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.”
Geese—a band of four 23-year-old longtime pals from Brooklyn and Manhattan—represent such an exciting jolt of rock ’n’ roll possibility that they successfully convinced marquee producer Kenny Beats to change his name in order to work with them. When the members of Geese were still in elementary school, Beats was showing up on increasingly big hip-hop records by Smoke DZA, ScHoolboy Q, Freddie Gibbs, and Vince Staples. But as he doggedly pursued Geese through 2024 and convinced them to give his new Los Angeles digs a try, they offered a caveat: He should drop the Beats once and for all and just be Kenny Blume. The swap proved worth it. Together, Geese and Blume made one of this year’s truly great rock records, finding an often-hidden seam between old-school indie-rock idiosyncrasy and the mainstream’s explosive power. *Getting Killed* feels like a burst of new life. Geese signed a pandemic-era deal for their high-school debut, *Projector*, before raising the stakes with their indulgent, discursive, and beguiling *3D Country*. But their flock unexpectedly grew early in 2025, when *Heavy Metal*—the brilliant solo debut of singer and leader Cameron Winter, actually released late in 2024—became an unexpected and uncanny breakthrough. Fans of that album may recognize its tunefulness at the start of Geese’s “Cobra,” where lilting keyboards indeed conjure “Love Takes Miles.” Aside from Winter’s singular voice and barbarically blunt lyrics, though, the similarities stop there: *Getting Killed*is a savage and beautiful thing, anchored by the athletic rhythm section of bassist Dom DiGesu and drummer Max Bassin and given a serrated edge by guitarist Emily Green. Where “Islands of Men” moves from a warped Rolling Stones strut into art-rock transcendence, “Bow Down” is nervous and mean start to finish, Winter howling about lost love over an instrumental that feels like heart palpitations. Hinging around howled lines about bombs in cars, opener “Trinidad” indeed lands like a piece of twisted scrap metal. Geese, though, can be tender and exquisite. “Half Real” is an anthem for holding love close as the world tries to chip away at it, while the climactic soul stunner “Au Pays du Cocaine” is a let’s-stay-together update for our era of shared discontent. Geese have recently flamed the eternal embers of rock-savior dialogues, their imaginative but relentless approach suggesting for many talk about the next Strokes or Radiohead. And, sure, that might happen. But more importantly, Geese have simply done what so many great rock bands in the past have done—they’ve learned the lessons of their forebears, ripped them apart, and reordered them in a way that sounds as thrilling to them as to us. “I’m getting killed by a pretty good life,” Winter warbles on the title track, echoing Neil Young a half-century on. Whether you’re in heaven or hell, it’s hard not to nod at least a little bit of assent to one of rock’s most electrifying new crews and gripping new voices.
“That’s always something that I get a kick out of: just shaking up expectations,” Kevin Parker tells Apple Music, and after nearly two decades at the helm of Tame Impala, the Australian auteur has left no expectation unshaken. Throughout his zigzagging career, Parker has played the role of headband-sporting hard rocker, cinematic psychedelic architect, indie-R&B crossover king, Diana Ross’ *Minions* soundtrack dance partner, and Dua Lipa’s go-to studio Houdini, but each pivot has only reinforced his reputation as alt-pop’s premier purveyor of hazy-headed dream-state vibes. While Tame Impala’s fifth album *Deadbeat* initially took shape thousands of miles away from his studio in Perth, it nonetheless represents something of a full-circle move for Parker, embracing the coastal environment, isolationist methodology, and liberating blank-slate ethos that spawned his earliest forays into recording. “The album officially started in Montecito,” explains Parker, who decamped to the Californian coast with his wife and toddlers in tow. “My thing is I get an Airbnb somewhere on the coast—I just find places literally as close to the water as you can get. Staring at the ocean for me just helps me get lost, and there’s a tranquility that comes along with it.” And from that oceanic inspiration, Parker was reminded of an essential truth: The beach is a great place to hold a rave. Parker has, of course, been incorporating electronic textures into his work since 2015’s *Currents*, albeit in a manner that still adapted easily to Tame Impala’s arena-rocking live spectacle. But with *Deadbeat*, he surrenders fully to the spartan, strobe-lit allure of dance music, breaking down his traditionally maximalist approach to the most essential raw materials. The opening “My Old Ways” functions as a microcosm of Parker’s journey up to this point: Beginning with an iPhone recording that sounds like a dusty old John Lennon demo, the track hitches its core piano melody onto a hard-hitting house pulse, seamlessly bridging Parker’s classic-rock roots with his current beatmaking mindset. He spends much of *Deadbeat* savvily toeing the line between pop economy and dance-floor abandon. The cheeky, horror-themed “Dracula” is destined to join Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” in the canon of Halloween electro-disco delights; “Piece of Heaven” gorgeously unfurls like an ’80s synth-pop spin on *Pet Sounds*; and “Afterthought”—an 11th-hour addition recorded while the album was being mastered—is an irresistible New Order-esque earworm that makes it clear why this Aussie outsider has managed to infiltrate pop’s A-list inner sanctum. But *Deadbeat*’s most thrilling moments come on extended out-of-body experiences like “Ethereal Connection” and “End of Summer,” where Parker layers psychedelic synths over tough techno rhythms like fluorescent paint splattered on a concrete wall. And yet, even as he’s traded trippy guitar solos for blitzkrieged beats, Parker’s deeply personal songwriting has retained the wistful, self-interrogating quality that fortifies the emotional bond with his listeners. “I’ve always had a sick satisfaction from being hard on myself in my lyrics,” he says. “For me, it’s freeing to make beautiful music and then put a sticker on it that says, ‘That piece of shit!’ It flips around all those feelings that have followed me around my whole life and gives them purpose.”
After the stylistic sprawl of 2022’s *Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You*, Big Thief’s sixth album finds the group bringing their increasingly distinctive sound closer to the vest in a literal sense: *Double Infinity* is their first album as a proper trio, following the departure of bassist Max Oleartchik. As a result, these nine songs—woolly, warm, and with frissons of electricity coursing through their veins—capture Big Thief in a state of ragged intimacy, every melodic turn and shift in instrumentation expanding and contracting like a pair of lungs. The rumbling drum fills and strummy framework of “Words” seemingly stretch for miles on end, while the nearly seven-minute “No Fear” carries a faint gothiness in its inky guitar lines that drip around Adrianne Lenker’s bruising vocals. More so than on any other Big Thief album to date, rock music is the name of the game here; even “Grandmother,” which features ambient legend Laraaji lending vocal incantations, bursts and blooms in a manner not unlike what was coming out of the 1970s Laurel Canyon scene. Wild-eyed and positively hot-blooded, *Double Infinity* is the work of a band that never stops evolving, even as they continue to sound singularly like themselves.
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.
Turnstile is hardly the first band raised in a tight-knit DIY hardcore punk scene to graduate to big-tent popularity and grapple with what that success should look like. For the Baltimore-based five-piece, a stint opening for blink-182’s 2023 reunion tour served as a hands-on apprenticeship. “That summer was definitely a master class of existing in that space,” Turnstile bassist Franz Lyons tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “Riding with blink, they’re great people, but also their supporting cast—everything they do behind the scenes is very sharp, and it was cool to be in a situation where you have to learn how to mend your creative way to a different lens.” These lessons all came in handy in the making of their fourth album, *NEVER ENOUGH*, which doubles down on the genre-expanding—and, subsequently, audience-expanding—twists of 2021’s breakthrough *GLOW ON* and throws in an ambitious visual-album component that ties all 14 songs together. Among those songs are not just the tuneful, heavy midtempo anthems like the title track and “DULL” and hopped-up hardcore like “BIRDS” and “SUNSHOWER” that made *GLOW ON* stand out, but even bolder stylistic gambits like “I CARE” and “SEEIN’ STARS,” which channel The Smiths and The Police, respectively. The nearly seven-minute centerpiece “LOOK OUT FOR ME” somehow seems to incorporate bits of all of these at once. For singer Brendan Yates, who also produced the album, this is all part of a more thoughtful, confident, and collaborative approach to songwriting that was certainly helped by the luxury of having more time—and more resources—to let ideas evolve. “If there is a song that’s just very simple and you’re like, ‘This doesn’t sound like anything we’ve ever done, and maybe people are going to hate this, but the intangible is really there for me right now,’” he says. “So it’s like embracing that.” And sometimes trying new and more daring things also means throwing all those away in the end. Yates cites the album-closing “MAGIC MAN” as a song that began as a demo with just himself and a synth, expanded and contracted through many more iterations, and ultimately wound up as…just himself and a synth. Turnstile credits their versatility and trust in one another to having spent half their lives in Baltimore’s punk scene learning instruments on the fly, playing in multiple bands at once, and innately understanding the importance of community. These lessons, too, come in handy as the band begins to find themselves headlining the kinds of venues—possibly with pit-unfriendly seats—where they very recently were guests. What looks from the outside like complex ambition really is, from the band’s vantage point, little more than close friends with shared history indulging one another’s biggest swings. “When trust is your really big element that makes things function easily, that involves people’s happiness, too,” says Yates. “And being able to just be happy to do what you’re doing and be happy looking forward to what you’re about to do, it requires a certain amount of willingness to throw yourself into the deep end.”
As the frontwoman for pop-punk heroes Paramore, Hayley Williams has spent her entire professional life in the major-label system, having first signed to Atlantic Records in 2003 when she was just 15. But following the worldwide arena tour for Paramore’s 2023 album, *This Is Why*, the contract expired, and she returned to her concurrent solo career as a fully independent artist for the first time, completely unburdened by the weight of commercial expectations—and from any conventional notions of what even constitutes a proper album. In August 2025, she dropped a whopping 17 new tracks online at random, inviting fans to create their own playlist permutations. “I really did want to shirk the responsibility,” she told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe at the time. “I was kind of interested in other people’s perspective, also, because there’s just a point where you’re in the eye of that storm, you’re making things, you’re going through shit, and you can’t possibly have perspective.” However, four weeks after that initial data dump, Williams finalized her own version of the tracklist and officially corralled those songs under the title of *Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party*. You can understand why sequencing these tracks was such a daunting task: *Ego Death* feels a lot like listening to five-disc CD changer stocked with ’90s faves on shuffle mode, bounding between fuzzy Breeders-styled odes to anti-depressants (“Mirtazapine”), No Doubt-like tropical-pop mash notes (“Love Me Different”), and pure Alanis-worthy catharsis (“Hard”); she even works the chorus of Bloodhang Gang’s “The Bad Touch” into the grungy folk dirge “Discovery Channel,” transforming the original’s horndog hook into a raw expression of animalistic lust. But while *Ego Death* draws from a kaleidoscopic pop palette, Williams’ punk-rock heart beats loudly throughout, as she takes side-eyed shots at the Nashville establishment on the deceptively breezy title track, while using the gothic trip-hop backdrop and deadpan Lana-esque vocal of “True Believer” to paint a damning portrait of so-called Christians who “pose in Christmas cards with guns as big as all the children.” As a parting gift, Williams appends *Ego Death*’s original 17 loosies with the previously unreleased “Parachute,” which seamlessly folds Williams’ punk past and alt-pop present into a triumphant closer that sounds like Chappell Roan working up the nerve to stage-dive into the pit at Riot Fest.
Alex G’s cryptic, heartfelt indie rock has earned him friends in interesting places: He contributed guitar and arrangements to Frank Ocean’s *Endless* and *Blonde*, he co-wrote and produced about half of Halsey’s *The Great Impersonator*, he’s toured with Foo Fighters, and he soundtracked Jane Schoenbrun’s 2024 movie *I Saw the TV Glow*—a movie that, like G’s music, seemed almost instantly destined to be a cult classic, playing with nostalgia for early-’90s pop culture in ways that felt both comforting and deeply unsettling. He’s not a household name, but he touches a nerve. His first major-label album (whatever that really means in 2025), *Headlights*, isn’t different from his run of Domino albums (2015’s *Beach Music* to 2022’s *God Save the Animals*) in kind so much as in degree. “Every couple weeks, I’d have a new song and just start working on it,” he tells Apple Music. “And then, at the end of a couple of years, I guess I had these 12 songs that were good.” The conventional tracks are more straightforward (the early Wilco stomp of “Logan Hotel”), the experiments are both bolder and catchier (the Auto-Tuned hyperpop of “Bounce Boy”). For an artist who can pull deep feeling out of vague stretches of sound, he’s gotten incredibly good at knowing how to use detail and when: Just listen to the accordion that seeps into “June Guitar” or the girls’ chorus that drifts in and out of the alien-abduction/high-school-football story (yes) “Beam Me Up”—touches that feel both unexpected and irreplaceable. The result is an album that feels less like a collection of indie-rock songs than a dream about collections of indie-rock songs—vivid but patchy, intimate but abstract, emotionally deep but totally indirect. In some ways, he’s just another point on the continuum of artists like Pavement or The Velvet Underground, both of whom managed to balance directness with abstraction, shadow with light. In others, he feels perfectly made for his moment, an enigmatically normal-seeming guy whose gift for melody and cool fragments of sound work as well as background vibes for chill times as hermetic texts left to be parsed by comment-section scholars. There’s a reason his fans latch on so tight: Like a good dream, Alex G points toward mystery.
A key theme of The Beths’ fourth album is that linear progression is an illusion. “I feel like there’s a through line of difficult things happening, and the realization that everything \[is\] not going to keep gradually improving, and that life is often a bit more cyclical, or more of an up-and-down that you’re constantly moving through,” vocalist/guitarist Elizabeth Stokes tells Apple Music. “Which sounds like a depressing thought, but it doesn’t feel depressing. It doesn’t feel optimistic either. It’s just what it is.” In the years preceding the album’s creation, Stokes underwent several challenges that reinforced this notion. Having started taking an SSRI to address mental and physical health issues—she’d recently been diagnosed with Graves’ and thyroid eye disease—she found that the medication’s positive impact was countered by a clouding of her ability to write music. “I wasn’t able to write a song,” she explains. “I feel like I lost my internal compass. The SSRI was great for digging me out of the hole I was in, but my writing is so emotionally driven and my gut reactions were so different.” To counter the writer’s block, Stokes read Stephen King’s *On Writing*, *How Big Things Get Done* by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner, and *Working* by Robert A. Caro. At one point, she spent every morning writing 10 pages of stream-of-consciousness material on a typewriter. “I’d write about stuff I don’t normally like to write about because it’s too painful or close to home, or it makes me feel weird,” she says. “So, I was able to approach some of that stuff and ended up using a lot of that material. I’ve always written emotionally and from my own experience, but it feels like it’s going further than that. It’s definitely gone deeper.” Whether addressing the numbing side effects of the SSRI in the ragged, frenzied “No Joy” or Stokes’ complicated relationship with her mother in the fragile “Mother, Pray for Me,” *Straight Line Was a Lie* maintains the New Zealand quartet’s knack for pairing pop-infused melodies with spirited, jangly indie rock. Here, Stokes takes Apple Music through The Beths’ fourth album, track by track. **“Straight Line Was a Lie”** “Once I’d found the through line, I didn’t think we had a song that summed it up. I was on the bus on the way home after a session of working on the album and sang it into my phone. I don’t normally do the thing where the second verse is just the first verse, but it felt appropriate for it to be circular and feel like a journey you go on again.” **“Mosquitoes”** “It’s mostly about Oakley Creek, which during the \[2023\] Auckland Anniversary Weekend floods got wiped out. It’s a very beloved space. It’s now 2025, and it still hasn’t recovered. There are no paths anymore; it’s kind of grown wild a bit and changed a lot. To some extent, it feels like a lot of life is just being eroded, but nature continues on in a way that’s comforting. You can say Oakley Creek got destroyed, but it didn’t. It’s still there—it’s just different.” **“No Joy”** “It’s about not finding joy in the things that you normally find joy in. It’s weird. You’re not sad, but you’re also not able to find happiness. It’s its own weird purgatory. That came out in the song where it’s a very tense, neurotic riff. Nothing’s very high or very low; everything’s in the middle but trying to make it feel fun despite that. You don’t want the song to make you feel nothing.” **“Metal”** “It’s talking about existing in a human body and all the systems and functions that your body needs. It’s very complicated, and it’s kind of a miracle that it exists. But also, I’m going through all this weird health stuff, and I don’t really feel in control of what is happening in my body and my brain. I was trying to learn about what was going on with the human body and just being frustrated that I didn’t understand it, and the song’s kind of ping-ponging between those two perceptions of yourself.” **“Mother, Pray for Me”** “It’s about my relationship with my mother. She is a first-generation immigrant from Indonesia. We moved to New Zealand when I was four. It’s about our relationship and the gulf of understanding that exists between us, where we don’t really understand each other, and our lives growing up were such different experiences, and this feeling of trying to meet in the middle and understand the other.” **“Til My Heart Stops”** “It’s a very yearning song. I quite often feel like I push people away. It’s very easy to isolate yourself, especially if you’re feeling a bit weird and you can put walls up between you and other people: people that I love, people that I know well, people I wish I knew better. But there is this real desire to be a part of the world and be close with other people and to not have that. The euphoria I want to experience is there at the end of the song, but you have to fight to get to it.” **“Take”** “‘Take’ is really fun to play. It’s kind of hectic and driving. It’s about the call of the void of taking something to help you through when you’re struggling, whatever that is for you, whether it’s drinking, which is the national sport of New Zealand and Australia sometimes. The call of it is very strong. It’s just about coping, I guess.” **“Roundabout”** “It’s quite constructed, more so than our other songs, and a lot more spacious than we normally are, which is kind of scary. We always want to fill every inch of space. It’s about people you’ve known for a very long time and how you love all the different versions of them. People that you’ve known since you were different people, and you know that you’re going to be different people again in the future.” **“Ark of the Covenant”** “That’s a reference to Indiana Jones. It’s like, don’t look at the Ark of the Covenant ’cause if you look at it, your face will melt off. Sometimes you feel like there are things in your brain which you don’t want to visit, things about yourself that you don’t want to address, ’cause they feel terrifying. And then, you look at them, and they’re not the Ark of the Covenant. Your face doesn’t actually melt off. It’s fine.” **“Best Laid Plans”** “It’s just a fun song to finish on. It’s about the fantasy of giving up and indulging yourself in that. You know you can’t, you can never give up, you shouldn’t give up. But sometimes, when something’s hard, you’re just like, ‘But what if I just did it?’ What if I just let go and float away?’ It’s just embodying that feeling as an indulgent fantasy, and then afterwards, you can come back to earth and get it done.”
Love, Davina McCall, and making more tunes to play live: Wet Leg’s inspiration for their second album sounds like it came easily, but they had to shift into new territory on *moisturizer*. Their debut—2022’s *Wet Leg*—provided 36 minutes of lo-fi hooks, wit, and twentysomething confessions to catapult them into a BRIT- and Grammy-winning swirl of well-deserved hype. After a relentless but enjoyable touring schedule, they decided to escape to a seaside town for two weeks at a time to turn their attention to album number two. “I think we’re really fortunate we can write in that traditional band setup,” Rhian Teasdale tells Apple Music’s Matt Wilkinson. “When we stopped touring, we were like, ‘OK, what are we going to play when we go on tour again? Let’s make some tunes.’” So the band decamped to a house in Southwold, Suffolk and got to work. “There was a kid’s playroom with some LEGO around, so we took the majority of the stuff out and put all of our gear in it,” says guitarist Joshua Mobaraki. “Some days we were like, ‘OK, let’s start at this time and put a shift in.’ And then other times, it was 1 am and all of a sudden we were writing again. It was really cool.” *moisturizer* finds the band once again teaming up with producer Dan Carey and repeatedly nailing the perfect three-minute song on 12 tight tracks. They admit they give away more of themselves than they did on *Wet Leg*. While “catch these fists” has a strong message about reclaiming personal space, they stray into more romantic territory elsewhere. Hester Chambers wrote “don’t speak” for Mobaraki, who’s also her partner, but she subverted the idea. “She wrote me a song from me to her, which is really cheeky,” he says. “CPR” captures the feeling of infatuation, while “davina mccall” and “11: 21” sum up more secure, longer-term love, which are themes Teasdale had avoided before this album. “I’d never even attempted writing any kind of lyrics that were to do with love,” she says. “I had this rule when I was younger to just not even use the word ‘love.’ I was really hesitant because I felt like there were so many love songs out there. Also, it didn’t feel very authentic. When I was younger, I don’t think I really did know love, so I was just pulling out cliche after cliche.” On *moisturizer*, Wet Leg sound as vital and adventurous as they did on their debut—but there’s a new assurance creeping in too. “Our position as a band is to just constantly be surprised that people still want to listen to it,” says Mobaraki. “I don’t know if the imposter syndrome goes or it’s like you turn it into something else. It’s a way of not being like, ‘Everyone’s telling us that we’re amazing. That means that we are amazing.’ Instead, it’s just like, ‘Huh, let’s do another song. I like that one. Let’s do another one.’ I think we’ve developed and grown and we’re different now. We’re giving ourselves permission to take up space.”
Strings and other orchestral elements add a soaring sense of adventure to prolific Melbourne ensemble King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard’s 27th studio album. Recorded concurrently with 2024’s *Flight b741*, *Phantom Island* was made in collaboration with composer Chad Kelly and a full orchestra. Yet, there’s plenty of room for loving forays into psych, boogie rock, and other fertile territory. The opening title track even flirts with cinematic jazz in the manner of Quincy Jones or David Axelrod, before “Deadstick” leans into the interplay between guitars and horns as singer Stu Mackenzie nails some particularly pleasing falsetto. Taking flight is a recurring theme on the album, as heard on “Aerodynamic” and “Grow Wings and Fly.” Layered vocals make “Eternal Return” especially lush, with the lyrics saluting the touring life while still longing for the gum leaves and unpredictable weather of Melbourne. And between warm hand drums and funky guitar flourishes, “Panpsych” feels like the sonic equivalent of comfort food. Having played together across so many albums and tours, it’s only natural that the band members are beautifully in harmony as Kelly’s agile arrangements guide these jammy songs skyward.
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.”
Over the past few years, the North Carolina natives have carved out their own distinct (and influential) lane in indie rock: *Twin Plagues*, the band’s 2021 breakthrough, introduced fans to their noisy hybrid of shoegaze and country, while 2023’s *Rat Saw God* helped kick off a new generation’s alt-country revival. Wednesday’s sixth album, *Bleeds*, hones their signature sound—often gnarly, occasionally sublime—with lyrics by bandleader Karly Hartzman that play out like contemporary Southern gothic short stories unfolding inside of dusty dives or along the banks of creeks in her hometown of Greensboro. *Bleeds* arrives in the wake of a pivotal time for the five-piece band (singer/guitarist Hartzman, guitarist MJ Lenderman, lap steel/pedal steel player Xandy Chelmis, bassist/pianist Ethan Baechtold, and drummer Alan Miller): Hartzman wrote much of the album during a grueling world tour, in the midst of which she and Lenderman ended their six-year romantic relationship. But the songs of *Bleeds* are intimate in a different way entirely, built around strikingly detailed anecdotes picked up from conversations with friends or overheard bar wisdom. “Weeds grew into the springs of the trampoline/You saw a pit bull puppy pissing off a balcony,” Hartzman sings on “Wound Up Here by Holdin On,” jointly inspired by a line from a friend’s poem and a story about a body pulled out of a West Virginia creek. A rerecorded version of “Phish Pepsi,” first released on Hartzman and Lenderman’s 2021 collab EP *Guttering*, recounts a weird, stoned teenage memory (“We watched a Phish concert and *Human Centipede*/Two things I now wish I had never seen”). And their small-town transcendentalism is at its best on “Elderberry Wine”—the prettiest they’ve ever sounded, though not without its ennui.
The fact that Dijon Duenas had a hand in producing one of 2025’s most anticipated indie-rock releases (Justin Vernon’s two-part Bon Iver opus *SABLE, fABLE*) and most surprising pop-star comeback (Justin Bieber’s *SWAG*) speaks to his singular standing in the contemporary musical landscape. Arriving mere weeks after he became every Belieber’s most popular search term, Dijon’s second full-length, *Baby*, is an open invitation for his recent converts to follow him deeper into his lo-fi underworld—and a reassurance to his longtime fans that he isn’t farming out all his best production ideas to famous guys named Justin. On the conjoined opening tracks “Baby!” and “Another Baby!,” Dijon comes off as part Prince, part Salvador Dali, rendering his sensuous serenades in pitch-shifting surrealist style, like tapes from a late-night “Paisley Park” session left out to melt in the morning sun. And whether he’s indulging in the sound-collage gospel of “HIGHER!,” the distorted dub-soul of “FIRE!,” or the barking dog-assisted folk ballad “loyal & marie,” Dijon’s real superpower is crafting straight-from-the-heart songs and then throwing them delightfully off-balance, perpetually dropping elements in and out of the mix with a “what does this button do?” sense of mischief.
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.”
Following the widescreen dream pop of 2021’s *Blue Weekend*, Wolf Alice felt some sonic skin shedding was in order for their fourth album. “We were thinking about what we were doing in a much more calculated way,” bassist Theo Ellis tells Apple Music’s Matt Wilkinson. “I don’t know whether it’s age or whether it’s having done this for the fourth time, but less was more with this record.” Recorded in LA with Adele/Paul McCartney producer Greg Kurstin, *The Clearing* finds the North London four-piece stripping back the alt-rock fuzz and shoegazey FX that had characterized their earlier releases for a more classic sound. One with a warm analog glow and rich FM radio-friendly melodies that positions them closer to ’70s soft rock than the 2010s indie scene from which they broke out. Listen closely, and there are nods to that golden era bubbling up throughout *The Clearing*: drummer Joel Amey’s “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover”-cribbing shuffle on “Leaning Against the Wall,” the ELO/Beach Boys chug that drives “Bread Butter Tea Sugar,” and guitarist Joff Oddie switching between breezy strumming, intricate fingerpicking, and searing melodic lines like *Rumours*-era Lindsey Buckingham. Such echoes reflect the band’s listening habits: a stack of records on heavy rotation in the studio that included Fleetwood Mac, George Harrison, and folk-rock outliers Pentangle. “This time, we weren’t afraid to give references. Maybe in the past I felt that I didn’t want to give them because then it would sound like that,” singer Ellie Rowsell says of the band’s touchstones when making *The Clearing*. “But now I felt much braver to say, *this* is my reference. I knew that it was going to sound like us because I understood what we were a bit more.” The wide-open space afforded by *The Clearing*’s musical palette allows Wolf Alice’s finest set of songs to date to shine. Whether it’s “Just Two Girls’” sparkling, disco-flecked pop, Rowsell’s hushed reflections on aging and motherhood on “Play It Out” or “White Horses”—a remarkable interpolation of folk and krautrock that startles without having to turn everything up into the red. “Maybe there are people who are scared of rock music that is soft. ‘Soft rock’ has felt like something I should never say out loud up until now,” reflects Rowsell. “I don’t care. I’m interested in music that you can play live that is energetic and performative without having to be all distortion pedals and shouting and fast and loud. I like that stuff still, but there’s certain songs that we have in our set where I’m like, ‘Why is this an “up” part of the set when it’s just a good acoustic guitar?’ Or, ‘How come I feel like I am giving 100 percent when I’m not stomping around on stage screaming in people’s faces?’”
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.
Don’t tell Danny Brown he can rap over anything. Even if it’s true—the Detroit rapper has paired his dexterous rhymes and his stretchy, versatile voice on prog rock, EDM, boom-bap, and seemingly everything in between—he’s weary of people making more of his expansive tastes than they are. “I don’t want it to be a gimmick,” he tells Apple Music. “Is the music enjoyable or not?” From that perspective, it makes perfect sense that Brown chose to build his new album, *Stardust*, in the sounds of the hyperpop scene. Not only is it a natural progression sonically from previous albums like *XXX*, *Atrocity Exhibition*, and his *SCARING THE HOES* collaboration with JPEGMAFIA; it’s also the perfect soundtrack for this stage of his life. Brown’s previous solo album, 2023’s *Quaranta*, was largely somber and reflective: While its title was designed to commemorate him turning 40, the lyrics found him picking up the shattered pieces of his life after years of substance abuse, a messy breakup due to infidelity, and music feeling more like a job than a tool of creative expression. But on *Stardust*, he’s confident, excited, and having the time of his life. “Sleeping real good at night, ’cause I’m proud of myself,” he raps on album opener “Book of Daniel.” “Say a prayer when I wake up because that rehab helped.” He says that his drug-addled party raps in the 2010s and early 2020s were initially just a result of trying to rap about something different from the dope-dealing bars that populated his earlier work. “I don’t ever think I heard the word Adderall in a rap before I said it, and now it’s just normal,” he says. “But I’m not proud of that at all. ’Oh, I created drug culture in rap.’ That’s not how I want to be remembered. That’s why I’m off that shit.” A collection of beats and choruses by hyperpop heavy hitters like Quadeca, Holly, and underscores are bright, eccentric, dance-ready, and skittery. But Brown insists that upbeat instrumentals don’t mean the raps lack substance. “If the beats are going to be more poppy than normal, I gotta talk about something. I can’t let it be dumbed down,” he says. “I knew I wanted to say something, but I didn’t just want to repeat myself, And I didn’t want it to be the ‘I’m sober’ album. To me, that’s no different than me making a druggie album again.” These aren’t just mindless pop tunes, even if they go down easy. “Lift You Up” is a dance-ready number with Angel Prost (her Frost Children sister Lulu Prost also shows up on the album) about a toxic relationship, while “Flowers” features a chorus by vocalist 8485 and joyful, triumphant raps about how Brown has persevered through hard times. “Starburst” has Brown landing boastful punchline raps over a discordant, screeching beat, and “1999” pairs more confident bars with skittery synths and metal-heavy shrieks by JOHNNASCUS. “The End” is the most powerful of all, though: a nearly nine-minute journey in three parts, with Danny vulnerably revisiting his years of addiction with candor, clarity, and accountability before making a promise to himself to never go back. The ethereal drum ’n’ bass sound bed and dreamy vocals by Zheani make the song sound like the closing credits on a samurai video game from the 2000s. It’s a fitting conclusion for someone who’s crystal clear about his priorities for the first time in way too long. “50 Cent told me,” Brown says, “that if I just wanted to make music for myself, I might as well just stay in my basement.”
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.
In the seven years since Dev Hynes last released an album as Blood Orange, the English musician wasn’t exactly twiddling his thumbs. After 2018’s searching *Negro Swan*, the scene veteran released a mixtape (*Angel’s Pulse*) and an EP (*Four Songs*), composed soundtracks for film and TV, and hopped on records with Lorde, Turnstile, and Vampire Weekend. All the while, he contemplated the future of Blood Orange. “I’m always making music,” Hynes tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. But before he could release it, he had to answer his own questions: “Why should it exist? What’s the point?” Then Hynes’ mother died in 2023, and the direction for the fifth Blood Orange album, *Essex Honey*, became clear. Set in the county outside London that Hynes once called home, it’s a sublime examination of what “home” even means, refracted in the prism of his elegant hybrid of hazy pop, feather-light funk, and ghosts of post-punk and New Wave. Echoes of distant music memories forge pathways into the past: “Regressing back to times you know/Playing songs you forgot you owned/Change a memory, make it 4/3,” Hynes sings on “Westerberg,” its title a nod to The Replacements’ lead singer and its hook a play on the band’s 1987 track “Alex Chilton.” More Easter eggs are buried in the bass grooves, sax solos, distorted guitars, and orchestral swoons—a Durutti Column sample on “The Field,” an Elliott Smith interpolation sung by Lorde on “Mind Loaded,” a line about writer’s block delivered by Zadie Smith on “Vivid Light.” The prevailing mood is liminal, surrendered between past and present, though in Hynes’ hands, purgatory sounds heavenly.
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.
If the title of Deftones’ 10th album seems provocative, that’s because it’s supposed to. “I like the exclusivity of the name,” vocalist Chino Moreno tells Apple Music. “It feels restricted, maybe naughty. It has all these connotations. But it was the name of the folder on my desktop where I would put stuff while we were working on all the songs.” Written and recorded over two and a half years in Nashville, Joshua Tree, and Rick Rubin’s Shangri-La studio in Malibu, *private music* sees Moreno, guitarist Stephen Carpenter, drummer Abe Cunningham, and keyboardist/turntablist Frank Delgado reteaming with producer Nick Raskulinecz, who helmed their 2010 album *Diamond Eyes* and 2012 album *Koi No Yokan*. The album’s first single and leadoff track, “my mind is a mountain,” came out of a studio jam. “It was one of those songs like ‘Change,’” Carpenter says, referencing the band’s signature tune from 2000’s *White Pony*. “We were just in the room messing around, and it started forming.” “I love the fact that it’s bombastic,” Moreno adds. “There’s a push and pull in that song that I really love. It’s heavy, but the one way that we collectively always describe our band is, no matter what style of music it is, we always like to feel that you can nod your head to it. This song has that head-nod thing.” “i think about you all the time” came out of a quiet moment Moreno had on the beach near Shangri-La. “I remember getting up in the morning, walking down the street, jumping in the ocean, coming back in my swim trunks and sitting there in my bare feet with the guitar and just start playing,” he says. “That night, I made a cup of coffee and said, ‘Nick, let’s record that thing I did this morning.’” “milk of the madonna” is a thunderous Deftones banger, with Moreno’s emotional tenor soaring over the band’s swirling, writhing tempest. “infinite source” was the first song written for the album: Carpenter came up with the original idea in Nashville before he, Moreno, and Cunningham completed it on tour. As Moreno points out, *private music* has staying power. “Nothing feels like it was a snapshot of that time and now we’re in a different place,” he says. “Two and a half years after their inception, the songs still feel very much immediate.”
Even though HAIM named their fourth studio album—and first since 2020’s *Women in Music, Pt. III*—*I quit*, the trio of sisters aren’t quitters. “Quitting can be looked at as giving up in normal circumstances,” bassist/vocalist Este Haim tells Apple Music. “We look at it as a new beginning and betting on yourself. We quit things that don’t serve us anymore.” The follow-up to their Grammy-nominated opus takes its name from a scene in 1996’s *That Thing You Do!* where the band’s leader announces his departure by snapping his fingers and sing-talking the words “I quit”—a move the women use regularly as an inside joke. “One day, we were checking the mic and we did it again,” Este adds. “We were like, ‘Wait, should we name our album *I quit*? Say that again.’ ‘Wait a minute. Should we?’ It took on a life of its own.” Produced by Rostam and lead vocalist/guitarist Danielle Haim, the band’s latest takes parting shots at the people in their lives who have seemingly done them wrong. (And with single artwork inspired by paparazzi pics—most famously for “Relationships,” a cheeky take on the iconic post-divorce Nicole Kidman photo—the Haims aren’t just speaking to their romantic follies but the celebrity and industry machine at large.) Appropriately, the opening track “Gone” samples the George Michael smash “Freedom! ’90,” setting the tone for the album’s message: liberation from anything and everything that may have restrained them. “I’ll do whatever I want/I’ll see who I wanna see/I’ll fuck off whenever I want/I’ll be whatever I need,” Danielle intones. Their songs range from groovy (“Down to be wrong”) to nostalgic (“Take me back”), dreamy (“Lucky stars”), and bluesy (“Blood on the street”). “All over me” feels straight out of a ’90s rom-com montage, and “The farm” gives off a Sheryl Crow-infused vibe. The contemplative “Everybody’s trying to figure me out”—co-written by Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon—also offers a meditation on self-acceptance: “Everybody’s got their own decisions, and I know that I’ve got mine/And I’ll be fine.” Ultimately, though, the sibling rockers see their new work as fit for the stage, and that’s important to how they create their music, Este explains: “We always think about our live show when we are writing songs, because that’s really where our heart is—playing live.” **“Gone”** Alana Haim: “‘Gone’ was actually the last song that we wrote for this album. We were listening to the album and it felt like we really needed an introduction to the world of *I quit*. Before ‘Gone’ was written, it felt like it was going into, it needed that breath of, ‘Okay, we’re starting the album.’ We started with that guitar line—I think Danielle had this—and it kind of just came out. I think every songwriter would say this: There’s this spiritual muse that comes into your brain sometimes, and we love that muse. We pray for that muse to kind of let us be the vessel. But we were kind of hanging on this one note, and Danielle just kind of blurted out, ‘Can I have your attention, please?’ And we were like, ‘Oh, we’re starting now.’” **“All over me”** AH: “Maybe other people are very open with their siblings. We are not! I don’t want to know! But when we were making ‘All over me,’ we had fallen into this time where we were all single and we were all having very different experiences, but they were all coming kind of from the same point of view: We were all having these one-night stands and we were all having these crazy-ass stories about these one-night stands. ‘All over me’ kind of just blossomed from that time.” **“Relationships”** Danielle Haim: “This was one of the hardest songs to crack—and honestly, there’s always one on every album. It’s always kind of like our favorite one. ‘The Wire’ was very tough to crack; ‘Want You Back’ was super tough to crack; ‘The Steps,’ super, super tough to crack. This is in the same lineage as those. It went through a bunch of different versions, but it’s one of my favorite songs we’ve ever written.” **“Down to be wrong”** DH: “We knew we were writing songs in the studio with Rostam and he’s always so supportive of searching for different sounds. I know we were like, ‘Yeah, we’re making an album,’ but it wasn’t until we wrote that song where we were like, ‘Okay, wow, we have one super down.’ Not to sound weird, but it was just that was the one where we were like, ‘Holy shit, I do think we have a great song here.’ And when we got that chorus, I think it kind of just opened up something within all of us.” AH: “When we wrote that chorus of just screaming, we were visualizing just playing it live and screaming with everybody and getting that weight off your shoulders. It was a very cathartic day in the studio.” **“Take me back”** DH: “Our friend Tobias Jesso Jr. was in the area when we were working on this in the studio. Honestly, we didn’t plan on writing anything; we just wanted to show him an update of what we had been making. He’s from Vancouver, and we somehow got on this conversation about high school, and what we were doing during high school.” Este Haim: “I’m just going to say, to be fair, all three of us went to the same high school, so we don’t really have any perspective on what it was like to go to school anywhere else.” AH: “That day, it was filled with so much joy and this nostalgic feeling of reminiscing about that funny time.” **“Love you right”** DH: “That was one of the first songs we wrote. ‘Love you right’ came from a drumbeat. I feel like we needed to have this kind of moody, really in-the-pocket drum, like roomy-sounding. I had this whole vision in my head.” AH: “We’re extremely inspired by the drums. A lot of these songs were birthed out of Danielle cooking on the drums.” **“The farm”** AH: “It was a somber day in the studio. When we made this album, we were all across the board extremely happy that we were single. But then there are those moments where you have to be self-reflective and you’re in your home alone and you realize that you’re a human being that has emotions, and you’re looking around your house where there’s no noise. You’re just sitting in silence and you realize: You know what? I’m alone. ‘The farm’ is that kind of song where you’re reflecting on that time of being alone. Learning to be okay alone with yourself is the most important lesson you can learn just being alive.” **“Lucky stars”** DH: “It’s a very optimistic song. There were some really amazing times through these last couple of years where we were meeting new people. There were some that just fully came into our lives, maybe for not that long, but it was truly so fun and inspiring. It just was like, wait, this person’s amazing. It’s reflecting on putting yourself out there and then also wondering why some people come into your life and being so thankful for that, but also just kind of being like, ‘Wow, I’m so happy that I met this person.’ Is it in the stars or what, I wonder, or is this just kind of happening?” **“Million years”** AH: “Saying, ‘I’ll carry you on my back even if it takes a million years,’ to me, that is kind of like an ode to my siblings. Anytime I’m feeling low, I’m so lucky that I was born with my two best friends. In \[my\] low points, I get to call my siblings and they know exactly what to say. It’s an ode to anyone in your life that you’ll have forever, that has your back.” **“Everybody’s trying to figure me out”** DH: “That song’s really close to my heart. It’s probably my favorite one on the album. It started after a bit of a panic attack after tour. I just remember sitting down and writing, ‘Everybody’s trying to figure me out and that’s all right,’ which I think, at the time, I lost track of a bunch of people and got really in my head. I used the whole song as a bit of a mantra to remind myself that I’m okay, and you think you’re going to die, but you’re not going to die. When I’m having a bit of a panic moment, it’s a really helpful mantra.” **“Try to feel my pain”** DH: “It’s a bit like holding up a mirror, maybe to yourself, and maybe a bit to your partner, and realizing that sometimes you can feel yourself a bit numb within a relationship. And I think that’s a bit like putting everything on the table and putting a mirror up to it.” **“Spinning”** AH: “The first song that I’ve ever sang lead on—so daunting! I had just started dating someone, and I was so fucking obsessed with that ooey-gooey first four days where you are falling down the rabbit hole. You’re getting calls and you see their name and you get all butterflies and all those ooey-gooey first moments. The relationship lasted very little time after I wrote the song. I fall head first into every relationship; I really throw all caution to the wind. The man that it’s about has no idea. And in the grand scheme of things it was a very insignificant part of my life, but for that moment, it was great. I wish I could bottle the feeling, but it’s now bottled in a song.” **“Cry”** EH: “This is the first song I’ve sung lead on by myself—like Alana said, super daunting. I fashion myself a bass player first and maybe a singer after that. When we came into the studio \[that day\], I was crying, which is not a rare occurrence. I tend to feel things—maybe not deeper than most people, but I’m a pretty sensitive bitch. I was with someone for almost five years and we left on completely amicable terms, but even when that happens, you’re still mourning the loss of something, almost like having a best friend and then all of a sudden they’re gone. I was talking about it in the studio, and I said his name, and I just burst into tears. I can’t remember what sister it was—it might even have been Rostam—but someone was like, ‘We should probably talk about this with music. Let’s harness this feeling while it’s fresh.’ I had been bottling up a lot of what I was feeling in order to just survive. Hopefully I’ll be able to get through it on tour. Even when I was hearing it in the studio, I just starting crying. So hopefully I’ll get my shit together and get tear duct surgery before that and just plug them up.” **“Blood on the street”** AH: “On our first album, we had ‘The Wire.’ On our third album, we had ‘Hallelujah.’ And I think when it came to ‘Blood on the street,’ we really wanted a song where we each sing a verse. And me and my siblings grew up jamming together. I will say, we were in a very interesting place mentally when we wrote that song, but it was like this feeling of just being like, to be frank, ‘Fuck you for fucking me over.’ We really did get all of our aggression out. We’ve been playing it live, and that song live is the biggest release.” **“Now it’s time”** AH: “We were just kind of throwing spaghetti at the wall when we were making this. Obviously we love U2; we interpolated their guitar riff from ‘Numb.’ It was an exchange because U2, they have a song on *Songs of Experience* called ‘Lights of Home’ where they interpolated Danielle’s guitar riff from ‘My Song 5.’ This album really is this beautiful journey of self-exploration for us, of feeling comfortable in your own skin and being okay with just being with yourself. In this song, we’re standing on this solid ground with our six feet of being like, ‘We have now given you every emotion that we felt like in this chapter of our lives—and now we’re on the other end and just we’re complete.’ This feels like the end of this chapter and we can close the book, put it on the shelf and just say, fucking, ‘I quit.’”
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.
The Florida-born singer-songwriter’s 2022 debut album, *Preacher’s Daughter*, was not exactly standard pop fare—a Southern Gothic odyssey steeped in themes of original sin and family trauma, whose fictional protagonist (spoiler alert) dies at the end. Nevertheless, the album broke through to the mainstream, even cracking the Top 10 of the Billboard 200 following its vinyl reissue this spring. Her long-awaited second album, January 2025’s *Perverts*, sat somewhere between passion project and provocation; its 90 minutes of eerie ambient collages seemed designed to challenge fans, if not shake them off entirely. Eight months later, Cain’s third album revisits the narrative that began with *Preacher’s Daughter*, whose centerpiece, “A House in Nebraska,” is a melancholy ode to Willoughby Tucker, the protagonist’s first love. *Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You* functions as a *Preacher’s Daughter* prequel—a story of two young, damaged lovers for whom doom is a powerful aphrodisiac. “I can see the end in the beginning of everything,” she sings on the reverb-drenched “Janie” before concluding grimly: “It’s not looking good.” Between sprawling ambient-folk stunners like “Nettles” and “Tempest,” Cain slips in a handful of moody instrumental interludes à la *Perverts* and a pair of fan favorites initially released as demos: “Dust Bowl,” a staple of her live sets for years, and the 15-minute “Waco, Texas,” for those who like their slow-dance numbers with a hearty dose of fatalism and a sprinkle of ’90s cult lore. Fitting for a concept album set in 1986, there’s also “Fuck Me Eyes,” a synth-pop power ballad starring a hell-raising, denim-wearing angel.
Like the so-called slackers of early-’90s alt-rock (Beck, Pavement, etc.), Mac DeMarco’s sleight of hand is to make beautiful music without apparently trying—a chiller so chill he doesn’t write songs so much as wait for them to come snuggle up in his lap. *Guitar* is his most quietly striking album since the landmark *Salad Days*, stripping the slimy synth textures and bubbling drum machines out of his early sound to reveal sparse, paper-thin soft rock whose eerie melodies and gently jazzy chord progressions have more in common with ’40s-era pop like The Ink Spots and The Platters than anything from the underground (“Sweeter,” “Nightmare”). “Miracle, reveal yourself to me,” he sings at the beginning of “Holy,” channeling the meditative stillness of a John Lennon demo or early-’70s Al Green. It might sound wimpy at first. Then you realize a sound so naked and dry leaves him nowhere to hide. That’s strength.
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.”
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.
Each Stereolab album functions as a portal to a future we once imagined but never achieved: a world of flying cars, egg chairs, and space-age bachelor pads where the coolest Franco-pop, German psychedelic, and Brazilian jazz records are spinning 24/7. And so it remains on the indie icons’ first new album in 15 years, which begins with a minute-long flourish of oscillating synths that sounds like an old mainframe being rebooted back to life. *Instant Holograms on Metal Film* finds the Stereolab machine in perfect working order after an extended period of inactivity, and, if anything, the group sounds eager to make up for lost time with gloriously overstuffed songs that key in on familiar pleasure points while introducing all manner of shapeshifting surprises. “Immortal Hands” eases you into a laidback loungey groove before hitching itself to a funky drum-machine beat and coasting through a dizzying swirl of brass and flutes; “Electrified Teenybop!” plays like the theme music to some alternate-universe dance show where the kids get down to a frenetic fusion of ping-ponging Kraftwerkian electronics and lustrous disco orchestrations. But, as ever, Stereolab’s splendorous soundworld is built atop a foundation of pointed political commentary addressing our present-day struggles and inequalities: Embedded within the breezy kaleidoscopic pop of “Melodie Is a Wound” is a scathing indictment of social media disinformation and the oppressive elites that manipulate it to their advantage. And yet, when the band returns to their motorik hypno-rock roots for the song’s exhilarating second act, they reassure us that utopia is still within our reach.
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.
In complicated times, a simple pleasure can feel more important than it’s meant to be. Certainly the news that Allison and Katie Crutchfield were going to make their first album together since the demise of P.S. Eliot, the DIY-punk band they’d formed as teenagers, could have been rapturously greeted by a substantial sector of the 21st-century indie-rock fandom. Add to that the revelation that this project was being made in collaboration with MJ Lenderman, contemporary avatar of the loose-limbed guitar-driven rock that the sisters have been helping to keep from falling out of vogue, and Snocaps could have been hailed as conquering heroes. Instead, the existence of the band was a secret until the moment their self-titled (and appropriately candy-themed) debut arrived on Halloween 2025. As surprises go, it’s a modest one, but maybe more welcome than could have been anticipated. The same can be said of the music itself: 12 songs (and a cute album-ending reprise) led by chiming guitars and the twins’ vocals that feel simultaneously low-stakes and vital, logically splitting the difference between the rougher-hewn rock of Allison’s post-P.S. project Swearin’ and Katie’s (Grammy-nominated!) Americana-skewing Waxahatchee. The Crutchfields and Lenderman play all the instruments, along with North Carolina-based producer Brad Cook, who also helmed the last couple of Waxahatchee albums; it would be tempting to float the dreaded “supergroup” label if everything else about the project didn’t resist that kind of portentousness.
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.
“We were feeling really energized, confident, and excited,” The Last Dinner Party singer Abigail Morris tells Apple Music, as she thinks about making their not-very-difficult second album, *From the Pyre*. “There was no pressure from any outside force. It was all coming from us, what was inspiring us and what made us excited in the studio.” After the huge buzz (and BRIT Awards) that followed their debut album, 2024’s *Prelude to Ecstasy*, the band found the follow-up came surprisingly easily. Combining heavy themes and postmortems on past relationships with imagery involving nature, fire, and farming implements, the five-piece still manage to make their lyrics wry and cheeky. “This Is the Killer Speaking” takes them into murder ballad territory, while “Inferno” finds them watching *The Real Housewives* as a way of dealing with their meteoric rise. “The record feels simultaneously a lot darker, more serious, and aware of the state of the world,” says Morris. “Also, I think it’s tongue-in-cheek sometimes and a bit wry, which is the way we approach the world: having that balance of absurdity and deep emotion.” In early 2025, TLDP teamed up with Grammy-winning producer Markus Dravs. “We admired so much of his previous work,” says bassist Georgia Davies. “He’s worked with Florence, Wolf Alice, and Björk and we were like, ‘Tick, tick, tick.’ We didn’t have all the songs fully written like we did with the first album. There were seeds of ideas and skeletons of songs that we built up all together as we were going along, which was a different process. It was really fun as well.” The last step was to name the album, which happened over dinner and sake in Japan. “Having a really evocative title like that is important,” says Morris. “I love the word ‘pyre.’ It’s so medieval. The record’s meant to be a dark *The Canterbury Tales* \[Chaucer’s Middle English pilgrimage collection\].” Read on as Morris and Davies take you through *From the Pyre*, track by track. **“Agnus Dei”** Abigail Morris: “I wrote this in three parts because I had a crush on someone and was imagining being with them. We actually got together, and then I wrote some of it about that, and when we broke up, I finished it. Lyrically, it’s a nice way to set up the record because a lot of the songs are discussing relationships. It’s about the nature of being a musician and having a romantic life, writing about people you date and how you mythologize the other person and make them immortal by turning them into a character in the song. Sometimes you write about someone you only met once or sometimes it’s a relationship. I think it’s just the way we communicate if you choose to date only musicians.” **“Count the Ways”** Georgia Davies: “This was an old song. We were trying to work on it for the first album, so we had the genesis, but took it down a thousand different roads. All of them were dead ends. So we revived her for the second album. We were in America and listening to Arctic Monkeys, and we were like, ‘Oh, it should sound like *AM*.’ So I wrote the intro and the bass guitar line that runs throughout the song. It’s very fun to play, and I feel like people will sing along to it. Then it built up, and we added this choir outro with crazy strings.” **“Second Best”** AM: “This came from Emily \[Roberts, guitarist\] because of a relationship that she went through. That was a really interesting song lyrically because Emily started it and she wrote the choruses. Then, she took it to Lizzie \[Mayland, guitarist\] and Lizzie wrote the intro, and then I wrote the verses. So it was a committee song, which we’ve never done before. Emily was like, ‘This is what the song’s about. Interpret that.’ It’s about feeling inferior and betrayed and frustrated at being let down by someone you love and feeling you’re not their priority. It was a creative writing exercise.” **“This Is the Killer Speaking”** AM: “I was upset, confused, and angry after being ghosted for the first time, so I decided that the way to process it was to write a character song and make it funny. Originally, I wrote it just for myself as a joke. I was listening to a lot of Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Nick Cave and thinking, ‘I want to write a song like that.’ I think it was easy to make light of it instead of getting angry because, obviously, I don’t want to murder anyone.” GD: “This was also the song I think that helped us realize the concept of the album. It’s so character driven and we were thinking about how it sat and what connected this cowboy murder ballad to songs like ‘Agnus Dei’ and ‘Inferno.’ Using the lens of this song helped us to figure out what the whole album was about.” **“Rifle”** GD: “Lizzie wrote the lyrics for this one, and I think that it’s both metaphorical and quite literal because it’s talking about warmongering in general. Obviously, looking at it now, it’s quite clearly about the genocide in Palestine, but it’s also about how it would feel to know and love someone who went on to wage war and the devastation and anger that would cause to a mother. The whole song is quite angry in the choruses, but I think that clouds over this deep sadness and devastation. When the French section in the middle occurs, it feels like a parting of clouds temporarily for this personal address to one another, which is in the two-part harmony.” **“Woman Is a Tree”** AM: “This was another one that came from a place of wanting to do something specific with a song in the same way that ‘Killer’ was a murder ballad, but I wanted to write a folk song about womanhood, female friendships, and how men factor into your circle. I was drawn to this classic metaphor that a lot of folk stories and myths use, which is conflating women in nature. I feel like there’s such a rich well of imagery to draw on, and I wanted to write something more atmospheric. Not about one specific thing, but more of a mood of relating my perception of femininity to my perception of nature.” **“I Hold Your Anger”** AM: “Aurora \[Nishevci, keyboards\] wrote this song late in the process, and we were like, ‘That has to be on the record.’ We’re all in our mid-to-late-twenties, and this is the time when you start thinking about motherhood, family, and what you want from your life and feel intimidated and frightened. If you want children you have to decide, ‘So do I want to do an album or to have a baby?’ I can’t imagine trying to do both at the same time.” GD: “I think that Aurora saw her own parents make so many sacrifices for her. It’s about the expectation as well as the anxiety of ‘Am I capable of being this selfless to give my entire being to another person? What is the expectation of a mother?’” **“Sail Away”** AM: “I wrote this with my boyfriend at the time, maybe four years ago. We had the chorus and lyrics, and, at that time, it wasn’t about our breakup. Then, I started trying to write the verse lyrics when we were still together and nothing really was sticking. I got custody of the song, so when we broke up, I was able to write the verse. The processing of the breakup was tumultuous, so this is me trying to distill every good thing about the relationship into one song. Even if relationships end badly, it’s nice to be able to recognize the good moments. It’s the same person I wrote ‘Nothing Matters’ about, so it’s like this is the circle on the next record. We were in a car and now we’re on a boat.” **“The Scythe”** AM: “I wrote the chorus as part of another song when I was a teenager, and it wasn’t really about anything, because at that age I hadn’t been in a relationship. I found it a few years ago and started writing on top of it with more experience of love, then I realized that I was actually writing about grief. The nature of grief is it takes years and years to realize what’s going on and how deeply it’s affected you. My father passed away when I was 17, and now I’m 25 and still figuring out how to talk about that loss. When I was writing a song about a normal breakup, I realized that I was also writing half from the perspective of me and half from the perspective of my mother.” GD: “I think one of the beautiful things as a result of putting the song out is all of our comment sections on Instagram and YouTube become these places where people come to share their own stories of grief and the way that they respond to it, how it makes them feel held and comforted to hear this beautiful perspective on grief.” **“Inferno”** AM: “‘Inferno’ is my favorite song on the record because it’s the last one I wrote. So it feels the most up-to-date with where I am as a person. I wrote it on a break from touring in Paris—I was walking around and there was an art gallery with a crucifix hanging in the window. It looked so weird and out of place in this really brightly lit, white gallery. The song’s about being in the band and the swirling chaos of how it felt to come up over the last 18 months. There’s a reference to *The Real Housewives* because if we weren’t going out, Georgia and I would sit in our hotel room shellshocked and watch it in silence.”
Though 2023’s *Everyone’s Crushed* marked a significant breakthrough for experimental New York pop duo Water From Your Eyes, they didn’t change much in recording its 2025 follow-up, *It’s a Beautiful Place*. The band, which consists of Rachel Brown and Nate Amos, made the album where they have always recorded: in Amos’ bedroom. The homespun feel doesn’t necessarily lend itself to the sound, though, which finds Water From Your Eyes at their sharpest and most daring. “Life Signs” imagines a middle ground between post-punk and Anticon-style abstract rap. “Nights in Armor” bursts with crunching guitars and a pummeling floor tom, an atmosphere that moves to the background as layers of Brown’s vocals fight for space amid the chaos. No sound, no concept, no lyric is off-limits for the duo, and it’s exhilarating to witness just how many disparate ideas they consistently attempt to fit into traditional and non-traditional pop structures.
Watching the pure joy of Glastonbury-goers doing the Woke Macarena to CMAT’s anthem “Take a Sexy Picture of Me” at her 2025 performance might make you think Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson is having an easy time being a pop star. But the story behind her third album, *EURO-COUNTRY*, released two months later, suggests otherwise. “I didn’t think I was going to make another record so quickly, and when all these ideas started landing, I knew I needed to do this before I could do anything else,” CMAT tells Apple Music of the follow-up to 2023’s *Crazymad, for Me*. “It was a very hard album to make for a number of reasons, and it’s a very heavy subject matter. What we were trying to pull off was so difficult that I had a really hard time making it. But that being said, I’m really proud of it,” she says. It’s a big album. While “Take a Sexy Picture of Me” provided the perfect—and well-deserved—pop crossover, complete with viral TikTok dance, CMAT was keen to stay true to her roots and go “full country” on songs like “When a Good Man Cries.” CMAT recorded the album in New York, addressing themes of grief, loss, and “the ambition to be bigger and more important than you currently are,” both in terms of herself and her native Ireland. “In general, I have to work on things on the road when they’re in their infancy,” she says. “But place-wise, I think this album was born of grief and loss and sadness and stuff, and things being put into perspective for me in a way that they hadn’t been before. All of this suffering I endured making it, and now I’m bearing the fruits.” Read on as CMAT talks through *EURO-COUNTRY*, one track at a time. **“Billy Byrne from Ballybrack, the Leader of the Pigeon Convoy”** “I definitely needed something to open up the record that wasn’t my voice. A lot of this album is criticizing Ireland, which is something I love more than anything else in the world. So, I wanted something that captured my love for it and to show people I wasn’t coming from a snotty place. One day, I randomly came across a documentary, and this scene happened. Billy Byrne is about to free a lot of pigeons, and this is a phone call that he makes from a telephone box that’s in the middle of a beach. He sums up everything that I love about Ireland: its weirdness, its beauty, and its warmth.” **“EURO-COUNTRY** “‘EURO-COUNTRY’ is a bit of a Frankenstein song—I wrote bits of this years ago for a completely different thing. I knew the album was going to be called *EURO-COUNTRY* and then I thought, ‘I’d love a title track for this record.’ Usually, it’s the other way around. The line ‘I feel like Kerry Katona’ came because I have a real fascination with beautiful blondes who are destroyed by the press. I’ve written about Princess Diana and Anna Nicole Smith in the past, and I think Kerry is another one of those women that was rinsed by the British press, completely fucking unfairly. I really do admire her, and I think she’s very strong.” **“When a Good Man Cries”** “I’m really glad the way those two songs run into each other. That’s one of the most successful bits of the album. I needed to go full country immediately, so everyone knew what the record was. This is me going in on myself because I made an ex-partner cry. He hadn’t done anything wrong. There’s this thing in third-wave feminism, which is, I feel, now outdated, where women should be like men. Making a man cry is turning a trope on its head. I repeat ‘Kyrie Eleison’ \[‘Lord have mercy’\] over and over again at the end, which is a reference to my favorite song of all time, ‘The Donor’ by Judee Sill, in which she’s begging God for another chance to become a good person.” **“The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station”** “‘The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station’ is a meditation on irrational hatred and intolerance. It’s based around me getting annoyed every time I saw a poster of Jamie Oliver because when we were on tour, we’d eat a lot of sausage rolls from his branded delis. I don’t actually have any beef with Jamie Oliver, so I’m kind of like, ‘Ciara, you need to stop being a bitch. He’s got kids.’ And then there\'s a stream-of-consciousness section in the bridge where I’m going through my own history to try and figure out how I became such a bitch. I think it’s good to be self-critical—I don’t think anyone should ever rest on their laurels when it comes to kindness and their capacity for it. We should all be trying way harder.” **“Tree Six Foive”** “This song has been around for two years, and it used to be called ‘365,’ but there’s a little artist called Charli xcx who released a song with the same name, which is enormous. So, I was like, ‘I can\'t call it that, so I’ll just call it what it is in my phonetic spelling.’ It’s about looking back on my history again and thinking about a time where I made the decision to try and not to be treated badly anymore. I wanted it to be a proper flashback of a song. Even though I don’t have these feelings anymore, it’s a former version of myself that’s doing bad foreshadowing. A stupid song written by a stupid person to illustrate the person that I used to be, I guess.” “Take a Sexy Picture of Me” “If I’m making an album that is so much about capitalism, the cruelty of the modern condition, and how lack of community has made everyone be an asshole, I had to do one song where I was like, ‘I have also been a victim of this.’ The thing that had been rattling around in my head the most was last year, when we were doing festivals, and there were all the comments being nasty to me over my physical appearance and my weight. I remember saying, ‘Let’s make this the most accessible-sounding, biggest, fattest pop song so that loads of people are forced to listen to the most uncomfortable lyrics I’ve ever written.’ Under no circumstances did I think it was going to go anywhere near as big as it did, with Julia Fox doing a little TikTok dance to it, but I knew it would pop off in some way.” **“Ready”** “A lot of people in my life really loved this song, but I didn’t know how I felt about putting it on a record because it felt too optimistic and poppy. And I still don’t really know how I feel about the song, but I really like the place that it occupies in the record. It’s about somebody who is giving up after a period of complete stagnation. I wrote it in a COVID-y time. I’m saying I’m so bored of having depression that I’m going to do something self-destructive but fun because I don’t care anymore.” **“Iceberg”** “This is a song about my best friend Bella. It’s funny, we’ve been best friends since we were 14, and I’m a pop star and she’s a lawyer. She’s the most studious, hardworking person in the world. When she got her job which she’d worked towards her whole entire life, I saw the pressures of this ambition and this full-time work completely beat her down for a while. And she started to go in on herself. I found it really funny that she thought that I wouldn’t know she was suffering. This is the thing in female friendships that I think is so beautiful—you cannot pull the wool over my eyes. I know who you are. There’s a joking line in the beginning of it where I’m like, ‘Where did you go, crazy girl boss?’” **“Coronation St.”** “I wrote bits of this when I was 23. Leaving something to sit and marinate in one form for seven years is something I like doing, so it’s like I’m in collaboration with a former version of myself. It’s about jealousy, being stagnant, and feeling like I didn’t get everything I thought I was owed by life. I wanted to capture that deadness and feeling of having nothing happening in your life and really double down with hindsight just how harrowing it was. I used to do a weird job managing and cleaning apartments in Manchester, and one of them overlooked the set of *Coronation Street*. I found it mad that it was fake buildings. I was like, ‘Wow, even Coronation Street’s not real.’” **“Lord, Let That Tesla Crash”** “Weirdly, this is the least profound song on the record. It’s about loss. My friend died, and I had to write the story of us in it because it was the first time I lost someone I was really close with. You make friends with people without thinking much about it, just enjoying their company. And then, when they’re gone, you realize what the point of them was. I only realized how much he meant to me when he died, and so much about his death annoyed me. I felt quite stupid being a touring musician/pop-star person because I was like, ‘What\'s the point in this?’ And then, I went to see the flat we both lived in together, and there was a charger and a Tesla parked outside it, and I remember being so angry about that.” **“Running/Planning”** “I wasn’t going to bring this song to the studio, but we made a draft of it in one night, which sounds almost exactly the same as it does now. It was so instinctive and so immediate. This is another song about ambition, drive, and the downsides of it. I was thinking about how there’s a treadmill of life that you get on when you’re in a heterosexual relationship. You date for a couple of years and then you get engaged, get married, and then you have a baby and live the rest of life. There’s a transactional element to romantic relationships that muddies something that’s otherwise quite beautiful. And also, societal pressures to conform. With conformity comes the weird prejudices against people who don’t \[conform\]. Carving your own path and going against it makes your life so hard.” “Janis Joplining” “‘Janis Joplining’ is a name I’ve given to being self-destructive. What’s weird is that’s not what the song’s about. I just thought it was a good line. Maybe it’s a bit salacious, but I had a crush on a guy who was married, and I realized a lot of it was born of seeing him and his wife interact with each other. Actually, what I was longing for was the community they had formed and their intimacy. It ends the record because after everything I’ve just spoken about, what I want is this egalitarian relationship and to comfortably talk intimately with everyone in the world, and if I can’t have it, then I self-destruct and go Janis Joplining. I wanted to end on a note that sounds like I think I have a solution to all the problems I’ve just spoken about for 45 minutes.
In the decade since 2015’s *I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside* dropped, Earl Sweatshirt transformed from Odd Future’s mumbly alumnus into one of the most unique hip-hop artists of his generation. The acerbic idiosyncrasies and deceptively lethargic flow that made the ruminative rapper so compelling early on in his run metamorphosed over time to place him in an even less categorizable stratum. More recent work, like 2022’s *SICK!* or the following year’s *VOIR DIRE* with The Alchemist, found him seemingly examining and embracing the possibilities of brevity, doing more by saying less and keeping his projects as concise as they are insular. In line with that apparent methodology, *Live Laugh Love* contains songs that are often quite brief, filling the space provided by his curatorial left-field beat selections with pithy, incisive bars and comparatively looser vocal riffs. Some of these producers have been by his side for a while, namely Black Noi$e and Navy Blue who, respectively, contribute to roughly half the tracks. Apart from a sole instrumental from underground climber Child Actor—the murkily soulful *2 Fast 2 Furious* nod “Heavy Metal aka ejecto seato!”—the remainder come from Theravada, a New York-based artist who Earl’s fans may recall from *SICK!*’s “Tabula Rasa.” The first four songs here benefit from his beats—from the squirmy filter funk of “gsw vs sac” through the percussive jolts of “Gamma (need the <3).” Yet regardless of who happens to be behind the proverbial boards, *Live Laugh Love* is anchored by Earl’s unconventional appeal and discursive proclivities. “INFATUATION” mixes metaphors as if they were recipes, serving up tastily reconstructed wordplay seasoned with heady poetry. Among the longest songs here, “Live” cautiously raises one of the album’s oft-revisited trope dissections—dying on a hill—before spiraling downwards with a beat-flip to match the mood. The slightly redacted “CRISCO” offers up a fractured narrative flecked with graphic imagery, while “WELL DONE!” subversively flexes in different directions than most rappers could even attempt. On the closing “exhaust,” he comments on both work ethic and something far more personal, vacillating between civil splits and parting words of wisdom, albeit with the occasional Erykah Badu interruption.
After years spent grinding on the DIY circuit under aliases like Mother Marcus and Riley on Fire, the Baltimore musician (born Marcus Brown) took on the Nourished by Time moniker in 2019. He broke through with 2023’s *Erotic Probiotic 2*, his first album as Nourished by Time—a swirl of lo-fi synth-pop, post-punk, funk, and R&B that made capitalist critique sound cool. On his second full-length (released on XL Recordings, as was his 2024 *Catching Chickens* EP), Brown simplifies his sound without sacrificing its freewheeling eccentricities and lyrical nuance. Here, songs about love reveal themselves as songs about surviving and finding meaning in an alienated, oppressive modern world. “Know he’s got a purpose/But he’s always working/Tryna beat the system/Manifest a vision,” he sings on “9 2 5,” which transmutes day-job drudgery into piano-house euphoria. Here and there, shimmers of beauty and absurdity shine through the cracks, like a story of a half-baked psychic reading on “Idiot in the Park.”