Cate Le Bon’s gently surrealistic art-pop has a way of conjuring scenes that feel both unreachably distant and archetypically close at the same time: a mirrored palace on a rocky outcropping, a cryptic ritual conducted by robed figures on a freezing beach—the kind of stuff you wake up from thinking, “It must mean something,” without quite knowing what. *Michelangelo Dying* forms a kind of triptych with 2019’s *Reward* and 2022’s *Pompeii*, channeling the dreamy stiffness of late-’70s Bowie (“Mothers of Riches,” “Body as a River”) and late-’80s Cocteau Twins (“Jerome”) into a sound that feels totally—and at this point, almost inescapably—her own. And should you wonder if an artist so heady and poised would deign to write a love song, there’s six aching minutes of “Is It Worth It (Happy Birthday)?”
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.”
Whitney’s fourth album is a moment of rebirth for the Chicago duo. After making a hard pivot towards pop-influenced sounds on 2022’s *Spark*, Julien Ehrlich and Max Kakacek—who, at this point, are a million miles away sonically from the teenage-kicking garage rock of their previous band Smith Westerns—return to the pastoral folk rock they made their name on with *Small Talk*. The result is a gorgeous and warm affair, complete with lush instrumentation and feathery melodies that resemble a full realization of the sound they first gained notice with on their critically acclaimed debut *Light Upon the Lake* from 2016. Ehrlich and Kakacek’s distinctive vocals continue to complement each other perfectly, their self-produced arrangements taking on levels of complication that stretch far beyond the Simon & Garfunkel comparisons of their early work and more towards the velvety soft rock of the late 1970s, every horn stab and piano run possessing the effervescence of sipping champagne at dusk.
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.
There’s nothing lucky about the lottery according to sludgy Philly shoegaze revivalists They Are Gutting a Body of Water. On *LOTTO*, they rage against the circumstances of the modern person, birthed into what is meant to be the most prosperous time in world history but littered with more man-made atrocities and horrors than most sane people can deal with. The music on *LOTTO* is angry, but where They Are Gutting a Body of Water make their mark is in the willingness to persist, a defiance that courses through this record. Amongst the crashing cymbals, monotone screeds against modern capitalism, and thunderous guitar melodies, a stubbornness peeks through like a sliver of sunshine in a thunderstorm. This isn’t optimism, but a desire to fight for those no longer able. On the emo-leaning “american food,” they incorporate turntablism and the scraggly indie rock of early Broken Social Scene as the lyrics scan like the most poetic rest-stop bathroom graffiti imaginable; an indictment of the villainy at America’s core: “The benefit of believing you’re bad/Is that you get somebody to blame.”
The members of Parcels had barely graduated high school when they left Byron Bay, Australia for Berlin in 2014, five friends sharing a dream and a cramped one-bedroom apartment. Within a year, they had released their debut EP and signed a label deal; by 2017, they were collaborating with Daft Punk on the band’s single “Overnight,” a track that would become the dance icons’ final production. After two albums—2018’s self-titled debut and 2021’s double LP *Day/Night*—and nearly a decade in motion, Parcels finally took a break in 2023. For six months, they lived their ordinary lives while working on songs individually before reconvening to finish them together. Whereas *Day/Night* was recorded in a single studio and meticulously planned out, their third album *LOVED* was made more loosely, with sessions in Berlin, Byron Bay, Sydney, and Mexico City, and a go-with-the-flow approach that let the album emerge on its own. “It\'s kind of like Parcels back to our most authentic self, in a way,” bassist Noah Hill told Apple Music’s Travis Mills in April 2025. “This one feels a lot more pure and direct, and more to what we naturally have inside of us.” From opener “Tobeloved,” *LOVED* is dotted with moments of laughter and colorful ad-libs that drop listeners right in the booth with them. That joy permeates the production, a vintage blend of peppy keys, hand-claps, chest-swelling crescendos, and funky guitar riffs that beg for a little shimmy. They also bring tenderness: “Ifyoucall” offers unconditional love with the warmth of a long hug, and “Leaveyourlove” is a starry-eyed declaration of devotion. The latter, written in Mexico while watching the sun set over the ocean, became the album’s anchor point. “We were all writing our own individual verses about our own love stories at the time, and wanting to lean into that directness and not being afraid to talk about love so directly,” said Hill. “This track just clicked with all of us instantly.” But *LOVED* also refers to the emotion in the past tense. The disco fizz of “Yougotmefeeling” sugarcoats the realization that a relationship is past saving, and the more delicate “Summerinlove” aches with post-breakup yearning. Other songs like “Safeandsound” and “Finallyover” embrace the unknowable future with optimism, while closer “Iwanttobeyourlightagain” circles back to where it all began: “I remember when we were green/Five people and two sets of keys/Trying so hard to be seen.”
Long before KAYTRANADA was headlining festivals and winning Grammys, he was a child obsessed with JAY-Z’s 2003 record *The Black Album* and its companion documentary *Fade to Black*. Watching prolific producers like Pharrell Williams, Just Blaze, Kanye West, and Rick Rubin build beats from scratch, he went from fan to student, poring over album credits and eventually teaching himself to make beats by reverse-engineering J Dilla tracks. By the early 2010s, the Haitian Canadian producer had fused his love of hip-hop with a growing fascination for house music, emerging from the underground with viral edits of Janet Jackson and Teedra Moses songs, all driven by his signature drum swing. Following in the footsteps of his early heroes, KAYTRANADA became a master collaborator: His first three studio albums featured voices from PinkPantheress and Tinashe to Kali Uchis and even Williams himself. On *AIN’T NO DAMN WAY!*, KAYTRANADA lets his production do all the talking. Stripped back to hypnotic loops, slick rhythms, and far-flung samples, the album is for total dance immersion—the kind that makes time slip away in the club. The chunky retro beat of “SPACE INVADER,” paired with a refrain from Latrelle’s Neptunes-produced “My Life” (“Gotta get away sometimes”), sets an escapist tone. Stutters and glitches ripple through tracks like “CHAMPIONSHIP,” “TARGET JOINT,” and “GOODBYE BITCH!” as if you’re catching him mid-DJ set. His blending of styles and eras transforms the ’80s Afro-boogie of Steve Monite’s “Things Fall Apart” into contemplative poolside house, while rapper Cappadonna’s 1998 song “Black Boy” becomes a resilient disco jaunt. Even the soulfully reassuring croons of “DON’T WORRY BABE / I GOT U BABE” serve as a Trojan horse for a slow-burning banger. The party carries on until the TLC-sampling closer “DO IT (AGAIN!),” both a playful last call and an invitation to run it back all over again.
Tamara Lindeman’s music as The Weather Station seems to expand and contract with every movement. The long-running project broke through in 2021 as fifth album *Ignorance* grew her folk-rock milieu to encompass the sounds of sophisti-pop acts like The Blue Nile and Prefab Sprout, while 2022’s companion record *How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars* pared back her arrangements to nearly nothing. On her seventh album, *Humanhood*, Lindeman has blown up her sound yet again: Alongside the nocturnal vibe she so expertly cultivated across *Ignorance*, these 13 tracks—initially recorded straight to tape over the course of two improvisational sessions in late 2023—encompass freewheeling ’60s psychedelic pop, darkly shaded jazz, and flurries of spoken-word sound collage. Joining her trusty supporting players from the *Ignorance* sessions is a who’s who of left-field sounds, including orchestral-folk auteur Sam Amidon and ambient-saxophone jazz sensation Sam Gendel. At the center of it all, Lindeman’s ability to pull back and let silence briefly reign remains as breathtaking as her most acrobatic vocal moments. Her lyrical focus picks up from where she left off on the previous two Weather Station records, pivoting specifically from the encroaching threat of climate change towards an episode of depersonalization she experienced while contemplating the world’s ever-evolving ills. What results is an album that’s contemplative and soul-searching, as Lindeman avoids finding easy answers and instead seems to channel her thought process in real time. “I don’t know quite where to begin,” she sings over the brushed drums and elegiac piano of *Humanhood*’s quietly devastating closer, “Sewing.” “I know it don’t look like I’m doing anything.” Quite the opposite, in fact.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
Irish quintet Just Mustard had already cut an intriguing figure prior to the release of *WE WERE JUST HERE*, developing a gorgeous squall of friction and angst that allowed them to stand apart from the post-punk sound so thoroughly embraced by many of their contemporaries. On their third album, the group takes their biggest leap yet, incorporating the tricky rhythms of electronic music—the dissonant squelch of industrial, 2step’s unmistakable clip-clop gait—into their already tough-to-pin-down sound. The dusky dubstep environs of “DANDELION” and the propulsive mountain-scaling of “SILVER” suggest superhuman qualities behind Shane Maguire’s drum kit, while he pounds against squalls of noise on “THAT I MIGHT NOT SEE,” sounding as if a storm is beating against the windows of the studio itself. All this elemental wonder is brought down to Earth courtesy of singer Katie Ball, whose eerie, steady vocals resemble standing in the eye of a storm—watching pure chaos unfold in 360 degrees while maintaining a sense of calm.
Bartees Strange’s third album finds the Washington, D.C. singer-songwriter stretching his sonic limbs further than ever before—an achievement, to be sure, since Strange’s first two records (2020’s *Live Forever* and 2022’s critical breakthrough *Farm to Table*) cemented his ability to effortlessly hop between anthemic rock, dusky blues, and rap cadences within just a few minutes. With a slightly darker sound befitting its namesake, *Horror* adds a few impressive guises to Strange’s genre menagerie: There’s the explicitly Fleetwood Mac-esque jangle of “Sober,” the melancholic trip-hop skitter of “Doomsday Buttercup,” and the lucious house thump of “Lovers,” which might count as Strange’s starkest left turn to date. Across these 12 tracks, Strange also fine-tunes his winning formula of countrified balladry and propulsive riffs, both of which are given a big-ticket pop spit-shine courtesy of contributions from studio wizards Yves and Lawrence Rothman as well as the ever-ubiquitous Jack Antonoff. Don’t mistake big names for unnecessary flashiness, though: *Horror* retains the down-to-earth POV that’s made Strange an increasingly powerful presence in indie, even as his ambitions grow.
My Morning Jacket leader Jim James will be the first to tell you that the band’s 10th album is, on some fundamental level, more of the same: the same rootsy eclecticism, the same soft-but-chunky ’70s rock (“Squid Ink,” “Die for It”), the same lightly psychedelic insights into the human condition (“Everyday Magic,” “Time Waited”). “Love or hate the band, I think you could agree we try a lot of different things,” he says. “We’re open to any kind of music, any style of music, this or that. And I think this album is kind of the same.” The difference this time was in the approach—namely, the hiring of an outside producer, Brendan O’Brien (Pearl Jam, Bruce Springsteen), for the first time in their 25-plus-year career. The result was a collective shift in which the band was able to free themselves from the minutiae of record-making and relax into being a band—an experience James likened to an athlete connecting with the right coach (and this from a guy who insists he was “never good at sports”). Take “Everyday Magic” and “Time Waited,” highlights that come early in the album but that James wrote deep into the recording process. “It was hilarious because when I started working with Brendan, all these songs kept coming out,” James says. “I email him one song. I’m like, ‘Oh, my God. Check this out.’ No response.” Then another, and another. “‘I wonder if he just missed the email.’” Just when it seemed like he’d reached the end of his efforts, the right ones materialized. “I realized for the first time that I don’t have to take it personally,” he says. “Even when I was trying so hard to micromanage and force everything, at the end of the day, the record makes itself,” he says. *is* is.
In form alone, *Through This Fire Across from Peter Balkan* feels like a summation of John Darnielle’s ambitions across his 30-year-plus career. His work as The Mountain Goats, rich with storytelling and character study, has often approximated the trappings of musical theater, from the detailed scene-setting of his 2002 classic *Tallahassee* to the loosely structured rock opera of 2023’s *Jenny from Thebes*. But the project’s 23rd album feels practically made for the Broadway stage, right down to the sweeping orchestration of the album’s opening “Overture” (the first time an instrumental has been featured on a Mountain Goats album). Fittingly, the record features backing vocal contributions from *Hamilton* godhead and longtime Darnielle friend Lin-Manuel Miranda—but despite these slight shifts in sound, longtime fans will still recognize *Through This Fire* as carrying the same elements of Darnielle’s music that have been present throughout his career, every song a detailed revelation of an imaginary world that its creator adds glorious life to.
If 2025, as Charli xcx famously prophesied, gave rise to Turnstile Summer, then Militarie Gun Autumn is surely upon us. Like their Baltimore spiritual brethren, Ian Shelton’s LA-based project-turned-band has been burrowing a path from the circle pit to the festival stage, complementing their innate, jugular-bulging intensity with mass-appeal hooks and an eagerness to crowd-surf beyond the parameters of hardcore. And with their second proper album, *God Save the Gun*, Militarie Gun makes their most concerted swing for the bleachers yet. “We wanted to make a big record; we wanted to make a classic,” Shelton tells Apple Music. “We actually took that moment to step back and be like, ‘How do we actually take this as far as we can?’ I think our producer, Riley MacIntyre, was so emotion-forward, and I would say that we’re a very emotion-forward band.” For Shelton, that meant coming to terms with being a former straight-edge kid who, just as Militarie Gun was taking off, had his first-ever sip of alcohol at age 30 and gradually developed a heavy drinking habit. “I’ve been slipping up,” he admits on the album’s gate-crashing salvo “B A D I D E A,” but the song’s irrepressible energy and cathartic chant-along chorus suggest he isn’t wallowing in misery so much as giving himself a kick in the butt to get his life back on track. “I think a huge part of *God Save the Gun* is that you don’t have to burn your life down to make it better,” Shelton says. “We think that you have to hit this rock bottom, but if you know you’re in a tailspin, you could just go ahead and choose to take yourself out of it.” As such, there’s a sense of uplift to even the album’s most incendiary moments: “Maybe I’ll Burn My Life Down” barrels in on a bruising backbeat caked in distortion, but Shelton’s despairing self-diagnosis—“I feel trapped!”—is delivered on a bed of choral Beach Boys harmonies. And coming out of the blown-out grungy finale of the suicide-themed elegy “I Won’t Murder Your Friend,” the voice of Modest Mouse lead singer Isaac Brock appears on the dreamy interstitial “Isaac’s Song” as if Shelton were being consoled by a guardian angel. But *God Save the Gun* also sees Shelton displaying the confidence to let his melodies shine without feeling the need to rough them up: “Laugh at Me” exudes the jangly sparkle of a ’90s Gin Blossoms nugget, while the acoustic ballad “Daydream” aspires to be nothing less than a “Wonderwall” for the generation aging out of hardcore. “We’ve played in hardcore bands,” Shelton says. “But we are a rock band, and we don’t approach anything from being like, ‘What do people in hardcore think?’ Everything that we do is for self-soothing.”
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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.”
Five years after 2020’s *Freeze, Melt*, Cut Copy has only grown more nuanced and self-reflective, with soft-sung leader Dan Whitford leaning into confiding closeness across *Moments*. That suits the Melbourne band’s warm, tender synth-pop, which can still flash back to their more extroverted past with selectively clubby touches. American singer Kate Bollinger lends dreamy guest vocals amid some weepy steel guitar on “Belong to You,” a track that balances melancholy and motion in a way that feels distinctive to Cut Copy. The like-minded “Still See Love” explores the stark duality between its peppy verse and pensive chorus, while “When This Is Over” taps a poignant choir of children and “Gravity” morphs its way through a slippery, suite-like structure. Yet, even when a song starts off mellow, the band often introduces some engaging new facet near the end, from the vocodered mantra closing the slow-burn title track to the burbling layers coming to a head during the final minute of “More Alive.” This album may be fairly low-key, but Cut Copy still knows how to hypnotize with sneaky hooks and quiet sincerity.
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?”
Listening to Purity Ring’s panoramic synth-pop has always felt a bit like stepping into a futuristic fantasyland, so it makes perfect sense that Megan James and Corin Roddick would envision their self-titled fourth album as the soundtrack to a *Final Fantasy*-style RPG that exists only in their own minds. But while *purity ring* comes loaded with fleet-footed, breakbeat-driven bops (“many lives,” “between you and shadows”) ideal for whipping through levels at warp speed and slaying enemies with militaristic precision, the album’s more manic tracks flow naturally into meditative soundscapes (“part ii,” “mistral”) that reflect the more exploratory aspects of gaming, where you’re content to just wander through and marvel at the digital vistas around you. And even if you’re not a headset-sporting joystick jockey, there’s no resisting the emotional undertow of “imanocean,” where James turns off the pitch-shifting vocal filters and Roddick eases off the electro-freakery to deliver an acoustic-driven, heart-pumping indie-pop anthem.
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
