As one of a few shouty, abrasive, angular bands coalescing around Brixton live venue and rehearsal space The Windmill during the late 2010s, shame found themselves being ushered into a pigeonhole. Alongside the likes of Squid, black midi, and Black Country, New Road, they were heralded as the new wave of post-punk by a UK music press and A&R industry keen to have uncovered the next fertile scene. Wisely, the five-piece did their best to elude those strictures on the follow-ups to 2018 debut *Songs of Praise*. But reflecting on 2021’s *Drunk Tank Pink* and *Food for Worms* (2023), records that benefitted from ideas drawn from psych-rock, folk, jazz, and even singing lessons, shame began to wonder if some of their urgency had been thinned out. As a result, *Cutthroat* arrives with the band’s horizons still broad but their sound revitalized. The title track, with its combustion of riffs and groove, and the agitated polemic of “Cowards Around” captures the bracing, confrontational energy of the band’s live shows. It’s an opening salvo that establishes the vim and efficiency with which they go on to try out rockabilly (“Quiet Life”), the cockeyed but melodic sound of early Pavement (“Plaster”), sing-along indie pop (“Spartak”), and a collision of Portuguese folk, disco, and New Wave (“Lampião”). Against this absorbing backdrop, singer Charlie Steen muses on just how conflicted and paradoxical the human condition is. And he does it with a little more self-assurance and a bit less vulnerability and doubt than before. “Well, you can follow your fashions/You can follow your cliques/And I feel sorry for you/For feeling sorry for me,” he declares on “Spartak.” *Cutthroat* is the sound of shame continuing to explore their sound—and arriving somewhere increasingly unique.
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.
Nilüfer Yanya’s third album, 2024’s *My Method Actor*, found the London singer-songwriter in an existential quandary. “It’s a weird one making a third album, because it’s like: ‘What is pushing me to do this?’” she told Apple Music at the time of its release. “Where is that desire coming from? Where am I going with this? Where am I going to be on the other side of this?” In writing the LP, she found some of those answers: “It’s a journey, but you don’t really know where it’s going,” she said. “But it’s about not worrying too much about the outcome; it’s learning to trust myself, to really listen to myself.” A few songs were abandoned in the process, which she undertook with her songwriting partner Wilma Archer. But upon returning from touring *My Method Actor*, Yanya found that some of those ideas deserved revisiting, and they form the *Dancing Shoes* EP. The title might be a little tongue-in-cheek—these four tracks don’t quite suit the club floor—but it does perhaps suggest a desire to dance the blues away. And like all of Yanya’s prior albums, she finds a springy tension between laidback rockers that mask pain with compelling grooves (“Kneel,” “Cold Heart”) and equally affecting, soul-baring pop ballads (“Where to Look,” “Treason”).
In the two and a half years since 2022’s *NO THANK YOU*, Little Simz attempted to write its follow-up four times, to no avail. From the outside, the London native was at the top of her game. Since 2021’s game-changing fourth album, *Sometimes I Might Be Introvert*, she’d won a Mercury Prize, owned the Glastonbury stage, and earned a spot among the power players of UK rap. But privately, her personal life was imploding. In 2025, word spread of the lawsuit Simz had filed against Inflo, the childhood friend and longtime collaborator who’d produced her last three albums, for allegedly failing to repay a 1.7-million-pound loan. The betrayal left the rapper at a loss, as she recounts on “Lonely”: “Sitting in the studio with my head in my hands/Thinking what am I to do with this music I can’t write?” From this turmoil, the 31-year-old musician arrived at a breakthrough that manifests on her sixth album, *Lotus*—named for the flower that thrives in muddy waters. Here Simz pulls no punches on the topic of her former friend, snarling her way through the bluesy opener “Thief” (“This person I’ve known my whole life, coming like the devil in disguise”) and the eerie “Flood,” produced by Miles Clinton James with cameos from Nigerian British pop star Obongjayar and South Africa’s Moonchild Sanelly. But the mood lifts on tracks like “Young,” a bit of post-punk method rapping on being dumb, broke, and alive (“A bottle of Rio and some chicken and chips/In my fuck-me-up pumps and my Winehouse quiff”), and on “Free,” a jazzy boom-bap meditation on love versus fear, on which Simz reaches a cathartic conclusion: “Love is every time I put pen to the page.”
According to Alex Kapranos, longtime lead vocalist of Franz Ferdinand, fear may be the largest untapped source of renewable energy on the planet. The millennial-era stalwarts are hoping that by charging headlong into that which frightens us most, maybe, just maybe, we’re all capable of tapping into the secret drive hidden on the other side. “I think we all have fears within us and fears that we confront in our life at different times,” Kapranos tells Apple Music’s Hanuman Welch. “And how we react to those fears is how we learn who we are really. And fear is not necessarily a bad thing either. Fear is associated with some of the greatest things you do in your life. Think about asking somebody out on a date: There\'s quite a lot of fear that you have to overcome to do that. Yeah, no. I think it\'s a fascinating insight into who we are.” Kapranos and Franz Ferdinand are no strangers to self-reflection. *The Human Fear* arrives at the peak of millennial-era revivalism thanks to the cresting wave of indie-sleaze nostalgia. But the band’s workmanlike approach to touring hasn’t seen them slow down much in the two decades since their self-titled art-rock debut catapulted them to fame. A lineup change also inspired the band to get back into the studio, where they captured a bit of that anthemic energy on the album’s lead single “Audacious,” a glam-rock bruiser they say serves as a bit of a mission statement for the entire album. “I think the spirit of the song encapsulates what I think being in a band should be, which is quite an audacious thing,” bassist Bob Hardy reveals. “There’s no point being onstage or getting on a stage unless you’re going to do it in an audacious way. If you’re not going to do it the whole way, then what the fuck are you doing?” Much of that “what the fuck are you doing” energy emerged organically when the band reassembled in the studio. Not that a sense of zeal has ever been absent across the band’s discography, but the Scottish quintet wanted to make sure they were hitting the record button with their guitars already firmly tuned. “We made sure that the songs were bangers first and foremost,” Hardy says. “And then we got the band together and learned them. And a lot of the album’s recorded live, so it’s the live sound of the band really tearing into it, and I think it gives the whole record a really exciting feel. It sounds like we’re having fun, and we were having fun making it.” “I hear stories about bands that will go into the studio and say that, ‘Well, the studio\'s jammed a bit.’ And then the record just came, and you can hear it sometimes,” Kapranos adds. “I like the idea of going to the studio when you’ve got some great songs and you know how to play them. I think that makes for a good record.”
After back-to-back albums focused on their love of horror, experimental hip-hop trio clipping. head into the cybernetic unknown on their sixth, *Dead Channel Sky*. Even as their sound has become progressively more streamlined since the lurching abstractions of their self-titled debut on indie institution Sub Pop back in 2014, co-producers William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes conjure pure and jagged bolts of electricity across these 20 tracks, borrowing equally from the mechanical menace of early house and techno and the kitchen-sink IDM of Squarepusher and Aphex Twin. As with clipping.’s previous records, *Dead Channel Sky* is a highly collaborative affair: Wilco guitarist Nels Cline contributes scorched licks to the inside-out instrumental “Malleus” while indie hip-hop legend Aesop Rock lends his distinctive pipes to “Welcome Home Warrior.” But the speed-demon dexterity that is Daveed Diggs’ rapping skills remain as clipping.’s mainframe; he acrobatically hops across the album’s ones-and-zeroes eruptions like a computer virus avoiding detection, guiding listeners through *Dead Channel Sky*’s corroded landscape with ease.
David Byrne’s last album, 2018’s *American Utopia*, wasn’t merely an album: It was a sprawling multimedia work that encompassed music, a stage show, and a film that captured the magic of its performance. In fact, it was so sprawling that its chronology even includes a lengthy period of dormancy, between opening on Broadway at the end of 2019 and restarting in 2021 after COVID restrictions were eased. “During the pandemic, of course, I wanted to write new songs, but I felt like what was happening was bigger than anything I could write about,” Byrne tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe of that unexpected gap. “And I didn’t quite know how to address it.” While the songs that make up his eighth album under his given name, *Who Is the Sky?*, recorded with the musically elastic Ghost Train Orchestra, aren’t directly a product of that time, there are threads and themes that trace back to it. “I realized that some of these new songs are coming out of that,” he adds. The most obvious is probably the ode to his living quarters “My Apartment Is My Friend,” where Byrne ruminates on how intimate that physical space has become. \"So forgive me if I hesitate, if a tear comes now and then,” he sings. “You stood by me when darkness fell/My apartment is my friend.” Byrne has always had a gift for making the specific, and even the fantastical, seem universal. “Moisturizing Thing” plays like a Hollywood sci-fi, starring Byrne himself, in which he tries an anti-aging skin treatment only to turn into a toddler, forcing him to see the world through another’s eyes. He’s constantly asking more of himself in these songs: He questions a smiling religious teacher who’s gorging himself on hors d’oeuvres (“I Met the Buddha at a Downtown Party”); he ponders the place he’s been put in history (“The Avant Garde”); he wonders how his wife just understands things so naturally (“She Explains Things to Me”); he sees life in cycles of happiness and pain, searching and resolution (“Everybody Laughs”). And he does it all with the playfulness, grace, and naked, life-affirming joy of a musical elder statesman who has never lost his curious, creative spark.
*Raspberry Moon* begins exactly how you’d expect a Hotline TNT album to begin: with another melancholic missive from singer/guitarist Will Anderson wrapped in candy-coated distortion. But just when you think the opening “Was I Wrong?” is about to fade into the fuzz, it takes an unexpected detour into an extended, synth-washed ambient fadeout that goes on for so long, it earns its own track-title distinction (“Transition Lens”). And while that left turn doesn’t exactly portend Hotline TNT taking a *Kid A*-sized leap into the electronic unknown, it is nonetheless emblematic of a band in the midst of an exciting evolutionary phase. *Raspberry Moon* marks the first time Anderson has recorded with his touring band, and you instantly sense the difference in both density and depth on “The Scene,” a psychedelic sludgefeast that harkens back to Dinosaur Jr.’s SST era. But the sonic upgrade is as much about enhancing nuance as amplifying noise: When they’re not consistently striking the shoegaze/power-pop sweet spot on Teenage Fanclub flashbacks like “Letter to Heaven” and “Candle,” Hotline TNT bring graceful acoustic textures to the fore on “Dance the Night Away” and “Lawnmower,” putting the focus squarely on Anderson’s gleaming melodies. And with the rousing “na na na na” hook of “Julia’s War,” Anderson confirms his former DIY project is ready to conquer festival stages.
For their sixth album, hardcore punk collective The Armed purposely started writing without any premeditated ideas. After the conceptual trilogy of their last three albums—2018’s *Only Love*, 2021’s *ULTRAPOP*, and 2023’s *Perfect Saviors*—they decided to focus on urgency over detailed lyrical cohesiveness. “It felt like a new era, like we were leaving something behind,” vocalist and de facto spokesperson Tony Wolski tells Apple Music. “In starting something new, we wanted it to come from a place that was animalistic.” As such, *THE FUTURE IS HERE AND EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE DESTROYED* is brimming with rage—at consumerism, social media, political divisiveness, post-COVID isolationism, and general disappointment with the direction of society. “When you look at the world writ large, I just don’t understand how this would turn around,” Wolski says. “The levers that could change things in any meaningful way are the people who hold all the power, but they have none of the incentive. So, it’s an overtly negative record. But I do think there’s a glimmer of hope at the end—or at least a lack of hopelessness.” Like The Armed’s previous output, the record features a rotating cast of band members and guest musicians including Queens of the Stone Age guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen, ex-Punch vocalist Meghan O’Neil, Michigan hardcore troupe Prostitute, Converge guitarist Kurt Ballou, Rough Francis drummer Urian Hackney, and many more. Below, Wolski comments on each track. **“Well Made Play”** “It’s a very severe opener. We like doing that on all our albums, but the execution is drastically different than our last few openers. I think the band is at its absolute strongest, physically, musically—everything—right now, so I feel like this has added power. Lyrically, it’s about how self-awareness has become the world’s scarcest resource. It’s about the hyper-celebritization of culture, and how that has sort of removed self-awareness from our skills. It’s like we’ve evolved beyond it or something.” **“Purity Drag”** “We wanted to front-load the album with brutality. We’re referencing East Bay hardcore on a lot of these songs, so we just wanted it to feel like one of those albums that we got when we were 14, 15, where it just doesn’t relent. I think this has a chorus you can shout along to, and the song is, I daresay, near danceable. But it has very cynical lyrics about leftist disappointment. It’s about seeing the convictions that you have reduced to social trends. It’s about seeing some of the worst type of people espousing your ideas from wildly sanctimonious perspectives and in very ineffectual ways that will never yield results.” **“Kingbreaker”** “Again, we wanted to front-load the album with rage. My cousin Kenny, who plays bass in the band, this was one of his demos. He originally titled it ‘Optional,’ which was funny because he meant that literally, like, ‘I don’t know if we need to do this.’ It’s basically one bass note shredding for two minutes, and we added a breakdown. Lyrically, the song is about isolation. Post-pandemic, I think we still haven’t pulled out of the fact that everyone lives incredibly siloed lives. The great reintegration that everyone talked about never really happened, at least spiritually.” **“Grace Obscure”** “This is the first bona fide punk song we’ve made in a minute. It’s a just a blistering tempo, a double-time shredder. Meghan O’Neil has been playing with us as a vocalist, and she was the singer of a band called Punch back when we were starting out. I would say that Punch is one of my favorite hardcore bands of all time, and I think that Meghan is probably my favorite hardcore vocalist ever. Her vocals are completely insane. This is one of the first songs that we’ve done with her taking front and center, which is really cool. You can hear some East Bay hardcore here, and the chorus is a not-too-subtle allusion to AFI.” **“Broken Mirror” (feat. Prostitute)** “Similar to ‘Kingbreaker,’ this started as a very primitive, emotionally driven demo. I recorded a super dumb caveman drumbeat. After recording that, I just hit record and made up the chord progression. And I didn’t tune the guitar. Then I came up with the vocals in five or six minutes. The goal was to reduce artistic expression to the most primitive, most immediate version of yourself. Lyrically, it’s very much inspired by a Protomartyr song called ‘Tarpeian Rock’ where they’re just yelling shit that needs to be thrown from the rock. Moe from Prostitute sings on this, and his voice has a lot more gravitas than mine. They’re probably the scariest, most important punk band right now.” **“Sharp Teeth”** “After five brutal songs, to just slam into a Red Hot Chili Peppers-ass song felt hilarious to me. It’s a classic Armed juxtapositional whiplash kind of thing. Urian and Kenny, the rhythm section on this song, hit this unbelievable, heavy groove. In contrast to the grooviness and levity of that instrumental, the lyrics are about the hands-down worst time in my entire life. I don’t want to talk about it, and I wouldn’t have even felt comfortable singing it, but the fact that Cara \[Drolshagen\] is singing this one felt therapeutic. It’s really dark subject matter over a really happy track.” **“I Steal What I Want”** “This one has been around for a long time. I think I wrote this and ‘AN ITERATION,’ which was on *ULTRAPOP*, around the same time. But sometimes we need to get better in order to make a song work. It was almost like a space rock thing originally, but it needed to hit harder. So we made it more rigid, and then Troy \[Van Leeuwen\] recorded those guitar leads that are like equal parts Robert Smith and Adrian Belew, and it just fucking clicked. Lyrically, it’s about trying to enjoy the end of the world and holding on to what you love as everything else falls apart. That idea might be super well-trodden and not particularly original, but holy shit, does it feel authentic to me right now.” **“Local Millionaire”** “I have the distinct memory of Kenny playing me this demo when we were recording the last album and thinking, ‘Oh, man, this song is going to be so fucking sick.’ Everyone needs a song for the haters, and this is our song for the haters. It’s about self-obsession and turning that obsession into hatred for people who you subconsciously see becoming the better version of you. The band METZ was breaking up while we were recording this, so we put those harmonized vocalizations in the background to pay tribute to them. They’re a fucking awesome band, and it feels like something they would do.” **“Gave Up”** “This is probably the most traditional Armed song on the record. I don’t mean that to diminish it, it just feels like it could live on some of our earlier records. It’s a classic Kenny song, and he made the initial prototype of what our compositions sound like. Lyrically, it’s about hollowing yourself out to fit in, which is I think something that every single person alive does and has done to some extent. But it gets out of hand when you turn yourself into an empty vessel for the opinions of others. It touches on rage-bait culture, the clout of consensus, and becoming a human Supreme T-shirt.” **“Heathen”** “I wrote this track, and it took me a minute to be courageous enough to share it with the rest of the band, because there’s a lot of conventional shit in it. But I’m glad I did. Patrick \[Shiroishi\]’s sax playing reminds me of Bowie’s *Blackstar*. Cara and I are both singing dozens of robot harmonies, which makes this weird, fragile, genderless voice. It’s melodramatic as fuck, but I think it’s a really cool moment in the context of this record in particular. On another of our records, it may have blended in more. It’s kind of an emotional soak after all this instantaneous rage.” **“A More Perfect Design”** “We wanted to have a track that just left it all out there. And we wanted to leave no doubt in someone who listened to this that we had given everything we had to it. Converge is one of my favorite bands, and what makes them so unique is the ability to perform in a way that captures that extreme emotion. A lot of extreme music is not successful in that way. It’s extreme, it’s fast, but it’s also clean and technical, and all that stuff can kind of zap the anger or angst. So, this song is very much effect over technique. No one was allowed to tune their instrument before we recorded this. It needed to be catharsis to the point of, like, ‘Oh, shit. Maybe we went too far.’”
*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.”
Lord Huron’s reverb-soaked, sepia-toned Americana has worn several faces over the years: the wide-eyed pioneer (*Strange Trails*), the lovelorn drifter (*Vide Noir*), the wistful cowboy just looking for a cold beer and place to hang up his spurs (*Long Lost*). As its title suggests, *The Cosmic Selector* leans into the spacier side of their sound, channeling moody, Lynchian atmospheres (“Looking Back”), ’50s ballads (“It All Comes Back”), and front-porch hymns (“Looking Back”) with the kind of gauzy, interstellar remove of late-’90s bands like Mercury Rev and Sparklehorse. Part of the project’s charm is that it never tries to sound too earnest or authentic in the moods it captures, instead embracing them for the cinematic archetypes they are, whether it’s the lonesome highway of “Who Laughs Last” (narrated by the incomparable Kristen Stewart) or the washed-up performer longing to see their name in lights one last time (“The Comedian”).
What makes the darkness of billy woods’ raps bearable is that you’re always a step or two away from a good joke or decent meal—a real-world, life-goes-on resilience that has been the bedrock of hip-hop from the beginning. That said, *GOLLIWOG* is probably the most out-and-out unsettling album he’s made yet, a smear of synth rumbles, creaky pianos, and horror-movie strings whose dissonances amplify scenes of otherwise ordinary dread, whether it’s the Black artist trying to charm the boardroom of white executives on “Cold Sweat” or prolonged eviction scene of “BLK XMAS.” Now in his mid-forties, woods is confident enough in his critique to make you squirm in it and has a rolodex of some of the best producers in underground rap to back him up, including Kenny Segal, El-P, Conductor Williams, and DJ Haram. Spoiler alert: The real monsters are human.
On the three fearlessly freaky EPs Saya Gray released between 2022 and 2024, no style was off-limits: Hyperpop, folk, jazz, industrial alt-rock, glitchy electronica, even metal were all fair game, sometimes within the span of a single song. You got the sense the Toronto-based artist was coming up with ideas faster than she could commit them to tape. But for her first proper full-length album, the former musical director for Daniel Caesar and Willow Smith grounds her manic, collagist aesthetic in a more old-school approach. *SAYA* was written primarily on an autumn 2023 retreat to Japan, where she cozied up with an acoustic guitar and reconnected with the music of classic-rock icons like The Beatles and Joni Mitchell. You can feel the difference within the opening seconds of “..THUS IS WHY ( I DON’T SPRING 4 LOVE ),” where a sunrise-summoning melody, gritty guitar groove, and a soothingly slack drumbeat meld into a ’90-style alt-pop anthem. But even when working in more conventional singer-songwriter mode, Gray’s idiosyncratic, genre-mashing spirit cuts through loud and clear: The breezy country lullaby “SHELL ( OF A MAN )” is teed up with a brain-bending acoustic arpeggio worthy of a prog-rock record; “H.B.W” is a harmonious fusion of dreamy psych-folk melodies and dark trip-hop textures; while the exquisitely chill closer “LIE DOWN” sounds like a Fleetwood Mac classic given a dub remix.
Released in the wake of his divorce from singer-songwriter Amanda Shires, 2025’s *Foxes in the Snow* is Jason Isbell’s first solo acoustic album, and his first album without The 400 Unit since his 2013 breakthrough *Southeastern*. But don’t let the context color things too much: Isbell’s best writing has a scythelike quality whether backed by a band or not, and relationships born, broken, salvaged, and mourned have been subject matter for him from the get. The lovelorn will no doubt revel in the agony and catharsis of “Eileen,” “Gravelweed,” and “True Believer” (“All your girlfriends say I broke your fucking heart, and I don’t like it”), but allow us to direct you instead to the folksy, John Prine-like wisdom of “Don’t Be Tough”: “Don’t be shitty to the waiter/He’s had a harder day than you,” and, later, “Don’t say ‘love’ unless you mean it/But don’t say ‘sorry’ ’less you’re wrong.” Anyone can cradle their ego, but it takes a gentleman to know when to put it to bed.
Sleigh Bells have never been ones for subtlety, but *Bunky Becky Birthday Boy* finds Derek Miller and Alexis Krauss taking their sugary, maximalist approach to a new level. The noise-pop duo’s sixth album feels like a distinct departure from 2021’s comparatively smooth and clean-sounding *Texis*, with clear points of inspiration taken from J-pop’s kitchen-sink instrumentation and the spiky electronic pop of new-gen pranksters 100 gecs; opening track “Bunky Pop” pairs hyperspeed blast beats with skipping vocal samples, while “Roxette Ric” runs wild with massage-chair synth rattles and headbanging slices of electric guitar. More than ever before, the bright and sunny choruses of ’80s pop-rock are embedded in Sleigh Bells’ DNA, as evidenced in the oceanic melody of “Badly,” which could easily pass for a peak-era Go-Go’s tune. But such straightforwardness always arrives with an innovative twist in Sleigh Bells’ musical world; witness the surprisingly cloudy New Wave environs of penultimate “Hi Someday,” which flips the chorus of Morrissey’s “Every Day Is Like Sunday” into a passionate, positive rallying cry in support of the great unknown—a fitting gesture for a band that’s never stopped pushing themselves forward.
Soon after The National singer Matt Berninger released his solo debut, *Serpentine Prison*, in the fall of 2020, its name seemed to backfire. After two decades as one of indie rock’s most magnetic lyricists and vocalists, he was trapped inside writer’s block, stuck in a cycle where anything that resembled work or even input induced despair. That trap slowly broke as he and his band began work on 2023’s *First Two Pages of Frankenstein* and its surprise follow-up, *Laugh Track*; their rebuilt rapport slowly revived his lexicon. That same year, Berninger and his family left Los Angeles after a decade, with their country escape to Connecticut recalling scenes of his Ohio childhood. He settled into new rhythms and modes, writing lyrics between the seams of baseballs. *Get Sunk*—a reference to that earlier depressive period and, implicitly, springing out of it—steadily took shape. To make *Get Sunk*, Berninger and longtime engineering partner and producer Sean O’Brien bounced around a Los Angeles studio, building beats and sequences for six hours at a time until Berninger finally found the words that fit. They recruited a sterling support cast, including Hand Habits’ Meg Duffy, session ace Booker T. Jones, and Ronboy leader Julia Laws. They called their dozen or so helpers the “Saturday Musicians.” Berninger’s voice has always been The National’s calling card, the athletic baritone at its center. Wouldn’t a solo album, especially a second, just feel redundant or reductive, an imitation of its more famous setting? But *Get Sunk* is marked by an unexpected versatility. Where he cannily mumbles his way through the textural maze of “Nowhere Special,” he becomes ultimately approachable on “Junk,” a gorgeous and gothic love song that suggests Nick Cave. Where “Frozen Oranges” is a Middle American fever dream about searching for contentment, “No Love” documents the end of personal chemistry, of a relationship that once held meaning now corroding into, at best, niceties. The linchpin, though, is closer “Times of Difficulty,” where that whole big band gathers together to offer an anthem for interdependence, to reaching out for a lift when you get sunk. “Feels like we missed another summer/If we’re not dying, then what are we?” he moans. Getting on, best we can.
With a title taken from a quote about a lethal self-driving Tesla crash, La Dispute’s fifth album revels in observations on modern malaise. The lightning-fast advancement of technology, the chaos of existential uncertainty, the unblinking eye of the surveillance state, the stultifying pressure of societal expectations, and all manner of personal crises take a bow on *No One Was Driving the Car*. The first La Dispute album produced entirely by the band, it’s the result of far-flung writing sessions conducted in the UK, Australia, the Philippines, and the band’s home state of Michigan. Partly inspired by the 2017 Paul Schrader film *First Reformed*, the 14-track album is a post-hardcore epic that revolves around lead vocalist Jordan Dreyer’s angsty narratives about the world we live in.
Indie rock songwriter Indigo De Souza finds the deep mysteries of the unknown equal parts intriguing and terrifying on her fourth album, *Precipice*. She walks up to the edge and neither leaps nor retreats, but rather looks with a curiosity that moves from fascinated to morbid at a moment’s notice. Throughout *Precipice*, De Souza gazes at the future and gives its uncertainty her full attention. Take “Crying Over Nothing,” a playful shuffle that dazzles with shimmering synths and De Souza’s near falsetto. On the track, she recalls taking all day to respond to texts, the pain in moving on from a relationship, the physical ache that comes alongside the dissolution of love. She’s in limbo. Elsewhere, she urges herself towards some sort of equilibrium on standout cut “Be Like the Water.” Over handclaps, DIY percussion, and Rhodes piano chords, De Souza encourages her subject to move through this world with joy and adaptability, leaning on deceptively simple advice: “Be like the water/Go where you’re going.”
The real surprise about the historically artier Meg Remy embracing the ordinary comforts of folk, country, gospel, and soul is how right it sounds, a *Dusty in Memphis* or early Aretha album for listeners cautiously merging the life of the mind with the achingly normal ups and downs of regular adulthood. Remy has said it has at least something to do with her own growth as a person: Nearing 40 and a mother of two, the high-concept stuff just doesn’t hit the way it used to. Still, to familiar forms she brings her funky, left-field mind: the deep-soul surrealism of “Walking Song” (“You had boots on/I had bare feet/It was a natural conspiracy”), the love-letter-as-feminist-critique of “Dear Patti,” the way she uses her bluesy lament (“Emptying the Jimador”) to offer metaphors about being a shoplifter amid the gifts of language. Over a band she reportedly directed to play like they were from Tennessee, she sings her weird heart out, never dull, just growing up.
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.
In July 2024, Queens of the Stone Age descended underneath Paris for a unique unplugged performance to an audience of six million...corpses. Founder Joshua Homme says his interest in the city’s famous catacombs began in childhood and it became a dream to play there. “Obviously, in the simplest terms, there’s a bunch of bodies and they’re stacked in a certain manner,” he tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. Recording in a subterranean cemetery filled with over six million skeletal remains proved challenging, but Homme had a “desire for it to have this improv element to it.” Ultimately, the morbid setting helped turn their hard rock anthems into haunting, acoustic balladry. “It’s very ASMR in there,” he says. “When you’re playing something that’s stripped down to the bones, and I guess in front of people that are stripped to the bones too, it just felt intuitively like this should be \[like\] there’s almost nothing being performed. Everything is more important somehow. When you’re doing that, the ceiling’s dripping and the camera people were walking and it’s crunching on the ground, it becomes part of the performance.” The songs on the EP date back from 2005’s *Lullabies to Paralyze* (“I Never Came”) to 2023’s *In Times New Roman...* (“Paper Machete”), befitting a catalog that, over the course of nearly three decades, has had no shortage of songs that would lend themselves to sparse funeral dirges. (For reasons only Homme can explain, 2002’s “Song for the Dead” is not among them.) In place of loud guitars and drums are mournful strings and understated percussion; Homme’s soulful wail, however, needs no reinvention for the venue. But in this instance, the music itself isn’t the main draw for Homme. “The bigger truth is that the catacombs is so the protagonist,” he says. “It’s so overwhelming that we’re also there and we’re playing, but it felt like at all times that we were just serving this audience, which really deserved attention. People are viewing it a bit like a zoo in a way, but this was like, ‘I brung something for you. I got you this thing, and can I show it to you?’ It felt like we were having this moment together.”
A casual listener could be forgiven for not being able to distinguish Foxwarren’s self-titled 2018 debut from the celebrated solo albums that its frontman, Andy Shauf, releases under his own name. Though he’s the sort of singer who rarely raises his voice above a casual-conversation murmur, Shauf can’t help but sound like anyone but himself, thanks to that instantly recognizable folksy twang in his voice and a signature storytelling style that masterfully toes the line between comedy and tragedy. But with the second release from Foxwarren, Shauf’s long-running but sporadically active band with his childhood pals from Saskatchewan, this avowed Randy Newman disciple has started taking notes from GZA. With Foxwarren’s five members spread across four provinces, Shauf turned to sample-heavy ’90s rap classics like *Liquid Swords* for guidance on how to stitch their isolated parts together into a cohesive statement. The result is an album that brilliantly blurs the line between traditional ’70s-singer-songwriter craft and cinematic sound collage. Where a tender serenade like “Dance” could’ve easily been presented as a stripped-down piano ballad, here it’s situated within a splendorous swirl of mutated strings, flute loops, and gently drifting rhythms, like a dreamy remembrance of some bygone Hollywood golden-age musical (an effect enhanced by the snippets of found-sound dialogue threaded throughout the record). And with the mellotron-smeared grooves of “Strange,” the glam-rock swing of “listen2me,” and the disco-house motion of “Wings,” *2* bottles up all the energy and excitement of old friends who’ve discovered new ways of unlocking their creativity. Close listeners of Shauf’s work know that, beneath the sad-sack surface, his writing can be very funny—but, for the first time, it sounds like he’s truly having fun.
Long before KAYTRANADA was headlining festivals and winning Grammys, he was a child obsessed with JAY-Z’s 2003 record *The Black Album* and its companion documentary *Fade to Black*. Watching prolific producers like Pharrell Williams, Just Blaze, Kanye West, and Rick Rubin build beats from scratch, he went from fan to student, poring over album credits and eventually teaching himself to make beats by reverse-engineering J Dilla tracks. By the early 2010s, the Haitian Canadian producer had fused his love of hip-hop with a growing fascination for house music, emerging from the underground with viral edits of Janet Jackson and Teedra Moses songs, all driven by his signature drum swing. Following in the footsteps of his early heroes, KAYTRANADA became a master collaborator: His first three studio albums featured voices from PinkPantheress and Tinashe to Kali Uchis and even Williams himself. On *AIN’T NO DAMN WAY!*, KAYTRANADA lets his production do all the talking. Stripped back to hypnotic loops, slick rhythms, and far-flung samples, the album is for total dance immersion—the kind that makes time slip away in the club. The chunky retro beat of “SPACE INVADER,” paired with a refrain from Latrelle’s Neptunes-produced “My Life” (“Gotta get away sometimes”), sets an escapist tone. Stutters and glitches ripple through tracks like “CHAMPIONSHIP,” “TARGET JOINT,” and “GOODBYE BITCH!” as if you’re catching him mid-DJ set. His blending of styles and eras transforms the ’80s Afro-boogie of Steve Monite’s “Things Fall Apart” into contemplative poolside house, while rapper Cappadonna’s 1998 song “Black Boy” becomes a resilient disco jaunt. Even the soulfully reassuring croons of “DON’T WORRY BABE / I GOT U BABE” serve as a Trojan horse for a slow-burning banger. The party carries on until the TLC-sampling closer “DO IT (AGAIN!),” both a playful last call and an invitation to run it back all over again.
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.
The Norwegian musician and interdisciplinary artist began unwittingly conceptualizing her ninth album in the solitude of the pandemic, during which she developed a newfound passion for perfume. It was later that Hval gathered that her scent obsession was an answer to that era’s void of intimacy and physicality. This explains the intriguingly lush title, borrowed from a scent of the same name from French perfumer Serge Lutens described as smelling somewhere between cold steel and morning mist. It also explains the record’s ghostly sensuality, rife with sights, smells, and sounds which Hval conjures in their absence—the incandescent buzz of stage lights and scent of spilled beer in rock clubs now shuttered. (“A stage without a show/A hazy silhouette/Around an empty space,” she sings over moody trip-hop on “The artist is absent.”) Here, scent is a portal to another time and place: On “To be a rose,” the smell of cigarettes transports her to her childhood, her mother smoking on the balcony: “Long inhales and long exhales/Performed in choreography/Over our dead-end town.”