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.
In following up their 2021 album, *Infinite Granite*, Deafheaven have chased a seismic shift with a melding of strengths. Whereas *Infinite Granite* almost completely abandoned the band’s black-metal roots for clean vocals and a lush shoegaze sound, *Lonely People with Power* combines elements of both. “To me, this is the ultimate Deafheaven album,” vocalist George Clarke tells Apple Music. “I think it harnesses all these disparate ideas that we’ve had over our entire career in the best way that they’ve ever been done. While it does include sonic touchstones from our earlier albums, it also includes some from our more recent material—just done in a way that, I think, is smarter. If we were to stop at this point, I think this is the record that would best explain what it is we do.” Lyrically, *Lonely People with Power* explores exactly what the title implies. “Initially, there was this broad scope that recognized that people who tend to want to amass power, people who tend to seek influence, are also people who tend to lack intimate connections,” Clarke says. “They’re people who are what I keep describing as spiritually vacant. I think there’s a void there that is often wanting to be filled with this sort of ephemeral influence. “As we kept writing and the subject matter got more personal, I was thinking about the idea of what is passed on to us,” he adds. “Life lessons, things that you learn from your parents, things that you learn from your teachers, and how their handicaps and their perspectives shape your own worldview. And how, in a sense, everyone wields a certain amount of power. Everyone, in a sense, is a lonely person with power.” Below, Clarke comments on each track. **“Incidental I”** “The melody in ‘Incidental I’ appears again in ‘Doberman.’ A lot of the incidentals and the way that they function within the album were created by \[guitarist\] Kerry \[McCoy\], who very much likes to conceptualize records by using melodic reprisals. This one of the three is the shortest, but certainly one of the most mood-setting tracks of the record. I really love the way that it came out. It’s quite simple, but effective.” **“Doberman”** “This was the last song we wrote for the album. To me, it was the big single, which we ended up not going with. But in my estimation, it has a lot of our strengths. What I really enjoy about it is that we leaned a little further into Emperor-like qualities in the chorus and used these types of synth textures to enhance the chorus parts. And the bridge is very Aphex Twin-influenced. To me, this is our Emperor/Aphex Twin record, which is fun.” **“Magnolia”** “We decided on this as the first single because we wanted to come out with a haymaker. It’s one of the most to-the-point songs we’ve ever written. I think it’s very interesting and catchy, but in a condensed way that we’ve not yet explored in previous albums. The beginning riff is something that we had been sitting on since 2023; it was our soundcheck riff. Kerry came up with it, and it would often get stuck in our heads. Some of our writing happens on tour in those moments because everyone’s onstage, and we developed it from there.” **“The Garden Route”** “A lot of these songs really benefited from what we had learned on *Infinite Granite* in terms of songwriting and how to structure a song that’s lean and transitions well but still has an emotional punch to it. I think this song is one of those examples. It really couldn’t have been written without having done *Infinite Granite*. And I like that we sometimes do this harsh vocal over a clean guitar, which we first experimented with in 2014 or ’15. At the time, it was almost uncomfortably jarring but has since really become part of our sound.” **“Heathen”** “Again, a song that really could not have been written without *Infinite Granite*. The thing that was interesting with this song is that we had originally thought there would be no clean vocals on this record. But Kerry had this vocal idea for the beginning, and it really stuck with me. It was immediately catchy, and it really fit with the lyrics. After a quick conversation, we decided that the most Deafheaven thing to do is to do what’s natural to us and what we think sounds best. Setting a precedent for ‘no this’ or ‘no that’ was really contradictory to our whole ethos. And I’m glad we did because I think it’s a welcome element once you’ve gotten this far into the record, to hear this variety. It’s one of my favorites lyrically, too.” **“Amethyst”** “As we were writing this, we felt it was going to be the centerpiece of the album. I think it’s the favorite song on the record for a lot of us within the band. It might be my favorite. To me, it’s a fresh take on a very classic Deafheaven sound and structure. It has all the things that I like. And then, lyrically, it’s a centerpiece as well. The album artwork and the photography within the record are based on the lyrics to this song. I think both sonically and thematically, this is maybe the strongest representation of the album.” **“Incidental II” (feat. Jae Matthews)** “This was a lot of fun to put together. We have Jae Matthews from Boy Harsher on the track. We’re big Boy Harsher fans, and we have a lot of mutual friends. I was talking to one of them about what we were working on, and he suggested that we get in touch with Jae. We got on the phone, and I explained the themes of the album, and I sent her a very early version of the song to see if she was interested. She was excited, which I was really happy about. We flew her out to LA and spent a day in the studio. She wrote the lyrics for it after we discussed it. Much like ‘Incidental I,’ it’s such an important mood piece to the album, especially going into ‘Revelator.’ I think the two connect in a really wonderful way.” **“Revelator”** “This song is the bruiser. It’s just a lot of fun, and the credit goes mostly to Kerry. This is where his head was at a lot of the time when we were making this record, just wanting to go fast and write something that was pissed but sort of unhinged. There’s this clean break, and then it goes into this chaos of blast beats, and we layered a thousand guitars. It’s a very high-energy song, and one that I think is really built for our live show as well. A lot of these songs were written with the live show in mind, and I think this one most of all.” **“Body Behavior”** “I love this song. It is, even within our repertoire, a pretty strange one. It was the first song we wrote for the album. The guys were listening to a lot of krautrock, and so the verses come from there. It’s bass- and drum-driven and very cool. Again, that thing happens where this record couldn’t have been written without *Infinite Granite*. The entire bridge section is this *Infinite Granite* by way of \[Radiohead’s\] *In Rainbows* type of beautiful interacting guitars. Overall, I think this song was a little bit of us figuring out what we were going to do next. The first song you write for something new is always a little bit of that.” **“Incidental III” (feat. Paul Banks)** “This was purposely written to go into the next song, ‘Winona.’ They share the same kind of chord and lead structure. We discussed doing a monologue here, and then we agreed that it would be interesting to have someone other than me voice it. Having Jae on ‘Incidental II’ and Paul \[Banks\] from Interpol on this lets our audience more into the broader world of Deafheaven and what we like. To me, it’s obvious that we like Boy Harsher and Interpol, but I don’t think everyone else maybe sees it that way. This gives us an opportunity to show how well-rounded the project is—and to work with people that we really admire.” **“Winona”** “Winona is a 5,000-person town in Mississippi. It’s a town where my grandparents lived. A lot of my family is buried there and is from there. Along with ‘Amethyst,’ this is the other big epic on the record. The coolest thing about this song, for me, is that there’s a choir on it, which repeats throughout the track, and the choir is just a bunch of our friends. It was six men and six women, and Kerry and I conducted them, which we’d never done before. Much of the choir group were producers and musicians with real orchestral experience, so we’d be side-eyeing them, like, ‘Are we doing OK here?’ It was a lot of fun to make.” **“The Marvelous Orange Tree”** “The song is named after a magic trick from the 1830s, and it always felt like the closer. Again, with the clean vocal thing, while we were writing the song, we were just like, ‘This makes sense here. We should embrace this skill set.’ To me, it’s our big Mogwai track or something. It’s a really cool midtempo song that’s focused on density more than anything else. Because of that, it really sets itself apart from the rest of the record. It’s pure heft and no speed. It’s just a nice flavor to round out a record that dabbles in a lot of different things throughout.”
Noah Lennox used to feel as though his solo work as Panda Bear was, in his words, “disparate and separate” from the music he’d make with Animal Collective. But now, over two decades on, it seems more like one continuous project. “Playing drums in AC, singing in AC, writing songs for AC, doing features, doing remixes, doing this record where I’m collaborating with all these different people or getting these different flavors from different people,” Lennox tells Apple Music, “it all kind of feels like part of the same creative wave.” “This record” is *Sinister Grift*, the first Panda Bear album to feature contributions from all three of his Animal Collective bandmates—David “Avey Tare” Portner, Brian “Geologist” Weitz, and Josh “Deakin” Dibb—not to mention collaborations with Patrick Flegel (aka Cindy Lee) and SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE’s Rivka Ravede. Recorded at his home studio in Lisbon and in his hometown of Baltimore, it’s meant to feel like a contemporary take on an early rock ’n’ roll record, with Lennox opting to illuminate the natural qualities of the music, rather than distort or deliberately obfuscate them, as he did on 2019’s *Buoys*. “It still feels very contemporary, very plug-in, very digital audio workstation to me,” he says. “There’s echoes of older music that I love in there, but there’s no retro-ness to it, I hope. I’m not a big fan of that kind of thing.” Front to back, the album is meant to mirror what Lennox calls the “playful menace” at the heart of its title—an idea he’d had before he’d written a single lyric. Before falling into the abyss of its second half, the music feels effervescent even when the songs themselves are anything but. “‘Sinister grift’ is this lie that we tell ourselves, that if we’re just careful enough or if we’re ‘good people,’ we can somehow avoid suffering or regrets, mistakes, hurting ourselves or people—this very inevitable part of living,” he says. “I like contrast. I feel like the light is lighter when it’s put against darkness, or things are funnier when they’re addressing something really dark. But it really started just because I liked the title. I like how it sounded, I like how it looked on paper. It sounds kind of dumb, but sometimes things start really simply like that.” Here, Lennox takes us inside a few songs from the album. **“Praise”** “It kind of started as a song thinking about my son—the anecdote about him not picking up his phone is very real. But then it became a song more about fatherhood and then a song about parenthood. There’s this fire driving the relationship, where it feels like no matter what the kid does, he’s not calling you back. If he’s maybe being a little difficult or acting up, there’s this sense that there’s an underlying force, that unbreakable thing that drives the relationship.” **“Anywhere but Here”** “I stole pretty wholesale the idea from a \[The\] Louvin Brothers song called ‘Satan Is Real,’ where there’s a vocal refrain, and then he preaches or tells the story for a second. I’m a huge fan of that record, but that song specifically. I thought it would be cool to try to do my own version of that. I think my original idea was to ask my daughter Nadja to do the spoken-word part, which she wrote. But then I asked Dean Blunt to do it, and he was down, but he couldn’t. Ultimately, I was so excited about getting my daughter onto the thing and, lucky for me, she was down to do it eventually—as long as I paid her.” **“Ends Meet”** “This song always reminds me of ‘Monster Mash.’ It’s a song about appreciating life, including the more difficult things. The ‘Monster Mash’-iness comes from the sense that there’s something coming to get you—these difficult things in life are going to happen to you, no matter what you do. But it’s said in this very playful way, which I hoped was fun. I find that telling a joke is a way to enter into a difficult conversation. A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.” **“Just as Well”** “I’m a huge reggae fan, huge dub fan, and I’m always looking for a way to do something that feels reggae without explicitly being reggae, and there’s a couple attempts on this record. I’d say ‘Just as Well’ is one and the other ‘50mg,’ which feels a bit like a cross between a reggae track and a country track to me. I feel like this song is maybe the best attempt I’ve made at doing something that feels like an impression of reggae. It’s something that I feel like is always in me, but doing a version of it that feels genuine is difficult.” **“Ferry Lady”** “There’s a lot of percussion in it, but it’s not actually a drum kit playing, unlike most of the other songs. It feels kind of like the gateway to the second half of the record to me. It’s in between the lightness and the dark, the ferry from one side of the record to the other. It’s about any type of relationship that has ended and hasn’t ended like you thought it would, about people growing apart.” **“Venom’s In”** “‘Venom’s In’ is about having a reality thrust upon you in life and not wanting it. It feels like the character in the song can tell that change is coming and wants to stop it, but knows it’s impossible. So the venom is already in the body, the change is going to happen. It’s a pretty desperate song to me—it feels very low.” **“Elegy for Noah Lou”** “That one represents the original vision for the record, insofar as I thought we were going to do these straight-ahead recordings: guitar, bass, drums, singing, and I would play everything. The original idea was to spend months following the recordings, abstracting those forms or blurring them. But as we worked with the arrangements, we got the structures and the tone of the stuff really right, so a lot of the stuff felt like it was done, like it didn’t need to grow into anything else. So that idea of blurring everything we left behind, except you hear it a little bit in this wasteland section of the record. ‘Elegy for Noah Lou’ is where it kind of feels like the song is sort of there, but it’s muted and more like an impression of the song than a song.” **“Defense”** “I was a huge fan of Patrick \[Flegel\]’s, from Women forward. He had played some shows with the rest of the AC guys at some point, had stayed at Josh’s place coming through Baltimore once or twice. We actually recorded right before *Diamond Jubilee* came out, so I kind of feel like I snuck it in a little bit. It was just one of those things where Patrick was the first person I thought of to do it. I knew Patrick could handle the guitar work and, thankfully and very luckily for me, Patrick was down to do it.”
Around the time of her big break with 2022’s *Preacher’s Daughter*, Ethel Cain was dubbed a pop star, though it was often hard to tell from her songs. Aside from “American Teenager,” a Springsteen-esque anthem that laundered sneakily unpatriotic sentiments through arena-ready melodies, that album’s songs were largely dirges (gorgeous ones, at that) preoccupied by ideas of doomed love, faith, and fate. Written and produced almost entirely by Cain (the stage name and alter ego of Hayden Anhedönia), the project’s lore was nearly as compelling as the music itself, launching Anhedönia into something like stardom. Since then, Anhedönia’s spoken freely about the pitfalls of popularity; she penned a Tumblr post last year identifying an irony epidemic within online fan culture: an aversion to approaching art with sincerity rather than memes. You could be tempted to view *Perverts*, Cain’s first release since *Preacher’s Daughter*, as a provocation—an often-challenging 90-minute work that seems designed to scare off a stan or two. Songs like “Pulldrone” and “Housofpsychoticwomn” are noise experiments that stretch well past the 10-minute mark, full of eerie drone, depersonalized spoken word, and terrifying imagery regarding sex and sin. The moments of hard-earned beauty feel all the more rewarding: the fuzzy, sultry “Vacillator,” or “Etienne” and “Thatorchia,” a pair of elegiac instrumentals that sound like beams of heavenly light piercing through the darkness.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
Horsegirl were in high school when they recorded their debut LP *Versions of Modern Performance*, an eye-opening, words-blurring blend of ’90s indie rock that was meant to feel live and loud. But the Chicago trio—Nora Cheng, Penelope Lowenstein, Gigi Reece—became a New York trio as they began working on its deeply personal follow-up, *Phonetics On and On*, an album of coming-of-age guitar pop written during Lowenstein and Cheng’s first year at NYU. “There is a loneliness and instability to moving that the three of us really experienced together,” Lowenstein tells Apple Music. “It brought us very close, having this shared experience of becoming a professional band really young, touring, then moving somewhere new—we started to lean on each other in a familial way. There\'s something overwhelming about this period in your life.” All of that—the intensity, “the intimacy, the ‘Where is home?’ sort of feeling,” as Lowenstein describes it—made its way into the minimalist pop of *Phonetics On and On*, recorded with Welsh singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon at The Loft, Wilco’s famed Chicago studio space. If before they’d turned to the noise and post-punk angles of Sonic Youth and This Heat for inspiration, here they found themselves discovering (and embracing) the immediacy of classic records from Al Green and The Velvet Underground. They realized they wanted to be vulnerable and direct, without sacrificing a sense of play or their sense of humor. “I got to college and I discovered The Velvet Underground beyond *White Light/White Heat*,” she says. “I heard *Loaded* and I was like, ‘Oh, wow: accessible, emotional songs that make me feel like I’ve felt this way before.’ As a songwriter, I was like, ‘What if I wrote as a way of reflecting on my own life,’ which was not really something that I had approached as a kid. Then it was more like, ‘How do I write music to just feel powerful?’” Here, Lowenstein takes us inside a few songs on the album. **“Where’d You Go?”** “Not to talk too highly of my own band, but we felt like there were songs on the record that could have been singles that weren’t. And we thought it was cool to open with a song like that to show that all the songs stood on their own in a cool way.” **“Rock City”** “That title was us just goofing around. Sometimes, the titles will become too joke-y and then we have to tone it down. That’s how you end up with songs like “Homage to Birdnoculars” or “Dirtbag Transformation (Still Dirty)” on the record. No one needed to do that. We tried to pare it down, but ‘Rock City’ made it through in terms of joke titles.” **“2468”** “I thought that song was a really shocking choice for us to make, and that’s part of why I’m proud of it. It just came together in the studio in a really playful, different way for us, and it felt like we unlocked this really new dimension to our band.” **“Julie”** “I originally wrote that song on an acoustic guitar, and we spent months trying to crack it, trying a million arrangements with an electric guitar and the full band. But it felt like something was lost from the song. In the studio, there was this freak accident where the engineer turned my guitar completely off—and then you only heard the arrangements that my bandmates had written to complement me. At the same time, I was just singing what, for me, is a really vulnerable vocal, but with the confidence as if I was playing guitar. That was a really intimate moment, and a metaphor for my bandmates listening to me, and something that ended up being stronger than what I had originally written.” **“Frontrunner”** “Nora and I live together, and basically I had just had a really terrible, emotional day. I was a complete mess. And it was at the weekend, and I hadn\'t gone anywhere, and Nora and I were like, ‘OK, we should just play guitar today, you need to do *something*.’ And we wrote that song together, like we had played guitar from dawn until dusk together in our apartment.”
The thing about desire is it relies on the not-having of the thing you want; then sometimes you get it, and the whole game changes. In the case of Lucy Dacus—the dreamy singer-songwriter and guitarist, best known these days as one-third of indie-rock supergroup boygenius—the conundrum could apply to any number of current-life situations, among them her unexpected success as a Grammy-winning rock god. “I think that through boygenius, it felt like, ‘Well, what else? I don’t want more than this,’” Dacus tells Apple Music. “I feel like I’ve been very career-oriented because I’ve just wanted to play music, satisfy my own drive, and make things that I can be proud of. Getting Grammys and stuff, I’m like, ‘Well, I guess that’s the end of the line. What is my life about?’” On her fourth solo album, *Forever Is a Feeling*, Dacus takes a heartfelt stab at answering that question, and in doing so, opens another desire-related can of worms. While the record explores the intoxicating, confusing, fleeting qualities of romance, it simultaneously functions as a fan-fic-worthy relationship reveal. (She went public with her relationship with boygenius bandmate Julien Baker weeks before the album’s release.) On *Forever*, Dacus dives headfirst into the implied complications, recruiting co-producer Blake Mills for subversive, swooning folk-pop numbers that revel in the mysteries of love, and what precedes it. Dacus’ songwriting has always been vulnerable, though perhaps never this much, nor in this way. “What if we don’t touch?” she begins the super-sexy “Ankles” by proposing—instead, she imagines hypothetical bitten shoulders, pulled hair, crossword puzzles finished together the morning after. (“It’s about not being able to get what you want,” Dacus says of the song. “You want to get them in bed, but you also want to wake up with them in the morning and have sweet, intimate moments, and you can’t. So, you just have to use your imagination about what that might be like.”) She explores the in-between stages of a relationship on the wispy “For Keeps,” takes a quiet road trip through the mountains with her partner on “Talk,” and on “Big Deal,” she wonders to a star-crossed lover if things could ever go back to how it was before, though the climactic final chorus suggests otherwise. Writing *Forever* brought Dacus closer to an answer to the question she posed to herself earlier, and she doesn’t care how cheesy it may sound. “I want my life to be about love,” she explained to Apple Music. “It feels corny to say. But that’s part of what this project is—the idea that talking about love is corny. I don’t think love is all you need, but I do think you need it amongst everything else.”
Ichiko Aoba has come into her own as one of Japan’s most vital artists since debuting at 19 years old, with her boundless curiosity and musical versatility only growing as her career has progressed. On *Luminescent Creatures*, she casts her gaze toward the sea, channeling its moments of tumult and peace into 11 meticulously crafted songs that glow with awe. Ichiko and her chief collaborator, pianist and composer Taro Umebayashi, deftly lead an ensemble through the Kyoto-raised Ichiko’s brief yet complex compositions, on which she shows her precisely honed instincts for employing both airy minimalism and oceanic grandeur. “COLORATURA” rises and falls like waves, its circling flutes and cascading piano propelling her whispered voice into a tangle of strings; on “Lucifèrine,” she creates a mille-feuille of her own voice, bringing to full brightness the “light deep within the soul” marveled over in her lyrics. *Luminescent Creatures* shows how Ichiko has evolved—not just as an artist, but as an observer of the natural world over the last 15 years.
After back-to-back albums focused on their love of horror, experimental hip-hop trio clipping. head into the cybernetic unknown on their sixth, *Dead Channel Sky*. Even as their sound has become progressively more streamlined since the lurching abstractions of their self-titled debut on indie institution Sub Pop back in 2014, co-producers William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes conjure pure and jagged bolts of electricity across these 20 tracks, borrowing equally from the mechanical menace of early house and techno and the kitchen-sink IDM of Squarepusher and Aphex Twin. As with clipping.’s previous records, *Dead Channel Sky* is a highly collaborative affair: Wilco guitarist Nels Cline contributes scorched licks to the inside-out instrumental “Malleus” while indie hip-hop legend Aesop Rock lends his distinctive pipes to “Welcome Home Warrior.” But the speed-demon dexterity that is Daveed Diggs’ rapping skills remain as clipping.’s mainframe; he acrobatically hops across the album’s ones-and-zeroes eruptions like a computer virus avoiding detection, guiding listeners through *Dead Channel Sky*’s corroded landscape with ease.
According to Alex Kapranos, longtime lead vocalist of Franz Ferdinand, fear may be the largest untapped source of renewable energy on the planet. The millennial-era stalwarts are hoping that by charging headlong into that which frightens us most, maybe, just maybe, we’re all capable of tapping into the secret drive hidden on the other side. “I think we all have fears within us and fears that we confront in our life at different times,” Kapranos tells Apple Music’s Hanuman Welch. “And how we react to those fears is how we learn who we are really. And fear is not necessarily a bad thing either. Fear is associated with some of the greatest things you do in your life. Think about asking somebody out on a date: There\'s quite a lot of fear that you have to overcome to do that. Yeah, no. I think it\'s a fascinating insight into who we are.” Kapranos and Franz Ferdinand are no strangers to self-reflection. *The Human Fear* arrives at the peak of millennial-era revivalism thanks to the cresting wave of indie-sleaze nostalgia. But the band’s workmanlike approach to touring hasn’t seen them slow down much in the two decades since their self-titled art-rock debut catapulted them to fame. A lineup change also inspired the band to get back into the studio, where they captured a bit of that anthemic energy on the album’s lead single “Audacious,” a glam-rock bruiser they say serves as a bit of a mission statement for the entire album. “I think the spirit of the song encapsulates what I think being in a band should be, which is quite an audacious thing,” bassist Bob Hardy reveals. “There’s no point being onstage or getting on a stage unless you’re going to do it in an audacious way. If you’re not going to do it the whole way, then what the fuck are you doing?” Much of that “what the fuck are you doing” energy emerged organically when the band reassembled in the studio. Not that a sense of zeal has ever been absent across the band’s discography, but the Scottish quintet wanted to make sure they were hitting the record button with their guitars already firmly tuned. “We made sure that the songs were bangers first and foremost,” Hardy says. “And then we got the band together and learned them. And a lot of the album’s recorded live, so it’s the live sound of the band really tearing into it, and I think it gives the whole record a really exciting feel. It sounds like we’re having fun, and we were having fun making it.” “I hear stories about bands that will go into the studio and say that, ‘Well, the studio\'s jammed a bit.’ And then the record just came, and you can hear it sometimes,” Kapranos adds. “I like the idea of going to the studio when you’ve got some great songs and you know how to play them. I think that makes for a good record.”
*Rarely Do I Dream* is Trevor Powers’ fifth album as Youth Lagoon and second since he reemerged in 2023 with *Heaven Is a Junkyard* after a seven-year break. Finding Powers sifting through the universe he’s created, discovering joy in what others paint as mundane, it begins with a shuffling drum groove and an audio sample taken from a home movie, setting the DIY, homespun tone for the album. “Speed Freak” features a distorted bass melody and clanging drums accented by a dash of cassette-tape hiss. “Parking Lot” is a gorgeous piano ballad that puts its title in a romantic light. “What a parking lot,” he marvels. “Eight little spaces/Don’t let him lose/Let him cruise for the spot.”
On the three fearlessly freaky EPs Saya Gray released between 2022 and 2024, no style was off-limits: Hyperpop, folk, jazz, industrial alt-rock, glitchy electronica, even metal were all fair game, sometimes within the span of a single song. You got the sense the Toronto-based artist was coming up with ideas faster than she could commit them to tape. But for her first proper full-length album, the former musical director for Daniel Caesar and Willow Smith grounds her manic, collagist aesthetic in a more old-school approach. *SAYA* was written primarily on an autumn 2023 retreat to Japan, where she cozied up with an acoustic guitar and reconnected with the music of classic-rock icons like The Beatles and Joni Mitchell. You can feel the difference within the opening seconds of “..THUS IS WHY ( I DON’T SPRING 4 LOVE ),” where a sunrise-summoning melody, gritty guitar groove, and a soothingly slack drumbeat meld into a ’90-style alt-pop anthem. But even when working in more conventional singer-songwriter mode, Gray’s idiosyncratic, genre-mashing spirit cuts through loud and clear: The breezy country lullaby “SHELL ( OF A MAN )” is teed up with a brain-bending acoustic arpeggio worthy of a prog-rock record; “H.B.W” is a harmonious fusion of dreamy psych-folk melodies and dark trip-hop textures; while the exquisitely chill closer “LIE DOWN” sounds like a Fleetwood Mac classic given a dub remix.
Released in the wake of his divorce from singer-songwriter Amanda Shires, 2025’s *Foxes in the Snow* is Jason Isbell’s first solo acoustic album, and his first album without The 400 Unit since his 2013 breakthrough *Southeastern*. But don’t let the context color things too much: Isbell’s best writing has a scythelike quality whether backed by a band or not, and relationships born, broken, salvaged, and mourned have been subject matter for him from the get. The lovelorn will no doubt revel in the agony and catharsis of “Eileen,” “Gravelweed,” and “True Believer” (“All your girlfriends say I broke your fucking heart, and I don’t like it”), but allow us to direct you instead to the folksy, John Prine-like wisdom of “Don’t Be Tough”: “Don’t be shitty to the waiter/He’s had a harder day than you,” and, later, “Don’t say ‘love’ unless you mean it/But don’t say ‘sorry’ ’less you’re wrong.” Anyone can cradle their ego, but it takes a gentleman to know when to put it to bed.
Great Grandpa’s third album almost didn’t happen. While working on the follow-up to 2019’s *Four of Arrows*, the five-piece drifted apart, with non-band life taking over and the members scattering from their onetime home base of Seattle to further-flung corners of the globe. But fate intervened, and in 2023 the group threw out what they’d been working on and began creating what would become *Patience, Moonbeam*. The album’s ambitious nature becomes immediately apparent with the opening interlude “Sleep,” a brief yet potent string piece that condenses the story arc of a night’s slumber into less than 40 seconds. But *Patience, Moonbeam* packages its aspirations in a collection that has the surface vibe of slacker-pop, with easygoing rhythms, instantly hummable hooks, and fuzzed-out guitars, making its sudden left turns and emotional peaks hit even harder. Take “Ladybug,” which at its outset meshes Great Grandpa’s chilled-out acoustic guitars with the ultra-processed vocals and buzzy synths that define hyperpop. That segues into a more traditional indie-rock shuffle. Lead vocalist Al Menne’s winsome wail free-associates pop-culture images—Donald Glover on the cover of *GQ*, a line snatched from “All You Need Is Love”—before the digitally refracted voice rises up again: “I wish I could feel that good,” it laments, over and over, the mechanized voice conveying genuine longing for a world that should exist somewhere. It’s a wild combination, but Great Grandpa’s ability to bring together those disparate elements and inject them with full-band emotionalism makes everything come together. *Patience, Moonbeam* is full of moments where Great Grandpa explodes in glorious, and at times heartbreaking, fashion. “Task” shapeshifts from hiccuping chaos into a longing hymn; “Kid” reflects on guitarist Pat Goodwin and bassist Carrie Goodwin losing their first pregnancy, all the while knowing that mourning is something not to be rushed. It’s a record defined by wonder and possibility, and it was made by a band that came back together just in the nick of time.
Tamara Lindeman’s music as The Weather Station seems to expand and contract with every movement. The long-running project broke through in 2021 as fifth album *Ignorance* grew her folk-rock milieu to encompass the sounds of sophisti-pop acts like The Blue Nile and Prefab Sprout, while 2022’s companion record *How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars* pared back her arrangements to nearly nothing. On her seventh album, *Humanhood*, Lindeman has blown up her sound yet again: Alongside the nocturnal vibe she so expertly cultivated across *Ignorance*, these 13 tracks—initially recorded straight to tape over the course of two improvisational sessions in late 2023—encompass freewheeling ’60s psychedelic pop, darkly shaded jazz, and flurries of spoken-word sound collage. Joining her trusty supporting players from the *Ignorance* sessions is a who’s who of left-field sounds, including orchestral-folk auteur Sam Amidon and ambient-saxophone jazz sensation Sam Gendel. At the center of it all, Lindeman’s ability to pull back and let silence briefly reign remains as breathtaking as her most acrobatic vocal moments. Her lyrical focus picks up from where she left off on the previous two Weather Station records, pivoting specifically from the encroaching threat of climate change towards an episode of depersonalization she experienced while contemplating the world’s ever-evolving ills. What results is an album that’s contemplative and soul-searching, as Lindeman avoids finding easy answers and instead seems to channel her thought process in real time. “I don’t know quite where to begin,” she sings over the brushed drums and elegiac piano of *Humanhood*’s quietly devastating closer, “Sewing.” “I know it don’t look like I’m doing anything.” Quite the opposite, in fact.
On their third album, Liverpudlian boys Courting continue to invite favorable comparisons to UK pop-rock phenoms The 1975. They both have an obvious predilection for long album titles, and *Lust for Life*’s bait-and-switch opening tracks—the orchestral place-setting of “Rollback Intro” followed by the rude rave music of “Stealth Rollback”—is practically and lovingly ripped from Matty Healy and George Daniel’s playbook. But pithy comparisons otherwise elude Courting’s delightful multifariousness as they smash a brief interpolation of Belle and Sebastian’s “Get Me Away from Here, I’m Dying” turducken-style into the upbeat jangle of “Namcy” and follow the snarling alt-rock of “After You” with a six-minute odyssey of a title track that includes multiple suites and heavy vocal processing. Courting is the type of band to try anything once and immediately knock it out of the park.
Bartees Strange’s third album finds the Washington, D.C. singer-songwriter stretching his sonic limbs further than ever before—an achievement, to be sure, since Strange’s first two records (2020’s *Live Forever* and 2022’s critical breakthrough *Farm to Table*) cemented his ability to effortlessly hop between anthemic rock, dusky blues, and rap cadences within just a few minutes. With a slightly darker sound befitting its namesake, *Horror* adds a few impressive guises to Strange’s genre menagerie: There’s the explicitly Fleetwood Mac-esque jangle of “Sober,” the melancholic trip-hop skitter of “Doomsday Buttercup,” and the lucious house thump of “Lovers,” which might count as Strange’s starkest left turn to date. Across these 12 tracks, Strange also fine-tunes his winning formula of countrified balladry and propulsive riffs, both of which are given a big-ticket pop spit-shine courtesy of contributions from studio wizards Yves and Lawrence Rothman as well as the ever-ubiquitous Jack Antonoff. Don’t mistake big names for unnecessary flashiness, though: *Horror* retains the down-to-earth POV that’s made Strange an increasingly powerful presence in indie, even as his ambitions grow.
My Morning Jacket leader Jim James will be the first to tell you that the band’s 10th album is, on some fundamental level, more of the same: the same rootsy eclecticism, the same soft-but-chunky ’70s rock (“Squid Ink,” “Die for It”), the same lightly psychedelic insights into the human condition (“Everyday Magic,” “Time Waited”). “Love or hate the band, I think you could agree we try a lot of different things,” he says. “We’re open to any kind of music, any style of music, this or that. And I think this album is kind of the same.” The difference this time was in the approach—namely, the hiring of an outside producer, Brendan O’Brien (Pearl Jam, Bruce Springsteen), for the first time in their 25-plus-year career. The result was a collective shift in which the band was able to free themselves from the minutiae of record-making and relax into being a band—an experience James likened to an athlete connecting with the right coach (and this from a guy who insists he was “never good at sports”). Take “Everyday Magic” and “Time Waited,” highlights that come early in the album but that James wrote deep into the recording process. “It was hilarious because when I started working with Brendan, all these songs kept coming out,” James says. “I email him one song. I’m like, ‘Oh, my God. Check this out.’ No response.” Then another, and another. “‘I wonder if he just missed the email.’” Just when it seemed like he’d reached the end of his efforts, the right ones materialized. “I realized for the first time that I don’t have to take it personally,” he says. “Even when I was trying so hard to micromanage and force everything, at the end of the day, the record makes itself,” he says. *is* is.
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It was over a meal towards the end of touring their second album, *Gigi’s Recovery*, at the end of 2023 that the artistic blueprint for what would become *Blindness* came into being for The Murder Capital. *Gigi’s Recovery* was a mesmeric leap forward for the Irish quintet, the tightly wound post-punk of their 2019 debut, *When I Have Fears*, unfurling into something more wide-screen and dramatic. However, extended bouts of touring, including support slots with heavyweights Pearl Jam and Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, had turned The Murder Capital into a dynamically thrilling rock band. They wanted their next move to reflect that. “There’s quite an expansive and indulgent cinematic approach on our second record,” singer James McGovern tells Apple Music. “We went for dinner, and we all came together in agreement that we wanted to inject an urgency and an energy back into the music again. It was probably the first time we had a shared manifesto going into making a record.” It has resulted in an epic but lean rock record, the grooves a little looser-limbed, the hooks sharp—the sound of a band realizing exactly who they are three albums in. “We stripped back our process completely to a whole different way of working,” says McGovern. “We made no demos going into the studio, just phone recordings, and that really refocused us on what the substance of a song actually is, what we’re drawn to and what it means when it’s just those bare things.” Exploring themes of patriotism and nationalism alongside reflections on love and romance, *Blindness* is a gripping listen from start to finish. Let McGovern and guitarist Damien Tuit guide you through it, track by track. **“Moonshot”** Damien Tuit: “We wanted to open the record with this because it just bursts out of the speakers.” James McGovern: “It kicked the door down. It stood for everything that we’d set out to do in the very beginning. As you make a record, you’re brought down all these other garden paths that you don’t expect, but ‘Moonshot’ really just kind of stood for that. It had that exact character.” **“Words Lost Meaning”** DT: “This is an example of us being more than the sum of our parts. Gabe \[bassist Gabriel Paschal Blake\] had the bassline for the verse, and then I got some chords together for the chorus, and then James has this hook. It’s everyone working together, and it came together in a couple hours.” JM: “Months later, we were talking about this tune, and Gabe told us he was having a row with his girlfriend, and he’s not really a man of conflict, so he took some space for himself and went to play some bass and do a bit of writing, and that’s where he wrote this bassline. It’s kind of funny how the subject matter of the song unknowingly became about friction within a relationship itself.” **“Can’t Pretend to Know”** JM: “This has been through many different footings. It was a tune that I started out at home on the acoustic. I felt a love for it pretty quickly and then brought it in, and it went through a few different phases.” DT: “The initial version was slowed down: Pump \[guitarist Cathal Roper\] was doing a Chili Peppers kind of rhythm. When we were in the studio, John \[producer John Congleton\] forced us to push it full tilt. It was one that really grew in the studio.” **“A Distant Life”** DT: “That was written on tour. All the venues on this UK tour were freezing for some reason, and I had my guitar on. I was just plucking away, and James came up to me and was like, ‘Let’s just write a song.’” JM: “We were in transit to one of the many inspiring service stops in the UK, and I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, *Poetry Unbound*, hosted by Pádraig Ó Tuama. It’s a beautiful podcast, and he was doing Margaret Atwood’s ‘Bread,’ and she had a line in it about the salt taste of a mouth or something like that, so I nicked that line and started writing in the service station. That night, I went up to Irv \[Tuit’s nickname\], and he had two chords, but it was where he took it.” DT: “I played the first two chords and then just started following where he was going vocally, and that was that—the song pretty much done.” **“Born into the Fight”** DT: “We fucked around with a couple of different time signatures on this. You have to do that on one song every album before you go back to the time signature you can play in. This was Pump working his magic. Those were his chords, and it’s always nice when he’s playing keys because he just adds a different dimension.” JM: “I was really enjoying writing about rejection of faith and exploring that, having conversations with the lads about their experience of growing up in Ireland and saying prayers in class and all those things. There was a good tinder there that we wanted to keep exploring.” **“Love of Country”** DT: “We were jamming in the room in Dublin, and James was writing in his notebook, and then we stopped, and he read us out this poem and the room was just silent. We were like, ‘Yeah, that feels great.’” JM: “I know a lot of artists say this, but sometimes you are writing, and it does feel like you’re observing it a bit. The whole poem came out fully formed, really. I don’t think I edited anything in it. It was something that I’ve wanted to express for a long time. It’s not just the fact that we’ve just seen the riots in Dublin, or it’s not just the fact that there’s a hyper fixation on national ideologies globally now. It’s also feeling, as a kid, the anti-British sentiment on the playground or all these things and feeling rubbed up the wrong way by that stuff, this kind of ownership over land. It all seems to have come together into this tune in some way, as a small part of that conversation.” **“The Fall”** JM: “This was the first thing in my lyric notebook from this whole record. I’d written them in Cologne on tour. I remember all us really buzzing on the chords for this tune. We had a really good time playing it in our road-testing shows that we did at the MOTH Club in London and The Grand Social in Dublin. People were absolutely going mad for it, so it had something—we just had to put it together. It’s about how no one can change you but yourself, no matter what you’re going through, really.” **“Death of a Giant”** DT: “We were in Dublin, and Shane MacGowan’s funeral was on \[in December 2023\]. We all went and watched the hearse go by in the streets and then went straight into the room, and James just put some words about it to the music.” JM: “It just so happened that the procession was that day. We were just there to pay our respects. I think if the Irish do anything well, they celebrate death well. There was a real beauty to everything about the hearse, these black horses—the most majestic horses you’ve ever seen—and the young marching band. I didn’t really grow up on too much of The Pogues or Shane MacGowan’s work; it was only in my early twenties and starting this band, hanging out with mates and other bands, that I started to get into the breadth of his work. You could feel it that day with people singing on the street that there’s just something about him. I think, through all of his personal struggles, he as an artist really had his finger around the pulse of humanity more accurately than a lot of artists—and with such vulnerability and \[as\] a real true romantic as well. It’s nice to tip our cap in the only way we really can.” **“Swallow”** DT: “This began in my apartment with a loop, and James came over, added his part. Pump came over another day and added a part, edited it together, and then we sort of had demo-itis with it for a long time. One of the big lessons doing this album in the studio was trying to be kind to the music—something I think we struggled with generally. It’s difficult when you’re writing music—being gentle with how you critique and how you try and mold it and how you collaborate, because when you’re writing an album in the way we do—which is real true collaboration where we’re all bringing in stuff—there’s going to be some stuff that you don’t see for a long time.” JM: “That was me. I couldn’t see this song’s place in our world, but by the time it started to get recorded, I understood it. I had a great struggle with seeing this tune. Now I love it when I listen to the record.” **“That Feeling”** JM: “This was a really exciting one because it just fell out of a jam. We were in London in our studio in Holloway \[north London\]. We came back from a lunch break or something, picked up the instruments, started playing together, and there was ‘That Feeling’ almost in its entirety.” DT: “This one might be the only one that was born from a true jam on this album.” **“Trailing a Wing”** JM: “There’s a sweetness to this. I can’t really put my finger on it, but it’s there. It’s also a funny one. We played a show in Belfast, and I was out for dinner with my couple of cousins and aunties and stuff up there. We were in a Thai restaurant, and an actor who will remain unnamed walked into the restaurant, and my aunt said, ‘There’s that fella, he’s always trailing a wing.’ So, I was like, ‘What does that mean?!’ Obviously, he just cheats on his wife loads, but I thought it was a beautiful adage!”
It was during a time-out after the whirlwind success of his 2019 debut *Hypersonic Missiles* and its 2021 follow-up *Seventeen Going Under* that Sam Fender realized what his third album needed to be. Those two records had made the singer-songwriter from Northeast England one of the breakthrough artists of the past decade, a homegrown superstar who’d gone from playing local venues to stadiums and now had a pair of BRIT Awards sitting on his mantelpiece. But Fender had felt a little rushed making *Seventeen Going Under* and he was determined that it wouldn’t happen again, no matter how long it took. Allied to that, he also wanted to hold to a simple and concise aim. “When writing the past two albums I started with a clear goal and concept, but towards the end of recording it always morphed into something else—at least for me it did,” Fender told Apple Music when announcing *People Watching* in November 2024. “I wanted to go in there and write good songs; not think about some grandiose overblown message, just 10/11 good songs about ordinary people.” His patience paid off. *People Watching* is Fender’s most perfectly realized release to date. Its title neatly sums up the emotional connection at the heart of the 30-year-old’s music and his supernatural gift for wrapping everyday tales in an exhilarating, euphoric release. It’s still his beloved hometown that remains the primary focus but in Fender’s dexterous hands, the place has become a prism through which he sings about grief, family, mental health, poverty, homelessness, the government, and more. Sonically, *People Watching* is the most sumptuous work of his career, one that builds on the bounding, Springsteen-style expanse and emerges with a technicolor indie-rock masterpiece stacked with another raft of killer choruses for the masses to sing along to. Fender nodded to his love of The War on Drugs on *Seventeen Going Under* and here he goes one step further, enlisting the band’s mercurial leader Adam Granduciel as co-producer alongside Markus Dravs (Coldplay, Arcade Fire, Florence + the Machine). Nothing here is overloaded. Even at its most epic, there’s an intricacy and airiness about these songs, Granduciel’s synth flourishes adding a dynamic counterpoint to Fender’s rousing hooks. It’s a record of many shapes and textures, taking in the urgent classic rock of the title track, yearning anthems (“Little Bit Closer”), contemplative Americana with a bit of a swagger about it (“Wild Long Lie”), and wistful ’80s pop (“Crumbling Empire”). At its best, it pairs his love of US heartland rock with an Oasis-style jubilance. In its minor chord acoustic strums, “Chin Up” even has echoes of “Wonderwall” about it. But it’s hard to imagine Noel and Liam attempting a song like “Remember My Name,” the stirring, stark closer made up of nothing but Fender’s vocals and the moving horns of the Easington Colliery Band, an emotive salute to his northeast roots and a song that places Sam Fender out there on his own. *People Watching* may well be the sound of an artist entering his imperial phase.
JPEGMAFIA has become one of music’s most trusted collaborators, working with artists ranging from Danny Brown and Kanye West to Kimbra and indie rocker Helena Deland. Despite his sterling stature, the Air Force veteran returns to his experimental, boundary-pushing roots on his fifth solo album, *I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU*. Mixing punk, noise, industrial music, and more into a chaotic cacophony, JPEGMAFIA has proven that success certainly did not change his pursuit of musical freedom. On opener “i scream this in the mirror before i interact with anyone,” JPEG spits over free-jazz drums and metal guitars that explode into screeching solos. He lays out a manifesto of sorts for his perspective, rapping, “When they can’t read you like a book/They gon’ try to attack what you stand on/I’ma take off even if I land wrong/And take everything I can get my hands on.” On “don’t rely on other men,” JPEG leans into his experimental roots and examines his decision to occasionally make a mainstream leap, though he certainly doesn’t do that here. Over a beat from a chopped vocal and blown-out drums, the rapper asks a simple question, wondering at what cost he’s willing to suffer for his art: “Wanna cry on the bus or the Maybach?”
𝐖𝐞 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐢𝐧 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟓! 𝐓𝐢𝐜𝐤𝐞𝐭𝐬: tr.ee/-VV81Dp8Q5 Vinyl, CDs and more Cheekface merch at houseshoes.online UK local vinyl shipping from Alcopop Records ilovealcopop.co.uk/collections/cheekface
Following the critical and commercial success of 2023's ‘Grog,’ cult New York duo Frog return with ‘1000 Variations on the Same Song,’ their sixth album. '1000 Variations on the Same Theme' is an eclectic, emotional, and lyrically vivid collection. These songs see Daniel Batemanrefer to My Chemical Romance, Gucci, Stillwell deals, fatherhood, and the 6 train (“I was listening to a lot of Mozart, Kodak Black, and Prince, but it doesn't really sound like any of those.”). Musically, songs like “TOP OF THE POPS VAR. I” and “DOOMSCROLLING VAR. II” touch on the frenetic Indie Rock that defined their earlier work, while the idiosyncratic Alt. Country of ‘Count Bateman’ and ‘Grog’ can be heard on ‘WHERE U FROM VAR. III’ and ‘ARTHUR MCBRIDE ON THE LOWER EAST SIDE VAR. X.’ Singles like ‘JUST USE YR HIPS VAR. VI’ and December’s ‘DID SANTA COME VAR. IX’ also introduce a smoky lounge element to Frog’s sound. However, as Daniel explains it, these are all just variations on the same song: “1000 Variations on the Same Song is a theme and variations—there are times in your life as a songwriter where you'll start a bunch of stuff that all sounds alike, which can be a problem, something that you want to excise from yourself. This time, I decided to embrace it and take it as far as it could go. "The first four variations were recorded in one long take, ("HOUSEBROKEN") is the last one in that sequence. I added piano and doubled the vocals, etc, but basically, all those songs were done in one 15-minute stretch. If you’re working quickly and your goal is to finish an entire album or more in one night, amazing things can happen. How many songs can you write using the same chords? How many songs can you record and finish in one day? The answer to both is near-infinite with the right environment and mindset.” Since Frog returned from hiatus in 2023 with the addition of Daniel’s brother Steve Bateman on drums, they’ve received significant critical acclaim and enjoyed sold-out shows in the Tri-state area. In March, they will take their unique sound further afield with a nine-date North American tour. These shows will see the band joined by Frog co-founder Tom White on bass, and will take them to cities like Los Angeles, New York, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Ithaca, Hanover, and Boise (Treefort Music Fest) for some first-time-ever shows. The tour will also include a stop in the KEXP studios for a live radio session (with video to follow) on The Afternoon Show with Larry Mizell, Jr on March 25th.
On “Slugger,” the first track from SASAMI’s third album, *Blood on the Silver Screen*, the singer stamps out one of the oldest clichés in the book. Over shuffling hi-hats and a rubbery bassline she sings, “Whoever said that it’s better to have loved and to lost/Than to not have loved at all/Should just shut up forever.” Alongside co-producers Rostam and Jenn Decilveo, the LA-based indie rock star takes aim at the lovers and lust-hungry obsessives throughout. On “Love Makes You Do Crazy Things,” guitars screech and shout before SASAMI rolls through with a metal-worthy solo during the introduction. “Bet it all on you, now I gotta leave town,” she sings, exposing the dark underbelly that exists beneath the surface of pop music’s romanticism. The album finds her moving away from the experimental songwriting of previous records like 2022’s *Squeeze*, instead turning in a streamlined and diamond-sharp ode to the parts of love that suck.
