Indieheads Best of 2023

It’s hard to listen to Katherine Paul’s third album as Black Belt Eagle Scout without thinking about nature, not because of Paul’s lyrical signposts—salmon, stars, wind, rivers—so much as the texture of the music itself. Recorded in a converted church in Anacortes, Washington, near the Swinomish Reservation on which Paul grew up, *The Land, The Water, The Sky* captures the mix of ruggedness and ethereality that makes the Pacific Northwest so unusual, whether it’s the way the chants of “My Blood Runs Through This Land” float over its drums like fog over a pounding tide, or how the distant soprano saxophone of “Treeline” surfaces like a figure from the mist. Beautiful music, no doubt, but never so beautiful that it transcends the garage-band intimacy. Case in point: “Fancy Dance,” a reminder that no matter how far our thoughts might take us, we still belong to our bodies, and our bodies to the land.

This land runs through Katherine Paul’s blood. And it called to her. In dreams she saw the river, her ancestors, and her home. When the land calls, you listen. And KP found herself far from her ancestral lands during a time of collective trauma, when the world was wounded and in need of healing. In 2020 she made the journey from Portland back to the Skagit River, back to the cedar trees that stand tall and shrouded in fog, back to the tide flats and the mountains, back to Swinomish. It is a powerful thing to return to our ancestral lands and often times the journey is not easy. Like the salmon through the currents, like the tide as it crawls to shore this is a story of return. It is the call and response. It is the outstretched arms of the people who came before, welcoming her home. The Land, The Water, The Sky is a celebration of lineage and strength. Even in its deepest moments of loneliness and grief, of frustration over a world wrought with colonial violence and pain, the songs remind us that if we slow down, if we listen to the waves and the wind through the trees, we will remember to breathe. There is a throughline of story in every song, a remembrance of knowledge and teachings, a gratitude of wisdom passed down and carried. There is a reimagining of Sedna who was offered to the sea, and a beautiful rumination on sacrifice and humanity, and what it means to hold the stories that work to teach us something. Chord progressions born out of moments of sadness and solitude transform into the islands that sit blue along the horizon. The Salish Sea curves along her homelands, and when the singer is close to this water she is reminded of her grandmother, how she looked out at these same islands, and she’s held by spirit and memory. The Land, The Water, The Sky rises and falls, in darkness and in light, but even in its most melancholy moments it is never despairing. That is the beauty of returning home. When you stand on ancestral lands it is impossible to be alone. You feel the arms and hands that hold you up, unwilling to let you fall into sorrow or abandonment. In her songs Katherine Paul has channeled that feeling of being held. In every note she has written a love letter to indigenous strength and healing. There is a joy present here, a fierce blissfulness that comes with walking the trails along the river, feeling the sand and the stones beneath her feet. It is the pride and the certainty that comes with knowing her ancestors walked along the same land, dipped their hands into the water, and ran their fingertips along the same bark of cedar trees. This is a story of hope, as it details the joy of returning. Katherine Paul’s journey home wasn’t made alone, and the songs are crowded with loved ones and relatives, like a really good party. And as the songs walk us through the land it is important we hover over the images and the beauty, the moments that mark this album as site specific. The power of this land is woven throughout, telling the story of narrow waterways, brush strokes, salmon stinta, and above all healing. Let it take you. Move through the story and see the land through her eyes, because it is a gift, a welcomed sʔabadəb.* *The word “gift” in Lushootseed, the language of the Coast Salish people“

When the pandemic hit, Hannah van Loon adopted a dog named Gizmo, who became a much-needed companion while the Bay Area musician wrote her second album as Tanukichan. Aptly named after her new four-legged friend, GIZMO is an exercise in release, whether from situational hindrances — a forced lockdown, for one — or from self-imposed hedonistic coping mechanisms. “A theme I always had floating around was escape,” van Loon explains of her follow-up to 2018’s Sundays. “Escaping from myself, my problems, sadness and cycles.” To channel the more uplifting spirit she wanted for GIZMO, van Loon turned to the radio pop-rock of her childhood: “I was struck by the in-your-face positivity of the lyrics,” she adds, referencing artists like 311, The Cranberries, and Tom Petty. “I wanted to bring that positivity while writing about the sad and helpless emotions I’d been grappling with.” But GIZMO’s lightheartedness doesn’t make it shallow: “I think that I could let it go, as beautiful as snow,” she murmurs on “Don’t Give Up,” a nu metal-meets-Cocteau Twins groove about the sudden awareness that all the relationships you depend on could vanish instantaneously. Van Loon’s main collaborator on GIZMO was Toro y Moi’s Chaz Bear, and the jangly pop earworm “Take Care” showcases the heavily distorted, in-your-face guitarwork reminiscent of Bear’s own psych joints What For? and Mahal. On the hypnotic, wall-of-sound-rocker “Thin Air” featuring Enumclaw, van Loon channels the triumphant grit of The Smashing Pumpkins as she ponders the impermanence of even the most impactful relationships: “I’ll always have the memories/Of how you used to make me see/Until they fell in the ocean/They’re not swimming/They’re not floating.” Existentialism aside, GIZMO also sees van Loon break out of her sonic comfort zone. “One of the main changes of how I’m approaching music now is that I want to have more fun in the process,” she says, and she walks the line between melodrama and whimsy gracefully: “I can learn something because I’ve been here before,” she sings on the soaring, bittersweet “Been Here Before.” Deftones-inspired thrash drums and screeching electric guitars are gracefully contrasted with van Loon’s hypnotic, almost deadpan vocal style and a crystal clear acoustic guitar she describes as “cute.” Gizmo the dog suddenly passed away right as van Loon finished the album, but he’s immortalized with his photo on the cover — a fitting emblem of this new era of Tanukichan.

Less was recorded on the island of Great Bernera in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland, during September 2022.

Aptly named after the Italian word for frippery, Psychedelic Porn Crumpets’ sixth album leans into high-impact flourishes at every opportunity. Such hectic maximalism has long been the Perth act’s signature, but *Fronzoli* proves especially intricate and madcap. After the joyous prog-rock pummeling of opener “Nootmare (K.I.L.L.I.n.G) \[Meow!\],” the band locks into rapid-fire angularity on “(I’m a Kadaver) Alakazam” before running just as eagerly through Beatles-esque melodic uplift (“Cpt. Gravity Mouse Welcome”), glam swagger (“All Aboard the S.S. Sinker”), and even placid acoustic balladry (“Illusions of Grandeur”). If all of that sounds too disparate to really gel, a key uniting factor is songwriter/vocalist Jack McEwan, whose darkly debonair vocals recall Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner even when his lyrics reach their most absurd. The entire band handles every sharp left turn with aplomb, rivaling fellow Aussie exports King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard for pulling off abrupt scene changes with untroubled cool.

Veteran LA noise-rock trio HEALTH’s 2023 LP *RAT WARS* builds on their noise-centric industrial exercises, accentuating their hardcore tendencies with dance grooves, haunted synths, and wall-of-sound guitar lines. Taking influences from Nine Inch Nails, Ministry, and contemporaries like A Place to Bury Strangers, HEALTH builds deeply twisted odes to sweaty nights on the club floor and long mornings trying to fend off the sun. Like its predecessor, 2019’s *VOL. 4 :: SLAVES OF FEAR*, *RAT WARS* blends pain and catharsis, emptiness and ecstasy. On “UNLOVED,” the trio of Benjamin Miller, Jake Duzsik, and John Famiglietti cook up a track built around military-grade snare drums, gnarling synths, and hi-hats that slosh like boots in deep rain puddles. Duzsik takes the vocal lead, conjuring up a deeply dark tale as he croons in an almost-snarl, “And it was not my fault you were unloved when you were a child/I wasn\'t there.”

The question of whether you want an MC like Earl Sweatshirt and a producer like The Alchemist to test each other’s limits is on some level an existential one: Like, isn’t the fact that the dreamlike flights of *VOIR DIRE* feel like comfort food a testament to how much they’ve already stretched our conception of hip-hop? Ten years out from his first “real” album (2013’s *Doris*), Earl sounds grateful, fulfilled, and yet no less enigmatic than when he was a kid, holding space for a history of Black diasporic art from Martinican poet Aimé Césaire to the Swazi-Xhosa South African pop legend Miriam Makeba without sacrificing the hermetic quality that made him so appealing in the first place. In Vince Staples, he continues to find the straight-talking foil he needs (“The Caliphate,” “Mancala”), and in Al a producer who can nudge him just a little closer to the hallelujahs he’s either too cool or evasive to embrace (“Mancala”). And at 26 minutes, the whole thing easily asks to be played again.

Releasing two separate albums from the same cache of material in relatively quick succession is always a risky move, as it can suggest the songs in the second batch are leftovers that weren’t quite strong enough to make the cut on the first. But in Metric’s case, the life-altering effects of the pandemic—and the wealth of music they produced while holed up in their small-town Ontario studio—demanded an expanded canvas to catalog the maelstrom of conflicting emotions that define our early-2020s existence. After charting their journey out of lockdown and into the light on 2022’s *Formentera*, the synth-rockers have issued a sequel that crystallizes that uncanny mix of celebration and “now what?” introspection that awaits us on the other side. As such, *Formentera II* isn’t so much a linear continuation of its predecessor as a reverse-negative mirror image of it. Where the first installment forced listeners to contend with the intimidating electro-prog colossus “Doomscroller” before gradually chasing the dark clouds away, *Formentera II* welcomes you in with the instantly alluring glitter-ball grooves of “Detour Up” and “Just the Once” en route to the disorienting digital beats of “Descendants.” But in between those poles, *Formentera II* asserts a character all its own by teasing out the vintage glam-rock DNA that’s always been bubbling under Metric’s futurist sheen, as frontperson Emily Haines leads us out of the discotheque and into the stratosphere on stardust-sprinkled serenades like “Days of Oblivion” and “Who Would You Be for Me.”

From the stark gospel soul of his 2013 breakthrough “Take Me to Church,” to the T.S. Eliot-inspired visions of 2019’s *Wasteland, Baby!*, Andrew Hozier-Byrne traverses literature, religion, and classical imagery to chart his own musical course. For the third Hozier album, *Unreal Unearth*, he’s followed that impulse further than ever before. During the pandemic Hozier found himself catching up on literature that had long been on his to-read pile, including Dante Alighieri’s *Inferno*. Not the lightest of reading, but a line from Dante stuck a chord. “There’s a passage in Dante’s *Inferno*, when he’s describing what’s above the door to Hell. The third line is: ‘Through me, you enter into the population of loss,’” the Irishman tells Apple Music. “That line just resonated with me. It felt like the world we were in. The news reports were just numbers of deaths, numbers of cases. It was a surreal moment.” It struck him that the format and themes of Dante’s 14th-century epic, in which the poet descends through the nine circles of Hell, could be the perfect prism through which to write about both the unreal experience of the pandemic and the upheavals in his personal life. “There’s such a rich tapestry there. I didn’t study classics and I’m not an academic, but for me, all those myths are happening around us all the time,” he says. “You can play with them a lot and reinterpret them and then subvert them as well.” The result is Hozier’s most ambitious and emotionally powerful album to date. It’s a remarkable journey, taking in pastoral folk, soaring epics, and tracks addressing the devastation caused by colonialism. Here, Hozier guides us through, one track at a time. **“De Selby (Part 1)”** “I didn’t know the song was going to reference de Selby until it started taking shape. He’s a character in a book by Flann O’Brien called *The Third Policeman* \[written in 1939 but not published until after O’Brien’s death in 1967\]. The book is like *Alice in Wonderland*, and it’s a classic piece of surreal Irish storytelling. De Selby is this lunatic philosopher who—and I don’t want to spoil the ending—doesn’t know he’s dead and in the afterlife. It felt like an appropriate reference for the opening track, to reflect on this darkness that he’s entering into, this infinite space.” **“De Selby (Part 2)”** “Part two comes out in a totally different place. It was always in this funk, rock place, even in the early demos. Part one ends in the Irish language, it’s basically saying: ‘You arrive to me like nightfall. Although you’re a being of great lightness, I experience you like nighttime.’ It’s that idea of ‘I don’t know where you begin and I end,’ and the song explores that a bit lyrically.” **“First Time”** “It felt like a nice place to come out of the heaviness of the previous track. It represents limbo. This cycle of birth and death, of being lifted by an experience and then that experience ending and it feeling like your world collapsing in on you, and then going again. Alex Ryan, my buddy who is also my bass player, sent me this bassline one day and it was really colorful and light and playful to work with. I really enjoyed writing the lyrics, they’re not too structured. It’s almost like talk-singing and I hadn’t really explored that much before this album, so I wanted to try it out.” **“Francesca”** “I had written a song that was very specific to Francesca \[from the Second Circle (Lust) in Dante’s *Inferno*\], that was written from her perspective. I was even trying to write it in terza rima, which is the interlocking triplets that Dante wrote in. But that’s where I was a like, ‘OK, I have to step back a little bit from this.’ When this song came around, it started from personal experience and then I allowed those themes and some of the imagery from that character in and then let the two mix. It’s an example of letting the song have a life above ground and resonate with a life below ground in regard to that character.” **“I, Carrion (Icarian)”** “It’s trying to capture that feeling when you’re lifting off. That sometimes when you’re falling in love with somebody, you’re met with this new lightness that you haven’t experienced ever before, but it’s also terrifying. To fully experience the best of that, you have to take into account that it could all collapse inwards and that you’re OK with that. It’s trying to hold those two realities in both hands and just playing with the imagery of it. It felt appropriate to come out of the hurricane of ‘Francesca,’ where two characters are trapped in a hurricane forever, into someone who is just on the wind.” **“Eat Your Young”** “I don’t know how intentional the reference to Jonathan Swift was in this. That essay \[Swift’s 1729 satirical essay *A Modest Proposal* in which he suggests the Irish poor sell their children as food\] is such a cultural landmark that it’s just hanging in the air. I was more reflecting on what I felt now in this spirit of the times of perpetual short-term gain and a long-term blindness. The increasing levels of precarious living, poverty, job insecurity, rental crisis, property crisis, climate crisis, and a generation that’s inheriting all of that and one generation that’s enjoyed the spoils of it. The lyrics are direct, but the voice is playful. There’s this unreliable narrator who relishes in this thing which was fun to write.” **“Damage Gets Done” (feat. Brandi Carlile)** “I’ve known Brandi Carlile for years, she’s an incredible artist and I’m lucky to call her a friend. As that song was taking shape, I wanted it to be a duet. It’s kind of like a runaway song. It’s not as easy to access that joy, that sense of wonder when you’re young that captures your enjoyment for a moment and then it’s gone. Brandi has one of those voices that is powerful enough to really achieve that feeling of a classic, almost power ballad. There’s very few artists that I know that have voices like that, who can just swing at notes the way Brandi swings at notes and hit them so perfectly with this immaculate energy and optimism.” **“Who We Are”** “This song was like a sneeze. Once we had the structure down, we jammed it and I just started wailing melodies that felt right at the time, and then took that away and came back with a song very quickly. Something I wanted to get into the album was this idea of being born at night, of starting in complete darkness. It’s a song that starts in childhood in this cold and dark hour, being lost and then just scraping and carving your way through the dark. It’s an idea that I wanted to put into a song for years, but never did.” **“Son of Nyx”** “A real collaboration between my bass player Alex Ryan, \[producer\] Daniel Tannenbaum \[aka Bekon\], and myself. Alex sent me a piano piece he recorded when he was at home in County Kerry. What you hear at the beginning is the phone memo, you can hear the clock ticking in his family’s living room. Alex’s dad is called Nick, so the song’s name is a play on words. In Greek fable, Nyx is the goddess of night and one of her sons is said to be Charon, the boatman who brings people to the underworld. All those voices that you hear are the choruses or the hooks from the other songs on the album distorted or de-tuned, so you’re hearing the other songs spinning around in that space.” **“All Things End”** “‘All Things End’ started from a personal place. There was a number of songs that could have taken the place of Heresy \[the Sixth Circle\]. In the medieval or the classic sense of heresy, ‘All Things End’ took that place. In those moments as a relationship is crumbling and it’s slipping away from you, it was something that you truly believed in and you had all your faith in and you had all of your belief in. In approaching that concept of that not happening it feels like something heretical. It’s a song about accepting, about giving up your faith in something.” **“To Someone From a Warm Climate (Uiscefhuaraithe)”** “The previous song reflects upon a parting of ways. I suppose in that context, this reflects upon the great loss of this experience and making sense of love after the fact, which is very often the case. If you’ve grown up in a cold climate like Ireland, you learn to warm up the bed quickly so you’re not shivering for too long. It’s a song I wrote for somebody who is from a warm climate who had never experienced that before. \[It’s about\] the significance of something so mundane but so remarkable—to experience a bed that has been warmed by somebody else in a space that you now share now with somebody new. It’s a love song.” **“Butchered Tongue”** “This reflects upon what is lost when languages are lost off the face of the earth. I’ve been lucky enough to travel the world for the last 10 years, going into places that had either Native American or Australian place names—some of the places I mention in the song—and asking people what the place name means and being surprised that no one is able to tell you. The song nods to some of the actions, some of the processes that are behind the loss of culture, the loss of language. There is a legacy of terrible violence, but we have to acknowledge not just that, but also bear witness to this generosity and welcomeness that I experience in those places.” **“Anything But”** “This one falls into the circle of Fraud. It was fun working with American producers on this. They thought it was a very sweet, caring love song. The lyrics in the verses are like, ‘If I was a rip tide/I wouldn’t take you out...If I was a stampede/You wouldn’t get a kick,’ The song is saying on paper that these are kindnesses, but the actual meaning is a joke—what you’re saying is I want nothing to do with you. The third verse says, ‘If I had death’s job, you would live forever.’ So that’s where it fits into the circle of Fraud. I was having fun with that.” **“Abstract (Psychopomp)”** “As a kid I saw somebody running into traffic to try and pick up an animal that had just been hit by a car. This song looks at that memory in an abstract way and sees all of this tenderness and somebody going to great risk to try and offer some futile gesture of care towards a suffering thing. But it’s also about acceptance and letting go. The alternate title is ‘Psychopomp,’ which is a Greek term for a spirit guide—somebody who moves somebody from one part of life into the next. Charon the boatman would be a psychopomp, so it seemed appropriate for a memory of seeing somebody pick up a dead animal off a road and then place it on the sidewalk where it dies.” **“Unknown/Nth”** “This is pretty much just me and a guitar which is what I enjoy about this. It’s very similar to the approach of my first record. I really enjoyed the space that’s in that song and then letting that space be something that had a lot of stillness and a lot of coldness in it.” **“First Light”** “It seemed like an appropriate ending song—of coming out and seeing the sunlight for the first time. Dante talks a lot about how he misses the sky, how he hasn’t seen the stars for so long. He hasn’t seen clouds, he hasn’t seen the sun. I wanted to put that feeling of being in this very oppressive space for a long time and then to see the sky, as if for the first time. I was writing this song with that feeling in mind, of this great opening, a great sense of furtherance and great open space. The record needed something like that. It needed this conclusive deep breath out, this renewing of the wind in the sails and then going on from there.”

Part of the fun of hearing a new Sparks album in 2023 is realizing just how deep their influence continues to run, whether through the meticulous theatricality of artists like Jack Antonoff (Fun., Bleachers) and Phoenix or the sheer overload of hyperpop. The imagery is still funny and immediate (the bored but overemotional protagonist of the title track, the baby trying to climb back into its mother’s womb on “Nothing Is As Good As They Say It Is”), and the music wound so tightly it sounds like its buttons are about to pop off (“We Go Dancing”). And while the brotherly duo’s blend of bitter irony and wide-eyed novelty might’ve seemed misanthropic 50 years ago, now it sounds like a familiar prognosis: Just listen to “Gee, That Was Fun,” where an ever-swelling din of voices lists off all the other things they could’ve done instead of being with you before a lonely Russell Mael concedes he had a pretty good time after all.

Laurel Halo’s 2018 album, *Raw Silk Uncut Wood*, marked a shift in her work, pulverizing the avant-techno rhythms of records like *In Situ* and *Dust* into choppy electro-acoustic textures flecked with jazz piano. On *Atlas*, her first major album in five years, her music continues to dissolve. Across these 10 elusive, enigmatic tracks, there are few melodies, no rhythms, no fixed points at all—just a hazy swirl of strings and piano that sounds like it was recorded underwater and from a great distance. Yet for all the music’s softness, it bears little in common with ambient as it’s typically conceived. An air of disquiet permeates the pastel haze; her atmospheres frequently feel both consonant and dissonant at the same time. Even at its most abstract, however, *Atlas* radiates unmistakable grace. In “Naked to the Light,” melancholy piano carves a path halfway between Erik Satie and mid-century jazz balladry; in “Belleville”—a distant tribute, perhaps, to the Detroit techno that influenced her—a languid keyboard figure echoes *Blade Runner*’s rain-slicked noir before a wordless choir briefly raises the specter of Alice Coltrane’s spiritual jazz. But those reference points are fleeting: For the most part, *Atlas* is a closed world, a universe unto itself, in which blurry shapes tremble in a fluid expanse of deep, abiding melancholy.

Irish singer-songwriter CMAT had a very clear idea of what her second record was going to be about when she started making it, but somewhere along the line, it morphed into something else. “It’s about the breakup and the fallout of a breakup,” Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson tells Apple Music. “I was in a relationship with someone who’s much older than me, and it was about trying to look at that as objectively as possible, and give time and space to my feelings about it.” CMAT set out to write what she describes as “a record of forgiveness,” but as she put that into practice, she discovered it wasn’t the album she needed to make. “As I was making the record, I realized I’m actually just still really fucking angry about everything that happened, and I became more \[so\] as I went on and went through it. So it’s not really an album about forgiveness, it’s an album about the fact that shit happens, these things happen, and it doesn’t make any sense and there’s no point to it.” The end result is *Crazymad, for Me*, a second record that builds on the country-pop sway of her debut with lush strings, ’70s grooves, melodious hooks, uplifting harmonies (a glorious duet with John Grant on “Where Are Your Kids Tonight?” will have you shimmying your way to the dance floor), and an Americana twang. Somewhere inside these songs of anger, sadness, and contemplation, CMAT started to make sense of everything. “Nothing good comes from suffering,” she says. “But it has to happen and you just have to learn how to move on with it.” These things happen, but at least they’ve got a great soundtrack. Read on as CMAT guides us through *Crazymad, for Me*, track by track. **“California”** “Every time I started on the topic and every time I started writing about it, I had this voice in the back of my head that was like, ‘Everybody that was there is going to know that you’re exaggerating and everybody is going to think you’re so sad. Him, and all of his friends, and everyone that knows you is going to think you’re such a pathetic loser for even talking about this in the first place.’ I probably should have made this album before my first record. I’ve wanted to make this record for six or seven years, but it really took a lot of pep-talking—and this song is me going through all of that and trying to be like, ‘I need to do it anyway.’” **“Phone Me”** “This is about the paranoia of feeling like you’re being cheated on, but the other person isn’t admitting to it. I was making up really weird images in my head, like, ‘What lengths would I have gone to to figure out if this person’s cheating on me?’ One of them was raising a Greek goddess from the dead, Cassandra, the goddess of prophecy. Her curse was that she was always going to tell the truth and know the truth and know what was coming before it happened, but nobody was ever going to believe her. I also make reference to the Rebekah Vardy incident, where Coleen Rooney had to remove everyone off her \[Instagram\] stories except for Rebekah Vardy, and plant fake stories to figure out if she was the person leaking her stories. I liked taking those two things and matching them together. In my head, there is a conference of girls all standing around trying to figure out the truth about something, and it’s me, Coleen Rooney, and Cassandra, the Greek goddess of prophecy.” **“Vincent Kompany”** “This is about the fact that I tend to have a relationship with myself and my own mental illnesses, where time is a very important thing. I like to tell stories about terrible, scary, maybe worrying things that I did when I was very mentally ill, but only if they happened three years ago, so that I can be, ‘I was crazy back then, but I’d never do that now.’ As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that I’m always doing something insane, and it’s only time and foresight and whatever else that makes me realize that I was always the crazy person. There’s a line in it where I say, ‘Cut all my hair off trying to look like Vincent Kompany.’ I wrote this song with my friend Declan McKenna and we spent maybe two hours going through a list of bald celebrities that I could use in the simile. Eventually, he was like, ‘\[Burnley FC manager\] Vincent Kompany!’ I was like, ‘Oh, if he’s a dodgy bastard, I don’t really want to put him in a song,’ so I had to research him very thoroughly. Turns out, lovely man. Family guy.” **“Such a Miranda”** “When I first really started a relationship with this person, I was 18 and I’d moved to Denmark. I moved back to Ireland to be in a relationship with him and I also stopped watching *Sex and the City*; I stopped doing all of these things that were for me and that I was supposed to be doing for me. I look back on that time with a lot of regret. It’s not a very profound \[or\] logical song, or anything, it’s just literally me talking about how much I regret doing that.” **“Rent”** “This song is kind of the second part to ‘Such a Miranda’ in the sense that it fast-forwards into the middle of the relationship and is me telling the story of being in it. It’s probably the saddest song I’ve ever written. It’s about being in a relationship with someone and realizing you’ve dedicated your whole life to someone who doesn’t even know you, and you don’t even know them, and how isolating and awful that feeling is, and how chaotic it is as well; how your life looks a bit different every day because you don’t know who you’re getting.” **“Where Are Your Kids Tonight?” (feat. John Grant)** “This is a song about realizing that I’ve turned into my mother. For me, there are three scenes on the record. The first sequence of songs is a bit angry, the second sequence of songs \[where this one sits\] is very reflective and ‘Maybe I’ve done something wrong,’ and then the third sequence is trying to make peace and move on. ‘Where Are Your Kids Tonight?’ is a song about the passing of time and how quickly it’s gone, because I feel like people often get to their mid to late twenties and they’re like, ‘Fuck, I was 12 two weeks ago. What the fuck happened?!’” **“Can’t Make up My Mind”** “I wanted to really capture that fuzzy-headedness of indecisiveness and lack of commitment, because I’m definitely a commitment-phobe in life. I don’t know how people buy houses, I don’t know how people get married. That concept to me is very confusing. I don’t even know how people decide where they’re going to live for the rest of their life. I have specifically chosen a path where I move around all the time, and that suits me perfectly well, because I need to be constantly stimulated, like a toddler with an iPad. I need to be constantly scrolling or something. And I can’t make up my mind.” **“Whatever’s Inconvenient”** “This one is about being bad at romance and human relationships. I’m definitely a bit of a Madame Bovary about things. I always think something could be a bit better and a bit more romantic and a bit more crazy and a bit more wild, and that will fuck me up and put me into terrible, terrible positions. I’m definitely guilty of going for the craziest or the most rebellious, wild option, even into my adulthood, and it just runs a train through your life. You have to just not be a narcissist, and take people for what they are and enjoy them and commit to them and see the best in them—instead of always picking the worst option possible to live on the edge.” **“I…Hate Who I Am When I’m Horny”** “I wanted to put this feeling into a song because I had never heard anyone else ever talk about it in a poetic sense. I have so many friends that have been very hurt and confused by their own feelings towards someone they love. They’ll love this person and be so committed to this person, but after a while, the sexual attraction completely leaves them and they find anything new attractive. Quite a lot of my friends who are gay men suffered a lot in their early to mid twenties or thirties with this exact same feeling, where they’ve found someone and they love them, but they just want to have sex with anyone else. I think there’s a lot of shame associated with this feeling, and there’s a lot of shame associated with sex in general. But if I was to add a positive note, I would say there are other solutions to the problem rather than hating yourself. As a very famous drag queen, Trixie Mattel, once said, ‘If having sex with someone who isn’t my husband is illegal, then lock me up and throw away the key.’” **“Torn Apart”** “This is going back to the Cassandra prophecy thing, but it’s the other end of the prophecy here, where shit has hit the fan and everything has gone wrong, and you’re at the end of the relationship and there’s always a feeling of, ‘Well, I knew it was always going to happen, so why did I even bother?’ It’s about running through the past and looking for signs that it was always going to end. But if you look for that in anything, you’ll find it.” **“Stay for Something”** “‘Stay for Something’ is also about running back through the minutiae of a relationship that you’ve exited and looking to make sense out of it. I think this is also a very important song in the record for me because it really sums up that super-chaotic feeling of something terrible has happened, so I have to find reasoning for it, and I have to make sense out of it and it has to be a chapter that factors into the story of my life overall. I can’t have suffered for nothing, I can’t have stayed for nothing, I can’t have just stayed in this terrible relationship and not benefited from it in some way, but the truth is that I did and I think, in general, people do. There’s no reason for suffering, there’s no point to it, and these things don’t really make sense.” **“Have Fun!”** “I think the minute that it was written, I remember thinking it sounds like the last song on an album. It sounds like the exit song from a sitcom or something, it’s quite a jovial, jaunty number. I liked the idea of ending on something uplifting when I knew so much of the record was going to be so dramatic. Thematically, it makes sense as well because it’s the closest thing to a forgiveness song on the record. It’s not even really about forgiving and forgetting, but it’s more just about being like, ‘Well, that happened and now it’s not happening anymore, so I’m going to go have some fun,’ because that was what was missing for the last five years or whatever it was. I think it’s nice to end on a hopeful note.”

Derealised is the Third studio album which was released on January 20, 2023.

“I needed my audience to see that Killer Mike is something that this nine-year-old kid created to be fierce and badass and protect him from any ill,” the artist born Michael Render tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “This is my come-home moment musically. It is gospel, it is soul, it is funk, it is hip-hop. And from a moral standpoint, I was taught morality through the Black Southern Christian church, which gave us the civil rights movement, the abolitionist movement, which gave us some of the most beautiful music ever. And I feel like I\'m honoring that and I finally figured out my place.” Released 10 years after Run The Jewels transformed Killer Mike from a workaday regional rapper to the kind of guy holding public court with national politicians, *MICHAEL* is, on some level, a celebration of just how far he has come. But it’s also an exploration of the complex personality that got him there: the son of a drug dealer who needs to mourn his childhood but struggles to let his guard down (“MOTHERLESS”), the community leader trying to elevate youth while snapping back at the perceived narrowness of their politics (“TALK’N THAT SHIT!”), the middle-aged man finally reckoning with the collateral PTSD of Black life in America (“RUN”). “My mother and grandmother left me,” he says. “‘MOTHERLESS’ is about that and about the emptiness you feel, and as a human I feel like I\'ve lost something. But if all the electricity left tomorrow, there\'d still be trees moving, there\'d still be wind grooving, and that\'s all we return to. When you close your eyes, you listen to this record, this device ain\'t how you are hearing this song. These vibrations are how you\'re hearing this song.” There’s also “SCIENTISTS & ENGINEERS,” which features fellow Atlanta legends Future and André 3000. “Artists love and respect one another,” he says. “The what, who\'s done what, it\'s literally the style. You just waiting to hear your partner\'s next style.” And on a production level, the sustained mix of slow-and-steady trap beats with gospel choirs and soaking-wet organs evokes both the humidity of his Atlanta summers and the blend of sacred and profane that has characterized Black pop from Sam Cooke to Kanye West. If he weren’t so smart and soulful, you might call him a crank. But he’s both.

Progressive development as an artist isn’t as easy as it looks, but Jessy Lanza’s *Love Hallucination* has all the hallmarks of a leap forward. The Canadian producer and musician has always drawn from a catalog of dance music spiked with a sly pop sensibility. Part of this comes from the ferment Lanza draws from as a member of UK label Hyperdub, a singular incubator of unique electronic artists since the 1990s. But influences and collaborators can only do so much. Lanza has a voracious appetite for sounds, a musical magpie building something unique from the shimmering parts of techno, gqom, house, and drum ’n’ bass. You could hear that foundation being built on her 2021 *DJ-Kicks* installment, where considerate experimenting is the rule. But where her mix was built of ready-made parts fused together, *Love Hallucination* is all Lanza—though that almost wasn’t the case, as these songs were originally written for other artists before she decided to record them herself. By taking these tracks in-house, Lanza has channeled her anxieties, desires, and tastes into a musical vector, giving *Love Hallucination* heft and velocity. “Don’t Cry on My Pillow” mixes familiar jabs of romantic resentment with the thrum of industrial drums. The twin tracks “Drive” and “I Hate Myself” are breathy anti-mantras cradled by louche downtempo, the sound of a mind that can’t let go as the world swirls around it. On “Marathon,” Lanza nearly snarls under a glittery Y2K-era R&B beat to underline her pursuit of unapologetic physical pleasure.

For his 19th solo album, punk godfather and infamous Stooges vocalist Iggy Pop teamed up with superproducer Andrew Watt and an all-star band. Featuring appearances from Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan, Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith, Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard, late Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins, and blink-182 drummer Travis Barker—among others—the songs on *EVERY LOSER* are essentially played by famous musicians who grew up listening to Iggy Pop. “Andrew is very all-star-oriented in general,” Iggy says of the young producer. “It\'s like a fetish with him. Amusingly, he has an incredible collection of mint-condition rock star T-shirts. Once we started working together, he started wearing Iggy Pop T-shirts. Every day I got to see a new one.” Lyrically, *EVERY LOSER* sees Iggy seesawing from stream-of-consciousness bitch-fests (“Modern Day Ripoff,” “All the Way Down”) and love songs to Miami (“New Atlantis”) to reading the classifieds as a way to honor a decades-old suggestion from Andy Warhol (“The News for Andy”). The title of the album comes from a line in the social-media-inspired track “Comments” in which Pop says, “Every loser needs a bit of joy.” “Andrew suggested that whole line as the title,” he tells Apple Music. “If I was Pink Floyd, maybe I could get away with that. But I’m not, so I came back with *EVERY LOSER*.” Below, he discusses each track. **“Frenzy”** “There’s some name-calling there, but it’s just one particular dick and prick who gave me the ammo for those lines. No, you can’t ask who it is—but I’m sure he knows. It’s not a total rant, but it’s in the tradition of ‘Leader of the Pack’ or something like that. There’s some aggro there, but once it’s in motion you’re thinking about all sorts of things—the sharks in the sea that are out get you—but you’re also thinking about, ‘Shut up and love me, will you?’ Many things are ping-ponging in your mind. It’s a very tough little three minutes of rock music.” **“Strung Out Johnny”** “Andrew is a producer who’s also a top-flight musician and a good writer. When he sent me this song, he put a little provisional title on it—‘Strung Out Johnny.’ I thought, ‘I know something about that subject. I could sing on that.’ So we kept the title. I’m singing it to the archetypal Johnny, the universal young man. I wanted to sing to him about how it goes—step one, step two, step three, and then you’re fucked. But I wanted to put myself in there too, so the song would be a little warmer and more sincere.” **“New Atlantis”** “It\'s a love song to Miami and an homage to Donovan, who had a song called ‘Atlantis.’ Things are sinking here in Miami. I’ve experienced it because I’ve been here 24 years. But I do love this place. I’ve had the best years of my life here. I remember talking to Andrew about the song while he was on a boat in the Bahamas. I said, ‘You know Atlantis, the lost civilization, is right under you? Have you heard the song by Donovan?’ I don’t think he had. So he started blasting it out all over the sea on the boat speaker system.” **“Modern Day Ripoff”** “This came at a point in the record when I was starting to get cranky because I’m like 45 years older than Andrew and his energy doesn’t stop. I told him, ‘In The Stooges, we’d just do seven songs and an instrumental. Isn’t that enough?’ But no, he said we needed more, more, more. So, for the last three songs—starting with this one—I started writing bitchy lyrics. It’s just a standard middle-aged-white-guy-complaining song, but tongue-in-cheek. At one point it says, ‘Why can’t I do blow anymore? I can’t smoke a joint because I’m too paranoid? What the fuck?’” **“Morning Show”** “Andrew asked me if I was interested in doing a ballad, and I said yes. This was something he already had in his pocket. It’s like a Stones-type ballad. I never talked to him about it, but I’m guessing that was the inspiration. But I approached it more like a mature country singer would. A lot of people imagine it might be about, ‘Oh my god, I’ve got to wake up and be Iggy Pop again,’ but it’s nothing to do with that. It’s just about feeling down and depressed but putting as good a face on it as you can. Kinda like ‘Tears of a Clown’ by Smokey Robinson.” **“The News for Andy (Interlude)”** “When I was making *Funhouse* with The Stooges, we shared a motel with Andy Warhol and his entourage, who were making the film *Heat* at the time. At one point, Andy suggested to me, ‘Why don’t you just read the newspaper and let that be the vocal of the song?’ I never did anything about it, but I told the story to Andrew and he was dying. He said we should do it. So what I’m saying here is from three different advertisements that were in the free handout paper that was laying around the studio that day. You know, the local spreadsheet that’s sponsored by strip bars and usually run by leftists.” **“Neo Punk”** “Travis Barker is playing on this, and I guess he walked right into that one. But he plays so well on it. The way he plays on the choruses sounds like he listened to ‘I Got a Right’ by The Stooges. I’ve been fascinated for a long time with the way that punk started out as one music and then became many musics and then ultimately seeped into the fashion world, into ethics, sexual orientations, all sorts of things. And suddenly people are making very quick, very large money out of doing things in a punky way. That’s kind of what it’s about.” **“All the Way Down”** “This is another one of the songs where I was getting crankier during the sessions. The guitarist in my band had posted a little footage of me from our last tour. I was dismantling the mic stand and she titled it ‘Full beast mode.’ I was quite proud that I could still manage the full beast mode. So, the song is basically saying, ‘I’m gonna go full on, and then complain a little bit.’ Stone Gossard from Pearl Jam plays on this one. I opened some shows for them many years ago, and their fans weren’t interested. They just wanna see Pearl Jam.” **“Comments”** “The music has a beautiful, lonely vibe to it, but then the chorus is so happy. What makes me happy these days is getting a giant check for doing something easy. And the loneliness part, that comes from Zuckerberg and Musk. I will look at the comments \[on social media\] until I get a general picture, but then I just sort of feel like I’m going to puke. Even if they’re positive—because it’s just one after the next after the next. And it’s always ‘You’re great!’ or ‘You’re a piece of shit!’ There’s not much in the middle, generally.” **“My Animus (Interlude)”** “What I\'m trying to say there is that I have a certain pride in the idea that my front, when I want to put it forward, is not dependent on being some kind of multimillionaire, or chart-topper, or stadium king, or any of that. It comes from me, and it comes from what I think is just a healthy ability I have—and I\'ve maintained—to be able to seek out the important pleasures in life. That’s how I’d put it.” **“The Regency”** “There’s a very interesting relationship between the parking business, the banks, and the stadium business. The real money is in that parking lot. It’s a really big business. That’s sort of what this song is talking about. And Taylor Hawkins played on this and ‘Comments.’ He really makes them come alive. I had met Taylor when I opened for the Foo Fighters, and then he played me in the CBGB movie. His abs were the movie poster, presumably as my abs.”

The breakup song is a time-honored tradition, yet so few of them actually name names. But on *Blame My Ex*—the second full-length album from Toronto indie-rock quartet The Beaches—singer/bassist Jordan Miller is spilling all the tea. The album comes out swinging with “Blame Brett,” a sassy post-breakup anthem written in the fallout of her split from Glorious Sons lead singer Brett Emmons. But where that song presents a cheeky portrait of dating on the rebound, the rest of *Blame My Ex* explores the relationship wreckage from every possible angle, chronicling the grief-stricken nadirs, noncommittal hook-ups, and reclamations of independence that follow the dissolution of a long-term partnership. Since releasing their 2017 debut, *Late Show*, The Beaches have favored the EP format, but as Miller tells Apple Music, Life After Brett demanded a full-album exploration. “Music has less of a shelf life nowadays because of TikTok, but there\'s just something about doing a full 10-song project,” she says. “You\'re able to tell more of a story, there\'s more of a theme to it. This record is a breakup record, and it was important for us to present it as an album, so that you have a lot of context and a lot more depth in the story.” But with hooks sharpened by Charli XCX cohort Lowell and punchy New Wave production courtesy of Metric/Arkells associate Gus van Go, *Blame My Ex* could be the leanest, most energized concept album ever. Here, Jordan and sister, guitarist Kylie Miller, provide a track-by-track guide to mending a broken heart. **“Blame Brett”** Jordan Miller: “If you listen to the song, it\'s not actually about our breakup. I had been on this really weird date with this other guy—I won\'t name his name!—and we had only been on three dates, and he told me that he loved me. And I was like, \'Oh, wow, this is fresh off of my real severe breakup—I\'m really not ready for this yet.\' So I wanted to write a song apologizing to all of my future partners where I\'m like, \'I\'m going to be a bit of an asshole for a little while, LOL, don\'t blame me, blame my ex-boyfriend!’ And I think it was Lowell\'s idea to do the \'Blame Brett\' thing. It\'s just really good alliteration! But everyone was like, \'Yeah, that\'s really funny... but you should probably get his permission first,\' so I of course did call him first. Obviously, I am clearly still going through a little bit of pain in this song, but it wasn\'t meant to be vindictive. It\'s a silly sort of tongue-in-cheek thing.” **“What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Paranoid”** JM: “This album ebbs and flows. \'Blame Brett\' is a little bit sillier, but this one is much more grounded and earnest. It\'s my expression about heartbreak. The inspiration for the song came from when I started going out to parties and social gatherings without my boyfriend for the first time. And I was like, \'Who am I without this person? I don\'t know what to talk about.\' And so I started to develop social anxiety for the first time. I was a very confident and outgoing person, so it was very jarring for me. But the more people listen to this song, the more I understand that\'s just a normal reaction to happen after a breakup.” **“Me & Me”** JM: \"When you\'re growing up as a woman, the worst thing in the world you can think of is to end up as somebody who\'s alone and doesn\'t have a romantic relationship. So I was inspired by this *Sex and the City* episode where Carrie is drinking a glass of wine by herself in a pashmina, and I\'m like, \'Ah, that\'s just yummy to me! That\'s just so cozy and pleasurable.\' And as I started feeling better about being by myself, I started to really enjoy going for dinner by myself, or going to see a film by myself. And that kind of gave me hope: If I don\'t end up having another love of my life, I can still experience joy through friendships and flings, but also through myself, by just being comfortable being alone.” **“Everything Is Boring”** Kylie Miller: “Jordan will be constantly talking about some history-related thing, and a lot of the time, the other girls in the band don\'t really connect to this stuff. And she’ll be like, \'Oh my god, you guys are so boring, you have nothing to talk about—I don\'t want to talk about TikTok anymore.\' Jordan is definitely an old soul and has very different interests than a lot of young women her age, and so I feel like sometimes it\'s hard for her to relate, and I think that’s where this song came from: Jordan being out at a party and really not relating to anybody. Because she\'s too smart!” **“My Body ft Your Lips” (with Beach Weather)** JM: “I\'m so glad that we ended up doing it as a duet \[with Nick Santino of Beach Weather\]. The person who inspired the song was also going through a breakup when we started hooking up, and so \[doing a duet\] makes me seem like less of a dick, because it becomes about two people finding solace in a sexual experience, rather than a person feeling like they\'re being used. Nick did such a good job.” **“Kismet”** JM: “I actually wrote this song pre-breakup, when I was pretty hungover in Nashville. I\'ve just always loved that word \'kismet.\' I\'m a romantic-comedy girl at heart, so I wanted to write my own romantic-comedy song about a meet-cute. In the context of a breakup album, it can be about meeting the next person that you get really excited about. It\'s needed in the album because it adds a little bit of levity before you get to some of the sadder songs that are coming up.” **“Shower Beer”** KM: \"This song is about the need to go out because you\'re dealing with insane FOMO, which Jordan and I both suffer from. We also wrote this song before the breakup, and actually changed the lyrics: It used to be \'Brett, can you wash my hair?\' and we changed it to \'Babe, can you wash my hair?\' after the breakup, so the song still really fits in with this album.” JM: “I feel like you can tell on yourself as a songwriter. The person in this song is facing the end of her relationship, and she\'s avoiding being at home so that she can also avoid the other problems in her life by going out a lot. It\'s an interesting exercise listening to songs after a pivotal moment in your life, and you\'re like, ‘Oh wow, I guess that\'s what I was feeling.\'” **“Edge of the Earth”** JM: “This is the only song that isn\'t about me. I wrote it about \[keyboardist\] Leandra \[Earl\] and her now ex-girlfriend. They had a very passionate and fiery relationship. It\'s also really important for Leandra and I—because we\'re both queer—to include some queer storylines on this record. I\'ve been out for years, and Leandra just came out two or three years ago, and it\'s been a real connection point between her and a lot of our fans, and they\'ve asked us why we hadn\'t written about it yet.” **“If a Tree Falls”** JM: “When I wrote this song, I didn\'t expect to be so in touch with my pain going through this experience. I\'m normally somebody who avoids it or laughs at it, but this song is really about the dissolution of my relationship and feeling betrayed and let down. I needed to sort of hug that pain and hold on to it—that\'s the only way that you can move on from feeling truly hurt. It was very important to me that this song made it on the record, because it provides context for everything else you\'re going to listen to. And I really wanted to make sure my vocal performance expressed that raw-nerve-ending pain, so I would stick little notes that said things like \'I still love Brett\' all over the vocal studio and I’d look at them to put myself back in that situation, just to really feel it and torture myself. This song is one of the most important songs I\'ve written in my career so far, because there\'s no facade. There\'s no tongue-in-cheek jokes. It\'s just an honest expression of grief.” **“Cigarette”** JM: “I didn\'t want to end the record on a sad note; I wanted to end on a hopeful moment. And \'Cigarette\' is that moment to me. It\'s about meeting a really cool person—in this particular instance, it was this sick skateboarding chick—who excites you and makes you hopeful for the future, and just gives your heart a little pitter-patter.”