both happy and sad. It resulted in his first double album, recorded, in large part, in a new home studio he built in Palm Springs. “The reality is that I was feeling extremely reflective about my family, thinking about the way we grew up,” he says. “Being ultra nostalgic and realizing that everything our family’s gone through has culminated in where we are now, which is a mixture of really tragic things and really beautiful things. I was just thinking that if I could make the record somehow feel that way, then that would be a good record.” Here, Nielson takes us inside a few of the album’s songs. **“Meshuggah”** “As I write more songs, there’s more and more territory that I haven’t explored, so I sometimes find myself in these little songwriting challenges. I think the original idea here was trying to think of a way to make a love song that used sugar as imagery, because after so many songs have been written, the history of pop music is so broad and so clichéd. So, I thought, what if the metaphor wasn’t sweetness? What if the metaphor was actually energy? Because sugar is a source of metabolic energy. I don’t think anyone’s written a love song that’s this cold, scientific assessment of the way that sugar—or love, or somebody’s love, or the way somebody is—somehow infuses you with power, and almost in a scary way.” **“That Life”** “‘That Life’ had a lot to do with the first six months or so of living and working in Palm Springs. It’s an interesting place because almost every day, it’s peaceful and sunny. But most of the Coachella Valley is really windy and noisy and spooky at night. So, it’s quite creepy—it feels kind of haunted, and I think that’s the thing that makes me like it so much, that it’s a mix between something really pleasant and something that seems to be hiding something dark. ‘That Life’ was taking impressions of all kinds of things that were going on around me—or things that I imagined were going on—and piecing them together in a kind of panorama. I was thinking about Palm Springs as Hieronymus Bosch’s *The Garden of Earthly Delights*. There’s all these kinds of hideous stories all around.” **“Layla”** “’Layla’ is me imagining the mindset of my mother when she was young, and my uncle when he was a young boy—thinking about how they both wanted to escape. I’ve always felt kind of weird about how one of my uncles came to Portland, and my mom went to New Zealand. I just was always like, ‘Why would you want to leave paradise?’ But for Hawaiians, Hawaii isn’t paradise—it’s just home. And sometimes, home is heavy. At the beginning, the idea was almost like, let’s write a reggae song, like one that my uncle would have written. But it’s not a reggae song—there’s not really that many reggae elements to it. You can just hear that somebody had reggae in mind when they were writing it.” **“Weekend Run”** “My family never had any money, and a lot of my family, they just do regular jobs—anything from working for a moving company, being a house painter or builder, or scooping ice cream at Baskin-Robbins. I think ‘Weekend Run’ is just an ode to the weekend, to the idea that the weekend is really special, and it didn’t just appear out of nature. The weekend was won by the labor movement, and a lot of people take something like that for granted. People actually came up with it and made it happen, and people could still come up with ideas like that. People could still fight for things like that.” **“Nadja”** “I think it’s a bit of a collage, of a few specific experiences that I feel like, because I’ve experienced them multiple times, it just can’t be a coincidence. There is this part in the song where I sing about being in a bed where someone you love has been sleeping. You miss them so much, and then you find one of their hairs, a strand of hair on the pillow, and then you just feel so dysfunctionally kind of obsessed with the person, just not knowing what to do with the hair. You can’t throw it away, or do you just leave it there? I remember finding a strand of hair from someone that I was in love with, and I tied the string around my finger, coiled it up and then just ate it, just thinking where else is it going to go? I have to put this hair inside me because I don\'t know what else to do. It’s something strangely, slightly creepy. But also, I don’t know—it’s true.” **“Keaukaha”** “Keaukaha is almost like an emotional landscape. We got back from Hawaii, me and my brother, and during the time when we were mixing the record, we did a bunch of jamming and recording. Keaukaha is part of Hilo. It’s the place where my mom grew up as a little kid. This is really exactly the way I felt coming back that time, so we called it Keaukaha because that\'s where we’d been spending time, and that’s where Mom took us to show us where she grew up, in the house she was in. It’s a heavy place for me because there’s just so many things that happened there. I wouldn’t say bittersweet, but it’s just that some things are just so heavy that it’s impossible to enjoy them 100 percent. There’s just so much weight and history.” **“I Killed Captain Cook”** “I suppose I was in some way looking for approval from my mom because my mom loves that story so much. Over the pandemic, I had some time on my hands, and I was teaching myself photography. So, I went to Hawaii and took my daughter, and then I asked my mom if she would want to dance to the song, and I would try and film it on this camera I’d bought, and maybe that could be a little project. I kind of started to see how all these things all fit together into one project. I just had to kind of look at it through the lens of where I was now, not where I originally thought the album was going to end up. It’s a Hawaiian song to me, my interpretation of slack-key and hapa haole music.” **“Drag”** “Kody and I were working in Palm Springs with \[bassist\] Jake \[Portrait\], and we kind of just started riffing. It was a really nice day, and we captured the way the afternoon felt. Before we start making music, one of my favorite things to do is to try to cultivate a mood. Try to find something special, try to have a day that feels special, and then right in the middle of experiencing that day, try and make some music. Hopefully, that translates and captures the moment, so you can revisit it whenever you want. That’s ‘Drag.’”

Created between the dry freeways of Palm Springs, California and lush coastlines and Hilo, Hawai’i, V is the definitive Unknown Mortal Orchestra record. Led by Hawaiian-New Zealand artist Ruban Nielson, V draws from the rich traditions of West Coast AOR, classic hits, weirdo pop and Hawaiian Hapa-haole music. With his sharpest-ever ear for “making it UMO”, Ruban evokes blue skies, beachside cocktail bars and hotel pools without ever turning a blind eye to the darkness that lurks below perfect, pristine surfaces. The road to V began in April 2019 when UMO headed to Indio, California, to perform at Coachella. For that fortnight, Ruban booked an Airbnb in nearby Palm Springs and brought his family along. Between performances, he realized the desert resort city’s palm tree-lined streets reminded him of a childhood spent playing by white hotel swimming pools with his siblings while their entertainer parents performed in showbands across the Pacific and East Asia. A year later, Ruban started thinking about Palm Springs again as the COVID-19 pandemic loomed on the horizon. After contemplating spending lockdown at home in Portland, he purchased a house in Palm Springs. Having spent a decade touring, Ruban knew he had health issues and burnout to address. As America went into lockdown, he settled in for enforced downtime. Under the palm trees, he had the space to reflect. He felt a sense of gratitude for the lifestyle music had afforded him. The warm, dry weather cleared up his lifelong asthma issues, he found himself singing better than ever before, and new songs began to flow out of him in his home studio. When he recorded his third album Multi-Love, Ruban incorporated disco elements into the lo-fi funk-rock dreamscapes of his first two records. Coming from a punk background where the slogan “disco sucks” had been casually thrown around, he found a subversive glee in flipping the script. On V, you can hear a continuation of this impulse in the arid disco-funk of ‘Meshuggah’. “There are two kinds of musical taste, constructed and instinctual,” Ruban said. “Taste as clout is dangerous to art, in my opinion. Then, there’s music that will send a shiver down your spine. You didn’t ask for that shiver. It just happens.” During the pandemic’s early days, Ruban’s brother Kody had flown from New Zealand to Palm Springs to help him with his recordings. When they talked about records that moved them in that spine-shivering manner, Ruban started thinking about the ubiquitous 70s AM radio rock and 80s pop songs he remembered hearing as a child while their parents were working as entertainers. He wanted to write his version of those records, leading to the two glorious uptempo singles UMO released in 2021, ‘Weekend Run’ and ‘That Life’. However, the golden good times never last forever. As health issues began to plague one of his Hawaiian uncles, Ruban realized he was coming face to face with a sharper, more acute sense of mortality looming. Putting his recordings aside, he helped his mother and another of her brothers move home from New Zealand and Portland to Hawai’i to be with him. As they settled in, Ruban began dividing his time between Palm Springs and Hilo on the northeastern side of the big island. He knew that part of his connection with Palm Springs came from how it evoked aspects of his childhood. For Ruban, Hawai’i had a similar association, but it also brought back faded memories of the darker side of his parents' lifestyle. On those trips, he heard those classic AM radio rock records he’d talked about with Kody everywhere. They were inextricably intertwined with the palm trees, swimming pools, and glamorized hedonism he’d internalized since childhood. There's a type of music in Hawai'i called Hapa-haole (Half white). You can hear it expressed in signature UMO style through the humid guitar-led atmosphere of V's penultimate song, ‘I Killed Captain Cook’. Although the songs are presented in a traditional Hawaiian manner, they're mostly sung in English. Having been influenced by Hawaiian music since UMO’s first album, Ruban saw a space for himself within the tradition. When he reflected on his success, he realized he had the responsibility and platform to represent Hapa-haole music on the global stage. After reuniting with Kody at a cousin’s wedding in Hawai’i, the brothers traveled to Palm Springs. There, with assistance from their father, Chris Nielson (saxophone/flute) and longstanding UMO member Jake Portrait, they brought everything Ruban had been mulling over about together through the fourteen singalong anthems, cinematic instrumentals and mischievous pop songs that make up V. “In Hawaii, everything shifted off of me and my music,” Ruban said. “Suddenly, I was spending more time figuring out what others need and what my role is within my family. I also learned that things I thought were true of myself are bigger than I thought. My way of making mischief - that’s not just me - that’s my whole Polynesian side. I thought I was walking away from music to focus on family, but the two ended up connecting.” The first double album in the UMO discography, V, makes a strong case for itself as Ruban’s sunbleached masterpiece while simultaneously recontextualizing and enriching the journey that led him to this moment. Alongside Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation, Pulp’s Different Class, and Prince’s 1999, it’s a breakthrough work from a mid-career artist in full control of his creative powers. Most of all, V is about having fun while making music and art that transcends clout and currency. In the process, Ruban effortlessly reclaims taste as a personal part of selfhood; in that reclamation, he propels UMO to breathtaking new creative heights.

Young Fathers occupy a unique place in British music. The Mercury Prize-winning trio are as adept at envelope-pushing sonic experimentalism and opaque lyrical impressionism as they are at soulful pop hooks and festival-primed choruses—frequently, in the space of the same song. Coming off the back of an extended hiatus following 2018’s acclaimed *Cocoa Sugar*, the Edinburgh threesome entered their basement studio with no grand plan for their fourth studio album other than to reconnect to the creative process, and each other. Little was explicitly discussed. Instead, Alloysious Massaquoi, Kayus Bankole, and Graham “G” Hastings—all friends since their school days—intuitively reacted to a lyric, a piece of music, or a beat that one of them had conceived to create multifaceted pieces of work that, for all their complexities and contradictions, hit home with soul-lifting, often spiritual, directness. Through the joyous clatter of opener “Rice,” the electro-glam battle cry “I Saw,” the epic “Tell Somebody,” and the shape-shifting sonic explosion of closer “Be Your Lady,” Young Fathers express every peak and trough of the human condition within often-dense tapestries of sounds and words. “Each song serves an integral purpose to create something that feels cohesive,” says Bankole. “You can find joy in silence, you can find happiness in pain. You can find all these intricate feelings and diverse feelings that reflect reality in the best possible way within these songs.” Across 10 dazzling tracks, *Heavy Heavy* has all that and more, making it the band’s most fully realized and affecting work to date. Let Massaquoi and Bankole guide you through it, track by track. **“Rice”** Alloysious Massaquoi: “What we’re great at doing is attaching ourselves to what the feeling of the track is and then building from that, so the lyrics start to come from that point of view. \[On ‘Rice’\] that feeling of it being joyous was what we were connecting to. It was the feeling of fresh morning air. You’re on a journey, you’re moving towards something, it feels like you’re coming home to find it again. For me, it was finding that feeling of, ‘OK, I love music again,’ because during COVID it felt redundant to me. What mattered to me was looking after my family.” **“I Saw”** AM: “We’d been talking about Brexit, colonialism, about forgetting the contributions of other countries and nations so that was in the air. And when we attached ourselves to the feeling of the song, it had that call-to-arms feeling to it, it’s like a march.” Kayus Bankole: “It touches on Brexit, but it also touches on how effective turning a blind eye can be, that idea that there’s nothing really you can do. It’s a call to arms, but there’s also this massive question mark. I get super-buzzed by leaving question marks so you can engage in some form of conversation afterwards.” **“Drum”** AM: “It’s got that sort of gospel spiritual aspect to it. There’s an intensity in that. It’s almost like a sermon is happening.” KB: “The intensity of it is like a possession. A good, spiritual thing. For me, speaking in my native tongue \[Yoruba\] is like channeling a part of me that the Western world can’t express. I sometimes feel like the English language fails me, and in the Western world not a lot of people speak my language or understand what I’m saying, so it’s connecting to my true self and expressing myself in a true way.” **“Tell Somebody”** AM: “It was so big, so epic that we just needed to be direct. The lyrics had to be relatable. It’s about having that balance. You have to really boil it down and think, ‘What is it I’m trying to say here?’ You have 20 lines and you cut it down to just five and that’s what makes it powerful. I think it might mean something different to everyone in the group, but I know what it means to me, through my experiences, and that’s what I was channeling. The more you lean into yourself, the more relatable it is.” **“Geronimo”** AM: “It’s talking about relationships: ‘Being a son, brother, uncle, father figure/I gotta survive and provide/My mama said, “You’ll never ever please your woman/But you’ll have a good time trying.”’ It’s relatable again, but then you have this nihilistic cynicism from Graham: ‘Nobody goes anywhere really/Dressed up just to go in the dirt.’ It’s a bit nihilistic, but given the reality of the world and how things are, I think you need the balance of those things. Jump on, jump off. It’s like: *decide*. You’re either hot or you’re cold. Don’t be lukewarm. You either go for it or you don’t. Then encapsulating all that within Geronimo, this Native American hero.” **“Shoot Me Down”** AM: “‘Shoot Me Down’ is definitely steeped in humanity. You’ve got everything in there. You’ve got the insecurities, the cynicism, you’ve got the joy, the pain, the indifference. You’ve got all those things churning around in this cauldron. There’s a level of regret in there as well. Again, when you lean into yourself, it becomes more relatable to everybody else.” **“Ululation”** KB: “It’s the first time we’ve ever used anyone else on a track. A really close friend of mine, who I call a sister, called me while we were making ‘Uluation’: ‘I need a place to stay, I’m having a difficult time with my husband, I’m really angry at him…’ I said if you need a place to chill just come down to the studio and listen to us while we work but you mustn’t say a word because we’re working. We’re working on the track and she started humming in the background. Alloy picked up on it and was like, ‘Give her a mic!’ She’s singing about gratitude. In the midst of feeling very angry, feeling like shit and that life’s not fair, she still had that emotion that she can practice gratitude. I think that’s a beautiful contrast of emotions.” **“Sink Or Swim”** AM: “It says a similar thing to what we’re saying on ‘Geronimo’ but with more panache. The music has that feeling of a carousel, you’re jumping on and jumping off. If you watch Steve McQueen’s Small Axe \[film anthology\], in *Lovers Rock*, when they’re in the house party before the fire starts—this fits perfectly to that. It’s that intensity, the sweat and the smoke, but with these direct lines thrown in: ‘Oh baby, won’t you let me in?’ and ‘Don’t always have to be so deep.’ Sometimes you need a bit of directness, you need to call a spade a spade.” **“Holy Moly”** AM: “It’s a contrast between light and dark. You’re forcing two things that don’t make sense together. You have a pop song and some weird beat, and you’re forcing them to have this conversation, to do something, and then ‘Holy Moly’ comes out of that. It’s two different worlds coming together and what cements it is the lyrics.” **“Be Your Lady”** KB: “It’s the perfect loop back to the first track so you could stay in the loop of the album for decades, centuries, and millenniums and just bask in these intricate parts. ‘Be Your Lady’ is a nice wave goodbye, but it’s also radical as fuck. That last line ‘Can I take 10 pounds’ worth of loving out of the bank please?’ I’m repeating it and I’m switching the accents of it as well because I switch accents in conversation. I sometimes speak like someone who’s from Washington, D.C. \[where Bankole has previously lived\], or someone who’s lived in the Southside of Edinburgh, and I sometimes speak like someone who’s from Lagos in Nigeria.” AM: “I wasn’t convinced about that track initially. I was like, ‘What the fuck is this?’” KB: “That’s good, though. That’s the feeling that you want. That’s why I feel it’s radical. It’s something that only we can do, it comes together and it feels right.”

WIN ACCESS TO A SOUNDCHECK AND TICKETS TO A UK HEADLINE SHOW OF YOUR CHOOSING BY PRE-ORDERING* ANY ALBUM FORMAT OF 'HEAVY HEAVY' BY 6PM GMT ON TUESDAY 31ST JANUARY. PREVIOUS ORDERS WILL BE COUNTED AS ENTRIES. OPEN TO UK PURCHASES ONLY. FAQ young-fathers.com/comp/faq Young Fathers - Alloysious Massaquoi, Kayus Bankole and G. Hastings - announce details of their brand new album Heavy Heavy. Set for release on February 3rd 2023 via Ninja Tune, it’s the group’s fourth album and their first since 2018’s album Cocoa Sugar. The 10-track project signals a renewed back-to-basics approach, just the three of them in their basement studio, some equipment and microphones: everything always plugged in, everything always in reach. Alongside the announcement ‘Heavy Heavy’, Young Fathers will make their much anticipated return to stages across the UK and Europe beginning February 2023 - known for their electrifying performances, their shows are a blur of ritualistic frenzy, marking them as one of the most must-see acts operating today. The tour will include shows at the Roundhouse in London, Elysee Montmartre in Paris, Paradiso in Amsterdam, O2 Academy in Leeds and Glasgow, Olympia in Dublin, Astra in Berlin, Albert Hall in Manchester, Trix in Antwerp, Mojo Club in Hamburg and more (full dates below) To mark news of the album and the tour, Young Fathers today release a brand new single, “I Saw”. It’s the second track to be released from the album (following standalone single “Geronimo” in July) and brims with everything fans have come to love from a group known for their multi-genre versatility - kinetic rhythms, controlled chaos and unbridled soul. Accompanied by a video created by 23 year old Austrian-Nigerian artist and filmmaker David Uzochukwu, the track demonstrates the ambitious ideas that lay at the heart of this highly-anticipated record. Speaking about the title, the band write that Heavy Heavy could be a mood, or it could describe the smoothed granite of bass that supports the sound… or it could be a nod to the natural progression of boys to grown men and the inevitable toll of living, a joyous burden, relationships, family, the natural momentum of a group that has been around long enough to witness massive changes. “You let the demons out and deal with it,” reckons Kayus of the album. “Make sense of it after.” For Young Fathers, there’s no dress code required. Dancing, not moshing. Hips jerking, feet slipping, brain firing in Catherine Wheel sparks of joy and empathy. Underground but never dark. Still young, after some years, even as the heavy, heavy weight of the world seems to grow day by day.

A Wednesday song is a quilt. A short story collection, a half-memory, a patchwork of portraits of the American south, disparate moments that somehow make sense as a whole. Karly Hartzman, the songwriter/vocalist/guitarist at the helm of the project, is a story collector as much as she is a storyteller: a scholar of people and one-liners. Rat Saw God, the Asheville quintet’s new and best record, is ekphrastic but autobiographical and above all, deeply empathetic. Across the album’s ten tracks Hartzman, guitarist MJ Lenderman, bassist Margo Shultz, drummer Alan Miller, and lap/pedal steel player Xandy Chelmis build a shrine to minutiae. Half-funny, half-tragic dispatches from North Carolina unfurling somewhere between the wailing skuzz of Nineties shoegaze and classic country twang, that distorted lap steel and Hartzman’s voice slicing through the din. Rat Saw God is an album about riding a bike down a suburban stretch in Greensboro while listening to My Bloody Valentine for the first time on an iPod Nano, past a creek that runs through the neighborhood riddled with broken glass bottles and condoms, a front yard filled with broken and rusted car parts, a lonely and dilapidated house reclaimed by kudzu. Four Lokos and rodeo clowns and a kid who burns down a corn field. Roadside monuments, church marquees, poppers and vodka in a plastic water bottle, the shit you get away with at Jewish summer camp, strange sentimental family heirlooms at the thrift stores. The way the South hums alive all night in the summers and into fall, the sound of high school football games, the halo effect from the lights polluting the darkness. It’s not really bright enough to see in front of you, but in that stretch of inky void – somehow – you see everything. Rat Saw God was written in the months immediately following Twin Plagues’ completion, and recorded in a week at Asheville’s Drop of Sun studio. While Twin Plagues was a breakthrough release critically for Wednesday, it was also a creative and personal breakthrough for Hartzman. The lauded record charts feeling really fucked up, trauma, dropping acid. It had Hartzman thinking about the listener, about her mom hearing those songs, about how it feels to really spill your guts. And in the end, it felt okay. “I really jumped that hurdle with Twin Plagues where I was not worrying at all really about being vulnerable – I was finally comfortable with it, and I really wanna stay in that zone.” The album opener, “Hot Rotten Grass Smell,” happens in a flash: an explosive and wailing wall-of-sound dissonance that’d sound at home on any ‘90s shoegaze album, then peters out into a chirping chorus of peepers, a nighttime sound. And then into the previously-released eight-and-half-minute sprawling, heavy single, “Bull Believer.” Other tracks, like the creeping “What’s So Funny” or “Turkey Vultures,” interrogate Hartzman’s interiority - intimate portraits of coping, of helplessness. “Chosen to Deserve” is a true-blue love song complete with ripping guitar riffs, skewing classic country. “Bath County” recounts a trip Hartzman and her partner took to Dollywood, and time spent in the actual Bath County, Virginia, where she wrote the song while visiting, sitting on a front porch. And Rat Saw God closer “TV in the Gas Pump” is a proper traveling road song, written from one long ongoing iPhone note Hartzman kept while in the van, its final moments of audio a wink toward Twin Plagues. The reference-heavy stand-out “Quarry” is maybe the most obvious example of the way Hartzman seamlessly weaves together all these throughlines. It draws from imagery in Lynda Barry’s Cruddy; a collection of stories from Hartzman’s family (her dad burned down that cornfield); her current neighbors; and the West Virginia street from where her grandma lived, right next to a rock quarry, where the explosions would occasionally rock the neighborhood and everyone would just go on as normal. The songs on Rat Saw God don’t recount epics, just the everyday. They’re true, they’re real life, blurry and chaotic and strange – which is in-line with Hartzman’s own ethos: “Everyone’s story is worthy,” she says, plainly. “Literally every life story is worth writing down, because people are so fascinating.” But the thing about Rat Saw God - and about any Wednesday song, really - is you don’t necessarily even need all the references to get it, the weirdly specific elation of a song that really hits. Yeah, it’s all in the details – how fucked up you got or get, how you break a heart, how you fall in love, how you make yourself and others feel seen – but it’s mostly the way those tiny moments add up into a song or album or a person.

In an interview about his 2023 album of melancholy synth-pop, *Fantasy*, Anthony Gonzalez (aka M83) said he didn’t want to talk about modern life so much as he wanted to avoid it. The irony is that since the release of 2011’s *Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming*, few artists have had as big of an impact on indie electronic music’s passage into the mainstream. Where 2016’s *Junk* explored the playful side of his ’80s obsessions and 2019’s *Knife + Heart* soundtracked the erotic, threatening side, the anthems of *Fantasy* tap into the heroism that has made his narrow vision so broadly appealing, from the tight New Wave vibe of “Amnesia” to the unsettling grandeur of “Dismemberment Bureau.” His nostalgia is escape, yes—but it’s also rebellion.

After COVID hit, Mac DeMarco began to feel as though making music had become just like any other job, something to be compartmentalized or kept separate from who he really is—you write a song, you record it, you release it, you tour, you start again. “But my life, what I do on a day-to-day basis, is as much the art as a record coming out,” he tells Apple Music. “I wanted to make it that again. I wanted to feel enveloped by the whole thing. I wanted to dispel the divide between my personal life and my public life, for my art, and just make it all one big glob. So, I just went.” He means that quite literally. On January 15, 2022, after a show in San Francisco, DeMarco jumped into his 1994 Toyota Land Cruiser and—with a minimalist recording setup packed away in the back—embarked on a three-month, cross-continental road trip completely alone. The plan was to drop in on family and old friends, and to write and record anywhere he stopped, be it a seedy roadside motel, backyard rental, or childhood bedroom. The only rule was that he wouldn’t come home to Los Angeles until he’d finished what’s become *Five Easy Hot Dogs*, an LP of instrumental music that doubles as a kind of travelogue, each song sequenced in the order that he wrote and recorded it and labeled by its place of origin. “I think that maybe what it’ll show people a little bit is that, even though I’m not singing on it, you can still tell that it’s my stuff because it has a very strong personality to it,” he says. “This trip reminded me that I love to travel, that I love to meet people, that I love to have experiences. It rejuvenated my interest in a lot of things. It was an adventure.” Here, DeMarco takes us along for the ride, recalling the sights and sounds of his trip, from Northern California to Western Canada to New York by way of Chicago. **Gualala, California** “On the first day, I left San Francisco, and I just drove the coast for a couple hours. No destination in the GPS. I knew I was going north, but that was pretty much it. Gualala is a little town on the \[Highway\] 1. I only stayed there for one night, at a weird little motel called the Seacliff. I brought all of my gear in from the car and was like, ‘Whoa. All right.’ Where I recorded there in the motel, I had these two windows that looked directly out onto the ocean there, and it was a beautiful place. I’ve been a lot of places in the world, but that part of the country is, to me, just a very beautiful chunk of earth, with the redwoods and the cliffs. There was a lot of weather, and I think that a lot of this record ended up sounding like that first portion I recorded, up the western side of the States into Canada—rainy.” **Crescent City, California** “Crescent City kind of marks the point where California gets a little bit sketchier. It’s still beautiful, you’re still on the coast, but there’s a big prison in Crescent City. I stayed in—I guess, for lack of a better term—in a hooker hotel. Kind of gross, kind of shitty. Still exciting, but a little bleak—and I’m kind of worried that someone might break into my car tonight. It was that kind of vibe. That’s one of my favorite songs on the whole thing. It’s a feeling I can get every couple albums, on a song or two: sad but bittersweet, maybe a little hopeful, maybe a bit of edge, but not too much.” **Portland, Oregon** “I went to Portland thinking, ‘I’ve been there a million times. I got a lot of friends there. I’ve had good times in Portland.’ And then I got there and pretty quickly realized I don’t really know anybody here anymore, and I don’t really know what to do. It was nice to be in a big city after just being on the coast alone for a couple days, but I pulled in expecting human interaction. And I spent three days there, but I got none of that. Didn’t see any homies. Went to some restaurants and talked to some people, but it was just a bit bleak. But that first night in Portland is where I set up my studio in this little back house I rented there. It’s the first time I had the drums up and more of a fully realized setup. It was exciting, and it was cool to see the full potential there.” **Victoria, British Columbia, Canada** “Victoria was interesting. I left Portland in a hurry, got a COVID test, and went and caught a ferry up near Seattle, at this place called Port Angeles. I got up there with the intention to surprise some old friends that I hadn’t seen in a really long time. And when I got there, I realized they were all out of town for the weekend. So, it was kind of the same thing where I was kind of like, ‘Well, fuck—pardon my French—what do I do?’ I was frustrated, so I decided, fuck it, I was just going to stay in a nice place. In Canada, we have these Fairmont hotels, and that’s where I booked a room. The Queen went there for tea in the ’50s or something—it’s that kind of energy, like you’re staying in a big, funny old castle. I decided I would wait for my friends there, and because it was a hotel, I had a bit more of a stripped-down recording setup. I just walked around Victoria and met kids on the street or found things to do. But it was a bit strange to be there for a couple days with no purpose.” **Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada** “I used to live in Vancouver—I moved there when I was 18 and lived there probably around until I was about 20. I love it, for the climate and the way the air is fresh. But it felt like a walk down memory lane the whole time, so it was a funny feeling being back. I even drove by the house that I recorded one of my first records in. I think those three songs, at least maybe the second and third, have that kind of wistful energy about them. I had this apartment for a minute. It was kind of weird; it was pretty big and reverb-y and made out of concrete. I did the first track there. But then I had this little back house really close to where I used to live there, and that’s where the other two songs were made.” **Edmonton, Alberta, Canada** “The Edmonton songs I recorded in my bedroom from high school, which I think had, arguably, the best drum sound that I got on the record. It just reminded me of being in high school because I would play something and then my mom would be like, ‘Sounds good, sweetheart.’ I don’t go back very often anymore, and I hadn’t seen some of my family in a long time—there have been a couple deaths since I’ve been back, and there was a lot of stuff to go over. So, it was a lot, but it was good. Usually, when I would go back to an old city, I’d call up the old friends, go to the bar, get hammered, have a good time, whatever. But instead, I bought my brother ice skates and went ice skating. I found myself reaching out to friends that I hadn’t seen since elementary school. And I think maybe those two songs are kind of more of the two more chipper ones on the record. In Edmonton, there was a little bit of heavy stuff, but it was kind of like, ‘I’m back.’ That’s how those sound to me.” **Chicago, Illinois** “Leaving Edmonton, it was kind of like, ‘OK, my trip begins again.’ It took me a while to get to Chicago and getting there was pretty gnarly. I hit some really, really bad snowstorms and stayed in Fargo for a night. But once I was there, Chicago was great. I went to a Bulls game, saw some old pals, had another little back house. I liked the recordings I got there—I got good results. I have friends in Chicago who were very hospitable, and I’m always happy to see them, but it was a nice time to be out there. The first song with the drums—it just felt like I hadn’t really touched that flavor very much yet. It’s kind of angular, but also kind of melodic and just a little bit funkier than most of the other stuff on the record.” **Rockaway, New York** “I was in New York the longest out of anywhere on the trip. Before I got there, I went to Connecticut to record for a little while, but not for this project. And then I got there. I stayed in Rockaway for a little while, ended up getting that recording, and then I moved over to Brooklyn after that. This artist, Akiko Yano, she’s like a hero of mine. I brought my stuff over to hers, and we did some songs together, which I don’t know what’ll happen with that. And then I was in other studios, doing a lot of stuff that was secondary to *Five Easy Hot Dogs*. It kind of felt like taking my head out of that space is maybe what I needed to finish this record. I’d lived in New York for a long time, in Far Rockaway. A friend was letting me stay at his house there, and I was going to my old house, too, because my old roommates are still there. Rockaway in the winter is a pretty raw little zone. It’s funny to go back to New York, and that’s the part of New York I go back to. Not very many people have that experience. It’s very peculiar.”

Blur’s first record since 2015’s *The Magic Whip* arrived in the afterglow of triumph, two weeks after a pair of joyful reunion shows at Wembley Stadium. However, celebration isn’t a dominant flavor of *The Ballad of Darren*. Instead, the album asks questions that tend to nag at you more firmly in middle age: Where are we now? What’s left? Who have I become? The result is a record marked by loss and heartbreak. “I’m sad,” Damon Albarn tells Apple Music’s Matt Wilkinson. “I’m officially a sad 55-year-old. It’s OK being sad. It’s almost impossible not to have some sadness in your life by the age of 55. If you’ve managed to get to 55—I can only speak because that’s as far as I’ve managed to get—and not had any sadness in your life, you’ve had a blessed, charmed life.” The songs were initially conceived by Albarn as he toured with Gorillaz during the autumn of 2022, before Blur brought them to life at Albarn’s studios in London and Devon in early 2023. Guitarist Graham Coxon, bassist Alex James, and drummer Dave Rowntree add to the visceral tug of Albarn’s words and music with invention and nuance. On “St. Charles Square,” where the singer sits alone in a basement flat, suffering consequences and spooked by regrets, temptations, and ghosts from his past, Coxon’s guitar gasps with anguish and shivers with anxiety. “That became our working relationship,” says Coxon. “I had to glean from whatever lyrics might be there, or just the melody, or just the chord sequences, what this is going to be—to try to focus that emotional drive, try and do it with guitars.” To hear Coxon, James, and Rowntree join Albarn, one by one, in the relatively optimistic rhythms of closer “The Heights” is to sense a band rejuvenated by each other’s presence. “It was potentially quite daunting making another record at this stage of your career,” says James. “But, actually, from the very first morning, it was just effortless, joyous, weightless. The very first time we ever worked together, the four of us in a room, we wrote a song that we still play today \[‘She’s So High’\]. It was there instantly. And then we spent years doing it for hours every day. Like, 15 years doing nothing else, and we’ve continued to dip back in and out of it. That’s an incredibly precious thing we’ve got.” Blur’s own bond may be healthy but *The Ballad of Darren* carries a heavy sense of dropped connections. On the sleepy, piano-led “Russian Strings,” Albarn’s in Belgrade asking, “Where are you now?/Are you coming back to us?/Are you online?/Are you contactable again?” before wondering, “Why don’t you talk to me anymore?” against the electro pulses and lopsided waltz of “Goodbye Albert.” The heartbreak is most plain on “Barbaric,” where the shock and uncertainty of separation pierces Coxon’s pretty jangle: “We have lost the feeling that we thought we’d never lose/It is barbaric, darling.” As intimate as that feels, there’s usually enough ambiguity to Albarn’s reflections to encourage your own interpretations. “That’s why I kind of enjoy writing lyrics,” he says. “It’s to sort of give them enough space to mean different things to people.” On “The Heights,” there’s a sense that some connections can be reestablished, perhaps in another time, place, or dimension. Here, at the end, Albarn sings, “I’ll see you in the heights one day/I’ll get there too/I’ll be standing in the front row/Next to you”—placing us at a gig, just as opener “The Ballad” did with the Coxon’s line “I met you at an early show.” The song reaches a discordant finale of strobing guitars that stops sharply after a few seconds, leaving you in silence. It’s a feeling of being ejected from something compelling and intense. “I think these songs, they start with almost an innocence,” says Coxon. “There’s sort of an obliteration of these characters that I liken to writers like Paul Auster, where these characters are put through life, like we all are put through life, and are sort of spat out. So the difference between the gig at the beginning and that front row at the end is very different—the taste and the feeling of where that character is is so different. It’s almost like spirit, it’s not like an innocent young person anymore. And that’s something about the journey of the album.”

For James Blake, making his sixth album felt like going home. Since emerging as a post-dubstep trailblazer in 2010, the electronic producer from the outskirts of London has explored a realm of different sounds including minimalist pop, trap beats, stark ballads, sparse chamber music, digitalized experimentation, and more, all while becoming a go-to collaborator for a wave of game-changing artists (Kendrick Lamar, Frank Ocean, Beyoncé, and Dave among them). On *Playing Robots Into Heaven*, though, he reconnects with the club sounds that fueled his early work—and a side of himself he felt compelled to tap back into. “It felt like, ‘Oh, I’m going to do the thing that I do really easily,’” Blake tells Apple Music. “Writing songs is definitely something I love doing, but it doesn’t come naturally to me. It’s really rewarding and challenging, but not my most natural thing. I think probably my most natural thing is collaging shit together.” That’s the approach Blake employs on *Playing Robots Into Heaven*, a captivating record where twisted loops and warped samples intertwine with the melancholic warmth of Blake’s trademark piano chords, hypnotic hooks, and heavily treated vocals. Following a loose narrative arc of a night out raving—taking in the euphoric thrills, spills, ups, downs, and return to reality—it’s a heady trip. Creating it, Blake realized that putting yourself through the wringer to make a record doesn’t have to be the mark of a serious artist. “What I learned was that the feeling of ‘Is this too easy?’ is actually a good feeling,” he says. “It means you’re onto something, it means you are doing something right.” Blake is in his element on *Playing Robots Into Heaven*—and here, he guides us through it, track by track. **“Asking to Break”** “I made this with \[Mount Kimbie’s\] Dom Maker. He started it off with a loop of me playing piano and singing, which is the first thing you hear. The refrain and the song came from that. It happened pretty naturally, pretty quickly. I’m not sure what word it is that the chord sequence evokes, but it evokes something. It doesn’t really happen on the rest of the songs. It’s unique to the album. I like this song as an opener just because it’s not exactly rave-y, but it’s sort of giving you a little nudge in that direction.” **“Loading”** “The whole album is the arc of a rave, basically, or the arc of maybe some kind of drug experience that includes a high and a comedown. ‘Asking to Break’ sets that up and then ‘Loading’ starts to bring you up into more of that place, \[with\] a little bit more euphoria. That’s why I liked it as a second tune. It’s not crazy hyped, but it’s suggesting it and you get that big release at the end. Again, I collaborated with Dom on this one. He made the loop that you hear at the beginning and then we bounce off each other really well.” **“Tell Me”** “‘Tell Me’ started on the tour bus. Me and Rob \[McAndrews, co-producer and Blake’s live guitarist\] were messing about with modular stuff and we ended up with a thing we really liked. There’s actually a video of us playing an early version of it, just bobbing our heads on the tour bus. We’ve got nothing else to do, we’re just eating peanut butter and drinking shit coffee and making stuff on this thing. I knew this had that transcendent wave vibe about it and it felt like a perfect one for the record.” **“Fall Back”** “I had a little modular jam I was working on. Yaw Evans is a producer from South London and I discovered him because he was remixing old grime a cappellas but using old hardware, and it was kind of unusual. I messaged him like, ‘Hey, I love what you do and it’s inspiring to me because I’m doing something a bit similar. Do you want to send me any ideas because I’d love to incorporate what you do into a song?’ Two of them ended up being on the record. One was the drums on ‘Fall Back,’ which I then manipulated a bit to bring it into that world. It’s got echoes of Burial but also maybe more traditional garage stuff. The way he programmed was different and maybe better than something I could do so I was just like, ‘Well, let’s use that.’ It could have been a case of like, ‘Oh, these drums are cool, I’ll do something like them,’ but I don’t really do that. I like to get it from the source.” **“He’s Been Wonderful”** “I actually remember playing an early version of this on Radio 1 about seven years ago. I ended up playing it out a lot at my 1-800 Dinosaur \[club nights\] back in the day but also the CMYK nights that I’ve been putting on—I’d be playing it every set. This song doesn’t feature my voice. I think the thing that some people might find odd about this record is that there are a couple of tracks where I’m not singing and it’s a sample of someone else. But there was a bonus on *Overgrown* that had Big Boi samples on it, ‘Every Day I Ran,’ so I’ve done it before.” **“Big Hammer”** “When I put this out as the first single, I was like, ‘This is the only way to make it clear that this record’s going to be different.’ Some of the other songs might have just been seen as slightly different James Blake tracks but this one was like, ‘OK, people aren’t really going to know what’s going to happen next,’ and that’s what I wanted. I sampled \[Hackney’s proto-jungle adventurers\] The Ragga Twins, who were a huge voice for me growing up. They’d either be at the things I was going to, or they’d be in the tracks of the DJs I was listening to. They were a big influence and when I sampled them, the tune just felt like, ‘Now I’ve got it, now it’s done.’ They brought the energy that the tune had without actually even being there.” **“I Want You to Know”** “This again is something that started with Yaw Evans’ drums. I was in a studio in Los Angeles and I was playing chords over it, just seeing what I could find. I ended up writing a little bit over it and then there was a moment where the only melody I could hear over this song was the Pharrell line from the end of Snoop Dogg’s ‘Beautiful.’ I was listening to it in the control room and once I’d sung it out loud, I was like, ‘Oh no, there is no better melody than that, that’s the only thing.’ It was like, ‘All right, let’s hope they clear it.’” **“Night Sky”** “This is now the arc downwards. We’re starting to really wind down. It’s a pretty odd piece of music. I really love the strange Gregorian-sounding shit at the end where you don’t really know what it is, whether it’s a voice or whatever, but it sounds haunting. I made it with Rob again. We started it together at my house with modular stuff. Those weird voices at the beginning, that’s all me put through some technology. I thought it created the perfect ladder down back to Earth.” **“Fire the Editor”** “The editor in this case is yourself and your self-censorship, and when you’re not truly saying what it is you want to say, or you are saying a version of it but not the whole thing. It’s a tough place to be. It’s a rallying cry to a freedom of thought and personal freedom. There’s a lyric in this song I really love: ‘If I see him again, we’ll be having words.’ There’s something a little bit confrontational about it, but the idea is that it’s setting you free at this moment in the album.” **“If You Can Hear Me”** “This is a letting go sort of song, too—a letting go of the constant pursuit of something, the pursuit of success or the pursuit of music, or the pursuit of whatever it is in your own life. It was actually written at the time of the movie *Ad Astra*, because I was writing something for it which ended up not being used. It was written to the scene where he finally communicates with his father who’s out in space and who might never come back. I think that in some way it’s a nice metaphor for how we go on our own path compared to our parents or maybe our father, in this case. We are trying to go as far as we can in a certain direction without getting lost and hopefully not repeating the same mistakes they did, but also learning from what they got right.” **“Playing Robots Into Heaven”** “The title *Playing Robots Into Heaven* came from an Instagram post where I’d made this jam on a modular synth. For some reason the phrase ‘The organist that plays robots into heaven’ is what came to mind because that’s just what it sounded like for me. This is the track that I posted on my Instagram during the pandemic and it’s on the album in full without any modification, exactly the piece that started the album off. Again, it’s bringing you all the way down back to Earth.”

slowthai says that *UGLY* is the record he’s always wanted to make but he never previously had the tools to do it. In the aftermath of the grueling self-examination of 2021’s *TYRON*, the rapper born Tyron Frampton found himself disoriented and depressed. “I was quiet and down and wasn’t finding anything exciting. I wasn’t feeling myself,” he tells Apple Music. “Delving into this gave me that freedom again. I felt inspired. I wanted to do something new and challenge myself, rather than just doing what’s expected of me.” Drawing on the bands he loved as a teenager, Nirvana and Radiohead among them, slowthai worked with producers Dan Carey, Kwes Darko, Sega Bodega, and Zach Nahome to assemble a crack team of players around him, including multi-instrumentalist Ethan P. Flynn, beabadoobee guitarist Jacob Bugden, Shygirl, Jockstrap’s Taylor Skye, and drummer Liam Toon as well as his pals Fontaines D.C. The idea, says Frampton, was to move away from the writing processes of his first two records and build these songs from jams then record them live. “I wanted to find the song naturally without it being like, ‘This sound and this sound and this sound,’ and it’s all in the computer,” he says. What’s emerged is slowthai’s most dynamic and inventive album yet—a record that takes in pulverizing electro beats, wiry post-punk grooves, thumping indie, neo-soul ballads, and widescreen rock but still sounds like part of the same whole. That’s mainly down to Frampton’s front-and-center delivery, his creative reset coinciding with a period of contemplation. “It’s about finding the love within yourself, taking time to be the best version of yourself,” he says. “It’s reflecting on life, on your journey, and also going back to being the kid, being free rather than chained to a genre.” *UGLY* is the sound of slowthai liberated. He talks us through it, track by track. **“Yum”** “This was a track that I didn\'t even think was going to be on the album. We’d been jamming, and Dan loves that modular stuff. I was like, ‘Let\'s make something fucking hard.’ We started jamming and I was taking the piss, saying stuff that I wouldn\'t normally say, stuff where I’d usually be like, ‘Oh no, I can\'t say that,’ and then that\'s how it came. It entails being pulled into two different directions—fatherhood and growing up and maturing as a person and then being pulled to friendship and all the things we take part in and indulge in.” **“Selfish”** “The title is self-explanatory. It’s about doing more for yourself, how you’ve got to love yourself and before you do that you can’t love anyone else, taking time for you and doing what you need rather than what\'s expected of you or what people think is right, removing all that shit. At the end of the day, it\'s your world and you’re the one in the driving seat. No one else is going to do that. No one is there other than your mum when you\'re born, and no one\'s there when you die. It\'s just you, so you’ve got to make sure you are number one.” **“Sooner”** “This is about the journey to get to where you get to realize you didn\'t need to go anywhere in the first place, how all the realizations I\'m having, I already knew at the beginning. I\'ve gone on this journey of being lost to get back to being young and carefree and not giving a fuck and doing stuff because I want to try it, rather than being like, ‘Oh, that\'s not what I like.’ Just being a kid again, driving around in the 306 feeling lovesick, not giving a fuck about anything and no worries. That\'s when I was at my happiest, when I was living for living and I didn\'t have the responsibilities, the ideals of that and the outlook at that time. That\'s what it means to me, that I wish I got there sooner.” **“Feel Good”** “When I made this, I didn\'t feel good, I felt like shit. This is my way of having a mantra. Everyone\'s got a song that they put on when they\'re sad to make them feel good, or they might have a song they just want to cry to, but I wanted to make a song for when I feel shit so I could just get up and be, ‘No, I feel good!’ I also wanted to make a song that was like a really repetitive pop song—like a pop song that\'s not a pop song.” **“Never Again”** “For me, this is like *West Side Story*, where there’s a kid who goes and follows his dreams, he had a relationship when he was young, goes and lives his life, comes back to his home, he\'s achieved what he wants to achieve, and then the girl that was his childhood sweetheart has gone and fallen in love with some other guy, had a family, the other guy is a wrong’un, then at the end it’s a tragedy because he doesn’t get the girl ’cause she couldn’t be saved. The whole point of it is, ‘Never again, I’ll never be consumed by chasing these things to leave behind something when I could have saved someone.’ It’s the love story.” **“Fuck It Puppet”** “I refer to the therapist in the first song, and the therapist told me about the ‘fuck-it puppet,’ like when you go to the pub with your mates and it\'s like, ‘Yeah, just link up with the boys,’ and they\'re like, ‘Have a drink!’ and you’re like, ‘Nah,’ then you get this little man or this little crow or whatever it is—everyone’s got one—and it goes, ‘Go on, bruv, just have one,’ and you\'re like, ‘No, man!’ and he’s like, ‘Go on, have one!’ so you have one, and then you have two and he\'s like, ‘Go on, have another!’ Then you\'re like, ‘No, I\'m going to go yard,’ and he\'s like, ‘No, you\'re good, you\'re good, come on, bruv,’ and the next minute you’re 20 deep, mashed up. It’s that voice that\'s in all of us that tells us it\'s a good idea when we all know it\'s a bad one.” **“HAPPY”** “This is the anthem of the album. It\'s saying that everything that you do, none of it is worth more than happiness, how I\'ll give it all up in a heartbeat just to smile and just to have the true feeling of happiness and to see other people happy. That\'s the journey, realizing none of this shit matters but the only thing that does is feeling good and being happy.” **“UGLY”** “It’s based on when the war between Russia and Ukraine started. It made me reflect on the patriarchy and how people fight other people\'s wars, how we’re sold this dream, society tells us that we should be a part of this thing. People tell you all these things, like the sun shines out your arsehole, just to get you to do certain things but their intentions necessarily aren’t for the good. That\'s why it\'s U-G-L-Y—an acronym that stands for ‘You\'ve got to love yourself/You can\'t be part of anything else.’ The first title for the album was \'Wotz Funny,\' but I didn\'t feel like it captured it enough. Then I loved ‘UGLY,’ I love the sentiment of it and it going against the norm.” **“Falling”** “When I was making this, I was imagining a monkey in an astronaut suit floating through space, floating endlessly, and he’s not going anywhere and he’s not got anywhere to be. The message of it is feeling like you’re a shell of yourself, you’re falling deeper into the abyss in your mind and you’re in autopilot through your life, floating through every day and not present in any moment. It’s falling out of love, falling out of life.” **“Wotz Funny”** “In life, when you’ve come from a different place and you\'ve had a different upbringing—like I didn\'t have the picket fence, family, mum and dad together, I wasn’t raised in that way, so my normality is different to the people that had that and who were cotton-wooled and sheltered, so the things that are funny to me and funny to a mass majority of people in the world, some people can\'t understand and we’re judged for it. Here I’m stating all the things that ain’t funny that people tend to laugh at—the junkie teacher that becomes homeless on the street, the single mum that\'s working hard, the geezer who’s a drunk who bullies all his mates up and he’s the hard nut on the estate. The irony of all these things is that it’s not funny at all but that\'s what tends to be funny to a lot of people.” **“Tourniquet”** “This is about cutting pieces of yourself away in order to grow, similar to \'Dead Leaves\' on *Nothing Great About Britain*. It’s about burning all the bridges and things that we\'re connected to, all these thoughts and theories of what is right and what\'s wrong and moving past it and just getting to a new place, amputating them pieces of ourselves in order to move forward. It\'s like, if you were trapped under a bus and you had to cut your legs off or die, what would you do? You\'d cut them off, wouldn\'t you?” **“25% Club”** “This was the song I wrote before ‘Yum.’ They’re twins, like Harry Potter and Voldemort’s wands. It’s about how every person has something in them that\'s missing that we\'re all in search of—that question of ‘why am I here?’ that we are never going to understand. It\'s a thing of wanting and longing, and I don\'t think you\'ll ever find that missing piece. It\'s always going to be 25% missing. The 25% Club is the club where we all reside and you find the person or the thing or whatever it is that makes up that other 25% to make you 100%, to make you complete. I think in a world where we long to be complete, it\'s a myth, it\'s a delusion of grandeur that you\'re going to get this missing piece of yourself and it\'s going to make you feel whole.”

slowthai’s third album may show a side of him that people haven’t heard before but he sees it as the fullest picture yet. “The first album was the sound of where I’m from and everything I thought I knew,” he says. “The second album is what was relevant to me at that moment in time, the present. And this album is completely me — about how I feel and what I want to be… it’s everything I’ve been leading up to.”

제가 지금 누리고 있는 것들이 언제 사라질지, 언제 사람들이 제 곁을 떠날지 항상 두렵습니다. 모든 것들이 잠깐동안 밝게 빛났다가 아무 일도 없었던 것처럼 사라지는 일종의 마법이라고 생각합니다. 2집 발매 이후 제가 꾼 꿈들을 엮어서 만든 앨범입니다. 도움을 주신 전 세계 사람들에게 감사의 말씀을 드립니다. I'm always afraid when what I have now will disappear and when people will leave me. I think these are some kind of magic, that will shine bright for a while and then lights out, like nothing happened. This is an album that I made with my dreams I dreamed after my 2nd album. Thanks to people all over the world for the help.

Many artists cite Brian Eno as an inspiration, but few can actually call him a mentor. Fred Gibson can. The London-born hitmaker known as Fred again..—who recently headlined Madison Square Garden and Coachella alongside Four Tet and Skrillex—grew up next door to Eno and joined his a cappella group as a teenager. There, the pioneering ambient musician took Gibson under his wing, eventually asking him to co-produce his 2014 albums with Underworld’s Karl Hyde. It was a dream tutelage, the effects of which can be heard in Gibson’s pining, atmospheric house tracks that eagerly flood busy dance floors with raw, tender feeling. In 2022, Eno told Apple Music that he learned a fair bit in return. “I think of Fred as my mentor as well,” he told Zane Lowe. “I learned so much about contemporary music from watching him working. It’s a two-way relationship.” Here, on the duo’s first joint full-length, produced during the first two years of the pandemic, they meet each other in a gorgeous, abstract middle: Mournful, pastel soundscapes swell with strings and tearful voiceovers (“Enough”) while skittering, chopped-up, uplifting tracks (“Cmon”) seem to distort elements of rave. Ultimately, *Secret Life* feels like proof that club and ambient music are not so different: Both genres are more subversive, emotional, and human than either are traditionally given credit for.

Having exorcised their fascination with post-punk on 2021’s *Drunk Tank Pink*, shame evolves on their third LP—with an expansive mix of anthems (“Fingers of Steel”), rippers (“Six-Pack,” “Different Person”), and ballads (“All the People,” the Phoebe Bridgers-featuring “Adderall”) that, like the Pixies before them, delivers the twists and abrasions of underground music with the straightforward warmth of classic rock. To note that they wrote most of it in a couple of weeks (and recorded it live in the studio) would sound like a corny bid for the scruffy vitality of rock ’n’ roll, were it not for the fact that you can tell.

shame were tourists in their own adolescence - and nothing was quite like the postcard. The freefall of their early twenties, in all its delight and disaster, was tangled up in being hailed one of post-punk’s greatest hopes. In 2018, they took their incendiary debut album Songs of Praise for a cross-continental joyride for almost 350 relentless nights. They tried to bite off more than they could chew, just to prove their teeth were sharp enough – but eventually, you’ve got to learn to spit it out. Then came the hangover. shame’s frontman, Charlie Steen, suffered a series of panic attacks which led to the tour’s cancellation. For the first time, since being plucked from the stage of The Windmill and catapulted into notoriety, shame were confronted with who they’d become on the other side of it. This era, of being forced to endure reality and the terror that comes with your own company, would form shame’s second album, 2021’s Drunk Tank Pink, the band’s reinvention. If Songs of Praise was fuelled by pint-sloshing teenage vitriol, then Drunk Tank Pink delved into a different kind of intensity. Wading into uncharted musical waters, emboldened by their wit and earned cynicism, they created something with the abandon of a band who had nothing to lose. Having forced their way through their second album’s identity crisis, they arrive, finally, at a place of hard-won maturity. Enter: Food for Worms, which Steen declares to be “the Lamborghini of shame records.” For the first time, the band are not delving inwards, but seeking to capture the world around them. “I don’t think you can be in your own head forever,” says Steen. A conversation after one of their gigs with a friend prompted a stray thought that he held onto: “It’s weird, isn’t it? Popular music is always about love, heartbreak, or yourself. There isn’t much about your mates.” In many ways, the album is an ode to friendship, and a documentation of the dynamic that only five people who have grown up together - and grown so close, against all odds - can share. The title, Food for Worms, takes on different meanings when considered with the ten vignettes the band has painted for you across the record. That spirit of interpretation, to see yourself reflected within it, is conveyed through the cover art. Designed by acclaimed artist Marcel Dzama, whose style evokes dark fairy tales and surrealism, it’s suggestive of what’s left unsaid, what lies beneath the surface. On the one hand, Food for Worms calls to mind a certain morbidity, but on the other, it’s a celebration of life; the way that, in the end, we need each other. It also strikes at the core of shame itself. Since the beginning, the band has been in the business of finding the light in uncomfortable contradictions: Steen always makes a point of taking his top off during performances as a way of tackling his body weight insecurities. Through sheer defiance, they play their vulnerabilities as strengths. Reconnecting with that ethos is what hotwired the band into making the album after a false start during the pandemic. Without pressure or an end goal - just a long expanse of time - nothing would hold. Their management then presented them with a challenge: in just under three weeks, shame would play two shows at The Windmill where they would be expected to debut two sets of entirely new songs. This opportunity meant that the band returned the same ideology which propelled them to these heights in the first place: the love of playing live, on their own terms, fed by their audience. Thus, Food for Worms careened and crashed into life faster than anything they’d created before: a weapons-grade cocktail that captured all the gristle, fragility and carnal physicality that earned shame their merits. It was only right that shame would record the album entirely live for the first time. The band recorded Food for Worms while playing festivals all over Europe, invigorated by the strength of the reaction their new material was met with. That live energy, what it’s like to witness shame in their element, is captured perfectly on record - like lightning in a bottle. They called upon renowned producer Flood (Nick Cave, U2, Foals) to execute their vision. Recording each track live meant a kind of surrender: here, the rough edges give the album its texture; the mistakes are more interesting than perfection. In a way, it harks back to the title itself and the way that with this record, the band are embracing frailty and by doing so, are tapping into a new source of bravery. It also marks a sonic departure from anything they’ve done before. shame have abandoned their post-punk beginnings for far more eclectic influences, drawing from the tense atmospherics of Merchandise, the sharp yet uncomplicated lyrical observations of Lou Reed and the more melodic works of 90s German band, Blumfeld. In the past, their music had been almost clinically assembled, with the vocals and the band existing as two distinct layers. But Food for Worms, there has never been such an immediate sense of togetherness - and more than that, it was fun. Everyone chipped in on vocals; they made the unifying choice to sing, rather than the solitude that comes with a shout. Roles were not so fiercely defined, with Steen taking command of the bass guitar for the anthemic “Adderall”, devising a simple progression that bassist Josh Finerty would never dream of, pushing the album into new, unexpected places. “Adderall” staggers, feeling the weight of its own bones, evoking a certain desperation that comes with dragging yourself through an internal fog. Steen explains: “‘Adderall’ is the observation of a person reliant on prescription drugs. These pills shift their mental and physical state and alter their behaviour; it’s about how this affects them and those around them. It’s a song of compassion, frustration and the acceptance of change. It’s partly coming to terms with the fact that sometimes your help and love can’t cure those around you but, as much as it causes exasperation, you still won’t ever stop trying to help.” The album opens with “Fingers of Steel”, which is heralded with an airy piano section that plunges into nosebleed-inducing guitars like a mutant orchestra; it was completely transformed from its folk-indebted beginnings. It delves into the cyclical nature of friendship, which the title invites you to consider. “‘Fingers of Steel’ is about helping a mate and the frustrations that come with it,” shares Steen. “It’s coming to terms with the fact that people can’t be who you want them to be and sometimes there isn’t anything you can do to help, it’s their own thing they have to work out for themselves and you have to accept that.” But it wouldn’t be shame if there wasn’t a bit of theatrical flair, signed off with a smirk. “Six Pack”, with its psychedelic wah-wah grooves and frenetic guitarwork, sees Steen act as your spirit guide into a room where, within those four walls, your wildest dreams come true: “Now you’ve got Pamela Anderson reading you a bedtime story / And every scratch card is a fucking winner!” he howls. The song is a product of lockdown-induced cabin fever, and the absurd places our mind can wander when we are confined. It’s an anthem for newfound freedom: “You’ve done time behind bars, and now you’re making time in front of them,” Steen sings, with a showman’s grandeur. It’s time to make up for everything you’ve lost or wasted - and shame wants it all. Food for Worms also sees Steen deliver one of his greatest vocal performances which came from learning to lean into the vulnerabilities his lyrics portray, rather than deflecting them. “Orchid”, opens with the easy amble of an acoustic guitar, a different sound for the band which required careful consideration for how his voice would adapt to it. His vocal teacher, Rebecca Phillips, encouraged him to approach it unflinchingly. He recalls her telling him: “Anything that you’re singing is obviously personal, but a very male tendency is to detach from it and think of the melody, instead of what you’re saying.” It was this new technique that allowed shame to embrace the songs that dealt with a deeply personal subject: fear for a friend’s mental well-being. Steen’s voice paces with sleepless worry, guilt, frustration – and absolute tenderness. Closing track “All the People”, a great musical swell of brotherly love, haunts the mind the lingering words penned by guitarist Sean Coyle-Smith: “All the people that you’re gonna meet / Don’t you throw it all away / Because you can’t love yourself.” With that weight, there is a lightness to the song which captures the spirit of Food for Worms and all the thoughts that expression evokes, all that bittersweetness. And even if you can’t put those feelings into words, shame have found them for you.

Protomartyr’s slurred ramblings and miasmic clouds of guitar have always had a touch of the apocalypse in them, or at least of the decay that might lead there. The paradox is how the Detroit band manages to make that decay sound so grand. New Wave rippers (“For Tomorrow”) and leather-jacket music (“Fun in Hi Skool”), ’50s slow dances (“Make Way”) and jock jams for the recently undead (“Polacrilex Kid”): Where some post-punk bands lean into their artiness and Eurocentrism, Protomartyr sound like Midwesterners raised on arena rock and the looming intensity of Bible stories. “Welcome to the haunted earth/The living afterlife,” Joe Casey moans at the album\'s onset. He’s grinding his teeth under the bleachers as we speak.

The Icelandic avant-rock outfit Sigur Rós has been making music, in various arrangements, for nearly 30 years. Their debut full-length *Von* came out in 1997, and their breakthrough album *Ágætis byrjun* arrived two years later. The second project was the first to feature multi-instrumentalist Kjartan Sveinsson, who, despite departing the group 15 years later, has always been seen as a critical piece of the magic. After their surprisingly dark and dissonant 2013 album *Kveikur*, the band took a break, focusing on personal projects and personal lives. But a series of casual jam sessions—from Iceland’s Sundlaugin to London’s Abbey Road—reignited their creative spark and resulted in *ÁTTA*, their first album in 10 years. The project, a collaboration with conductor Robert Ames and the London Contemporary Orchestra, is full of sweeping, mystical soundscapes that mirror the majestic vistas of the group’s home country. Although there is a lingering sense of apocalyptic foreboding—very likely a nod to climate-disaster-related doom—most of these songs are imbued with hope. “Gold,” a meditative vocal number bathed in pastel tones, seems to surround you, wide and warm, like arms in an embrace. “Andrá,” glacial and glowing, is practically a hymnal. Even the more mournful songs (“Skel,” “Mór,” and “Fall” are three) feel affectionate and tender—more like bittersweet love songs than sounds of alarm. For a band that has long been openly weary about the state of the world—a rage captured vividly on their last studio record—this project feels like a deep, cathartic breath, a tribute to the magnificent beauty that remains.

Amber Bain—the East London-based singer-songwriter who goes by The Japanese House—took her time with her second album (four years, to be precise, passed between her 2019 debut *Good at Falling* and the arrival of *In the End It Always Does*). “It was this weird, really expansive time where I was like, ‘I can’t think of anything to say,’” Bain tells Apple Music. “I’d write the odd song here and there, but I’d moved out of London, gone to \[English coastal town\] Margate and was living this slowed-down version of life, both because of lockdown and because I was out of the city.” Then, Bain broke up with her girlfriend and moved back to the capital—events which finally provided the catalyst for her second record. “It felt like my life was kind of restarting simultaneously with the ending \[of the relationship\],” she says. “It’s a very inspiring place to be, when you’re on the edge. It’s really easy to engage with ideas and your core emotions and wants when you’re not in a very stable place.” *In the End It Always Does* is an album—as its cover art suggests—about circularity (it’s not lost on Bain that its predecessor was also about a breakup), how distance can grow to become an uncrossable void in a relationship, and endings, whether that’s a split or the gradual fade of the pain you feel after one, something Bain found herself just as devastated by. All of which is set against “classic sounds: really nice guitars, really nice strings, really nice pianos” and, often, an embrace of Bain’s poppier side. Stepping away from her computer, she says, was creatively liberating. As was the cast of people she surrounded herself with, including long-term friend and collaborator George Daniel of The 1975, and producer Chloe Kraemer (who’s worked with Rina Sawayama, LAVA LA RUE, and more). “Working with a queer woman really opened up the emotion,” says Bain of working with Kraemer. “The conversations Chloe and I had during this record I wouldn’t have had with anyone else, because no one really gets it the same as she does. I just do think that communication between two women is different. And queer people—there’s a level of understanding there that you can\'t get really otherwise.” Below, Bain takes us inside her raw, honest, and beautiful second album, one track at a time. **“Spot Dog”** “As soon as I wrote the piano introduction to this, I knew it would start the album. My ex and I loved the film *One Hundred and One Dalmatians* and it’s a direct ode to a song called ‘A Beautiful Spring Day’ by George Bruns from the \[1961\] film’s soundtrack. I was using the song as an experiment: What do I want to be in my record? Do I want pianos and strings? Do I want synths? Do I want guitar-y bits? And this covers all bases on the album. I was really using the song as a palette to throw everything at in the beginning and see where I landed.” **“Touching Yourself”** “I’ll often write half a song when I’m in one place and then, when I try and finish it, I’ll be in a completely different place. So it ends up taking on a whole new meaning. For the first half of this, I was in the throes of romance and thought it was fun to write a song about sexting. It ended up being about someone being far away from you. Obviously, at the beginning I was far away from this person a lot—I was always touring. And then suddenly I was close to them all the time because it was lockdown, yet felt so far away from them. I feel like I’m really embracing a more poppy side of myself—often I hold myself back on that front. Originally, I was trying to write a chorus around this weird time signature, and in the end I gave up and was like, ‘I’m just going to write a really fun, simple pop chorus.’ It was a good lesson—the most simple songs are often my favorites.” **“Sad to Breathe”** “I wrote this when Marika \[Hackman, Bain’s ex, who *Good at Falling* is about\] and I broke up. We’re really good friends now and have sorted everything out—we’re very close. When I think about how completely depressed and destroyed I was from that breakup, I almost find it cute and funny. I think that’s why I decided to make the rest of that song euphoric and in double time. I guess in some ways it’s me looking back positively on this really sad time, and telling my former self that it’s going to be OK.” **“Over There”** “This is about when I was living in a throuple and one of them left. Then, in lockdown, she’d found another partner and ended up going to live with them. I felt really sad about that. The song is talking about how something beautiful so nearly happened, and how that feels such a loss when it doesn’t. My favorite line in it is, ‘She keeps her coat on/There’s not a lot to go on/She used to dote on me.’ It’s that feeling that you used to be so close to someone and now they don’t even take their coat off when they come round because they know they’re about to leave. That feeling—it’s like someone’s punching your chest. Musically, I was in a bit of a rut and \[US producer\] BJ Burton sent me something that he and \[Bon Iver’s\] Justin Vernon had been working on. I started writing over the little loop he sent me—luckily they said I could keep using the chords, because that would have really thrown a spanner in the works!” **“Morning Pages”** “There’s this book called *The Artist’s Way* where you write every morning. It’s meant to be a way of opening your brain and you’re supposed to throw away \[what you’ve written\] and not read it afterwards. I only ever did it once and it became the lyrics to this song. I sent Katie \[Gavin of MUNA\] the song and she wrote a verse on it. I fell in love with what she wrote—she’s great at completely understanding what a song is about. We’ve been friends with MUNA for so long and I really like the way our voices sound together. I think we’re drawn to this style of song, where the theme is sad and gay. I think it’s perfect.” **“Boyhood”** “I wasn’t in a particularly good place when I wrote the early version of this song. I was thinking about trauma and things that happen to you in your life—how you become the summation of those things and how that feels unfair in a way. I was also thinking about gender in terms of me not having had a boyhood. The word ‘girlhood’ doesn’t really even exist. I was thinking about how different it would be had I had a boyhood because a lot of the time I felt like I was a boy and would dress as a boy, asked to be called a boy’s name. It’s taken me a long time to accept certain aspects of my gender. In some ways, it’s about embracing the things that have happened to you and about letting go of others in order to become someone that you feel you are intrinsically. The demo was really electronic, then we experimented with stripping everything back and it becoming a completely acoustic organic song. We watched this video of a gay dance group dancing in cowboy hats and boots in front of the White House—I think it’s in the early noughties at Pride—and it’s exactly the same BPM as ‘Boyhood.’ We wanted to encapsulate a definite cowboy twang but also \[have\] a campness to it. It’s a dance song in a weird way—just a stripped-back, acoustic dance song.” **“Indexical reminder of a morning well spent”** “In lockdown, my then girlfriend and I were reading outside and having a really lovely morning. We were eating croissants or jam on toast and I accidentally got something on one of her books—a little fingerprint of jam or something. I was like, ‘I’m so sorry.’ She said, ‘It’s OK, it’s an indexical reminder of a morning well spent.’ She just made that up! And I wrote it down immediately. The song is about giving in to love and solitude and repetitive life. It’s a little map of things that were going on over the period of lockdown.” **“Friends”** “I had a much slower version of this originally. George and I were both pretty depressed at this point and I think we sped it up just to make a dance tune to cheer us up. I think we were a bit sick of listening to all these sad songs. George is an amazing sound designer when it comes to writing drum parts and creating rhythms. And I’m good at making basslines. We were collaborating in this new way, and it was really fun to explore that. Later, we ended up adding these Paul Simon-y guitars and making slightly less electronic. I don’t even know what genre this is, but it’s fun to have a sexy song about threesomes.” **“Sunshine Baby”** “I would call my ex and my dog my ‘sunshine babies.’ My dog is obsessed with the sun, and me and my ex are the same—probably some of the best moments of our relationship were just lying on the beach in Margate. The song started as an attempt to find a way to stop fighting, but at the end it became sort of a resignation about the relationship ending. That speaks to what the whole album is about. Do you resign to being in something that you’re not completely happy with, or do you resign to it ending? And which one’s worse? There’s relief in giving up. And you can hear that in the music—there’s catharsis in the outro, the sax, and lying back on a beach in the sand looking up at the sun like, ‘OK, fine.’” **“Baby goes again”** “This is inspired by Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Honey Hi’ or ‘Tusk.’ I think it’s about the feeling like you’re always on the cusp of fixing everything. Then I’d often feel like I’d just go and fuck everything up, or one of us would. Just when you’re starting to feel great again, someone’s done something stupid. There’s the lyric in there, ‘I keep circling/You can’t stop a circle, but I keep coming back around, at least I can’t keep coming back around.’ That again links to the title and the album art so clearly. It was: ‘I’m aware that I keep repeating myself and making the same mistakes, but at least I keep coming back around.’ I was wondering if that can be enough. And it wasn’t. But I think the song was the last glimpse of hope for my relationship in a lot of ways.” **“You always get what you want”** “I wrote this song when I was 17 or 18. It’s the oldest song on the record, and I really liked it. It was about when my girlfriend left me for a boy, and I was bitter. I was just like, you always get everything you want. Now, that person is one of my best friends because we were so young when we were together. But she makes a joke that I’ve cursed her and that, ever since I wrote that, things keep going wrong for her. The original version of the song was so embarrassing, but I really like the bass of it. We did all the production for it in one day.” **“One for sorrow, two for Joni Jones”** “I had this instrumental thing written with the piano and strings, and I had this idea that we’d have some sort of lyrical rambling over the top of it, kind of like an ode to Joni Mitchell. Obviously I love her so much and I named my dog after her. I went into the studio and said I’d written this weird thing—a poem I’d written hungover that morning after seeing a Charli XCX show—and that maybe it could be the lyrical rambling. Katie Gavin came in and sung pretty much the exact melody we have for it now. It was just so magical watching her do that—she was kind of laughing and crying and me and Chloe were both sobbing. It’s just one of the most honest and pure things I’ve ever written. It’s on the cusp of being embarrassing because it’s radical honesty. But I think it pulls back at the right moments. It’s talking about how it’s so sad that you think your life’s going to end \[after a breakup\], but actually day to day, you’re just going to be walking in the park with your little dog and everything’s going to be pretty much the same. This is definitely the most raw and real thing I’ve ever released.”

“I\'ve always written from a place of fiction,” Andy Shauf tells Apple Music. “When I was making \[2016’s\] *The Party*, I was going to a lot of parties. When I was writing \[2020’s\] *The Neon Skyline*, I was drinking at a bar called the Skyline. It feels now like it was a bit unimaginative, but I think I was trying to do the thing that people tell you to do, which is write what you know. I came to this realization that if I want to take a step forward, I need to write something that\'s outside of writing what I know.” Like its forebears, *Norm*, the Toronto singer-songwriter\'s eighth solo LP, takes a magnifying glass to its central character, but its stories are told through a series of narrators. That’s partly because when Shauf started writing it, there wasn’t a concept at all. “I was going to call the album *Norm*, and it was just going to be a normal album—like a normal batch of songs,” he says. But once he wrote “Telephone,” the seed for a storyline was planted. “It was about someone longing to be on the phone,” he says. “Then it flips to show the perspective of this person looking in the window while they\'re calling, and it has this stalker vibe to it. I just made a mental note that this could be a character and I could call them Norm.” With the help of a friend—Shauf writes, plays all the instruments, and records on his own—he sewed the narrative together, coloring in the detail of Norm’s increasing creepiness while constantly in God’s presence. (Shauf was raised Christian in small-town Saskatchewan, but doesn’t consider himself religious now.) “I think Norm is a pretty normal guy,” he says. “He\'s a bit of a fuck-up, and he has a side of him that\'s really disconnected from reality. And he\'s got some pretty serious problems. He\'s introduced very relatably, but at a certain point there\'s a shift that can change your perspective on everything that\'s happened before.” Here Shauf talks through how Norm’s story takes shape, track by track. **“Wasted on You”** “I was reading the Old Testament and looking for stories where I could flip the perspective so that God was narrating them, so that you heard this sort of imperfect God explaining his side of it. I was picturing this conversation between God and Jesus. My familiarity with Christianity—or just cartoon Christianity—made me feel like this was the most spoon-fed, \'Here\'s God as a narrator’ story, but I like that it\'s a little bit vague.” **“Catch Your Eye”** “This is the first introduction to Norm. We\'re in his head, and we are just getting a picture of that longing. It\'s a gentle introduction. I think by the end of the song, you\'re going to realize that something is a little bit off with what he\'s doing.” **“Telephone”** “I wrote it kind of as a joke, where it was the pandemic and I was trying to connect with someone and we were talking on the telephone a lot. And there was a lot of running out of things to talk about. I was starting to dread it. I decided I would write a song that at first seemed like I really loved the telephone, and by the end of it, it just had a lot of questions or it just turned on its side. I think you could still read that song as a love song—maybe if you aren\'t paying attention for the second half.” **“You Didn\'t See”** “I needed to have a point where the relationship between Norm and God was explained. You get a glimpse into why Norm is getting away with what he\'s doing, to a certain extent, while he\'s under the eye of God—so this is a song from God\'s perspective.” **“Paradise Cinema”** “You go from God\'s perspective of Norm standing behind a tree and God\'s just continuing to keep an eye on him to this. It\'s a lazy…maybe it\'s a Sunday afternoon stroll to the cinema—for more than one person.” **“Norm”** “Originally I wrote it about Norm standing in line to buy a sandwich, and then I realized that the story in that song sucked. But it was also because in any story involving God, I think there\'s the need for a divine intervention of sorts, or God needs to make himself known. So on one instance, he helped Norm, and on this instance, he needs to tell Norm that he\'s no longer okay with what he is doing. And at the same time, it\'s just Norm grazing around, watching some *Price Is Right*.” **“Halloween Store”** “I thought that my next record was going to be a disco record. At a certain point, I just realized that I was making—I don\'t know—like cartoon music. It was like I was becoming a caricature of myself making this weird, throwback...cartoon music is the best way I can say it. But this song, I wrote it with those songs and it\'s got this super-fast triangle and like a four-on-the-floor, dancy beat. I had the first two verses of it for a long time, and it just stuck around until I found a place for it in the Norm universe. This is the point in the story where the thing that Norm has been waiting for is finally happening, and he\'s not even sure if it\'s happening.” **“Sunset”** “It’s the furthering of the event in ‘Halloween Store’—it\'s too good to be true, and it\'s too easy. I wanted it to be so simple that you\'re wondering why it\'s even possible, or it\'s a terrible thing that\'s happening and it\'s the result of something that was not intended to be terrible or was not intended to have any weight at all, which is what happens in the next song—the flipped perspective of it.” **“Daylight Dreaming”** “This was the hardest part of the record for me. This is essentially someone just trying to play a joke on someone else, and there\'s history between these people, and there\'s a history of this joke specifically. But this time it turns into something that\'s completely unintended and gives Norm his opportunity.” **“Long Throw”** “We\'re sticking with the same perspective. I struggled with this story in how to tie it together, and I had this weird thing happen where I was watching *Mulholland Drive*, looking for some inspiration, and a certain scene in the movie froze. I watched it for about five minutes thinking that I was watching an insane creative choice, and I took a lot of meaning from it in the plot of the movie. It made me realize that this story has an ending that doesn\'t really need to be in the lyrics or in the story at all. And it\'s a very simple story, and this song is the ending of it, where the third perspective is just not getting a phone call.” **“Don\'t Let It Get to You”** “I was writing a lot with the synthesizer, and just trying to use atmosphere as much as possible. This song is a summary of the story, where there\'s a lot of chance happenings, certain decisions affecting other decisions. This is the sentiment of a cruel God just saying, \'All these things happen and you just can\'t let it get to you.\' But something that I was trying to do with this record a little bit more was to let almost an improvisation guide melodies. I would play a line and then that would be the line, instead of writing a melody. I would just play it until the moment was gone, and then I\'d recreate that and maybe harmonize to it.” **“All of My Love”** “This is kind of all three perspectives on the record. If there\'s a theme to the story, it\'s this idea of a really flawed love or a really flawed perspective of what love is or what love could be. Each of these perspectives are asking the same question. It\'s essentially the same structure as the first song, musically, but it\'s shifted to a very dark version of that. If the story of Norm is showed to you in a gradually darkening way, the music is doing the same thing—where at first, it sounds really nice, and probably by the second half of the second side, the music has also gone a bit sideways—it\'s got a sinister element to it.”

Each album from Oneohtrix Point Never, the project of songwriter and producer Daniel Lopatin, is informed by an open-ended theme or prompt. This allows each release to feel tied to some general philosophy while still being wholly unique. On 2015’s *Garden of Delete*, he made songs built around made-up scrapped vocals from pop stars; 2018’s *Age Of* pictured a world gone insane, with nothing left but artificial intelligence to determine what cultural touchstones were deemed worth keeping. On his 2023 album *Again*, the artist once again concocts a daring concept, this time imagining the project as a conversation between his current and former selves. On the album he asks, “What’s worth keeping? What do we throw away?” Among the detritus that inherently comes alongside radical technological development, what will outlast us? Lopatin recruited a number of collaborators for the project, including Robert Ames, Lee Ranaldo, Jim O’Rourke, Xiu Xiu, and Lovesliescrushing. While they’re mostly disparate in spirit, each artist has at times toyed with the interplay between electric and acoustic clashes, which Lopatin highlights on *Again*. Gorgeously arranged string suites come crashing against grating synths on the title track; massive electronic drums launch Lopatin’s voice towards the heavens on “Krumville.” Acoustic guitar strums get similarly propelled on “Memories of Music.” Lopatin collides sounds from different eras of his discography, highlighting both the diversity of his work and the underlying ideas he returns to time and again. There’s no such thing as *one* Oneohtrix Point Never signature sound; Lopatin’s ear is too shifty, too excited by what comes next and how it emerges. His trademark is a hodgepodge of inspirations—from full orchestral symphonies to barely perceptible VCR buzz. On *Again*, Daniel Lopatin taps into all these worlds—the ones he has created and the futures he imagines—to capture a moment in time, before it shifts once again.

It takes less than a second for Wilco’s 13th album to make its intentions known. Opening track “Infinite Surprise” begins in medias res, with an abrupt wash of dissonance and a metronome that sounds purposefully not on purpose. On the heels of 2022’s what-it-says-on-the-tin throwback to the band’s y’alternative roots, *Cruel Country*—and, really, most of the band’s work for the prior decade or so—this jarring introduction announces a welcome sense of mischief. *Cruel Country* arrived as Wilco was celebrating the 20th anniversary of their defining opus, *Yankee Hotel Foxtrot*, complete with valedictory mini-tour and lush box set recounting and relitigating the album’s famously tense personal/personnel drama. If there’s anything that defines Wilco’s career since, it’s Jeff Tweedy’s reluctance to replicate those conditions; no amount of creative energy and friction could be worth the psychic cost. Wilco has had the same lineup since 2005, they write and record in a cozy Chicago home base, they are a fully thriving and self-sufficient entity like few bands would dare to dream of. So the moment of noise and unease feels like a recentering, even if no one will mistake *Cousin* for *Yankee Hotel Foxtrot* or the winding krautrock freakouts of 2004’s *A Ghost Is Born*. Produced by Cate Le Bon—the first time the band has worked with an outside producer since Jim Scott co-produced 2009’s *Wilco (The Album)*—the album is the sound of a band wriggling out of that comfort zone in small but meaningful ways. “Sunlight Ends” is an atmospheric twinkle of a song driven by a hushed digital (or consciously digital-seeming) drum track that feels uniquely Wilco, yet not quite like anything the band has made in a long time. The title track has a similar skitter to it that lends just the right amount of wooziness. But the goal, beyond that opening second, is not to disorient or misdirect. While the album title can’t help but suggest *The Bear*, which leans heavily on Wilco syncs to shore up its Chicago bona fides, “cousin” as a concept also feels familial and familiar and sometimes maybe just a little bit weird.

Title aside, this bookend EP to Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus’ full-length debut isn’t a dustpan full of cutting-room-floor detritus released to clear the vaults, but a volume unto itself. “These are songs that weren\'t ready for *the record* and then we spent time on them and they\'re ready now,” Dacus tells Apple Music\'s Zane Lowe. While 2023\'s full-length debut was the sound of three accomplished artists and friends figuring out how to work together, *the rest*, coming six months and a world tour later, is the product of their natural chemistry developing into something more innate. “We\'re getting really good at recording with each other,” Bridgers says. “Our communication got so streamlined by the time we went to record this, we knew it was going to be great.” The four songs are on the pared-back and quieter side compared to forebears “$20” and “Satanist,” but no less striking or unsparing in their eye for detail. The Dacus-led “Afraid of Heights” is a romantic testament to risk avoidance, while “Voyager” is vintage Bridgers in melancholy mode, and the minimalism feels like a statement of intent rather than the hallmark of unfinished castoffs. “There\'s an immediacy to the decision-making that came out of it being three days in the studio and then trying to be sparse with the arrangements,” says Baker. “We had never had the experience of allowing ourselves a wealth of time to be ambitious, to fully maximize a track and then edit it down. And so this is slightly adorned scaffolding.”

Since forming in 2002, Xiu Xiu has used extreme music to touch some of our most vulnerable and well-protected parts, whether concerning sexual trauma, childhood abuse, suicidal depression, or life lost. Even by their own tireless standards, *Ignore Grief* is a bleak album, stripping away the gothic quasi-pop that has occasionally provided a spoonful of sugar to leave a high-definition void whose clangs, whimpers, and screeches evoke a spectrum running from industrial techno (“Esquerita, Little Richard”) to opera (“Dracula Parrot, Moon Moth”). The paradox of such unrelenting darkness is that you leave feeling happy to be alive—a privilege that, according to band principals Jamie Stewart and Angela Seo, can’t be said about everyone who inspired it.

This is a record of halves. Angela Seo sings on half of the record. Jamie Stewart sings on half of the record.  Half of the songs are experimental industrial. Half of the songs are experimental modern classical. Half of it is real. Half of it is imaginary. The real songs attempt to turn the worst life has offered to five people the band is connected with into some kind of desperate shape that does something, anything, other than grind and brutalize their hearts and memory within these stunningly horrendous experiences. The imaginary songs are an expansion and abstract exploration of the early rock and roll “Teen Tragedy” genre as jumping off point to decontaminate the band’s own overwhelming emotions in knowing and living with what has happened to these five people. What none of this record does and despite the oft repeated assertion, what Xiu Xiu has never done, is attempt to superficially shock the listener. Instead, Xiu Xiu has spent twenty years grappling with how to process, to be empathetic towards, to disobey and to reorganize horror; there is no other word for it other than horror. The motivation for writing Ignore Grief to be about a child who was sold into prostitution by his mother, a junior high student who was kidnapped and murdered, incessantly choosing alcohol and cocaine over one’s family, becoming lost in the bleakest, darkest aspects of cultish spirituality and committing suicide as means to escape and protest a life of violent sex work is because the members of Xiu Xiu themselves are deeply shocked. Old friend and new member David Kendrick (Sparks, Devo, Gleaming Spires) joins Angela Seo and Jamie Stewart through whatever this may be and whatever it may mean and why ever it may have occurred. The point of aesthetic examination is to see if there is any way to come out the other side or if there is even any reason. In either case there may not be but to simply turn away would be yet a further act of destruction. “I had now lost all confidence in myself, doubted all men immeasurably, and abandoned all hopes for the things of this world, all joy, all sympathy, eternally. This was the truly decisive incident of my life. I had been split through the forehead between the eyebrows, a wound that was to throb with pain whenever I came into contact with a human being.” -Osamu Dazai