Perpetually operating in a wondrous and woozy space for some two decades, Black Moth Super Rainbow serves as an essential part of the independent psychedelic music underground. Though sometimes their trips take darker turns, as on 2018’s *Panic Blooms*, the Pennsylvania-based act’s seventh album *Soft New Magic Dream* returns to a more blissed-out environment. Here, lead vocalist Thomas Fec, also known as Tobacco, returns from making left-field hip-hop with Aesop Rock as Malibu Ken and composing video game soundtracks with a brand-new love burrowing into his frontal lobe. The results always feel structurally damaged and actively decaying. As such, even the poppiest songs on the record seem capable of collapsing into themselves. “The Eyes in Season” and “Unknown Potion” nearly lose their inherent boom-bap structure in acidic, synthy gobs and heartfelt yet vocoded lyrics. Two of the more rock-oriented cuts, “Brain Waster” and “Wet Spot Dare,” cling to drums and basslines for dear life, the alternative being a chance to truly let oneself go and see what happens.
There has always been something deeply old-fashioned about DJ Koze’s music, a sense of wonder and invention more closely related to the rush of a Bugs Bunny cartoon or the moony romance of a prewar pop song than anything from the modern era per se. *Music Can Hear Us* is only his fourth album in 20 years—DJ work keeps him busy, and in general he does not seem like one to hurry—and builds on the pan-electronic style he developed on *Amygdala* and *Knock Knock*. The songs shuffle between tropical pop (the Damon Albarn-featuring “Pure Love”), melancholy ambience (“A Dónde Vas?”), lightly psychedelic club tracks (“Aruna,” “Buschtaxi”), and doo-wop sweetness (“Unbelievable,” “Umaoi”) with a fluidity that can feel both playful and dizzying. Music for tickling your third eye.
Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band’s *New Threats from the Soul* is the kind of funny, rambling, junk-shop-scouring, bumper-sticker-talking, dollar-draft-guzzling daydream on which minor indie legends are born. The songs here unfurl with the workmanlike self-pity of ’90s country (“New Threats from the Soul”) or Springsteen anthems on salaries not yet adjusted for inflation (“Monte Carlo / No Limits”), dappled with Casio flutes and drum machines whose not-quite prime-time textures only go to fill in the blanks where Davis’ walls of lyrics drop off. His characters are hopeless wrecks redeemed only (and then only occasionally) by their insistence to get up off their dumb asses and try again, and yet reveal in that dumbass insistence something beautiful, or at least true. “The Spanish moss, it weeps in mourning of/Not only personal but also planetary loss/Not just for the bloodshed, but, by god, for what the Bloody Marys cost,” he sings on the opening of “Mutilation Springs.” Then there’s eight more minutes. Call it busy doin’ nothing.
The first volume of New Zealand indie heroes Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s all-instrumentals *IC* series leaned into the abstract. The Vietnam-recorded collection from 2018 was skronky and dissonant, landing somewhere between pure punkish exuberance and the looseness of free jazz. Seven years later—and following the alluring, luxurious album *V* from 2023—*IC-02 Bogotá* signals that even when it comes to UMO’s restless, experimental side, their slippery sound continues to mutate. Yes, there’s plenty of knotty and intriguing improv material to get lost in here; the record, recorded in its namesake’s Colombian city and featuring UMO godhead Ruban Nielson alongside his brother Kody, is bookended by two sidelong jams that tone down *IC-01*’s noise in favor of spiraling keyboards and hypnotic, elliptical rhythmic patterns. But the chewy center of *IC-02* also contains some of the band’s poppiest material in a while, from the psychedelic skips of “Earth 5” to the synths that dot the easy beat of “Heaven 7.”
Ben Kweller’s seventh studio album is marked by an unimaginable tragedy: the death of his teenage son Dorian in a car crash in 2023. “The last two years have been the hardest times in my life,” Kweller tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “I replay that night over and over again in my head, and I’ve had to relearn how to live.” A month after Dorian’s passing, Kweller discovered a digital trove of music that his late son had been working on, which lit the spark that created *Cover the Mirrors*; the aching ballad “Trapped” draws from a melody Dorian had been working on. “I remember hearing him in his bedroom singing this amazing chorus, and I walked in and I’m like, ‘Dude, this is awesome, keep going,’” Kweller recalls. Even as some of *Cover the Mirrors*—especially the stream-of-consciousness piano-led opener “Going Insane”—emerged from the solitude of grief, the record finds Kweller embracing the warmth of collaboration more than at any previous point in his career, with contributions from Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield (“Dollar Store”), MJ Lenderman (the rollicking and elegiac closer “Oh Dorian”), Jason Schwartzman’s Coconut Records alias (“Depression”), and The Flaming Lips (“Killer Bee”). “The one thing that’s kept me together through this is community,” Kweller says. “I’m usually so protective of my music, and I think most artists are—but I’ve been so cracked open that I’ve really enjoyed and embraced it.”
Between Comedy Central’s *The New Negroes*, his Stony Island Audio podcast fiefdom, and countless hours of livestreaming, Open Mike Eagle has got plenty of media experience. For *Neighborhood Gods Unlimited*, he proffers a conceptually inventive take on imagined cable network Dark Comedy Television, with barely enough budget for an hour’s worth of programming. That translates to one of the indie-rap mainstay’s more diverse offerings thematically and, with help from underground producers like Child Actor and Ialive, sonically. On the sitcom-esque “me and aquil stealing stuff from work,” he and his buddy AQ both toil and loaf around like quintessential mall rats. His unabashedly nerdy tastes come through as he nods to *Adventure Time*’s wintry wizard on “contraband (the plug has bags of me)” and non-canonically mixes heterogenous comic book and cartoon lore on “michigan j. wonder.” Longtime cohorts R.A.P. Ferreira and Previous Industries’ Video Dave appear as fourth-wall-winking guest stars in sweeps-week fashion, but nobody upstages Mr. Number 1 on the Call Sheet.
With their first two albums, Sports Team captured the frantic, visceral thrills of their live show but they instill a sense of suave order to third effort *Boys These Days*. This is a record where the English indie rockers—who formed in Cambridge in 2016 with a specialism in wry, anthemic observations of Middle Britain—get their groove on by channeling the dapper ’80s stylings of Bryan Ferry and Prefab Sprout. Seeking to make a more intricately crafted studio album without it being anything as dull as that sounds, the six-piece headed to Bergen, Norway to work with girl in red and CMAT producer Matias Tellez. The result is a record that melds the playful thrills and melodious joy of 2020’s *Deep Down Happy* and 2022 follow-up *Gulp!* with a sumptuous, soulful sound that takes in exuberant, sax-assisted indie pop (slick opener “I’m in Love (Subaru)”), Pulp-esque wistfulness (“Maybe When We’re 30”), rollicking fusions of Britpop and Morricone (“Bang Bang Bang”), and freewheeling, melody-heavy sing-alongs (“Condensation”). At their best, they sound like early-’80s Elton John as reworked by *In it for the Money*-era Supergrass. As with their earlier output, though, there is razor-sharp perception lurking within all the cheeky winks to camera, and themes such as the uncertain shift from teenager to adulthood, the weaponization of nostalgia, doom-scrolling, war, and influencers with dogs all crop up over the course of these 10 tracks. In *Boys These Days*, Sports Team have made a grown-up pop record without losing the sense of what made them so exciting in the first place.
The Norwegian art-pop duo (Henriette Motzfeldt and Catharina Stoltenberg) met in high school in their hometown of Oslo, then moved to Copenhagen for school—in Motzfeldt’s case, the Rhythmic Music Conservatory, the incubator for some of the most forward-thinking pop music of the 2020s, from Erika de Casier to ML Buch. Since their 2016 debut EP *Okey*, the pair have entered into something of a creative mind-meld, occasionally writing songs from one another’s perspectives. On *Big city life*, their second studio album (following 2021’s *Believer*), Motzfeldt and Stoltenberg swagger through the cityscape of their own cheeky fantasies, a flirty neon pleasure dome where anything can happen. On “Roll the dice” and “Feisty,” they spit cool, campy bars about making friends in crowded bathroom lines and drunk taxi rides: “’Cause you’re a girl in the city/You just know how it is/You’re a professional, logistics, you just know this business,” they hype themselves up over a minimal drum-synth-piano riff. “You got time and I got money,” with its playfully swooning lyrics and sweeping string arrangements, plays out like the last karaoke number of the night.
The Oxford-based musician was a virtuoso DJ before he became a producer, pulling off risky transitions of genre and tempo in vinyl-only sets known to flit from hip-hop to drum ’n’ bass to free jazz. Before that, though, the artist born Felix Manuel was something of a child prodigy as a pianist and harpist. On *Under Tangled Silence*, the first Djrum full-length since 2018’s *Portrait with Firewood*, Manuel’s talents as an instrumentalist (piano, harp, and percussion) are foregrounded as much as his electronic production. On “A Tune for Us,” cascading piano gradually gives way to jungle breaks; elsewhere, heady acid house and futuristic dancehall wash up against a blissful, piano-guided ambient meditation. Manuel began the record during the pandemic lockdowns, then rebuilt it from scratch after a catastrophic hard-drive meltdown; the result is a striking, holistic portrait of an artist fully inhabiting himself.
Whether it’s Merrill Garbus’ megaphone vocals, her righteously indignant messaging, or the percussive rhythms thundering beneath them, Tune-Yards have never trafficked in subtlety. But with their sixth album, the creative partnership of Garbus and bass-playing hubby Nate Brenner delivers its most clearly articulated statement to date. *Better Dreaming* is the duo’s fiercely funky response to spending several years cooped up (first with the pandemic, then with a newborn), and a defiantly optimistic affront to a world descending into chaos and rage. Featuring guest giggles from their offspring, “Limelight” is a joyous jam with a pronounced P-Funk vibe, while the clattering disco-house workout “How Big Is the Rainbow” is an instant LGBTQ+ anthem that you can imagine being blasted at Pride parties around the world for years to come. But *Better Dreaming* acknowledges that staying positive in a world mired in negativity requires constant diligence and self-care, and with “Get Through,” Garbus delivers an inspirational soul serenade to keep us racing toward the light: “We don’t know how we get through,” she sings, “but we do.”
For more than a decade, the musician born Nat Ćmiel has been exploring what it means to be a 21st-century human (or post-human): On 2022’s *Glitch Princess*, yeule probed the limits of the flesh by way of modulated vocals and decaying Danny L Harle beats; on 2023’s *softscars*, the artist who once identified as a cyborg tiptoed into the corporeal world, inspired by the fuzzy rock music of the late ’90s. Their fourth album, *Evangelic Girl Is a Gun*, takes their glitchy avant-pop even further out of the matrix, eschewing Auto-Tune entirely to showcase their vocals at their rawest and most visceral. Enchantingly abject vignettes about doomed love and ego death play out over sexy-sad soundscapes that draw from ’90s trip-hop and alt-rock, with production from Mura Masa, A. G. Cook, and Clams Casino. Imagine the most morose possible version of a Charli xcx song and you’ve got the title track, on which yeule purrs dispassionately: “Nosebleed on the Sunset Strip/He picks me up in a fast whip/He laces up my leather boots/He wears a blood-stained velvet suit.”
“I found myself in a new world of touring and chaos so quickly that I built a separation between myself as Josh and Barry on stage to deal with it,” Josh Mainnie tells Apple Music. “But when it came to writing this album, I knew it had to be for me as Josh. I wanted to bring those two parts back together.” As DJ and producer Barry Can’t Swim, Mainnie has had a meteoric rise since the release of his 2021 debut EP *Amor Fati* and 2023 album *When Will We Land?*. Blending emotive melody with thumping electronic percussion and expertly chopped vocal samples, Mainnie’s signature has become a feel-good dance-floor communion. For his second album, *Loner*, Mainnie turns inwards to explore his rise to fame, moving from the spoken-word soul-searching of “The Person You’d Like to Be” to the trance synths of “About to Begin” and soulful horn fanfares of “Childhood,” all while keeping his introspection anchored in the joy that has become his calling card. “Once I started, it all came together quickly,” he says. “It’s an authentic side of me that needed to come out for everyone to hear.” Read on for Mainnie’s in-depth thoughts on the album, track by track. **“The Person You’d Like to Be”** “This is a collaboration with a good friend of mine, the poet Séamus. I’ve known him since university and always wanted to work together. We finally managed to make it happen and he came up with these lyrics that set the tone for the themes of the album really well. It’s about having two voices of conflict and duality—myself and Barry. I then put his vocal through an AI voice generator, so that it starts AI and becomes more and more Séamus as the track continues.” **“Different”** “I loved the lyric of ‘everybody different’ in this vocal sample I found and ended up building the entire track around it. I was also really inspired by the track ‘Church of Nonsense’ by Daniele Papini, which I’ve played in DJ sets for years, since it has this incredible rising bassline that I wanted to emulate here. It’s minimalistic and the synth that comes in two thirds of the way through wasn’t originally in there but when I brought it to rehearsals for the live show my keys player Jakes \[UK producer/artist Hannah Jacobs\] added it in and so it stayed!” **“Kimpton” (with O’Flynn)** “‘Kimpton’ is one of the earliest songs I wrote for the album. I wasn’t sure where to begin, so I went round to \[London DJ/producer\] O’Flynn’s house, since he lives around the corner from me, and we just began mucking about. He started this tune himself when he was on tour with Bonobo and I liked the vocal a lot but wanted to simplify it and build a different chord progression and texture around it. It developed as a jigsaw from there and I’m really happy with how it turned out.” **“All My Friends”** “This is another early one, probably written in November or December 2023. I found the vocal sample first and loved it so much I decided to keep it as it was and not overdo it with too much extra instrumentation. I’m generally quite quick in the studio, playing most of the instrumentation live myself and working on ideas until they’re finished rather than multiple things at once.” **“About to Begin”** “I wrote this while I was staying at my parents’ house on the day I delivered the finished album. I didn’t have anything to do, so I decided to quickly make something fresh to keep busy. I picked this vocal from a sample pack and it sounded pretty cheesy and American but I liked the energy of it. I put it through an AI voice generator, which added another persona to the themes of the record, and it’s since become a huge tune in the live show, so it had to go on the record.” **“Still Riding”** “This is one of my favorite tunes I’ve made and it was written a few years ago when I got back from touring in America for the first time. It’s been finished for a while but I couldn’t get the Kali Uchis vocal sample cleared until I think my own profile got bigger and they finally agreed. I’m so pleased because I love the track.” **“Cars Pass by Like Childhood Sweethearts”** “I was listening to a lot of \[French DJ/producer\] Pepe Bradock and his tune ‘Deep Burnt’ when I made this because I love the warmth and texture of the strings loop he uses. I started writing strings inspired by that and built all the other parts around it. It was originally just an instrumental but I spent a couple of weeks digging through samples and eventually found this vocal that works really well with the vibe of the tune.” **“Machine Noise for a Quiet Daydream” (feat. Séamus)** “This is a good place to have a bit of breathing space in the record. Séamus just sent me a poem he was working on one day, and I thought I’d see how it sounded on an instrumental I’d already finished and I loved the energy of it. I didn’t do much else, and none of it is really in time but I fell in love with his delivery on the phone voice note he sent through, so that’s what we kept.” **“Like It’s Part of the Dance”** “I don’t often write tracks for my live show but this is one that found its way into the show very quickly. I’ve been playing it for six or seven months and it always goes off—even when I sent the album to friends and the people I trust, a lot of people picked it out as their favorite. It’s all about the build and drop and energy.” **“Childhood”** “I was in Lisbon on holiday with my partner and I smuggled a keyboard along with me, which is what I ended up writing this one on. I started with the horns and vocal sample and then it was a case of finding a chord progression that led nicely into a sense of release. I felt like the track had a feeling of innocence to it, which comes with childhood, hence the title.” **“Marriage”** “‘Marriage’ ended up having a strange Russian doll process to it, since I wrote the vocal and had someone sing it live over an existing instrumental. Then I realized I didn’t like that instrumental, so I changed it before realizing I didn’t like the vocal anymore either so had to change that too! We got there in the end, and I love that it’s built around the lyric ‘My heart is closed for the season.’” **“Wandering Mt. Moon”** “I was in the toilet of an Indian restaurant in Brick Lane and suddenly heard the strings part of an amazing Bollywood track play through the speakers. I immediately Shazamed it and once I got home, wrote my own part inspired by it. It’s definitely become one of my favorites on the album since it’s such a lush and textured ending to have. The title also comes from a Game Boy *Pokémon* level, where you’re exploring a dark cave with only a ray of light, which is what this felt like to me.”
Don’t let her sweetness fool you: Frankie Cosmos’ Greta Kline has more insights about the inner struggles of sensitive young people than most of her indie-pop peers. Or, hey, do let it fool you—getting fooled is part of what being young is about. “I think it’s funny not to learn my lesson/And keep on acting like I’m 27,” she sings from her perch of infinite wisdom at age 31 (“Porcelain”), having confessed two minutes earlier, “I can’t go a day without touching my fucking telephone” (“Bitch Heart”). The music is more sophisticated than her 2010s K Records-style scrawls (listen to the ’70s soft-pop of “Vanity”) but never so sophisticated it gets in the way of her lyrics, which hit like little pinpricks. If it’s true, why make it more complicated?
Tyler Childers has never been one to play it safe, crafting traditionally informed, bluegrass-tinged country music with an expansive sense of what the genre can be. On this seventh full-length studio album from the Lawrence County, KY, native, Childers goes even bigger and bolder, recruiting superproducer and noted spiritual seeker Rick Rubin to helm a kaleidoscopic collection of wild, weird songs. *Snipe Hunter* opens with “Eatin’ Big Time,” a freewheeling rocker that takes its title from a phrase Childers and his band The Food Stamps deploy to mark milestones and celebrate successes. With a lyric as wild as his wailing vocal—there’s a verse about shooting and then skinning a man in a “motherfucking mansion”—it’s a fitting entry into this new world Childers built. “Bitin’ List” gets right to the point, opening with the line “To put it plain, I just don’t like you” while The Food Stamps sink their teeth into an old-time-adjacent arrangement. “Tirtha Yatra” pairs spiritual musings with a swinging beat, as Childers waxes poetic on the Bhagavad Gita. And longtime fan favorite “Oneida,” a staple of Childers’ live sets since 2017, gets its long-awaited studio treatment, bridging the gap between the burgeoning days of his career and this obvious high point.
Lifeguard’s *Ripped and Torn* is an impressive and indelible debut in a long legacy of rock bands making noise sound like an energizing good time—from British post-punk greats Wire and American legends Sonic Youth to 2010s lo-fi heroes like Women and Male Bonding. The Chicago trio of Asher Case, Isaac Lowenstein, and Kai Slater (who also makes music as the buzzy indie-pop project Sharp Pins) have been making music together since junior high, and *Ripped and Torn* sounds suitably locked-in even as its creators channel brash, challenging avant-rock sounds that equally recall the 1980s NYC no-wave scene and post-rock forebears This Heat. If that sounds intimidating, rest assured: Lifeguard is as tuneful as they are tormented-sounding, as evidenced by the peppy and caffeinated punk rock of “It Will Get Worse”—a song title that’s droll, cheeky, and the exact opposite of what to expect from these upstarts as they continue their ascent.
Ela Minus’ second album, *DÍA*, takes a massive leap when it comes to the sheer size of the Colombian producer and songwriter’s music. Her 2020 breakout debut, *acts of rebellion*, felt like someone communicating electronic pop to you in secret, with warm analog synth squiggles and a delightfully brittle feel, not unlike coldwave’s minimalist steeliness or the punkish, romantic sound of ’80s synth-pop. On *DÍA*, Minus cranks up her stylistic tics to max volume: The synths crash like monsoons, and her voice soars above the music instead of lying in wait in the shadows. The saucer-eyed wobbles of opener “ABRIR MONTE” immediately recall the lush rave waves of Jamie xx’s “Gosh,” while “ONWARDS” conjures peak-era electroclash, right down to Minus’ excellently disaffected and cool-to-the-touch vocal take. At times, *DÍA* also feels like a modern update of the icy, gothic synth-pop that Swedish duo The Knife first perfected on their 2006 album *Silent Shout*. The swooning tones and static bursts of “IDK” tackle feelings of anxiety head-on, while “I WANT TO BE BETTER” is riddled with self-doubt and regret, a hand reaching across the void toward past acquaintances. The feelings feel real; the imagery is corporeal and thoroughly sanguine—the latter quite literally over the serpentine synths of “IDOLS”: “All it took/Was a little blood/To see what I’m really made of.”
