The thing about desire is it relies on the not-having of the thing you want; then sometimes you get it, and the whole game changes. In the case of Lucy Dacus—the dreamy singer-songwriter and guitarist, best known these days as one-third of indie-rock supergroup boygenius—the conundrum could apply to any number of current-life situations, among them her unexpected success as a Grammy-winning rock god. “I think that through boygenius, it felt like, ‘Well, what else? I don’t want more than this,’” Dacus tells Apple Music. “I feel like I’ve been very career-oriented because I’ve just wanted to play music, satisfy my own drive, and make things that I can be proud of. Getting Grammys and stuff, I’m like, ‘Well, I guess that’s the end of the line. What is my life about?’” On her fourth solo album, *Forever Is a Feeling*, Dacus takes a heartfelt stab at answering that question, and in doing so, opens another desire-related can of worms. While the record explores the intoxicating, confusing, fleeting qualities of romance, it simultaneously functions as a fan-fic-worthy relationship reveal. (She went public with her relationship with boygenius bandmate Julien Baker weeks before the album’s release.) On *Forever*, Dacus dives headfirst into the implied complications, recruiting co-producer Blake Mills for subversive, swooning folk-pop numbers that revel in the mysteries of love, and what precedes it. Dacus’ songwriting has always been vulnerable, though perhaps never this much, nor in this way. “What if we don’t touch?” she begins the super-sexy “Ankles” by proposing—instead, she imagines hypothetical bitten shoulders, pulled hair, crossword puzzles finished together the morning after. (“It’s about not being able to get what you want,” Dacus says of the song. “You want to get them in bed, but you also want to wake up with them in the morning and have sweet, intimate moments, and you can’t. So, you just have to use your imagination about what that might be like.”) She explores the in-between stages of a relationship on the wispy “For Keeps,” takes a quiet road trip through the mountains with her partner on “Talk,” and on “Big Deal,” she wonders to a star-crossed lover if things could ever go back to how it was before, though the climactic final chorus suggests otherwise. Writing *Forever* brought Dacus closer to an answer to the question she posed to herself earlier, and she doesn’t care how cheesy it may sound. “I want my life to be about love,” she explained to Apple Music. “It feels corny to say. But that’s part of what this project is—the idea that talking about love is corny. I don’t think love is all you need, but I do think you need it amongst everything else.”
Samia’s third album, *Bloodless*, sounds as if someone’s opened a nearby window, allowing for a gush of fresh air to carry Samia Finnerty’s voice into the skies. The 28-year-old Minneapolis-based singer-songwriter’s follow-up to 2023’s *Honey* feels lithe and buoyant even at its most emotionally weighty. At times—the slinky “Lizard,” the echo-laden swell of “Sacred,” the thicket of woodwinds and vocals that run through closing track “Pants”—Samia recalls the ethereal New Wave of British pop-rock phenom The Japanese House, or the timeless bounce of Fleetwood Mac. At the center of such gestures is Samia’s close-to-the-bone lyricism, which continues to convey her pitch-perfect sly humor; atop the stormy strums and electronic frissons of “North Poles,” she wraps her bell-clear voice around evocations of “spyware lipstick” and fistfuls of natural wine before lobbing a grenade of reflection at the listener’s feet: “When you see yourself in someone/How can you look at them?”
Horsegirl were in high school when they recorded their debut LP *Versions of Modern Performance*, an eye-opening, words-blurring blend of ’90s indie rock that was meant to feel live and loud. But the Chicago trio—Nora Cheng, Penelope Lowenstein, Gigi Reece—became a New York trio as they began working on its deeply personal follow-up, *Phonetics On and On*, an album of coming-of-age guitar pop written during Lowenstein and Cheng’s first year at NYU. “There is a loneliness and instability to moving that the three of us really experienced together,” Lowenstein tells Apple Music. “It brought us very close, having this shared experience of becoming a professional band really young, touring, then moving somewhere new—we started to lean on each other in a familial way. There\'s something overwhelming about this period in your life.” All of that—the intensity, “the intimacy, the ‘Where is home?’ sort of feeling,” as Lowenstein describes it—made its way into the minimalist pop of *Phonetics On and On*, recorded with Welsh singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon at The Loft, Wilco’s famed Chicago studio space. If before they’d turned to the noise and post-punk angles of Sonic Youth and This Heat for inspiration, here they found themselves discovering (and embracing) the immediacy of classic records from Al Green and The Velvet Underground. They realized they wanted to be vulnerable and direct, without sacrificing a sense of play or their sense of humor. “I got to college and I discovered The Velvet Underground beyond *White Light/White Heat*,” she says. “I heard *Loaded* and I was like, ‘Oh, wow: accessible, emotional songs that make me feel like I’ve felt this way before.’ As a songwriter, I was like, ‘What if I wrote as a way of reflecting on my own life,’ which was not really something that I had approached as a kid. Then it was more like, ‘How do I write music to just feel powerful?’” Here, Lowenstein takes us inside a few songs on the album. **“Where’d You Go?”** “Not to talk too highly of my own band, but we felt like there were songs on the record that could have been singles that weren’t. And we thought it was cool to open with a song like that to show that all the songs stood on their own in a cool way.” **“Rock City”** “That title was us just goofing around. Sometimes, the titles will become too joke-y and then we have to tone it down. That’s how you end up with songs like “Homage to Birdnoculars” or “Dirtbag Transformation (Still Dirty)” on the record. No one needed to do that. We tried to pare it down, but ‘Rock City’ made it through in terms of joke titles.” **“2468”** “I thought that song was a really shocking choice for us to make, and that’s part of why I’m proud of it. It just came together in the studio in a really playful, different way for us, and it felt like we unlocked this really new dimension to our band.” **“Julie”** “I originally wrote that song on an acoustic guitar, and we spent months trying to crack it, trying a million arrangements with an electric guitar and the full band. But it felt like something was lost from the song. In the studio, there was this freak accident where the engineer turned my guitar completely off—and then you only heard the arrangements that my bandmates had written to complement me. At the same time, I was just singing what, for me, is a really vulnerable vocal, but with the confidence as if I was playing guitar. That was a really intimate moment, and a metaphor for my bandmates listening to me, and something that ended up being stronger than what I had originally written.” **“Frontrunner”** “Nora and I live together, and basically I had just had a really terrible, emotional day. I was a complete mess. And it was at the weekend, and I hadn\'t gone anywhere, and Nora and I were like, ‘OK, we should just play guitar today, you need to do *something*.’ And we wrote that song together, like we had played guitar from dawn until dusk together in our apartment.”
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.
Momma’s follow-up to their 2022 breakthrough album, *Household Name*, opens with the pair skewering a freshly abandoned ex with the line “I love you to death/But I’m outside the door.” No emotion is off-limits for Brooklyn-based songwriting duo Etta Friedman and Allegra Weingarten (now expanded to a quartet including guitarist, composer, and producer Aron Kobayashi Ritch and drummer Preston Fulks), who’ve created a breakup album full of spiky lyrics and sing-along hooks. “It’s written from the perspective of two people we hurt, so it’s kinda looking at ourselves in a critical lens, which was a really interesting exercise,” Friedman tells Apple Music. “I think it captures the turmoil of us moving on, and these people feeling left behind. The inner struggle of, ‘These people are important to us. I love them, but our lives are growing apart, and I’m changing, so I have to move on.’” *Welcome to My Blue Sky* gave Momma a new spark and a deeper songwriting chemistry that naturally evolved from being such close friends. “I definitely think we wanted to not make a *Household Name* round two, so we were trying to push ourselves to find new things that would excite us,” says Friedman. “With Allegra and I writing these songs with just the two of us on acoustic, it actually allowed more room to play.” Weingarten agrees that their close friendship takes away any hint of self-consciousness that could hamper their creativity. “We’re so connected as songwriters and also friends, there’s a lot less time wasted trying to figure something out on the spot,” she says. “It all came together super fast because when it’s just Etta and I, we can try anything. We learned to trust our intuition and followed that.” From the ’90s slacker sing-along of “I Want You (Fever)” to a nostalgic trip to the grungy dance floor on “Last Kiss,” it’s the sound of a band maturing and moving on up.
Certainly, any Pulp fan who caught the long-dormant Britpop legends on their 2024 reunion tour would’ve been completely satisfied with just hearing the ’90s classics we never thought we’d get to hear performed live again. But the surprise inclusion of some new tunes on the set list made it clear Jarvis Cocker and co. were not interested in being a mere nostalgia act. And now, less than a year later, Pulp has gifted us with a new album—and while it arrives 24 years after their last one, *More* actually came together with unprecedented expedience. “The previous two Pulp records \[2001’s *We Love Life* and 1998’s *This Is Hardcore*\] had a bit of a concept for them, and that slowed everything down,” Cocker tells Apple Music. “And this time I just thought, let’s not think about it. Let’s do it. And then you’ve got a lot of time to think about it later. Like the rest of your life, for instance.” With *More*, Pulp carries on as if the first two decades of the 21st century never happened, restoring their singular balance of disco decadence (“Spike Island,” “Got to Have Love”) and string-swept elegance (“Tina,” “Farmers Market”). As the elder black sheep of Britpop, Pulp always possessed a self-deprecating wit and lived-in wisdom that distinguished them from their more brash, lager-swilling peers, and as such, they were always less interested in glorifying youthful hedonism than probing adult relationships. So they can effortlessly reclaim their role as Britain’s shrewdest observers of social manners and misbehavior even as Cocker has crossed the threshold into his sixties. *More* is imbued with the simmering anxieties of a singer who knows he’s not getting any younger: Echoing the streetwise strut of Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger,” the urgent “Grown Ups” finds the guy who once sang “Help the Aged” starting to “stress about wrinkles instead of acne” himself, while the Spector-esque splendor of “Background Noise” closes the curtain on a long-term coupling where familiary has curdled into contempt. But even by the group’s sophisticated standards, piano ballad “The Hymn of the North” (featuring Chilly Gonzales) is a breathtaking display of melancholy and majesty that affirms Pulp is still in a different class all their own.
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. The split 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.
Portugal. The Man ringleader John Gourley has called Portland home since the mid-2000s, but his native Alaska is always on his mind. His psych-pop troupe’s 10th album is named for a remote fishing village on the state’s Seward Peninsula and it opens with two turbulent tracks—the cosmic-rock collage “Denali” and the mutant hardcore blitz “Pittman Ralliers”—inspired by the state’s infamous volcanic peak, Mt. McKinley. Fitting for a record that ruminates on our precarious relationship with the environment, *SHISH* can be as unpredictably calming and chaotic as nature itself, often within the span of a single song: “Tyonek” begins as a serene snapshot of life in the Arctic before triggering an avalanche of nu-metal riffage; the dulcet indie-pop groove of “Knik” erupts into a fuzzed-out out finale capped by a glammy, fretboard-busting guitar solo. *SHISH* is the sound of Portugal. The Man doubling down on their refusal to be pigeonholed as the feel-good hitmakers of the “Feel It Still” era, but the album rewards your endurance with the string-swept “Tanana,” an equally despairing and life-affirming anthem about finding strength and joy in the ones you love as the world burns.
*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.
Nation of Language is one of the 2020s’ undeniable indie-rock success stories, as the Brooklyn trio’s strange but delectable alchemy of pulsing electronic pop and the oaky, baroque sounds of late-2000s indie have reached a steadily growing audience with each release. You’ve likely heard “Weak in Your Light” from 2023’s *Strange Disciple* if you’ve turned on a single TV show in the last few years, and their fourth album *Dance Called Memory* continues their hot streak of broadly appealing and emotionally resonant songcraft. With frequent collaborator and LCD Soundsystem live member Nick Millhiser behind the boards, these 10 songs sparkle and bounce with every rhythmic twist, as lead singer Ian Richard Devaney’s angelic vocals hover above the proceedings. And lest you think they’re becoming easy to pin down, *Dance Called Memory* has a few tricks up its sleeve: Witness the brittle backbeats that make up the framework of “In Another Life” or the glistening shoegaze textures that course through “Now That You’re Gone.” It’s these subtle tweaks to their sound that prove that, even as they grow in popularity, Nation of Language continues to evolve in new and surprising ways.
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, she 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.
After writing 2022’s *Giving the World Away* in lockdown with the live show firmly in mind, Harriette Pilbeam took a different approach for her third album as Hatchie. She put touring on the back burner to just let this set of songs develop naturally and gradually, finding more inspiration in books and movies than in other music and relocating from California back to her native Brisbane and then to Melbourne. Pilbeam immersed herself in such melancholic romance films as *Before Sunrise* and *Blue Valentine*, savoring the poignancy of extended longing. The warm, woozy songs on *Liquorice* capture that sensation nicely, with the title track especially echoing the heightened reality of experiencing intense new love. “We’re just getting to the good bit,” she sings, before the swooning refrain “Don’t need anything other than this.” Produced by Melina Duterte (aka Jay Som) in her LA home studio, the album also features Pilbeam’s trusty partner Joe Agius (RINSE) and Warpaint drummer Stella Mozgawa. Pilbeam thrives in those close collaborations, while still sounding entirely like herself: lead single “Lose It Again” is a co-write with Orchin’s Jeremy McLennan, yet it’s exactly the kind of sugared dream pop she has always done so well. And even when she slips darker lyrical undertones into “Only One Laughing,” her lilting voice and the rippling guitar effects provide comforting reassurance.
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.
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.
In the six years since Jay Som’s critically acclaimed sophomore album *Anak Ko*, Melina Duterte has kept the kind of schedule that would strike fainter hearts with exhaustion. There’s been collaborations with Troye Sivan, beabadoobee, and Lucy Dacus; production credits across scores of indie records; a whole album with Palehørse’s El Kempner as Bachelor; and extensive touring as part of boygenius’ live band. With all this palling around, it’s not surprising that her third album as Jay Som features some high-powered collaborations: Jimmy Eat World’s Jim Adkins joins in for the surging emo-pop of “Float,” while the chugging alt-rock anthem “Past Lives” features contributions from Paramore’s Hayley Williams. But *Belong* also finds Duterte picking up exactly where she left off with Jay Som’s recorded catalog, her trademark sense of intimacy and intricate arrangements left fully intact. From the tick-tock guitars of “Casino Stars” to the open-air wistfulness of “Appointments,” Duterte continues to develop her own brand of close-mic’d emotionalism even as her star has grown ever brighter across the 2020s.
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.
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.
“There was basically an urgency to this record. It came out of me in this furious burst,” Florence Welch tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe of Florence + the Machine’s sixth full-length. “And it’s one of those records where if I hadn’t have put it out now, it never would’ve come out because I think how I felt about things is so specific to this moment in time, and this roared out of me. It was made almost like a coping mechanism.” That moment in time began for Welch during the *Dance Fever* tour. “I actually ended up having a ectopic miscarriage onstage that was dangerous, and that I had to be hospitalized for, and I had to have immediate surgery because I had a Coke can of blood in my abdomen,” she explains. Her health crisis and ensuing feelings fueled *Everybody Scream*, which offers a haunting yet cathartic experience for both the singer and those listening. “I felt so out of control of my body, it was interesting,” she says. “I looked into themes of witchcraft, and mysticism, and everywhere that you looked in terms of birth or stories of birth, you came across stories of witchcraft, and folk horror, and myths.” Infusing those elements throughout the album, Welch wails, warbles, belts—and, yes, screams—with emotional clarity and appropriately witchy charisma while getting quality assistance in the form of Mitski, Aaron Dessner, and IDLES guitarist Mark Bowen. The title track muses on fame and pushing through the pain to perform: “But look at me run myself ragged/Blood on the stage/But how can I leave you when you’re screaming my name?” Conjuring up a bacchanalian forest rave, “Witch Dance” casts a spell with its heated pace and Welch’s breathy chants. And for the singer, “Perfume and Milk” helps alleviate her own agony. “It was about healing and having watched seasons change and having watched other things growing and then returning to the earth and a sense that I was also part of that nature and part of that cycle,” she says. *Everybody Scream* ends with the stirring “And Love,” striking a hopeful note: “Peace is coming” she repeats on the ballad. “Let this one be the one that comes true,” she says. “Let this one be the one that is realized in the world. I think the songs are always three steps ahead of me. It’s been that way my whole life.”
