By the time Black Country, New Road released their sprawling second album *Ants from Up There* in 2022, lead vocalist Isaac Wood had departed the London-based indie experimentalists and a magical first phase of the group had come to a close. Rather than tour those records without their original singer, they rejigged their dynamic and wrote a whole new batch of songs—captured on 2023’s *Live at Bush Hall*—to initiate a new period of the band where vocals and much of the songwriting were led by Tyler Hyde, Georgia Ellery, and May Kershaw. It made for an exhilarating fresh start and their third album *Forever Howlong* directly picks up from the momentum of starting over again. “We’d done a lot of touring of the live album and we really wanted to further develop this new lineup and write new songs so we could get them into the set list,” saxophonist Lewis Evans tells Apple Music. “There’s a whole bunch of songs within the album that were written fairly early on as a buffer to the *Live at Bush Hall* songs so we could not have to play the same thing every single night.” That feeling of trying to capture the energy and edginess of a live show runs right through *Forever Howlong*. It’s a record of tightly mapped baroque folk pop, jagged indie explosions, and woodwind-heavy art-rock explorations, and it feels punchier and more contained than their previous work. “\[The songs\] developed way more on the live setting,” says Evans. “Our headspace was to really make sure that all of the songs that were brought into the writing room, to the rehearsal room, were arranged in such a way that the song could be served as well as possible and not adding anything to it that didn’t need to be there.” Drummer Charlie Wayne thinks that, even without the lineup change, the band was always heading towards doing something different. “I think it was always trending in this direction,” he says. “Having the three different singers definitely gave it a different quality, both in terms of the outcome and also in the actual songwriting. Three different perspectives grants you three completely different worlds to dive into and to try and pull together.” Let Evans and Wayne guide you through *Forever Howlong*, track by track. **“Besties”** Lewis Evans: “It’s a great big fanfare opening, really ramshackle and swashbuckling. It’s a great introduction into the new sound. It’s still got this very BCNR musical-communication thing that we have but also feels like a new style. That’s also why it was good to do as the first single, it was a good welcome to the new thing.” **“The Big Spin”** LE: “This was the first of the songs which we’re calling the Holy Trinity on the record, those songs being ‘The Big Spin,’ ‘Besties,’ and ‘Happy Birthday,’ which all came together at a very similar time. May brought this song in. It was much more light-hearted and groovy, and it had this light feel that we haven’t had before as a band. That went on to really inspire Georgia’s writing for ‘Besties,’ which then really inspired Tyler’s writing for ‘Happy Birthday,’ so this was the start of the domino effect of those three pop-ish songs on the record.” **“Socks”** Charlie Wayne: “This was one that we wrote at the beginning of last year. I think we saw Tyler performing a version of it on the piano before we’d thought about it as a band thing. It’s weird because it’s like a mini musical in itself, there are loads of ups and downs, and you can really focus in on the songwriter and the voice, and the band operates around it and expands and contracts. There are moments of real softness and rubato, that the time is moving in and out and it’s not, you’re just focusing in on the piano. Tyler recorded it all in that way, and the band had to try and play around her performance instincts where she allowed herself to just be on the piano playing with it.” **“Salem Sisters”** LE: “I originally wrote this song and sang on it live for a while when I was singing in the band for a short spell. I decided against singing anymore because I just didn’t enjoy it whatsoever. I thought that Tyler would be best suited for singing it. She wrote new lyrics, and it benefits a lot more from her vocals. I wasn’t able to bring what she can to the song. It’s like the closest we get to a ’70s songwriter-y throwback tune on the record I think but it still retains quite a bit of weirdness that I don’t think would exist quite yet in the ’70s. It’s a catchy song.” **“Two Horses”** CW: “This slightly preceded the actual getting under the bonnet and figuring out what the album is. It was the first time that Georgia really felt as though she brought a song specifically for BCNR with the intention of figuring out what her songwriting was going to maybe look like. Georgia had written a pretty good, complete song and all the arrangements had already been thought out. One of the big takeaways in the album is just serving songs and sometimes they don’t need to be these enormous expansive things, no one needs to be playing extremely loud all the time. It can just be following the journey.” LE: “This is quite a unique record for us because there’s no one way that we’ve written all the songs. This one is the only time we’ve ever written a song where it was all thought out before it was in the practice room. Georgia had a proper Brian Wilson imagination with this song and she knew exactly how she wanted it to sound. We were like, ‘No, let’s put our own thing on it,’ and then it worked out actually better the way that she decided it in the first place.” **“Mary”** CW: “This is the bit in the album where you can kind of step back from the instrumentation, which can often be a massive focal point of the band. It was a song that was always just going to work with the three vocals. It’s heavily inspired by The Roches. Having very light instrumentation behind it gives you the opportunity to see it as like group storytelling, watching those voices deviate away from each other and then come back.” **“Happy Birthday”** LE: “This was the quickest song to put together. It basically arranged itself. Tyler played us a couple of songs that she’d been writing when she went on a writing retreat in Italy with some friends. She played ‘Happy Birthday,’ which was called ‘Kids’ at the time, but we didn’t want to name it the same as the MGMT song, so we opted for a more famous song. We took it into the rehearsal room and just banged it out in a couple rehearsals, really. It was so satisfying and punchy, it really felt like we were so in the groove at that point. We all knew what the record was. We all knew at that point this song was going to be the thing that completes the album a little bit.” **“For the Cold Country”** LE: “May played this for the first time on the piano, or at the rough outline of it, when we were mixing *Live at Bush Hall*. I remember being like, ‘Wow, that’s crazy. How the fuck are we going to make that into a BCNR song?’ We spent the next two years trying to write it, because it is just unwieldy and enormous.” CW: “It didn’t really make sense until we’d gotten into the studio and we felt as though we could place everyone in a small room and then expand out again from there.” LE: “This was one of those songs that really didn’t benefit from us playing it loads live because we realized what was best suited for it was that the first half be this acoustic, really acoustic, warm, woody feeling section that would then open up into a more expansive guitars would turn electric.” **“Nancy Tries to Take the Night”** LE: “This was also an earlier-stage one. Tyler had the whole first half of the song, just the two acoustic guitars and the chorus, the chorus melody thing that happens. The whole minimalist section hadn’t yet been written. We felt like we wanted a new part of the song, and so I wrote this minimalist cell block kind of thing. It was quite inspired by something that I heard on a new Kiran Leonard record. That allowed us to have these two very different sections that are really contrasting.” **“Forever Howlong”** CW: “We started off doing a band arrangement for this and it didn’t quite fit. After speaking about it, May was like, ‘I think maybe it would sound really good if all of us were playing five clarinets as an arrangement,’ which was a cool idea, but maybe slightly impractical. The next best step was five recorders. The beginning of the song is fairly sparse and simple because all of us didn’t know how to properly play the recorder, and it gets more complicated towards the end. The bit at the end, which is a bit like a carousel, is a bit of a victory lap for us because we just all get our individual parts to play because we can all actually play them. The Royal Society of Recorders and Recorder Players should be getting in touch soon.” **“Goodbye (Don’t Tell Me)”** LE: “This is the oldest song on the record. Georgia brought this in when we were writing *…Bush Hall* stuff in 2022 and because she just wasn’t around enough because of Jockstrap commitments \[Ellery is also one half of Jockstrap\], we didn’t play it. We’d kind of made a half-baked version of it and it was good, but it really wasn’t sitting with the stuff that we were doing on *…Bush Hall*. But then as these songs like ‘Happy Birthday’ and ‘The Big Spin’ and ‘Besties’ came about, it really started to make more sense. We were really trying to go for a Neil Young thing on this tune, and the way that it can feel loose, but also there’s a deeper feeling in the pit of your stomach about it that is an unexplainable thing that just grooves. I don’t know if we quite achieved it, but the ending was meant to sound like The Beta Band’s ‘Dry the Rain.’ I don’t know if we achieved that at all! It ends up its own thing a bit, which is what you aim for when you say you want to have a reference for something—if it ends up not sounding like that, then you’ve won a little bit.”
Justin Vernon has never been shy about bearing the weight of his instantly mythical origin story and his fast, unlikely trajectory into global stardom. Four albums and 18 years after *For Emma, Forever Ago*, *SABLE, fABLE* is a document of finding peace—joy, even—and a testament to the work it’s taken to get there. “This record, as much as that first record, if not more, was really just a keystone for healing and growing away from this time period where I felt trapped,” he tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. Once COVID wiped out the tour plans for 2019’s *i,i*, Vernon, like pretty much everyone, used the time to take stock, and he came to understand, among other things, that touring might not be the healthiest thing for him. So he made songs. “It really was like, ‘Okay, I’m not well and I won\'t make it if I don\'t do something to change this pretty drastically and stop the whole touring engine,” Vernon says. “There was a sense of relief and an incredible grief to say goodbye to the team that we built. I was like, ‘Let me just get these songs done and just sneak them out there so I can just get them off my chest,’ because that’s what I really needed: to finish them, to learn what was inside them.” The first of these songs, written at the beginning of lockdown, “THINGS BEHIND THINGS BEHIND THINGS” is a snapshot of that lonely, uncertain time, but it feels bigger and more hopeful than that to Vernon with five years of hindsight. “In the short term, it makes you feel better, but it’s also a way to lean into your grief and lean into your pain and lean into your guilt,” he says. “I think eventually when I hear that song now, I feel clean from everything that I was dealing with when I had to write it and after I wrote it. But it takes years for things to take shape and for internal things to budge.” From there, the album begins to let more light in with songs like the evidently more hopeful “Everything Is Peaceful Love” (“It’s just all about celebrating this moment right here and just sort of trying to express that heart-leaping-out-of-your-chest feeling”) and “If Only I Could Wait,” featuring vocals from Danielle Haim of HAIM, which Vernon considers nothing less than his favorite American rock band. The album splits the difference between the immediacy of *For Emma* and the often inscrutable maximalism of *22, A Million* and *i,i*. It was during the album’s long gestation that Vernon’s profile was boosted by his work with Taylor Swift, even as his own project remained in the shadows, Vernon exercising a patience and restraint and creating a healthier perspective that was nothing less than career-saving, if not life-saving. “We are insanely beautiful creatures,” he says. “And so I think where I’ve got to with the simplicity of this music, it was just like, I just want to give it to you. I just want to have it be my version of Bob Seger’s ‘Against the Wind’—just boom, here it is. We’re not going to hide, we’re not going to put it behind any drapery. We’re going to just give it to you as much as humanly possible.”
The indie-pop band fronted by Michelle Zauner released their third album, 2021’s *Jubilee*, to massive critical acclaim and their first Grammy nomination. After spending five years writing *Crying in H Mart*, her best-selling memoir about grief, Zauner devoted the record to joy and catharsis, all triumphant horns and swooning synths. But for its follow-up, the ambitious polymath found herself drawn to darker, knottier themes—loneliness, desire, contemporary masculinity. She also gravitated to the indie-rock sounds of her past, recruiting producer and guitarist Blake Mills, known for his work with artists like Fiona Apple, Feist, and Weyes Blood. “\[For *Jubilee*\] we wanted to have bombastic, big instrumentation with lots of strings and horns; I wanted this to come back to a more guitar-oriented record,” Zauner tells Apple Music. “I think I’m going back to my roots a little bit more.” When she began to write the band’s fourth record in 2022, Zauner found inspiration in an unlikely literary juxtaposition: Greek mythology, gothic romance classics, and works that she wryly deemed as part of the “incel canon” à la Bret Easton Ellis’ *American Psycho*. From such seemingly disparate sources emerged the gorgeously bleak songs of *For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)*, whose title is presented with an implied wink, acknowledging the many women songwriters whose work is reduced to “sad girl music.” Indeed, the atmosphere on *For Melancholy Brunettes* is less straightforwardly sad, and more…well, it’s complicated. On “Leda,” the story of a strained relationship unfolds by way of Greek myths in which Zeus takes the form of a swan to seduce a Spartan queen. “Little Girl,” a deceptively sweet-sounding ballad about a father estranged from his daughter, opens with a spectacularly abject image: “Pissing in the corner of a hotel suite.” And on the fascinatingly eerie “Mega Circuit,” on which legendary drummer Jim Keltner lays down a mean shuffle, Zauner paints a twisted tableau of modern manhood—muddy ATVs, back-alley blowjobs, “incel eunuchs”—somehow managing to make it all sound achingly poetic with lines like, “Deep in the soft hearts of young boys so pissed off and jaded/Carrying dull prayers of old men cutting holier truths.” The universe Zauner conveys on *For Melancholy Brunettes* is sordid and strange, though not without beauty in the form of sublime guitar sounds or striking turns of phrase. (“I never knew I’d find my way into the arms/Of men in bars,” she sings on the wistful “Men in Bars,” which includes the album’s only feature from…Jeff Bridges?!) As for the title’s bone-dry humor—sardonically zesty castanet and tambourine add extra irony to “Winter in LA,” on which Zauner imagines herself as a happier woman, writing sweet love songs instead of…these.
“I found a crouton underneath a futon,” singer Sebastian Murphy intones over a steady bass throb punctuated by flute accents on “Uno II,” one of the many clever and catchy tunes on the quasi-self-titled *viagr aboys*. “Mama said I couldn’t eat it ’cause all my teeth are gone.” Such is the delightfully absurdist world of Viagra Boys, a Swedish quasi-punk group with an American vocalist and an undying hunger for shrimp and shrimp-related products. The band’s fourth album doubles down on the self-deprecating, society-skewering antics and infectious grooves of 2022’s *Cave World* with gleeful abandon. Powered by slashing guitars and a droning chorus, “Man Made of Meat” offers historical perspective for modern complainers: “I don’t wanna pay for anything/Clothes and food and drugs for free/If it was 1970, I’d have a job at a factory.” Jet-propelled bass boogie “The Bog Body” doubles as a commentary on superficiality that plays out like an inversion of the Demi Moore body-horror flick *The Substance*, complete with a zombielike swamp woman. “Pyramid of Health” simultaneously apes and lampoons Marcy Playground’s grunge-esque ’90s hit “Sex and Candy” before veering into carnival music and electronic noise. Resurrecting a successful template from previous albums, Murphy cuts loose with a hilarious, possibly stream-of-consciousness rant over skronky free jazz on “Best in Show Pt. IV.” With breathy backing vocals and a chiming minor-key organ melody, “Medicine for Horses” is more plaintive, reflective, and—maybe—straight-faced. The same could be said of Murphy’s mournful, wavering vocal on closer “River King,” but who knows? Where Viagra Boys are concerned, it’s anyone’s guess.
Will Toledo’s music as Car Seat Headrest has always *felt* like opera whether he called it that or not—at least, few other indie bands have made the droll monotonies of being an outcast sound so grand. A concept album nominally about a med-school student who discovers her secret powers to heal patients by literally absorbing their pain (yep!), *The Scholars* is both Toledo and his band’s most conventionally “big” album (soaring choruses, dramatic turns, multi-part songs) and its most cryptic, tucking all those big, obvious gestures into the folds of a story that feels just out of reach by design. The short songs hit hardest (“The Catastrophe,” “Devereaux”), but the long ones are where they get to make their weird stadium-sized dreams come true. Case in point, the 19-minute centerpiece “Planet Desperation”: Toldeo howls, “When I get to the pearly gates, will I see you on the inside pointing at me/Mouthing ‘There he is, officer—there’s the prick I warned you about.” Then they get to sound like The Who. Then a little bit like Genesis. Then the hand-drum section comes in.
In following up their 2021 album, *Infinite Granite*, Deafheaven have chased a seismic shift with a melding of strengths. Whereas *Infinite Granite* almost completely abandoned the band’s black-metal roots for clean vocals and a lush shoegaze sound, *Lonely People with Power* combines elements of both. “To me, this is the ultimate Deafheaven album,” vocalist George Clarke tells Apple Music. “I think it harnesses all these disparate ideas that we’ve had over our entire career in the best way that they’ve ever been done. While it does include sonic touchstones from our earlier albums, it also includes some from our more recent material—just done in a way that, I think, is smarter. If we were to stop at this point, I think this is the record that would best explain what it is we do.” Lyrically, *Lonely People with Power* explores exactly what the title implies. “Initially, there was this broad scope that recognized that people who tend to want to amass power, people who tend to seek influence, are also people who tend to lack intimate connections,” Clarke says. “They’re people who are what I keep describing as spiritually vacant. I think there’s a void there that is often wanting to be filled with this sort of ephemeral influence. “As we kept writing and the subject matter got more personal, I was thinking about the idea of what is passed on to us,” he adds. “Life lessons, things that you learn from your parents, things that you learn from your teachers, and how their handicaps and their perspectives shape your own worldview. And how, in a sense, everyone wields a certain amount of power. Everyone, in a sense, is a lonely person with power.” Below, Clarke comments on each track. **“Incidental I”** “The melody in ‘Incidental I’ appears again in ‘Doberman.’ A lot of the incidentals and the way that they function within the album were created by \[guitarist\] Kerry \[McCoy\], who very much likes to conceptualize records by using melodic reprisals. This one of the three is the shortest, but certainly one of the most mood-setting tracks of the record. I really love the way that it came out. It’s quite simple, but effective.” **“Doberman”** “This was the last song we wrote for the album. To me, it was the big single, which we ended up not going with. But in my estimation, it has a lot of our strengths. What I really enjoy about it is that we leaned a little further into Emperor-like qualities in the chorus and used these types of synth textures to enhance the chorus parts. And the bridge is very Aphex Twin-influenced. To me, this is our Emperor/Aphex Twin record, which is fun.” **“Magnolia”** “We decided on this as the first single because we wanted to come out with a haymaker. It’s one of the most to-the-point songs we’ve ever written. I think it’s very interesting and catchy, but in a condensed way that we’ve not yet explored in previous albums. The beginning riff is something that we had been sitting on since 2023; it was our soundcheck riff. Kerry came up with it, and it would often get stuck in our heads. Some of our writing happens on tour in those moments because everyone’s onstage, and we developed it from there.” **“The Garden Route”** “A lot of these songs really benefited from what we had learned on *Infinite Granite* in terms of songwriting and how to structure a song that’s lean and transitions well but still has an emotional punch to it. I think this song is one of those examples. It really couldn’t have been written without having done *Infinite Granite*. And I like that we sometimes do this harsh vocal over a clean guitar, which we first experimented with in 2014 or ’15. At the time, it was almost uncomfortably jarring but has since really become part of our sound.” **“Heathen”** “Again, a song that really could not have been written without *Infinite Granite*. The thing that was interesting with this song is that we had originally thought there would be no clean vocals on this record. But Kerry had this vocal idea for the beginning, and it really stuck with me. It was immediately catchy, and it really fit with the lyrics. After a quick conversation, we decided that the most Deafheaven thing to do is to do what’s natural to us and what we think sounds best. Setting a precedent for ‘no this’ or ‘no that’ was really contradictory to our whole ethos. And I’m glad we did because I think it’s a welcome element once you’ve gotten this far into the record, to hear this variety. It’s one of my favorites lyrically, too.” **“Amethyst”** “As we were writing this, we felt it was going to be the centerpiece of the album. I think it’s the favorite song on the record for a lot of us within the band. It might be my favorite. To me, it’s a fresh take on a very classic Deafheaven sound and structure. It has all the things that I like. And then, lyrically, it’s a centerpiece as well. The album artwork and the photography within the record are based on the lyrics to this song. I think both sonically and thematically, this is maybe the strongest representation of the album.” **“Incidental II” (feat. Jae Matthews)** “This was a lot of fun to put together. We have Jae Matthews from Boy Harsher on the track. We’re big Boy Harsher fans, and we have a lot of mutual friends. I was talking to one of them about what we were working on, and he suggested that we get in touch with Jae. We got on the phone, and I explained the themes of the album, and I sent her a very early version of the song to see if she was interested. She was excited, which I was really happy about. We flew her out to LA and spent a day in the studio. She wrote the lyrics for it after we discussed it. Much like ‘Incidental I,’ it’s such an important mood piece to the album, especially going into ‘Revelator.’ I think the two connect in a really wonderful way.” **“Revelator”** “This song is the bruiser. It’s just a lot of fun, and the credit goes mostly to Kerry. This is where his head was at a lot of the time when we were making this record, just wanting to go fast and write something that was pissed but sort of unhinged. There’s this clean break, and then it goes into this chaos of blast beats, and we layered a thousand guitars. It’s a very high-energy song, and one that I think is really built for our live show as well. A lot of these songs were written with the live show in mind, and I think this one most of all.” **“Body Behavior”** “I love this song. It is, even within our repertoire, a pretty strange one. It was the first song we wrote for the album. The guys were listening to a lot of krautrock, and so the verses come from there. It’s bass- and drum-driven and very cool. Again, that thing happens where this record couldn’t have been written without *Infinite Granite*. The entire bridge section is this *Infinite Granite* by way of \[Radiohead’s\] *In Rainbows* type of beautiful interacting guitars. Overall, I think this song was a little bit of us figuring out what we were going to do next. The first song you write for something new is always a little bit of that.” **“Incidental III” (feat. Paul Banks)** “This was purposely written to go into the next song, ‘Winona.’ They share the same kind of chord and lead structure. We discussed doing a monologue here, and then we agreed that it would be interesting to have someone other than me voice it. Having Jae on ‘Incidental II’ and Paul \[Banks\] from Interpol on this lets our audience more into the broader world of Deafheaven and what we like. To me, it’s obvious that we like Boy Harsher and Interpol, but I don’t think everyone else maybe sees it that way. This gives us an opportunity to show how well-rounded the project is—and to work with people that we really admire.” **“Winona”** “Winona is a 5,000-person town in Mississippi. It’s a town where my grandparents lived. A lot of my family is buried there and is from there. Along with ‘Amethyst,’ this is the other big epic on the record. The coolest thing about this song, for me, is that there’s a choir on it, which repeats throughout the track, and the choir is just a bunch of our friends. It was six men and six women, and Kerry and I conducted them, which we’d never done before. Much of the choir group were producers and musicians with real orchestral experience, so we’d be side-eyeing them, like, ‘Are we doing OK here?’ It was a lot of fun to make.” **“The Marvelous Orange Tree”** “The song is named after a magic trick from the 1830s, and it always felt like the closer. Again, with the clean vocal thing, while we were writing the song, we were just like, ‘This makes sense here. We should embrace this skill set.’ To me, it’s our big Mogwai track or something. It’s a really cool midtempo song that’s focused on density more than anything else. Because of that, it really sets itself apart from the rest of the record. It’s pure heft and no speed. It’s just a nice flavor to round out a record that dabbles in a lot of different things throughout.”
Noah Lennox used to feel as though his solo work as Panda Bear was, in his words, “disparate and separate” from the music he’d make with Animal Collective. But now, over two decades on, it seems more like one continuous project. “Playing drums in AC, singing in AC, writing songs for AC, doing features, doing remixes, doing this record where I’m collaborating with all these different people or getting these different flavors from different people,” Lennox tells Apple Music, “it all kind of feels like part of the same creative wave.” “This record” is *Sinister Grift*, the first Panda Bear album to feature contributions from all three of his Animal Collective bandmates—David “Avey Tare” Portner, Brian “Geologist” Weitz, and Josh “Deakin” Dibb—not to mention collaborations with Patrick Flegel (aka Cindy Lee) and SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE’s Rivka Ravede. Recorded at his home studio in Lisbon and in his hometown of Baltimore, it’s meant to feel like a contemporary take on an early rock ’n’ roll record, with Lennox opting to illuminate the natural qualities of the music, rather than distort or deliberately obfuscate them, as he did on 2019’s *Buoys*. “It still feels very contemporary, very plug-in, very digital audio workstation to me,” he says. “There’s echoes of older music that I love in there, but there’s no retro-ness to it, I hope. I’m not a big fan of that kind of thing.” Front to back, the album is meant to mirror what Lennox calls the “playful menace” at the heart of its title—an idea he’d had before he’d written a single lyric. Before falling into the abyss of its second half, the music feels effervescent even when the songs themselves are anything but. “‘Sinister grift’ is this lie that we tell ourselves, that if we’re just careful enough or if we’re ‘good people,’ we can somehow avoid suffering or regrets, mistakes, hurting ourselves or people—this very inevitable part of living,” he says. “I like contrast. I feel like the light is lighter when it’s put against darkness, or things are funnier when they’re addressing something really dark. But it really started just because I liked the title. I like how it sounded, I like how it looked on paper. It sounds kind of dumb, but sometimes things start really simply like that.” Here, Lennox takes us inside a few songs from the album. **“Praise”** “It kind of started as a song thinking about my son—the anecdote about him not picking up his phone is very real. But then it became a song more about fatherhood and then a song about parenthood. There’s this fire driving the relationship, where it feels like no matter what the kid does, he’s not calling you back. If he’s maybe being a little difficult or acting up, there’s this sense that there’s an underlying force, that unbreakable thing that drives the relationship.” **“Anywhere but Here”** “I stole pretty wholesale the idea from a \[The\] Louvin Brothers song called ‘Satan Is Real,’ where there’s a vocal refrain, and then he preaches or tells the story for a second. I’m a huge fan of that record, but that song specifically. I thought it would be cool to try to do my own version of that. I think my original idea was to ask my daughter Nadja to do the spoken-word part, which she wrote. But then I asked Dean Blunt to do it, and he was down, but he couldn’t. Ultimately, I was so excited about getting my daughter onto the thing and, lucky for me, she was down to do it eventually—as long as I paid her.” **“Ends Meet”** “This song always reminds me of ‘Monster Mash.’ It’s a song about appreciating life, including the more difficult things. The ‘Monster Mash’-iness comes from the sense that there’s something coming to get you—these difficult things in life are going to happen to you, no matter what you do. But it’s said in this very playful way, which I hoped was fun. I find that telling a joke is a way to enter into a difficult conversation. A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.” **“Just as Well”** “I’m a huge reggae fan, huge dub fan, and I’m always looking for a way to do something that feels reggae without explicitly being reggae, and there’s a couple attempts on this record. I’d say ‘Just as Well’ is one and the other ‘50mg,’ which feels a bit like a cross between a reggae track and a country track to me. I feel like this song is maybe the best attempt I’ve made at doing something that feels like an impression of reggae. It’s something that I feel like is always in me, but doing a version of it that feels genuine is difficult.” **“Ferry Lady”** “There’s a lot of percussion in it, but it’s not actually a drum kit playing, unlike most of the other songs. It feels kind of like the gateway to the second half of the record to me. It’s in between the lightness and the dark, the ferry from one side of the record to the other. It’s about any type of relationship that has ended and hasn’t ended like you thought it would, about people growing apart.” **“Venom’s In”** “‘Venom’s In’ is about having a reality thrust upon you in life and not wanting it. It feels like the character in the song can tell that change is coming and wants to stop it, but knows it’s impossible. So the venom is already in the body, the change is going to happen. It’s a pretty desperate song to me—it feels very low.” **“Elegy for Noah Lou”** “That one represents the original vision for the record, insofar as I thought we were going to do these straight-ahead recordings: guitar, bass, drums, singing, and I would play everything. The original idea was to spend months following the recordings, abstracting those forms or blurring them. But as we worked with the arrangements, we got the structures and the tone of the stuff really right, so a lot of the stuff felt like it was done, like it didn’t need to grow into anything else. So that idea of blurring everything we left behind, except you hear it a little bit in this wasteland section of the record. ‘Elegy for Noah Lou’ is where it kind of feels like the song is sort of there, but it’s muted and more like an impression of the song than a song.” **“Defense”** “I was a huge fan of Patrick \[Flegel\]’s, from Women forward. He had played some shows with the rest of the AC guys at some point, had stayed at Josh’s place coming through Baltimore once or twice. We actually recorded right before *Diamond Jubilee* came out, so I kind of feel like I snuck it in a little bit. It was just one of those things where Patrick was the first person I thought of to do it. I knew Patrick could handle the guitar work and, thankfully and very luckily for me, Patrick was down to do it.”
Around the time of her big break with 2022’s *Preacher’s Daughter*, Ethel Cain was dubbed a pop star, though it was often hard to tell from her songs. Aside from “American Teenager,” a Springsteen-esque anthem that laundered sneakily unpatriotic sentiments through arena-ready melodies, that album’s songs were largely dirges (gorgeous ones, at that) preoccupied by ideas of doomed love, faith, and fate. Written and produced almost entirely by Cain (the stage name and alter ego of Hayden Anhedönia), the project’s lore was nearly as compelling as the music itself, launching Anhedönia into something like stardom. Since then, Anhedönia’s spoken freely about the pitfalls of popularity; she penned a Tumblr post last year identifying an irony epidemic within online fan culture: an aversion to approaching art with sincerity rather than memes. You could be tempted to view *Perverts*, Cain’s first release since *Preacher’s Daughter*, as a provocation—an often-challenging 90-minute work that seems designed to scare off a stan or two. Songs like “Pulldrone” and “Housofpsychoticwomn” are noise experiments that stretch well past the 10-minute mark, full of eerie drone, depersonalized spoken word, and terrifying imagery regarding sex and sin. The moments of hard-earned beauty feel all the more rewarding: the fuzzy, sultry “Vacillator,” or “Etienne” and “Thatorchia,” a pair of elegiac instrumentals that sound like beams of heavenly light piercing through the darkness.
The remarkable thing about Mike Hadreas’ music is how he manages to fit such big feelings into such small, confined spaces. Like 2020’s *Set My Heart on Fire Immediately*, 2025’s *Glory* (also produced by the ever-subtle but ever-engaging Blake Mills) channels the kind of gothic Americana that might soundtrack a David Lynch diner or the atmospheric opening credits of a show about hot werewolves: a little campy, a little dark, a lot of passions deeply felt. The bold moments here are easy to grasp (“It’s a Mirror,” “Me & Angel”), but it’s the quieter ones that make you sit up and listen (“Capezio,” “In a Row”). Once he found beauty in letting go, now he finds it in restraint.
One summer night in 2022, during a break from shooting *The Crow* reboot in Prague, FKA twigs found her way outside the city to a warehouse rave, where hundreds of strangers were dancing to loud, immersive techno. The experience snapped the English polymath (singer, dancer, songwriter, actor, force of nature) out of the intense brain fog she’d been stuck inside for years—so much so that she was moved to invent a word to describe the transcendent clarity, a portmanteau of “sex” and “euphoria” (which also sounds a bit like the Greek word used to celebrate a discovery: eureka!). *EUSEXUA*, twigs’ third studio album (and her first full-length release since her adventurous 2022 mixtape, *Caprisongs*), is not explicitly a dance record—more a love letter to dance music’s emancipating powers, channeled through the auteur’s heady, haunting signature style. The throbbing percussion from that fateful warehouse rave pulses through the record, warping according to the mood: slinky, subterranean trip-hop on the hedonistic “Girl Feels Good,” or big-room melodrama on the strobing “Room of Fools.” On the cyborgian “Drums of Death” (produced by Koreless, who worked closely alongside twigs and appears on every track), twigs evokes a short-circuiting sexbot at an after-hours rave in the Matrix, channeling sensations of hot flesh against cold metal as she implores you to “Crash the system...Serve cunt/Serve violence.” Intriguing strangers emerge from *EUSEXUA*’s sea of fog, all of them seeking the same thing twigs is—sticky, sweaty, ego-killing, rapturous catharsis.
Squid entered into sessions for a third album keen to switch things up. The quintet’s second record *O Monolith*, released in 2023, was a dizzying blur of jerky art rock, prog-tinged folk, and eerie, experimentalist jazz, but things settle down a little on the startling *Cowards*. “We did want to simplify some aspects of this record,” says drummer and vocalist Ollie Judge. “That was kind of a springboard to focus a bit more on classic-y songwriting.” It has resulted in a record that feels like one the band has been building up to since they first emerged in the latter half of the last decade, where the thrilling alchemy of their playing locks into something more mesmeric. In streamlining their sound, Squid sound more powerful than ever with *Cowards* taking in hypnotic, motorik grooves, choral folk, epic bursts of strings, and propulsive, minor-chord rock. It is the work of a band realizing that less is more. “Doing something slightly more melodic and expansive was definitely something we had in mind,” adds guitarist Louis Borlase. “\[During the songwriting process\] we were kind of riding the wave and we didn’t have to stop and look around as much to make active decisions on how to let a certain idea come and go. It did feel like stuff was happening by itself. I think it’s the best record we’ve made.” Let Judge, Borlase, and bassist Laurie Nankivell guide you through *Cowards*, track by track. **“Crispy Skin”** Laurie Nankivell: “The working title for this was ‘Glass’ because we talked about how the opening keyboard lines had this slightly classic minimalist feel of a two-hand counterpoint that I think a lot of us are inspired \[by\] from the work of Philip Glass.” Ollie Judge: “I think this track shows the more chamber kind of feel to the record, with piano and acoustic instruments looking to set the stage. Lyrically, it’s just the same old dark stuff. It’s about cannibalism and an alternate reality where evil acts like that are normalized—and whether or not anyone could have such a strong moral compass not to indulge in things that are so widely normalized.” **“Building 650”** Louis Borlase: “This is one of the only tracks we’ve released which is under four minutes and that’s representative of the fact we wrote it quite quickly. It’d be nice if that happened more regularly. Sadly, it’s not the case.” OJ: “I remember we were doing some writing at our friend’s studio in Bristol and Jim Barr, who was Portishead’s touring bassist and is a man of few words, came in and said that ‘Building 650’ sounded like the bastard love child of Sonic Youth and Led Zeppelin. I see where he’s coming from.” **“Blood on the Boulders”** LN: “We started writing in a really nice cosy studio in really far-out East London called Arcus Sounds, run by two really nice friends. It’s a nice immersive room and you forget about your industrial surroundings and you can be in there for a long time and not get sick of it. It felt like that was quite a turning point in understanding the album in terms of how it was evolving sonically into something that we weren’t particularly worried about, the nakedness of sound. It’s probably the track where the parts are most out in the open on their own, at least for the first half of the song. We were really happy early on with the simplicity of the groove and how the vocals found their way into it. We were feeling good about how it didn’t feel like it needed any complicated or all-encompassing soundworld to take over the scene. Very importantly, it’s our first track where a little ‘E’ for explicit comes up on Apple Music.” **“Fieldworks I”** OJ: “Anton \[Pearson, guitarist\] described this as the problem child of the album. The first idea for the track was written in 2021 and I think we finished the final structure for it maybe a week before we went into the studio. It was originally all one track but got separated into two because it has two quite distinct sections. This was the one that set the tone for the record, I think, because it had just been with us for that long.” **“Fieldworks II”** LN: “We were quite keen early on to try out with \[producer\] Marta Salogni, seeing what it feels like to do a track or two with a producer we’ve never worked with before. We went up to The Church \[Studios\] in Crouch End and met Marta and came into this new space and said, ‘We’ve got this track that we know isn’t finished yet and we can’t make a decision on how the second half of it is going to end up but let’s record it anyway.’ The harpsichord that we made for the first half that you hear, that ostinato going through it like a thread, that was originally parts that me and Anton played on guitar that we really liked the harmonic feel of. But something didn’t quite sit with the idea of using guitars to do that. It marks quite a big turning point again to have this moment where we replace something that’s always been so central as a guitar, making it be played by another instrument, letting go of what you assume to be your go-to instrument.” OJ: “Yeah, it sounded a bit too like U2 with the guitars. It sounded too much like The Edge, so we had to take The Edge off.” **“Cro - Magnon Man”** LN: “Halfway through writing the album, it became really noticeable that we were talking about people more than places and caricatures. I’d come across this book in a charity shop, one of those quite dated 1970s picture books from science, and I was really struck by this outdated idea aesthetically of a figurehead of humankind and modernity that is…well you can’t ascribe the word tacky to it because we’re humans and Cro-Magnon people were the first early modern humans in Europe. It’s this idea of exploring a story of a pathetic self, a kind of hopeless case but for something that we’re also genetically based on, exploring the idea of the cave that the Cro-Magnon man lives in. Caves are always referred to and explored by psychologists as being representative of our mind, what we repress and what we can’t deal with.” **“Cowards”** LB: “This was the first track we wrote. There was a simplicity to it that felt like it struck quite true \[to\] what we wanted to achieve from the record.” OJ: “This is one of my favorite tracks on the record because if you dropped into the middle of the track and showed it to a Squid fan, they might not think it’s Squid. That’s always a really exciting prospect for anyone listening to a band that they’re a fan of.” **“Showtime!”** OJ: “The middle section of this one, where it gets a bit electronic and glitchy, was quite a task because there was just so much going on and it was hard to pin down what that section really was. We threw everything at it. There’s the string quartet, there’s drum machines, there’s synths, Arthur \[Leadbetter\] sampled some timpanis, which became quite a laborious process for him. It’s about Andy Warhol and how he was maybe quite an exploitative figure in the art world. I listened to a podcast about him. It was quite a trashy podcast, but it was reevaluating how he’s seen in popular culture.” **“Well Met (Fingers Through the Fence)”** LB: “There’s a hopeful but also somber feeling to the end of this song, which felt representative and nice to be like, ‘What’s next?’ as an end to the album.” OJ: “It’s got \[Copenhagen-based singer-songwriter\] Clarissa Connelly singing the lead in the first half. It was great to work with her. We hadn’t heard of her before we decided to record with her, it was a recommendation from \[Squid’s label\] Warp and we thought it was a perfect fit. She’s got a kind of ethereal, incredible range in her voice that goes so deep in the track.”
Equus Asinus, the scientific name for a domesticated donkey, is also the title of the fifth full-length album from Québec City folk-rock trio Men I Trust. Consisting of Emma Proulx, Jessy Caron, and Dragos Chiriac, the group cooks up lived-in, detail-oriented odes to the hazy memories of past relationships, the inevitable disconnect that bubbles up against the limitations of language, and the ambivalence in the face of existential despair. Much like referring to a donkey by its scientific classification, the band treats all ideas on the album with respect and seriousness. Lyrically, Proulx’s words are equal parts meditative and naturalistic, combining poetics and philosophy to describe the world as it is—horrors, beauty, all of it. Often relaxed but never without energy or passion, the band manages to craft songs that are pleasant companions. They are more complex than on records past, but the trio still builds a hearth that can comfort in the face of the world’s ills.
Is there anything Jane Remover *can’t* do? The 21-year-old rapper, singer, and producer’s surprise-released third album, *Revengeseekerz*, arrives just a few months after their striking and contemplative album *Ghostholding* under their Venturing alias. If that album dove deep into the tangled guitars and complex emotions of Midwestern emo, then *Revengeseekerz* finds Jane Remover fully leaving behind the gauzy anti-rock of 2023’s *Census Designated* and blasting off into the realm of rage music. It’s impossible to hear the bitcrushed synths of “Dreamflasher” and the lurching trap beats of “Experimental Skin” without conjuring images of current rage titans like Yeat and Playboi Carti. But nothing is ever that simple in Jane Remover’s world, as their dizzying and flashy approach to production means that even the catchiest *Revengeseekerz* material is densely packed with sonic bells and whistles. Amid a plethora of sonic gestures tilted towards the neon crags of modern rap, Jane Remover still finds the space to execute a few shocking left turns across these 12 tracks. Danny Brown lends his always elastic voice to the endless-ladder electroclash of “Psychoboost,” while “Professional Vengeance” bounces like a pop-punk Super Mario across a landscape of video-game lasers and pummeling bass. *Revengeseekerz* is the strongest statement yet from a true prodigy at the height of their powers.
The creation—and especially the success—of his 2024 viral hit “End of Beginning” prepared Djo, the musical alter ego of *Stranger Things* star Joe Keery, for the recording of his third album. “It was a boost of confidence and a good shot in the arm,” he tells Apple Music. “Doing a song from beginning to end in a studio and getting bit by that was like, ‘Oh man, this is how I want to do this. I don’t think I really want to try to do this in my bedroom.’” Famed New York City studio Electric Lady provided Keery and his frequent producer Adam Thein with the environment they needed. “We were using all the toys,” Keery notes. “This piece of gear was laying around, so let’s mess with it. And it ends up, it informs the whole track. There’s a lot of that going on on this record.” And so, *The Crux* was born. Unlike his past endeavors, this time he chose to focus on collaboration. “I came up musically in a time where it was Kevin Parker and Mac DeMarco and these guys who did it all by themselves. So I think for a while that was what I thought I wanted to be,” he says. “But doing this project, it made me come back to working more collaboratively, still producing stuff, but with other people. It was a real joy to have friends and family and outside musicians coming in and bringing this thing to life.” One surprising guest? Charlie Heaton, Keery’s *Stranger* love-triangle competitor, appears on the jaunty “Charlie’s Garden.” *The Crux* is filled with psychedelic beats, electronica tones, and groovy guitar licks and floats through Keery’s particular brand of twee indie pop with a blend of bright sounds and hazy nostalgia. There’s the uplifting (“Lonesome is a State of Mind”), carefree (“Basic Being Basic”), regretful (“Delete Ya”), somber (“Egg”), and bittersweet (“Crux”). And classic-rock influences abound, particularly on “Potion.” (“Love Fleetwood Mac. You can definitely hear that on that track,” he says.) Keery takes special pride in his output. “It’s my outlet for talking about my own life and my little diary,” he says. “I’m sure a lot of musicians, that’s the way that they do it. So to use it as a way to cope with what’s going on, and then especially one of my favorite parts is just, like, album order and the structure of the record as a whole. That’s one part of that journey.”
Even listeners familiar with Dan Bejar’s trip can find first encounters with a new album forbidding, a door slammed in your face when you’d shown up looking for a good time. A misty buffet of variety-show pop (“Dan’s Boogie”), Bowie-style glam (“Hydroplaning Off the Edge of the World”), and fake tropical jazz (“Cataract Time”), *Dan’s Boogie* is—like a lot of his albums since 2011’s *Kaputt*—both featherlight and impenetrably dense, filled with chintzy musical touches (the maudlin piano runs on “The Same Thing as Nothing at All”) and lyrical asides so flatly stated that the words strain against their meaning (“The Ignoramus of Love”: “I remix horses”). He’s funny, he’s surprising, he’s (ugh) “literate,” but most of all, you get the sense that he’s always nudging himself toward the unknown—a quality that commands respect when a lazier man would settle for a like.
The buzzing New York band (lead vocalist Cole Haden, drummer Ruben Radlauer, guitarist Jack Wetmore, and bassist Aaron Shapiro) formed in 2016, but broke through with their 2023 full-length debut, *Dogsbody*—a blast of haunted, hedonistic noise-rock that embellished the cool chaos of early aughts dance-punk with musical-theater melodrama. On its follow-up, *Pirouette*, Model/Actriz lean all the way in on those rococo tendencies and embrace their inner prima donnas without losing their grit. “Living in America, while trapped in the body of an operatic diva,” Haden laments in a campy stage whisper on “Diva” between tales of one-night stands in far-flung European locales. The pendulum swings wildly between abandon and control, but there’s a gonzo sensuality that ties it all together. Hence, an eerie acoustic ballad about being jealous of hummingbirds (“Acid Rain”) followed by a throbbing dance-punk jam (“Departures”) that relishes in the beauty of three-syllable words—parasol, silhouette, matinee, vagabond.
At the core of every PUP record is the tension between Stefan Babcock’s brutally self-analytical lyrics and the rapturous communal response that their music elicits. And that contrasting quality has become all the more pronounced as the manic Toronto punks have gradually eased off the gas pedal. After expanding their palette with brass sections and electronics on 2022’s high-concept corporate satire *The Unraveling of Puptheband*, they reemerge on *Who Will Look After the Dogs?* with a sharpened musical and lyrical focus, settling comfortably into a post-emo power-pop style that makes Babcock’s bitterest sentiments sound celebratory. Babcock has a knack for framing universal anxieties—be it breakups or the fear of death—in intimate yet irreverent details: The Weezer-esque chugger “Olive Garden” sees him trying to salvage a broken relationship by revisiting the Italian restaurant chain that’s hosted countless high schoolers’ first dates, while the breezy ’90s alt-pop jangle of “Hallways” reveals the morbid inspiration behind the album’s title, when Babcock talks himself off the ledge by declaring, “I can’t die yet/’Cause who will look after the dog?” (And while cataloging his joyless days and sleepless nights, he manages to slip in winking quotes of Disturbed’s “Down with the Sickness” and Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep.”) But if the entire PUP discography feels like an extended therapy session, then the irresistibly anthemic “Best Revenge” feels like a breakthrough, where the song\'s radiant guitars are matched by an equally sunny outlook: “The best revenge is living well,” Babcock sings, and even if there are days when he can’t fully live up to that promise, he’ll at least have a club full of fans shouting out the song’s ecstatic chorus to keep him on the right path.
The thing about desire is it relies on the not-having of the thing you want; then sometimes you get it, and the whole game changes. In the case of Lucy Dacus—the dreamy singer-songwriter and guitarist, best known these days as one-third of indie-rock supergroup boygenius—the conundrum could apply to any number of current-life situations, among them her unexpected success as a Grammy-winning rock god. “I think that through boygenius, it felt like, ‘Well, what else? I don’t want more than this,’” Dacus tells Apple Music. “I feel like I’ve been very career-oriented because I’ve just wanted to play music, satisfy my own drive, and make things that I can be proud of. Getting Grammys and stuff, I’m like, ‘Well, I guess that’s the end of the line. What is my life about?’” On her fourth solo album, *Forever Is a Feeling*, Dacus takes a heartfelt stab at answering that question, and in doing so, opens another desire-related can of worms. While the record explores the intoxicating, confusing, fleeting qualities of romance, it simultaneously functions as a fan-fic-worthy relationship reveal. (She went public with her relationship with boygenius bandmate Julien Baker weeks before the album’s release.) On *Forever*, Dacus dives headfirst into the implied complications, recruiting co-producer Blake Mills for subversive, swooning folk-pop numbers that revel in the mysteries of love, and what precedes it. Dacus’ songwriting has always been vulnerable, though perhaps never this much, nor in this way. “What if we don’t touch?” she begins the super-sexy “Ankles” by proposing—instead, she imagines hypothetical bitten shoulders, pulled hair, crossword puzzles finished together the morning after. (“It’s about not being able to get what you want,” Dacus says of the song. “You want to get them in bed, but you also want to wake up with them in the morning and have sweet, intimate moments, and you can’t. So, you just have to use your imagination about what that might be like.”) She explores the in-between stages of a relationship on the wispy “For Keeps,” takes a quiet road trip through the mountains with her partner on “Talk,” and on “Big Deal,” she wonders to a star-crossed lover if things could ever go back to how it was before, though the climactic final chorus suggests otherwise. Writing *Forever* brought Dacus closer to an answer to the question she posed to herself earlier, and she doesn’t care how cheesy it may sound. “I want my life to be about love,” she explained to Apple Music. “It feels corny to say. But that’s part of what this project is—the idea that talking about love is corny. I don’t think love is all you need, but I do think you need it amongst everything else.”
Samia’s third album, *Bloodless*, sounds as if someone’s opened a nearby window, allowing for a gush of fresh air to carry Samia Finnerty’s voice into the skies. The 28-year-old Minneapolis-based singer-songwriter’s follow-up to 2023’s *Honey* feels lithe and buoyant even at its most emotionally weighty. At times—the slinky “Lizard,” the echo-laden swell of “Sacred,” the thicket of woodwinds and vocals that run through closing track “Pants”—Samia recalls the ethereal New Wave of British pop-rock phenom The Japanese House, or the timeless bounce of Fleetwood Mac. At the center of such gestures is Samia’s close-to-the-bone lyricism, which continues to convey her pitch-perfect sly humor; atop the stormy strums and electronic frissons of “North Poles,” she wraps her bell-clear voice around evocations of “spyware lipstick” and fistfuls of natural wine before lobbing a grenade of reflection at the listener’s feet: “When you see yourself in someone/How can you look at them?”
Horsegirl were in high school when they recorded their debut LP *Versions of Modern Performance*, an eye-opening, words-blurring blend of ’90s indie rock that was meant to feel live and loud. But the Chicago trio—Nora Cheng, Penelope Lowenstein, Gigi Reece—became a New York trio as they began working on its deeply personal follow-up, *Phonetics On and On*, an album of coming-of-age guitar pop written during Lowenstein and Cheng’s first year at NYU. “There is a loneliness and instability to moving that the three of us really experienced together,” Lowenstein tells Apple Music. “It brought us very close, having this shared experience of becoming a professional band really young, touring, then moving somewhere new—we started to lean on each other in a familial way. There\'s something overwhelming about this period in your life.” All of that—the intensity, “the intimacy, the ‘Where is home?’ sort of feeling,” as Lowenstein describes it—made its way into the minimalist pop of *Phonetics On and On*, recorded with Welsh singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon at The Loft, Wilco’s famed Chicago studio space. If before they’d turned to the noise and post-punk angles of Sonic Youth and This Heat for inspiration, here they found themselves discovering (and embracing) the immediacy of classic records from Al Green and The Velvet Underground. They realized they wanted to be vulnerable and direct, without sacrificing a sense of play or their sense of humor. “I got to college and I discovered The Velvet Underground beyond *White Light/White Heat*,” she says. “I heard *Loaded* and I was like, ‘Oh, wow: accessible, emotional songs that make me feel like I’ve felt this way before.’ As a songwriter, I was like, ‘What if I wrote as a way of reflecting on my own life,’ which was not really something that I had approached as a kid. Then it was more like, ‘How do I write music to just feel powerful?’” Here, Lowenstein takes us inside a few songs on the album. **“Where’d You Go?”** “Not to talk too highly of my own band, but we felt like there were songs on the record that could have been singles that weren’t. And we thought it was cool to open with a song like that to show that all the songs stood on their own in a cool way.” **“Rock City”** “That title was us just goofing around. Sometimes, the titles will become too joke-y and then we have to tone it down. That’s how you end up with songs like “Homage to Birdnoculars” or “Dirtbag Transformation (Still Dirty)” on the record. No one needed to do that. We tried to pare it down, but ‘Rock City’ made it through in terms of joke titles.” **“2468”** “I thought that song was a really shocking choice for us to make, and that’s part of why I’m proud of it. It just came together in the studio in a really playful, different way for us, and it felt like we unlocked this really new dimension to our band.” **“Julie”** “I originally wrote that song on an acoustic guitar, and we spent months trying to crack it, trying a million arrangements with an electric guitar and the full band. But it felt like something was lost from the song. In the studio, there was this freak accident where the engineer turned my guitar completely off—and then you only heard the arrangements that my bandmates had written to complement me. At the same time, I was just singing what, for me, is a really vulnerable vocal, but with the confidence as if I was playing guitar. That was a really intimate moment, and a metaphor for my bandmates listening to me, and something that ended up being stronger than what I had originally written.” **“Frontrunner”** “Nora and I live together, and basically I had just had a really terrible, emotional day. I was a complete mess. And it was at the weekend, and I hadn\'t gone anywhere, and Nora and I were like, ‘OK, we should just play guitar today, you need to do *something*.’ And we wrote that song together, like we had played guitar from dawn until dusk together in our apartment.”
Momma’s follow-up to their 2022 breakthrough album, *Household Name*, opens with the pair skewering a freshly abandoned ex with the line “I love you to death/But I’m outside the door.” No emotion is off-limits for Brooklyn-based songwriting duo Etta Friedman and Allegra Weingarten (now expanded to a quartet including guitarist, composer, and producer Aron Kobayashi Ritch and drummer Preston Fulks), who’ve created a breakup album full of spiky lyrics and sing-along hooks. “It’s written from the perspective of two people we hurt, so it’s kinda looking at ourselves in a critical lens, which was a really interesting exercise,” Friedman tells Apple Music. “I think it captures the turmoil of us moving on, and these people feeling left behind. The inner struggle of, ‘These people are important to us. I love them, but our lives are growing apart, and I’m changing, so I have to move on.’” *Welcome to My Blue Sky* gave Momma a new spark and a deeper songwriting chemistry that naturally evolved from being such close friends. “I definitely think we wanted to not make a *Household Name* round two, so we were trying to push ourselves to find new things that would excite us,” says Friedman. “With Allegra and I writing these songs with just the two of us on acoustic, it actually allowed more room to play.” Weingarten agrees that their close friendship takes away any hint of self-consciousness that could hamper their creativity. “We’re so connected as songwriters and also friends, there’s a lot less time wasted trying to figure something out on the spot,” she says. “It all came together super fast because when it’s just Etta and I, we can try anything. We learned to trust our intuition and followed that.” From the ’90s slacker sing-along of “I Want You (Fever)” to a nostalgic trip to the grungy dance floor on “Last Kiss,” it’s the sound of a band maturing and moving on up.
Ichiko Aoba has come into her own as one of Japan’s most vital artists since debuting at 19 years old, with her boundless curiosity and musical versatility only growing as her career has progressed. On *Luminescent Creatures*, she casts her gaze toward the sea, channeling its moments of tumult and peace into 11 meticulously crafted songs that glow with awe. Ichiko and her chief collaborator, pianist and composer Taro Umebayashi, deftly lead an ensemble through the Kyoto-raised Ichiko’s brief yet complex compositions, on which she shows her precisely honed instincts for employing both airy minimalism and oceanic grandeur. “COLORATURA” rises and falls like waves, its circling flutes and cascading piano propelling her whispered voice into a tangle of strings; on “Lucifèrine,” she creates a mille-feuille of her own voice, bringing to full brightness the “light deep within the soul” marveled over in her lyrics. *Luminescent Creatures* shows how Ichiko has evolved—not just as an artist, but as an observer of the natural world over the last 15 years.
According to Alex Kapranos, longtime lead vocalist of Franz Ferdinand, fear may be the largest untapped source of renewable energy on the planet. The millennial-era stalwarts are hoping that by charging headlong into that which frightens us most, maybe, just maybe, we’re all capable of tapping into the secret drive hidden on the other side. “I think we all have fears within us and fears that we confront in our life at different times,” Kapranos tells Apple Music’s Hanuman Welch. “And how we react to those fears is how we learn who we are really. And fear is not necessarily a bad thing either. Fear is associated with some of the greatest things you do in your life. Think about asking somebody out on a date: There\'s quite a lot of fear that you have to overcome to do that. Yeah, no. I think it\'s a fascinating insight into who we are.” Kapranos and Franz Ferdinand are no strangers to self-reflection. *The Human Fear* arrives at the peak of millennial-era revivalism thanks to the cresting wave of indie-sleaze nostalgia. But the band’s workmanlike approach to touring hasn’t seen them slow down much in the two decades since their self-titled art-rock debut catapulted them to fame. A lineup change also inspired the band to get back into the studio, where they captured a bit of that anthemic energy on the album’s lead single “Audacious,” a glam-rock bruiser they say serves as a bit of a mission statement for the entire album. “I think the spirit of the song encapsulates what I think being in a band should be, which is quite an audacious thing,” bassist Bob Hardy reveals. “There’s no point being onstage or getting on a stage unless you’re going to do it in an audacious way. If you’re not going to do it the whole way, then what the fuck are you doing?” Much of that “what the fuck are you doing” energy emerged organically when the band reassembled in the studio. Not that a sense of zeal has ever been absent across the band’s discography, but the Scottish quintet wanted to make sure they were hitting the record button with their guitars already firmly tuned. “We made sure that the songs were bangers first and foremost,” Hardy says. “And then we got the band together and learned them. And a lot of the album’s recorded live, so it’s the live sound of the band really tearing into it, and I think it gives the whole record a really exciting feel. It sounds like we’re having fun, and we were having fun making it.” “I hear stories about bands that will go into the studio and say that, ‘Well, the studio\'s jammed a bit.’ And then the record just came, and you can hear it sometimes,” Kapranos adds. “I like the idea of going to the studio when you’ve got some great songs and you know how to play them. I think that makes for a good record.”
After back-to-back albums focused on their love of horror, experimental hip-hop trio clipping. head into the cybernetic unknown on their sixth, *Dead Channel Sky*. Even as their sound has become progressively more streamlined since the lurching abstractions of their self-titled debut on indie institution Sub Pop back in 2014, co-producers William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes conjure pure and jagged bolts of electricity across these 20 tracks, borrowing equally from the mechanical menace of early house and techno and the kitchen-sink IDM of Squarepusher and Aphex Twin. As with clipping.’s previous records, *Dead Channel Sky* is a highly collaborative affair: Wilco guitarist Nels Cline contributes scorched licks to the inside-out instrumental “Malleus” while indie hip-hop legend Aesop Rock lends his distinctive pipes to “Welcome Home Warrior.” But the speed-demon dexterity that is Daveed Diggs’ rapping skills remain as clipping.’s mainframe; he acrobatically hops across the album’s ones-and-zeroes eruptions like a computer virus avoiding detection, guiding listeners through *Dead Channel Sky*’s corroded landscape with ease.
*Rarely Do I Dream* is Trevor Powers’ fifth album as Youth Lagoon and second since he reemerged in 2023 with *Heaven Is a Junkyard* after a seven-year break. Finding Powers sifting through the universe he’s created, discovering joy in what others paint as mundane, it begins with a shuffling drum groove and an audio sample taken from a home movie, setting the DIY, homespun tone for the album. “Speed Freak” features a distorted bass melody and clanging drums accented by a dash of cassette-tape hiss. “Parking Lot” is a gorgeous piano ballad that puts its title in a romantic light. “What a parking lot,” he marvels. “Eight little spaces/Don’t let him lose/Let him cruise for the spot.”
What makes the darkness of billy woods’ raps bearable is that you’re always a step or two away from a good joke or decent meal—a real-world, life-goes-on resilience that has been the bedrock of hip-hop from the beginning. That said, *GOLLIWOG* is probably the most out-and-out unsettling album he’s made yet, a smear of synth rumbles, creaky pianos, and horror-movie strings whose dissonances amplify scenes of otherwise ordinary dread, whether it’s the Black artist trying to charm the boardroom of white executives on “Cold Sweat” or prolonged eviction scene of “BLK XMAS.” Now in his mid-forties, woods is confident enough in his critique to make you squirm in it and has a rolodex of some of the best producers in underground rap to back him up, including Kenny Segal, El-P, Conductor Williams, and DJ Haram. Spoiler alert: The real monsters are human.
On the three fearlessly freaky EPs Saya Gray released between 2022 and 2024, no style was off-limits: Hyperpop, folk, jazz, industrial alt-rock, glitchy electronica, even metal were all fair game, sometimes within the span of a single song. You got the sense the Toronto-based artist was coming up with ideas faster than she could commit them to tape. But for her first proper full-length album, the former musical director for Daniel Caesar and Willow Smith grounds her manic, collagist aesthetic in a more old-school approach. *SAYA* was written primarily on an autumn 2023 retreat to Japan, where she cozied up with an acoustic guitar and reconnected with the music of classic-rock icons like The Beatles and Joni Mitchell. You can feel the difference within the opening seconds of “..THUS IS WHY ( I DON’T SPRING 4 LOVE ),” where a sunrise-summoning melody, gritty guitar groove, and a soothingly slack drumbeat meld into a ’90-style alt-pop anthem. But even when working in more conventional singer-songwriter mode, Gray’s idiosyncratic, genre-mashing spirit cuts through loud and clear: The breezy country lullaby “SHELL ( OF A MAN )” is teed up with a brain-bending acoustic arpeggio worthy of a prog-rock record; “H.B.W” is a harmonious fusion of dreamy psych-folk melodies and dark trip-hop textures; while the exquisitely chill closer “LIE DOWN” sounds like a Fleetwood Mac classic given a dub remix.
Released in the wake of his divorce from singer-songwriter Amanda Shires, 2025’s *Foxes in the Snow* is Jason Isbell’s first solo acoustic album, and his first album without The 400 Unit since his 2013 breakthrough *Southeastern*. But don’t let the context color things too much: Isbell’s best writing has a scythelike quality whether backed by a band or not, and relationships born, broken, salvaged, and mourned have been subject matter for him from the get. The lovelorn will no doubt revel in the agony and catharsis of “Eileen,” “Gravelweed,” and “True Believer” (“All your girlfriends say I broke your fucking heart, and I don’t like it”), but allow us to direct you instead to the folksy, John Prine-like wisdom of “Don’t Be Tough”: “Don’t be shitty to the waiter/He’s had a harder day than you,” and, later, “Don’t say ‘love’ unless you mean it/But don’t say ‘sorry’ ’less you’re wrong.” Anyone can cradle their ego, but it takes a gentleman to know when to put it to bed.
Sleigh Bells have never been ones for subtlety, but *Bunky Becky Birthday Boy* finds Derek Miller and Alexis Krauss taking their sugary, maximalist approach to a new level. The noise-pop duo’s sixth album feels like a distinct departure from 2021’s comparatively smooth and clean-sounding *Texis*, with clear points of inspiration taken from J-pop’s kitchen-sink instrumentation and the spiky electronic pop of new-gen pranksters 100 gecs; opening track “Bunky Pop” pairs hyperspeed blast beats with skipping vocal samples, while “Roxette Ric” runs wild with massage-chair synth rattles and headbanging slices of electric guitar. More than ever before, the bright and sunny choruses of ’80s pop-rock are embedded in Sleigh Bells’ DNA, as evidenced in the oceanic melody of “Badly,” which could easily pass for a peak-era Go-Go’s tune. But such straightforwardness always arrives with an innovative twist in Sleigh Bells’ musical world; witness the surprisingly cloudy New Wave environs of penultimate “Hi Someday,” which flips the chorus of Morrissey’s “Every Day Is Like Sunday” into a passionate, positive rallying cry in support of the great unknown—a fitting gesture for a band that’s never stopped pushing themselves forward.
Great Grandpa’s third album almost didn’t happen. While working on the follow-up to 2019’s *Four of Arrows*, the five-piece drifted apart, with non-band life taking over and the members scattering from their onetime home base of Seattle to further-flung corners of the globe. But fate intervened, and in 2023 the group threw out what they’d been working on and began creating what would become *Patience, Moonbeam*. The album’s ambitious nature becomes immediately apparent with the opening interlude “Sleep,” a brief yet potent string piece that condenses the story arc of a night’s slumber into less than 40 seconds. But *Patience, Moonbeam* packages its aspirations in a collection that has the surface vibe of slacker-pop, with easygoing rhythms, instantly hummable hooks, and fuzzed-out guitars, making its sudden left turns and emotional peaks hit even harder. Take “Ladybug,” which at its outset meshes Great Grandpa’s chilled-out acoustic guitars with the ultra-processed vocals and buzzy synths that define hyperpop. That segues into a more traditional indie-rock shuffle. Lead vocalist Al Menne’s winsome wail free-associates pop-culture images—Donald Glover on the cover of *GQ*, a line snatched from “All You Need Is Love”—before the digitally refracted voice rises up again: “I wish I could feel that good,” it laments, over and over, the mechanized voice conveying genuine longing for a world that should exist somewhere. It’s a wild combination, but Great Grandpa’s ability to bring together those disparate elements and inject them with full-band emotionalism makes everything come together. *Patience, Moonbeam* is full of moments where Great Grandpa explodes in glorious, and at times heartbreaking, fashion. “Task” shapeshifts from hiccuping chaos into a longing hymn; “Kid” reflects on guitarist Pat Goodwin and bassist Carrie Goodwin losing their first pregnancy, all the while knowing that mourning is something not to be rushed. It’s a record defined by wonder and possibility, and it was made by a band that came back together just in the nick of time.
Tamara Lindeman’s music as The Weather Station seems to expand and contract with every movement. The long-running project broke through in 2021 as fifth album *Ignorance* grew her folk-rock milieu to encompass the sounds of sophisti-pop acts like The Blue Nile and Prefab Sprout, while 2022’s companion record *How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars* pared back her arrangements to nearly nothing. On her seventh album, *Humanhood*, Lindeman has blown up her sound yet again: Alongside the nocturnal vibe she so expertly cultivated across *Ignorance*, these 13 tracks—initially recorded straight to tape over the course of two improvisational sessions in late 2023—encompass freewheeling ’60s psychedelic pop, darkly shaded jazz, and flurries of spoken-word sound collage. Joining her trusty supporting players from the *Ignorance* sessions is a who’s who of left-field sounds, including orchestral-folk auteur Sam Amidon and ambient-saxophone jazz sensation Sam Gendel. At the center of it all, Lindeman’s ability to pull back and let silence briefly reign remains as breathtaking as her most acrobatic vocal moments. Her lyrical focus picks up from where she left off on the previous two Weather Station records, pivoting specifically from the encroaching threat of climate change towards an episode of depersonalization she experienced while contemplating the world’s ever-evolving ills. What results is an album that’s contemplative and soul-searching, as Lindeman avoids finding easy answers and instead seems to channel her thought process in real time. “I don’t know quite where to begin,” she sings over the brushed drums and elegiac piano of *Humanhood*’s quietly devastating closer, “Sewing.” “I know it don’t look like I’m doing anything.” Quite the opposite, in fact.
On their third album, Liverpudlian boys Courting continue to invite favorable comparisons to UK pop-rock phenoms The 1975. They both have an obvious predilection for long album titles, and *Lust for Life*’s bait-and-switch opening tracks—the orchestral place-setting of “Rollback Intro” followed by the rude rave music of “Stealth Rollback”—is practically and lovingly ripped from Matty Healy and George Daniel’s playbook. But pithy comparisons otherwise elude Courting’s delightful multifariousness as they smash a brief interpolation of Belle and Sebastian’s “Get Me Away from Here, I’m Dying” turducken-style into the upbeat jangle of “Namcy” and follow the snarling alt-rock of “After You” with a six-minute odyssey of a title track that includes multiple suites and heavy vocal processing. Courting is the type of band to try anything once and immediately knock it out of the park.