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.”
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.”
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.”
After growing up in Queensland’s bucolic Rainbow Bay before relocating to the more populous Byron Bay, the members of Australia’s Babe Rainbow still embrace a beach-friendly hippie lifestyle that’s well-represented in their music. The trio’s sixth album was recorded in a warehouse on a former banana farm and adds some groovy swathes of synth and drum machine to their gentle psych pop. Angus Dowling sings about flying off in a spaceship against funky guitar licks on “Like cleopatra,” while “Aquarium cowgirl” continues that song’s whimsical ’80s vibes. So much of *Slipper imp and shakaerator* is equally danceable and psychedelic, with added flute and percussion from Miles Myjavec and backing vocals from Camille Jansen. And after years of loyal co-signs from King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, that band’s Stu Mackenzie mixed the album and guests on “Mt dub.” There’s no sense of tightening up this music for commercial appeal; instead, it plays like a series of loose, tranquil jams between childhood friends. But with songs this sunny and catchy, the appeal is close to universal.
“Play,” the pop-art experimentalist Brian Eno tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, “is a way of exploring things.” On *AURUM*, released exclusively on Apple Music in 2025, the ambient pioneer takes that idea to new frontiers, using sonic texture and his meticulous detailing to create hushed realms and grand landscapes. Collecting tracks that Eno debuted on his Apple Music Chill radio show AMBER, Eno’s first solo full-length since 2022 shows the British innovator at the peak of his powers. On “Gorgeous Night,” synthesized, sustained drones rise up and tangle into one another, creating the aural equivalent of a shimmering, imperceptibly shifting aurora borealis. “Material World” pairs harsh tones that recall an alert tone’s implicit warning with an insistent beat and metallic scrapes, evoking the pulse of a city before it melts into its darkest hours. “Friendly Reactor Near Menacing Forest” echoes the standoff-level tension of its title, its rumbling low end and insistent upper register seemingly at odds as oscillations and shooting-star synth-strings veer into the mix. *AURUM* is available in Spatial Audio, and, as Eno tells Lowe, he’s been working with the idea of making music immersive for years. In the past, he would set up boomboxes around a space and make them play at once. “They weren’t synchronized together—that was the whole point,” Eno says. “But not being synchronized allowed new clusters of sound to appear.” Now listeners can replicate that ideal at home, giving new breadth and depth to songs like the fog-shrouded opener “Fragmented Film” and the windswept “Cascade.” With *AURUM*, he continues to explore his sense of play while creating ambient music, a genre that he’s been instrumental in defining and refining.
The Irish musician wrote her self-released debut album, 2019’s dreamy, reverb-drenched *All My People*, while living in Dublin and pining for her hometown of Connemara on Ireland’s Atlantic coast. Writing its follow-up, Maria Somerville returned to the rural landscapes of her youth, drawing inspiration from its wild terrain, its weather patterns and various bodies of water, and the Irish folk traditions still cherished by the locals. Between a pair of artist residencies on the nearby island of Inis Oírr, long conversations with her fisherman father, and home recording sessions with a small crew of new collaborators (Henry Earnest, Finn Carraher McDonald, Roisin Berkeley) emerged the ethereal songs of *Luster*, Somerville’s sophomore album and her 4AD debut. Wistful dream-pop numbers like “Garden” and “Projections” channel the woozy romance of Grouper, Mazzy Star, or Cocteau Twins, while evoking Somerville’s misty, windswept surroundings.
Graham Johnson’s music as quickly, quickly has always retained an intimacy even as the project has grown in scope. His homespun brand of psych-infused bedroom pop began evolving with 2021’s *The Long and Short of It*, remixing the DIY spirit of his catchy lo-fi tunes to include technicolor instrumental bursts and some of his clearest vocals to date. On its follow-up, 2025’s *I Heard That Noise*, Johnson imbues these vast soundscapes with moments of spontaneity and experimentation. His voice is more powerful than ever before, and he mirrors the whimsy of his instrumentals with his unpredictable melodic inclinations. Take “Enything,” a guitar-driven, folk-leaning track with spindly guitar melodies and a propulsive drum part. Johnson’s vocals build alongside the groove, which hints at a resolution that never comes. His ability to conjure and resolve tension is effortless and seamless. “Raven,” on the other hand, is an acoustic campfire jam, a track unlike anything else on the album. Here, Johnson performs the role of storyteller, his voice raw and vulnerable, matching the gravitas of the moment—whatever it may call for.
At this point in his increasingly eclectic career, it seems preposterous to call Ty Segall a garage-rocker, the label that’s stuck to him ever since he blasted out of Laguna Beach in a flurry of fuzz and feedback back in the late 2000s. And while the 10-song/40-minute format of *Possession* may position it as a leaner counterpoint to 2024’s sprawling prog-folk-jazz odyssey *Three Bells*, its compact package belies the amount of structural complexity, textural detail, and melodic ingenuity that Segall crams into each of these tunes. It’s a record built on familiar reference points—acoustic Zeppelin riffs, Bowie/T. Rex pageantry, Plastic Ono Band groove—that’s always taking you to unexpected places, as songs like the strings-’n’-sax-swirled “Shoplifter” and the funky-glam workout “Fantastic Tomb” cycle through multiple sections and accrue more power each step of the way. But even as he plunders the history of British rock with surgical precision, Segall remains an unkempt West Coast punk at heart: He signs off with “Another California Song,” an acerbic Golden State anthem infused with equal amounts of California dreaming and dreading.
“I wanted to make a record that was not going to be anything like what we’d done and something we couldn’t make in Australia,” vocalist/guitarist Caleb Harper tells Apple Music about Spacey Jane’s third album. It’s the sound of a band venturing outside their comfort zone. Such a goal doesn’t come without a little hardship. Relocating to Los Angeles to make the album, some of the issues the West Australian four-piece faced were practical, like figuring out how to get a rental without credit history. Others were artistic, with Harper learning how to work with outside writers such as Sarah Aarons (“Whateverrrr,” “How to Kill Houseplants”) for the first time. “All of those things felt new and foreign and scary,” he says. “I hear it lyrically. I feel this vulnerability and some confusion.” Shepherding the band through the process was producer Mike Crossey (The 1975, Arctic Monkeys), with whom Spacey Jane spent 12 weeks tracking the record. Given that they dedicated 18 months to writing the LP—which incorporates synths (“Falling Apart”) and even a piano-led ballad (“Ily the Most”) into their indie-guitar arsenal—*If That Makes Sense* accounts for roughly two years of the band’s life. “It’s the most work we’ve put into a record,” says Harper. The singer’s upbringing is a recurring lyrical theme and the album’s title is a response to the emotional complexity. “It’s the last line on the last song of the record,” he offers. “It’s representative of this idea of saying all these things and then discounting it with ‘if that makes sense.’” Here, Harper takes Apple Music through *If That Makes Sense*, track by track. **“Intro”** “On ‘Through My Teeth’ there are all these little peddling arpeggio guitars and synths, and we had 20 of them that we whittled down to four or five. Mike was playing around with them one day, just in isolation, and I filmed it with my phone. A month later, I said to Mike, ‘Listen to this, how cool was this on its own?’ So the intro is actually that audio ripped from the iPhone video and then it blends into all those voice memos of me writing the music over the preceding two years.” **“Through My Teeth”** “It’s about the identity crisis I felt when I was 17, 18, and just being a mess and feeling like people don’t know who I am anymore. I’m this person to this new group of people I’ve met and I’m unrecognizable to the people I’m leaving behind, and it’s all through the lens of this fucked-up little kid running around getting drunk, which was essentially me.” **“Whateverrrr”** “Sarah \[Aarons\] and I \[wrote the title\] like that when we were texting back and forth. It’s just stupid, how a kid might write it or say it. That ties into the song—it’s a kid being like, ‘Whatever, but I’ll think of you forever.’ It’s this awful sense of, there’s things that you can’t control that are so far away from you now as an adult that are like the foundation of who you are as a person. It’s like a reflection on family life, and it’s this juxtaposition of running through the sprinklers but something’s dark, something feels fucked up, and when you look back on it you can’t quite balance the two experiences.” **“All the Noise”** “It’s an attempt at \[reflecting on my parents’ split\] without putting any extra research into it. It’s what I’ve heard about what happened and what that may be. This was quite an angry sounding song, but it’s anger at not knowing. It’s not directed at anyone.” **“Impossible to Say”** “Sonically, we were thinking about Beck a bit. None of us are really Beck fans, but Mike was like, ‘Listen to a couple of these songs, that’s a cool direction.’ Having Ashton \[Hardman-Le Cornu, guitarist\] on the acoustic guitar is a rarity, in fact it’s the first time. He might have played a few bits on acoustic \[in the past\] that made their way into songs, but he’s on acoustic that whole song, which feels pretty different, and it’s a really exciting dynamic for us.” **“How to Kill Houseplants”** “It’s the idea that you try and give everything to this plant, this relationship—the right amount of love or sunlight or water or not enough—and it seems like you just keep fucking killing it despite your best intentions.” **“I Can’t Afford to Lose You”** “It’s a pretty simple love song, and \[it’s about\] trying not to screw something up. I wrote it on a tour bus in Denver and basically finished it in a couple of hours when the band were out doing some stuff. There’s not much to unpack there. It is what it is on face value.” **“So Much Taller”** “I’m lucky to be in a place of much better self-love than I was when I was still figuring out life. It’s about that. That kind of sums up the song in a lot of ways, and feeling like you’re constantly succumbing to a darkness and a cloud that is just there.” **“The More That it Hurts”** “I wrote it with Jackson Phillips, who goes by Day Wave, and he loves weird tunings. The guitars are so detuned. We just really liked that chorus. It goes chorus, verse, chorus, and then bridge and chorus, and so the goal was really to make the rest of the song work around those three choruses. Which was really fun.” **“Estimated Delivery”** “That song had a splice sample of what is essentially a breakbeat groove, and then we recreated the drums through 30 different layers. Kieran \[Lama, drummer\] plays a simplified version of it acoustically, and we have two drum machines running two separate loops. Then you slam all that together and run it through a tape machine. It took two days to make that drum beat. That’s the kind of shit you get up to when you have three months.” **“Falling Apart”** “Sometimes there’s a propensity to blame who you are and what you do on things that happened to you in the past, and I hate when people do that. But it’s basically what I’m doing in this song.” **“Ily the Most”** “Way out of my comfort zone. It’s a piano ballad, which we’ve never done before. It’s a hard song for me to sing, it’s pushing my range a lot of the time, and it’s a really raw, pop vocal right at the front. It’s just a love song, tied in with the fear of losing someone. That’s an important part of it. I love you, but fuck, I’m probably going to lose you.” **“August”** “That song is like the closing of a chapter in my life. I started writing it in September 2022, and I didn’t finish the lyrics until March 2024. It spans essentially the whole process of making the record and took on new meanings, from a letter to my family, to then a partner, all these chapters. I was also moving out of my house in LA, I’d packed everything up, I was surrounded by boxes, it was the last day of vocals, of any tracking, and I was just crying in the studio finishing those last lines. It all culminated in this quite emotional moment.”
What’s in a name? In the case of Yung Lean, what initially registered as a sardonic take on post-ironic internet rap tropes was, in fact, a riff on the Swedish rapper’s given name: Jonatan Leandoer Håstad. In the decade-plus since he broke through with 2013’s “Ginseng Strip 2002,” Lean has evolved past his position as Scandinavia’s foremost cloud-rap interpreter, embracing sincerity, transparency, and, more recently, post-punk. (On 2024’s *Psykos*, his first full-length collaboration with Drain Gang CEO Bladee, they channeled Joy Division and The Cure for songs about psychosis and ego death.) The title of his fifth solo album says it all: *Jonatan* is Lean at his rawest, a homecoming after a long, dark night of the soul. Lead single “Forever Yung” plays out like a funeral for his former self: Phoenixes rise from the ashes, masks are taken off, a rickety one-note bassline rattles ahead. A handful of bruised love songs crackle with manic energy and magical-realist details: On “Paranoid Paparazzi,” he raps about pills and lullabies in a voice that sounds like he’s just rolled out of bed, and “Babyface Maniacs” could be the theme song of a future *Badlands* remake: “Infamous murderous couple ridin’ through the drylands/Sugarcane kisses and shotguns, candy cane violence.” But at the emotional crux of *Jonatan* are heavy yet hopeful ballads that put chaos in the rearview—like “Swan Song,” on which Lean singsongs, “I wanna know what it feels like to come down from the trip of a lifetime.”
You’ll probably recognize the general sounds and styles on Ezra Furman’s 10th album: Beatles-y psych-folk (“Sudden Storm”), quasi-industrial ’90s pop (“Submission”), soft-focus disco (“You Hurt Me I Hate You”), and Springsteen-style garage (“Power of the Moon”). What’s great about Furman is the way she manages to make all these familiar, almost stock forms feel idiosyncratic by pushing them to their expressive limits. Like great karaoke, the key to her performances isn’t the way she pulls things together but the way she falls so joyfully, dramatically, performatively apart, queering the edges of pop tradition until it frays at the seams.
In his mid-to late twenties, Chicago rapper Saba earned a gold plaque for fan favorite “Photosynthesis,” performed on late-night TV, and made songs with rap greats like Black Thought and J. Cole. So, after a trio of thematically focused solo albums, his record with hip-hop production wizard No ID (Common, JAY-Z, Kanye West) finds him taking a confident, freewheeling approach. “Who is the GOAT, I wanna go toe to toe with it/’Cause I just know I’m not second to no n\*\*\*\*s,” he proclaims on “Woes of the World.” That doesn’t mean that he can’t still hold a subject though: “head.rap” pays homage to Black hair and his own locs, “Crash” romantically invites a woman to stay the night, and “How to Impress God” ponders spiritual fulfillment in light of his success. The synergy with his fellow Chicagoan is undeniable: No ID’s blend of bright piano keys and expertly chopped samples always hits, giving a warm landing place for Saba’s rhymes to land.
If ever a band could seize victory from the jaws of defeat, it’s Doves. Rising, quite literally, from the flames of house outfit Sub Sub after their studio burned down at the end of the ’90s, the Manchester trio—Jimi Goodwin and twin brothers Andy and Jez Williams—alchemized a peculiarly northern strain of melancholy into soaring, atmospheric rock, scoring two Mercury Music Prize nominations in the process. *Constellations for the Lonely* is the group’s sixth album and their second following a decade-long hiatus, which ended with 2020’s *The Universal Want*. However, Goodwin’s issues with addiction and mental health meant that he was unavailable for much of the album’s recording. Rather than sounding like the work of a band in crisis, though, *Constellations for the Lonely* is one of Doves’ best efforts yet. From dystopian, *Blade Runner*-evoking opener “Renegade” and the cinematic, neo-psychedelic sweep of “Cold Dreaming” through the aching, Smiths-like “Last Year’s Man” and closer “Southern Bell,” with its triumphant blaze of glory, Doves sound stronger than ever here. “All the issues outside of the studio were really worrying and we faced a lot of challenges, but the musicmaking itself was really good. I guess the studio was like our safe space,” Andy Williams tells Apple Music. “We had to grab Jimi when we could but there’s a certain chemistry when the three of us are in a room together. There’s a certain chemistry in the way me and Jez work together and in how Jimi works and how we can work on each other’s ideas and songs without there being any ego. Everything goes through the Doves filter.” Read on as the Williams brothers talk us through the making of *Constellations of the Lonely* track by track… **“Renegade”** Andy Williams: “As a vocalist, Jez always brings an authenticity. This was just the rough guide vocal, there’s loads of imperfections on it, but he just nailed the mood of the song. That emotion is a million times more important than anything else. Musically, it feels quite dystopian. We were going for a bit of a Scott Walker vibe. There was a lyric in there about Piccadilly Circus and someone said, ‘Why don’t you change it to \[Manchester park\] Piccadilly Gardens?’ To me, the song is like Scott Walker walking around Manchester in the year 2025.” **“Cold Dreaming”** AW: “We love David Axelrod and Rotary Connection. That was our attempt at creating a song from that era.” Jez Williams: “But hopefully with a modern twist. We’re not interested in replicating the past, we’ve always taken sonics from all sorts of places. There’s always an undercurrent of abstract atmospheres underneath the music moving it.” **“In the Butterfly House”** AW: “This was one that Jez brought in quite early on. I really thought about the lyrical content of the song. The music was suggesting something, but I couldn’t quite grapple with what it was. I’ve always been interested in the history of murder ballads, so I thought of the image of a butterfly house where something had gone on there. I tried to create a little story about somebody coming back at night to this butterfly house and something had happened in there. It’s our subtle attempt at a murder ballad.” **“Strange Weather”** JW: “This was two separate songs until we realized there was a connection between them. There was about 20 different iterations of it until we nailed it. It was an enjoyable nut to crack but it wasn’t easy. The first bit is very spacious and conjures up lots of visual images, I think, then we completely flip it on its head, and it does a complete U-turn for this mad bit at the end. We played it all the way through live, which is the key. You can’t hear the join because there isn’t one!” **“A Drop in the Ocean”** JW: “I brought in that song. It was written in a completely different style, and we did a 180 on it. It was really fast originally, and we did it in half time. It was really important to bring out the soul of the track. If you listen to the production, it’s got that contemporary soul sound to it, that dark soul vibe that we were going for. We had the chorus, and Jimi came in and absolutely nailed the verses.” **“Last Year’s Man”** JW: “I really like this song. It feels quite old time-y to me, it’s got a bit of a Celtic thing going on. Andy brought in the idea and then we put it through the Doves filter. My kids are 17 and 14 and, lyrically, it touches upon those feelings of not wanting them to grow up, wanting to keep them the same but everything always keeps changing.” **“Stupid Schemes”** AW: “Jimi brought this one to the table. The album really needs it at that point. It was perfect. When me and Jez both heard it, it sounded a bit different for us with that psychedelic lead guitar, we don’t normally do that. It’s got this really bright, optimistic feeling to it which is perfect for the record. It’s a break from the intensity.” **“Saint Teresa”** AW: “Saint Teresa was originally going to go on \[previous Doves album\] *The Universal Want* but we thought it would make it a bit overlong. We’ve never been interested in making an album with 20 songs on it that goes on for an hour and a half. It felt right for this one, though. All three of us are lapsed Catholics, so Saint Teresa figures in that. Jimi wrote the verses and I wrote the choruses. Again, Jimi delivers a great vocal here.” **“Orlando”** AW: “This was one of Jimi’s. He brought it in, and we put it through the filter. I really like his vocal on that. It doesn’t directly reference anything, but I feel it’s got a feel of some of the things that he’s been through himself—there’s metaphors in there. I’ve never asked him about the lyrics on this one but to me it feels like his statement about what he’s been through.” **“Southern Bell”** AW: “We’ve read that it sounded a bit like Queen, who have *never* been a reference for us…” JW: “I told you at the time! It’s those bloody BVs. We actually stripped it down, it was way more Queen before, there was like 60 backing vocals on it! We wanted to do a big spaghetti western thing. I sing the first bit and then Jimi comes in and does the second bit. I really wanted to try that because the story’s about two people running out of time, running out of luck, but they’re going to go out in a blaze of glory. It’s almost like a conversation between the two of them. It worked brilliantly. Immediately, I was like, ‘That’s got to be the last song on the record.’ We knew when we did ‘Renegade,’ that was the first track on the record, and we knew when we finished ‘Southern Bell’ that that’s how we were going to go out.”
Long before shoegaze and grunge became the rock music favored by young listeners in the mid-2020s, Doylestown, Pennsylvania, quartet Superheaven were reimagining the ’90s genres for a more modern age. The band quickly built an audience with their 2013 and 2015 albums, *Jar* and *Ours is Chrome*. After a lengthy hiatus, they reemerged with 2025’s self-titled third album, a project that finds them in the middle of a shoegaze renaissance, though with a newfound perspective. “Cruel Times” plays with the crunching guitar fuzz of alt-rock giants like Dinosaur Jr. and Built to Spill, while “Humans for Toys” is a heavy headbanger built around chugging chords mostly heard on metal ballads. As the band’s once-preferred sound became a fan favorite among a new crop of musicians, Superheaven cleverly adjusted their POV, creating a wider landscape of rock stylings than ever before.
the name of this album refers to the me who is a scared little kid. they're unkillable because, after the hell of this year, i realized i had no choice but to always protect them. they're unkillable because they've got me, and together nothing can stop us. this is the only way forward. i love you. december 7th 2024 vancouver
The Wombats—Matthew “Murph” Murphy, Tord Øverland Knudsen, and drummer Dan Haggis—are widely associated with the British indie-rock revival from the early 2000s. As they’ve matured in the ensuing years, though, their sound has evolved beyond the scope of that world. On their sixth studio album, 2025’s *Oh! The Ocean*, they update the band’s geographic influence, too. After Murphy moved to LA, the band recorded in the city’s Echo Park neighborhood. Though the album title suggests a cheery, awestruck disposition, Murphy’s writing is as biting as ever. He takes aim at “see and be seen culture” on opener “Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come” and wades into the murky anxiety of modern politics on “I Love America and She Hates Me.” The cultural, though, is balanced by plenty of introspective moments, like on “My Head Is Not My Friend,” in which Murphy dives into the ecstatic highs, crippling lows, and run-of-the-mill mundanities that animate the band’s best work.
William Tyler spent the first 15 years of his solo career bridging the fingerpicky intricacy of post-folk guitarists like John Fahey with the mellow, expansive qualities of ambient and New Age. *Time Indefinite* is both none of that and more. Built on loops made using an old cassette deck rescued from his late grandfather’s office in Jackson, Mississippi, the music here retains all the vernacular Americanness that made Tyler’s early albums feel approachable, but foregrounds texture instead of technique: the crumbling hymn of “Star of Hope,” the pastoral washes of “The Hardest Land to Harvest,” the creaking, almost horror-movie suspense of “Cabin Six” and “A Dream, a Flood.” The sum is music that has more in common with the sound manipulations of Jim O’Rourke or the late-’60s work of a composer like Gavin Bryars, whose stately, droning pieces captured the comfort of folk music within the frame of the avant-garde. He shifted gears—and he pulled it off.
When you have a voice as pure as Cleo Sol’s, you can sing about nearly anything and have it sound otherworldly. Sol, however, doesn’t take lightly the responsibility of her instrument, treating each opportunity—both in and outside of her role as lead vocalist for Sault—as an opportunity to spread joy, foster hope, and offer up praise to the most high. Sault’s mission across *10*—actually their 12th full-length project—lies squarely inside those ramparts, with Sol working alongside the group’s production engine, Inflo, alongside a slew of other collaborators (dancehall singjay Chronixx, legendary bassist Pino Palladino, rising pianist NIJE) to offer a balm for increasingly trying times. The titles alone—“The Healing,” “Know That You Will Survive,” “We Are Living”—telegraph their psalmic intention. So does Sol’s voice, which sails over Ohio funk in “Power,” recalls the radiance of disco queen Donna Summer on “Real Love,” and anchors uptempo jazz on “The Sound of Healing,” breathing life into relentless optimism. Sault has been nothing if not celebrated over the course of their elusive career, but that adulation notwithstanding, *10* reminds us there’s still hope for us all.
