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”).
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.
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.
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.”
After the reception to her 2023 self-titled debut as Blondshell, it’s no surprise that Sabrina Teitelbaum’s follow-up, *If You Asked for a Picture*, came together while she was quite literally on the move. “I was touring a lot, so I was in a lot of new places and just writing about what was going on,” she tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “I didn’t have the intention of making an album, but when I got home, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to start demoing these songs.’” The resulting 12 tracks may have come together casually, but *If You Asked for a Picture* is a fuller and richer evocation of the Blondshell sound, pairing spiky ’90s alternative rock sounds with acerbic couplets. Along with longtime studio collaborator Yves Rothman (Kim Gordon, Yves Tumor), Teitelbaum adds subtle sonic flourishes to her winning sound—peep the Ronettes-recalling backbeat of “23’s a Baby” and the dream pop of closer “Model Rockets”—but her cutting and personal songwriting style remains the project’s hallmark. Who else could write an introspective exploration of living with OCD, as Teitelbaum does on the explosive “Toy,” and sneak in a withering line like, “I’ve been running this ship like the Navy/But it’s more like a Wendy’s”? As Teitelbaum’s songwriting continues to mature, Blondshell’s balance of the devastating and the deeply funny continues on as one of indie rock’s most thrilling high-wire acts.
On their third album, Liverpudlian boys Courting continue to invite favorable comparisons to UK pop-rock phenoms The 1975. They both have an obvious predilection for long album titles, and *Lust for Life*’s bait-and-switch opening tracks—the orchestral place-setting of “Rollback Intro” followed by the rude rave music of “Stealth Rollback”—is practically and lovingly ripped from Matty Healy and George Daniel’s playbook. But pithy comparisons otherwise elude Courting’s delightful multifariousness as they smash a brief interpolation of Belle and Sebastian’s “Get Me Away from Here, I’m Dying” turducken-style into the upbeat jangle of “Namcy” and follow the snarling alt-rock of “After You” with a six-minute odyssey of a title track that includes multiple suites and heavy vocal processing. Courting is the type of band to try anything once and immediately knock it out of the park.
My Morning Jacket leader Jim James will be the first to tell you that the band’s 10th album is, on some fundamental level, more of the same: the same rootsy eclecticism, the same soft-but-chunky ’70s rock (“Squid Ink,” “Die for It”), the same lightly psychedelic insights into the human condition (“Everyday Magic,” “Time Waited”). “Love or hate the band, I think you could agree we try a lot of different things,” he says. “We’re open to any kind of music, any style of music, this or that. And I think this album is kind of the same.” The difference this time was in the approach—namely, the hiring of an outside producer, Brendan O’Brien (Pearl Jam, Bruce Springsteen), for the first time in their 25-plus-year career. The result was a collective shift in which the band was able to free themselves from the minutiae of record-making and relax into being a band—an experience James likened to an athlete connecting with the right coach (and this from a guy who insists he was “never good at sports”). Take “Everyday Magic” and “Time Waited,” highlights that come early in the album but that James wrote deep into the recording process. “It was hilarious because when I started working with Brendan, all these songs kept coming out,” James says. “I email him one song. I’m like, ‘Oh, my God. Check this out.’ No response.” Then another, and another. “‘I wonder if he just missed the email.’” Just when it seemed like he’d reached the end of his efforts, the right ones materialized. “I realized for the first time that I don’t have to take it personally,” he says. “Even when I was trying so hard to micromanage and force everything, at the end of the day, the record makes itself,” he says. *is* is.
Bartees Strange’s third album finds the Washington, D.C. singer-songwriter stretching his sonic limbs further than ever before—an achievement, to be sure, since Strange’s first two records (2020’s *Live Forever* and 2022’s critical breakthrough *Farm to Table*) cemented his ability to effortlessly hop between anthemic rock, dusky blues, and rap cadences within just a few minutes. With a slightly darker sound befitting its namesake, *Horror* adds a few impressive guises to Strange’s genre menagerie: There’s the explicitly Fleetwood Mac-esque jangle of “Sober,” the melancholic trip-hop skitter of “Doomsday Buttercup,” and the lucious house thump of “Lovers,” which might count as Strange’s starkest left turn to date. Across these 12 tracks, Strange also fine-tunes his winning formula of countrified balladry and propulsive riffs, both of which are given a big-ticket pop spit-shine courtesy of contributions from studio wizards Yves and Lawrence Rothman as well as the ever-ubiquitous Jack Antonoff. Don’t mistake big names for unnecessary flashiness, though: *Horror* retains the down-to-earth POV that’s made Strange an increasingly powerful presence in indie, even as his ambitions grow.
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.”
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It was over a meal towards the end of touring their second album, *Gigi’s Recovery*, at the end of 2023 that the artistic blueprint for what would become *Blindness* came into being for The Murder Capital. *Gigi’s Recovery* was a mesmeric leap forward for the Irish quintet, the tightly wound post-punk of their 2019 debut, *When I Have Fears*, unfurling into something more wide-screen and dramatic. However, extended bouts of touring, including support slots with heavyweights Pearl Jam and Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, had turned The Murder Capital into a dynamically thrilling rock band. They wanted their next move to reflect that. “There’s quite an expansive and indulgent cinematic approach on our second record,” singer James McGovern tells Apple Music. “We went for dinner, and we all came together in agreement that we wanted to inject an urgency and an energy back into the music again. It was probably the first time we had a shared manifesto going into making a record.” It has resulted in an epic but lean rock record, the grooves a little looser-limbed, the hooks sharp—the sound of a band realizing exactly who they are three albums in. “We stripped back our process completely to a whole different way of working,” says McGovern. “We made no demos going into the studio, just phone recordings, and that really refocused us on what the substance of a song actually is, what we’re drawn to and what it means when it’s just those bare things.” Exploring themes of patriotism and nationalism alongside reflections on love and romance, *Blindness* is a gripping listen from start to finish. Let McGovern and guitarist Damien Tuit guide you through it, track by track. **“Moonshot”** Damien Tuit: “We wanted to open the record with this because it just bursts out of the speakers.” James McGovern: “It kicked the door down. It stood for everything that we’d set out to do in the very beginning. As you make a record, you’re brought down all these other garden paths that you don’t expect, but ‘Moonshot’ really just kind of stood for that. It had that exact character.” **“Words Lost Meaning”** DT: “This is an example of us being more than the sum of our parts. Gabe \[bassist Gabriel Paschal Blake\] had the bassline for the verse, and then I got some chords together for the chorus, and then James has this hook. It’s everyone working together, and it came together in a couple hours.” JM: “Months later, we were talking about this tune, and Gabe told us he was having a row with his girlfriend, and he’s not really a man of conflict, so he took some space for himself and went to play some bass and do a bit of writing, and that’s where he wrote this bassline. It’s kind of funny how the subject matter of the song unknowingly became about friction within a relationship itself.” **“Can’t Pretend to Know”** JM: “This has been through many different footings. It was a tune that I started out at home on the acoustic. I felt a love for it pretty quickly and then brought it in, and it went through a few different phases.” DT: “The initial version was slowed down: Pump \[guitarist Cathal Roper\] was doing a Chili Peppers kind of rhythm. When we were in the studio, John \[producer John Congleton\] forced us to push it full tilt. It was one that really grew in the studio.” **“A Distant Life”** DT: “That was written on tour. All the venues on this UK tour were freezing for some reason, and I had my guitar on. I was just plucking away, and James came up to me and was like, ‘Let’s just write a song.’” JM: “We were in transit to one of the many inspiring service stops in the UK, and I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, *Poetry Unbound*, hosted by Pádraig Ó Tuama. It’s a beautiful podcast, and he was doing Margaret Atwood’s ‘Bread,’ and she had a line in it about the salt taste of a mouth or something like that, so I nicked that line and started writing in the service station. That night, I went up to Irv \[Tuit’s nickname\], and he had two chords, but it was where he took it.” DT: “I played the first two chords and then just started following where he was going vocally, and that was that—the song pretty much done.” **“Born into the Fight”** DT: “We fucked around with a couple of different time signatures on this. You have to do that on one song every album before you go back to the time signature you can play in. This was Pump working his magic. Those were his chords, and it’s always nice when he’s playing keys because he just adds a different dimension.” JM: “I was really enjoying writing about rejection of faith and exploring that, having conversations with the lads about their experience of growing up in Ireland and saying prayers in class and all those things. There was a good tinder there that we wanted to keep exploring.” **“Love of Country”** DT: “We were jamming in the room in Dublin, and James was writing in his notebook, and then we stopped, and he read us out this poem and the room was just silent. We were like, ‘Yeah, that feels great.’” JM: “I know a lot of artists say this, but sometimes you are writing, and it does feel like you’re observing it a bit. The whole poem came out fully formed, really. I don’t think I edited anything in it. It was something that I’ve wanted to express for a long time. It’s not just the fact that we’ve just seen the riots in Dublin, or it’s not just the fact that there’s a hyper fixation on national ideologies globally now. It’s also feeling, as a kid, the anti-British sentiment on the playground or all these things and feeling rubbed up the wrong way by that stuff, this kind of ownership over land. It all seems to have come together into this tune in some way, as a small part of that conversation.” **“The Fall”** JM: “This was the first thing in my lyric notebook from this whole record. I’d written them in Cologne on tour. I remember all us really buzzing on the chords for this tune. We had a really good time playing it in our road-testing shows that we did at the MOTH Club in London and The Grand Social in Dublin. People were absolutely going mad for it, so it had something—we just had to put it together. It’s about how no one can change you but yourself, no matter what you’re going through, really.” **“Death of a Giant”** DT: “We were in Dublin, and Shane MacGowan’s funeral was on \[in December 2023\]. We all went and watched the hearse go by in the streets and then went straight into the room, and James just put some words about it to the music.” JM: “It just so happened that the procession was that day. We were just there to pay our respects. I think if the Irish do anything well, they celebrate death well. There was a real beauty to everything about the hearse, these black horses—the most majestic horses you’ve ever seen—and the young marching band. I didn’t really grow up on too much of The Pogues or Shane MacGowan’s work; it was only in my early twenties and starting this band, hanging out with mates and other bands, that I started to get into the breadth of his work. You could feel it that day with people singing on the street that there’s just something about him. I think, through all of his personal struggles, he as an artist really had his finger around the pulse of humanity more accurately than a lot of artists—and with such vulnerability and \[as\] a real true romantic as well. It’s nice to tip our cap in the only way we really can.” **“Swallow”** DT: “This began in my apartment with a loop, and James came over, added his part. Pump came over another day and added a part, edited it together, and then we sort of had demo-itis with it for a long time. One of the big lessons doing this album in the studio was trying to be kind to the music—something I think we struggled with generally. It’s difficult when you’re writing music—being gentle with how you critique and how you try and mold it and how you collaborate, because when you’re writing an album in the way we do—which is real true collaboration where we’re all bringing in stuff—there’s going to be some stuff that you don’t see for a long time.” JM: “That was me. I couldn’t see this song’s place in our world, but by the time it started to get recorded, I understood it. I had a great struggle with seeing this tune. Now I love it when I listen to the record.” **“That Feeling”** JM: “This was a really exciting one because it just fell out of a jam. We were in London in our studio in Holloway \[north London\]. We came back from a lunch break or something, picked up the instruments, started playing together, and there was ‘That Feeling’ almost in its entirety.” DT: “This one might be the only one that was born from a true jam on this album.” **“Trailing a Wing”** JM: “There’s a sweetness to this. I can’t really put my finger on it, but it’s there. It’s also a funny one. We played a show in Belfast, and I was out for dinner with my couple of cousins and aunties and stuff up there. We were in a Thai restaurant, and an actor who will remain unnamed walked into the restaurant, and my aunt said, ‘There’s that fella, he’s always trailing a wing.’ So, I was like, ‘What does that mean?!’ Obviously, he just cheats on his wife loads, but I thought it was a beautiful adage!”
Emotional directness has always been part and parcel of the Laura Stevenson experience—but on *Late Great*, the Long Island-hailing singer-songwriter digs even deeper within as she chronicles the dissolution of a long-term relationship. “There were a lot of changes in my life,” she tells Apple Music. “I had to rebuild, and it was really difficult. The aftermath was having to navigate the world as a person on my own—which was difficult, because I was partnered for my entire adult life.” These 12 songs, imbued with the rich lyricism and melodic punch she’s long been known for, came together as Stevenson dealt with the wreckage amidst navigating continuing education, parenthood, and the expectations of agelessness that come with being a full-time musician. “When you’re in a band, you never really feel like a grown-up,” she laughs. “Your future thinking is not that clear. All of a sudden, it was like, ‘Oh, I’m a grown up, and I don’t know what is going on.” This period of change emboldened Stevenson to take charge in new ways with her studio collaborators, which included pop-punk compatriot Jeff Rosenstock, Real Estate drummer Sammi Niss, and producer John Agnello. “In the past, I wasn’t as vocal about things that I didn’t want—I’m a total people-pleaser, a peacekeeper,” she says. “This time around, I was pretty uncompromising about what I wanted. I sat with this one in a way that I never had before. I don’t think anything ever will be exactly the way you want it to be—but it was as close to what I really want as I’ve ever gotten.” Below, Stevenson tells the story behind each song on *Late Great*. **“#1”** “I wrote this song a long time ago. I was playing it while opening for Murder By Death in 2016, and I was like, ‘Their fans are gonna hate me if I play my little quiet songs.’ So I made it more boisterous than it was intended, and then I hated it and I put it away for a long time. When I was coming back to it, I kept hearing Roy Orbison singing the chorus—and I love a real schmaltzy chorus, so I leaned harder into that. Then I felt like it needed to be over-the-top, so I asked Jeff Rosenstock to add some orchestration—and it was exactly what I wanted. I felt like if it wasn’t huge, then it would be stupider somehow—so it had to be really stupid to the point where it was good, and we got there.” **“I Want to Remember It All”** “When I was writing this song, I was like, ‘Is this already a song?’ I felt like it worked *too* well—it couldn’t possibly be my idea. It’s a song about when things happen in your life that are supposed to happen. My daughter’s here, and every moment of my life that led up to her birth has been the exact right thing that needed to happen to make sure that this very specific human being was made. There were a lot of painful things that happened in the past couple of years, but I want to remember everything. I’ll take the painful stuff if I can have all the beautiful things.” **“Honey”** “Sonically and lyrically, it’s a weaving together of similar ideas. Part of it is about the relationship that I was in, part of it is about love in general, and part of it is about singing to someone I hadn’t even met. It’s love in a bunch of different forms, and then I wove it all together. I’m barely singing to anyone—I might be singing to myself, who knows.” **“Not Us”** “This one’s really sad. I’d never heard a song about this topic, which is when you’re in a relationship and watching everybody else around you break up, and you’re like, ‘That’ll never happen to us—we’re perfect.’ It’s not schadenfreude, but with each relationship that dies around you, for some reason it draws you closer. But then it does happen, and you’re like, ‘Holy shit, I didn’t see that coming.’ How did we get there? Did we just let it fall apart because we didn’t think about it? We just thought it would always work.” **“I Couldn’t Sleep”** “This one is about me getting back out there—I’ve never been single in my entire life. That was scary. Then I was seeing someone, and I felt absolutely nothing—and I was, like, actually happy, because it just didn’t feel right. But then you feel like, ‘Am I broken?’ And that’s scary too, but it’s okay. I just thought it was such a good song, and it makes sense with this chapter in my life where I’m just trying to figure out what is going on—what love is, how to love. This is the truth, and that’s how I’ve always been with the things that I make. I don’t censor it.” **“Short and Sweet”** “It’s about being back in the world again and making yourself vulnerable, and being afraid of that. I’m working as a music therapist, and I work with older populations at an assisted living facility sometimes. I sing that song ‘L-O-V-E,’ and the end of the song goes, ‘Take my heart, but please don’t break it.’ I had a long talk with the folks at the assisted living facility about that lyric, and how that’s such a scary thing—and that’s what love is. So the song is about that, and not being ready for that, because it’s a scary prospect.” **“Can I Fly for Free?”** “I was in Queens seeing Paul Simon, and I had an existential crisis about my life—and also about my physical safety at that moment, because it was a poorly organized operation, there were no clear exits, and I was really scared that the crowd was gonna go crazy and everybody was gonna die. But also, I was feeling a little suffocated in my life. I wasn’t making choices based on what I wanted, and I was going along with things and pretty freaked out. It was like this weird, pivotal, scary moment, and I remember looking up and the moon was coming up so low in the sky, and this Spirit Airlines plane flew past the moon in this way that I’m always gonna have in my mind. The title is kind of a joke, because I mention Spirit Airlines, so it’d be nice to have like some sort of sponsorship.” **“Domino”** “This is about another attempt at love. It’s about knowing something is going to end—and end badly—but also knowing that it was never really real in the first place. It’s another attempt at love, but then you want to go back in a time machine and just be in that place where you felt good for a second, even though you know that everything was bad. When something’s ending, you wish for that ‘ignorance is bliss’ situation, but you can’t get it.” **“Instant Comfort”** “This one’s about being out in the world again—getting burned, and getting burned bad. It’s about knowing what I represented to someone instead of what I actually was, and feeling a little used in that regard, which is scary, and hard. Musically, I was really excited about this one because I borrowed a mandolin from my work. I used a lot of really chime-y instruments, like a 12-string guitar and a couple of other acoustic guitars, to get a really bright-sounding guitar sound that I was looking for. I sat with it a lot in the aftermath to get a layered sound that I couldn’t really describe when we were in the studio, so I did it myself, and sometimes that’s the way to do it.” **“Middle Love”** “I wrote this one on piano very quickly. It’s about a moment in time where you’re dropped into a scene and looking around. It’s very special when those songs happen, because it’s like a short story but you’re not given all the characters or context and you have to figure it out. In this one, it’s two people sitting in a notary’s office, separating. Their driver’s licenses are sitting there, and they’re seeing pictures of themselves in the past from a couple of years prior. They’re looking back at them like, ‘Would you have believed that you’d be sitting there right now in the future?’” **“Late Great”** “I had a friend tell me that this one is their favorite one, and I was like, ‘Really?’ I mean, when I was writing it, I was like, ‘This is a good song.’ But when I was going through the instrumentation, something got lost there for me and I fell out of love with it. But now I’m starting to fall back in love with it, because I’ve been playing it by myself the way that I wrote it. Thematically, it sums the whole album up: I’m doing it on my own, but I’m figuring it out. It’s the only song that has a real positive message.” **“#1 (2)”** “This song is my favorite. I felt like the record needed something, and then it just found its way to the end of the record. A lot had changed during recording, and I had a lot of time to reflect on how crazy and sad everything was. I needed some sort of closure from the whole experience, so I wrote this one about mending the heaviness of it all. There’ll always be grief there, and I do feel like the song really works well in bringing everything full circle.”
It was during a time-out after the whirlwind success of his 2019 debut *Hypersonic Missiles* and its 2021 follow-up *Seventeen Going Under* that Sam Fender realized what his third album needed to be. Those two records had made the singer-songwriter from Northeast England one of the breakthrough artists of the past decade, a homegrown superstar who’d gone from playing local venues to stadiums and now had a pair of BRIT Awards sitting on his mantelpiece. But Fender had felt a little rushed making *Seventeen Going Under* and he was determined that it wouldn’t happen again, no matter how long it took. Allied to that, he also wanted to hold to a simple and concise aim. “When writing the past two albums I started with a clear goal and concept, but towards the end of recording it always morphed into something else—at least for me it did,” Fender told Apple Music when announcing *People Watching* in November 2024. “I wanted to go in there and write good songs; not think about some grandiose overblown message, just 10/11 good songs about ordinary people.” His patience paid off. *People Watching* is Fender’s most perfectly realized release to date. Its title neatly sums up the emotional connection at the heart of the 30-year-old’s music and his supernatural gift for wrapping everyday tales in an exhilarating, euphoric release. It’s still his beloved hometown that remains the primary focus but in Fender’s dexterous hands, the place has become a prism through which he sings about grief, family, mental health, poverty, homelessness, the government, and more. Sonically, *People Watching* is the most sumptuous work of his career, one that builds on the bounding, Springsteen-style expanse and emerges with a technicolor indie-rock masterpiece stacked with another raft of killer choruses for the masses to sing along to. Fender nodded to his love of The War on Drugs on *Seventeen Going Under* and here he goes one step further, enlisting the band’s mercurial leader Adam Granduciel as co-producer alongside Markus Dravs (Coldplay, Arcade Fire, Florence + the Machine). Nothing here is overloaded. Even at its most epic, there’s an intricacy and airiness about these songs, Granduciel’s synth flourishes adding a dynamic counterpoint to Fender’s rousing hooks. It’s a record of many shapes and textures, taking in the urgent classic rock of the title track, yearning anthems (“Little Bit Closer”), contemplative Americana with a bit of a swagger about it (“Wild Long Lie”), and wistful ’80s pop (“Crumbling Empire”). At its best, it pairs his love of US heartland rock with an Oasis-style jubilance. In its minor chord acoustic strums, “Chin Up” even has echoes of “Wonderwall” about it. But it’s hard to imagine Noel and Liam attempting a song like “Remember My Name,” the stirring, stark closer made up of nothing but Fender’s vocals and the moving horns of the Easington Colliery Band, an emotive salute to his northeast roots and a song that places Sam Fender out there on his own. *People Watching* may well be the sound of an artist entering his imperial phase.
JPEGMAFIA has become one of music’s most trusted collaborators, working with artists ranging from Danny Brown and Kanye West to Kimbra and indie rocker Helena Deland. Despite his sterling stature, the Air Force veteran returns to his experimental, boundary-pushing roots on his fifth solo album, *I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU*. Mixing punk, noise, industrial music, and more into a chaotic cacophony, JPEGMAFIA has proven that success certainly did not change his pursuit of musical freedom. On opener “i scream this in the mirror before i interact with anyone,” JPEG spits over free-jazz drums and metal guitars that explode into screeching solos. He lays out a manifesto of sorts for his perspective, rapping, “When they can’t read you like a book/They gon’ try to attack what you stand on/I’ma take off even if I land wrong/And take everything I can get my hands on.” On “don’t rely on other men,” JPEG leans into his experimental roots and examines his decision to occasionally make a mainstream leap, though he certainly doesn’t do that here. Over a beat from a chopped vocal and blown-out drums, the rapper asks a simple question, wondering at what cost he’s willing to suffer for his art: “Wanna cry on the bus or the Maybach?”
𝐖𝐞 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐢𝐧 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟓! 𝐓𝐢𝐜𝐤𝐞𝐭𝐬: tr.ee/-VV81Dp8Q5 Vinyl, CDs and more Cheekface merch at houseshoes.online UK local vinyl shipping from Alcopop Records ilovealcopop.co.uk/collections/cheekface
On “Slugger,” the first track from SASAMI’s third album, *Blood on the Silver Screen*, the singer stamps out one of the oldest clichés in the book. Over shuffling hi-hats and a rubbery bassline she sings, “Whoever said that it’s better to have loved and to lost/Than to not have loved at all/Should just shut up forever.” Alongside co-producers Rostam and Jenn Decilveo, the LA-based indie rock star takes aim at the lovers and lust-hungry obsessives throughout. On “Love Makes You Do Crazy Things,” guitars screech and shout before SASAMI rolls through with a metal-worthy solo during the introduction. “Bet it all on you, now I gotta leave town,” she sings, exposing the dark underbelly that exists beneath the surface of pop music’s romanticism. The album finds her moving away from the experimental songwriting of previous records like 2022’s *Squeeze*, instead turning in a streamlined and diamond-sharp ode to the parts of love that suck.
Following the critical and commercial success of 2023's ‘Grog,’ cult New York duo Frog return with ‘1000 Variations on the Same Song,’ their sixth album. '1000 Variations on the Same Theme' is an eclectic, emotional, and lyrically vivid collection. These songs see Daniel Batemanrefer to My Chemical Romance, Gucci, Stillwell deals, fatherhood, and the 6 train (“I was listening to a lot of Mozart, Kodak Black, and Prince, but it doesn't really sound like any of those.”). Musically, songs like “TOP OF THE POPS VAR. I” and “DOOMSCROLLING VAR. II” touch on the frenetic Indie Rock that defined their earlier work, while the idiosyncratic Alt. Country of ‘Count Bateman’ and ‘Grog’ can be heard on ‘WHERE U FROM VAR. III’ and ‘ARTHUR MCBRIDE ON THE LOWER EAST SIDE VAR. X.’ Singles like ‘JUST USE YR HIPS VAR. VI’ and December’s ‘DID SANTA COME VAR. IX’ also introduce a smoky lounge element to Frog’s sound. However, as Daniel explains it, these are all just variations on the same song: “1000 Variations on the Same Song is a theme and variations—there are times in your life as a songwriter where you'll start a bunch of stuff that all sounds alike, which can be a problem, something that you want to excise from yourself. This time, I decided to embrace it and take it as far as it could go. "The first four variations were recorded in one long take, ("HOUSEBROKEN") is the last one in that sequence. I added piano and doubled the vocals, etc, but basically, all those songs were done in one 15-minute stretch. If you’re working quickly and your goal is to finish an entire album or more in one night, amazing things can happen. How many songs can you write using the same chords? How many songs can you record and finish in one day? The answer to both is near-infinite with the right environment and mindset.” Since Frog returned from hiatus in 2023 with the addition of Daniel’s brother Steve Bateman on drums, they’ve received significant critical acclaim and enjoyed sold-out shows in the Tri-state area. In March, they will take their unique sound further afield with a nine-date North American tour. These shows will see the band joined by Frog co-founder Tom White on bass, and will take them to cities like Los Angeles, New York, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Ithaca, Hanover, and Boise (Treefort Music Fest) for some first-time-ever shows. The tour will also include a stop in the KEXP studios for a live radio session (with video to follow) on The Afternoon Show with Larry Mizell, Jr on March 25th.
Aesop Rock does not talk or tour. He has not been on a stage since 2017 or been interviewed since 2020. Instead, what one of his generation’s most recognizable and masterful voices continues to do as he enters the back half of his forties is rap—four albums since 2020 alone, each filled with his most harrowing or humorous experiences and a seemingly dauntless supply of esoteric or obvious enthusiasms. When he barks, “Anomaly in the algorithm, do the algebralculus/I’m all of Alexandria’s information in aggregate” at the start of “Checkers,” from his sprawling *Black Hole Superette*, it feels like he’s supplying a thesis statement of one—to be one of rap’s great outsiders, his rhymes free to do whatever they want. Would anyone else dare, after all, to spend three minutes chronicling the exponential growth curve of the snail population inside the aquarium he bought for his girlfriend, as he does on the dazzling “Snail Zero”? Or to use his dog’s mutt status and his cat’s tumescence to form a sort of superhero posse, as on “Movie Night”? Aesop Rock gets from Francis Bacon to H Mart, from EPMD to shaving cream and Nautica parkas, from the escape of his childhood hamster to the survival of Lahaina’s banyan tree in a matter of a few rhythmically intricate verses over spring-loaded beats. “Whole worth wrapped in what you can make with your bare hands/When sitting independent of the greater square dance,” he offers at one point, as if sneering at the music industry from the perfect privacy of his own studio. Indeed, no one else sounds or moves like Aesop Rock; on *Black Hole Superette*, he’s perhaps never sounded more like himself. The landmark track here might be “John Something,” where Aesop relays a story from his college days in Massachusetts above a hard-edged piano cut between percolating hand drums. It’s the tale of a visiting artist, possibly named John, who shows up to class to share slides of his photos but mostly just extols the Foreman-versus-Ali documentary *When We Were Kings*. Aesop rushed out to see the film and then felt its rush of excitement for himself, as he understood how vivid and compelling good storytelling might be. The gift of that artist was not his own work, but the enthusiasm he passed along for great work. It is clear that Aesop Rock—who counts Lupe Fiasco, Armand Hammer, and Open Mike Eagle as guests here—has passed that energy along to his successors and peers, even as he has remained on the industry’s outskirts. Thing is, he happens to remain one of the best rappers working too.
For over two decades, Natalia Lafourcade’s catalog has showcased her magnificent voice across a variety of styles, both as a stunning soloist and at the helm of skilled ensembles. Reuniting with her *De Todas las Flores* co-producer Adan Jodorowsky, the Veracruz-raised singer-songwriter taps into her home region’s musical history while drawing upon her wider discography for *Cancionera*. Perhaps most impressively, she recorded it entirely in one take, a feat that becomes more and more meaningful as the album persists. After a tone-setting instrumental introduction, she begins to shape the album’s fantastical broad narrative with the title track, portraying herself as an almost supernatural spirit of song. What follows is a series of memorable moments like the rumba-y-mezcal-enhanced “El Palomo y La Negra” and the fragile yet firm “Mascaritas de Cristal,” as well as moving duets like “Como Quisiera Quererte” with El David Aguilar and “Amor Clandestino” with flamenco singer Israel Fernández.
