After the reception to her 2023 self-titled debut as Blondshell, it’s no surprise that Sabrina Teitelbaum’s follow-up, *If You Asked for a Picture*, came together while she was quite literally on the move. “I was touring a lot, so I was in a lot of new places and just writing about what was going on,” she tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “I didn’t have the intention of making an album, but when I got home, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to start demoing these songs.’” The resulting 12 tracks may have come together casually, but *If You Asked for a Picture* is a fuller and richer evocation of the Blondshell sound, pairing spiky ’90s alternative rock sounds with acerbic couplets. Along with longtime studio collaborator Yves Rothman (Kim Gordon, Yves Tumor), Teitelbaum adds subtle sonic flourishes to her winning sound—peep the Ronettes-recalling backbeat of “23’s a Baby” and the dream pop of closer “Model Rockets”—but her cutting and personal songwriting style remains the project’s hallmark. Who else could write an introspective exploration of living with OCD, as Teitelbaum does on the explosive “Toy,” and sneak in a withering line like, “I’ve been running this ship like the Navy/But it’s more like a Wendy’s”? As Teitelbaum’s songwriting continues to mature, Blondshell’s balance of the devastating and the deeply funny continues on as one of indie rock’s most thrilling high-wire acts.
On their third album, Liverpudlian boys Courting continue to invite favorable comparisons to UK pop-rock phenoms The 1975. They both have an obvious predilection for long album titles, and *Lust for Life*’s bait-and-switch opening tracks—the orchestral place-setting of “Rollback Intro” followed by the rude rave music of “Stealth Rollback”—is practically and lovingly ripped from Matty Healy and George Daniel’s playbook. But pithy comparisons otherwise elude Courting’s delightful multifariousness as they smash a brief interpolation of Belle and Sebastian’s “Get Me Away from Here, I’m Dying” turducken-style into the upbeat jangle of “Namcy” and follow the snarling alt-rock of “After You” with a six-minute odyssey of a title track that includes multiple suites and heavy vocal processing. Courting is the type of band to try anything once and immediately knock it out of the park.
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.
My Morning Jacket leader Jim James will be the first to tell you that the band’s 10th album is, on some fundamental level, more of the same: the same rootsy eclecticism, the same soft-but-chunky ’70s rock (“Squid Ink,” “Die for It”), the same lightly psychedelic insights into the human condition (“Everyday Magic,” “Time Waited”). “Love or hate the band, I think you could agree we try a lot of different things,” he says. “We’re open to any kind of music, any style of music, this or that. And I think this album is kind of the same.” The difference this time was in the approach—namely, the hiring of an outside producer, Brendan O’Brien (Pearl Jam, Bruce Springsteen), for the first time in their 25-plus-year career. The result was a collective shift in which the band was able to free themselves from the minutiae of record-making and relax into being a band—an experience James likened to an athlete connecting with the right coach (and this from a guy who insists he was “never good at sports”). Take “Everyday Magic” and “Time Waited,” highlights that come early in the album but that James wrote deep into the recording process. “It was hilarious because when I started working with Brendan, all these songs kept coming out,” James says. “I email him one song. I’m like, ‘Oh, my God. Check this out.’ No response.” Then another, and another. “‘I wonder if he just missed the email.’” Just when it seemed like he’d reached the end of his efforts, the right ones materialized. “I realized for the first time that I don’t have to take it personally,” he says. “Even when I was trying so hard to micromanage and force everything, at the end of the day, the record makes itself,” he says. *is* is.
Bartees Strange’s third album finds the Washington, D.C. singer-songwriter stretching his sonic limbs further than ever before—an achievement, to be sure, since Strange’s first two records (2020’s *Live Forever* and 2022’s critical breakthrough *Farm to Table*) cemented his ability to effortlessly hop between anthemic rock, dusky blues, and rap cadences within just a few minutes. With a slightly darker sound befitting its namesake, *Horror* adds a few impressive guises to Strange’s genre menagerie: There’s the explicitly Fleetwood Mac-esque jangle of “Sober,” the melancholic trip-hop skitter of “Doomsday Buttercup,” and the lucious house thump of “Lovers,” which might count as Strange’s starkest left turn to date. Across these 12 tracks, Strange also fine-tunes his winning formula of countrified balladry and propulsive riffs, both of which are given a big-ticket pop spit-shine courtesy of contributions from studio wizards Yves and Lawrence Rothman as well as the ever-ubiquitous Jack Antonoff. Don’t mistake big names for unnecessary flashiness, though: *Horror* retains the down-to-earth POV that’s made Strange an increasingly powerful presence in indie, even as his ambitions grow.
✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ 【 LINKTR.EE/BATHSMUSIC 】 ✧ VINYL PRE-ORDER ✧ 'SEA OF MEN' VIDEO + SINGLE ✧ MERCH STORE ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧
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?”
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
Despite that Cass McCombs is one of the most enigmatic singer-songwriters of the 21st century, his 11th studio album *Interior Live Oak* is an uncommonly generous offering. With 16 tracks and over an hour in runtime, the record spans the many forms his music has taken across his career and pulls in impressive collaborators like indie rock journeyman Matt Sweeney, former Deerhoof member Chris Cohen, and Papercuts’ Jason Quever—the latter of whom collaborated with McCombs on 2024’s archival release *Seed Cake on Leap Year*. But it’s McCombs’ cryptic wit and preference for shaggy-dog melodies that takes center stage across *Interior Live Oak*, with a stylistic left turn or two to keep longtime listeners on their toes. Witness the spry and organ-led “Juvenile,” which takes on the classic New Zealand indie-pop sound while keeping his haunted, searching perspective intact. Few songwriters sound as uncomplicatedly plaintive as McCombs, and yet after more than 20 years of releasing records, he continues to draw listeners in with the type of lyrical musings and overcast melodies so stretched across the chassis of *Interior Live Oak*.
On “Slugger,” the first track from SASAMI’s third album, *Blood on the Silver Screen*, the singer stamps out one of the oldest clichés in the book. Over shuffling hi-hats and a rubbery bassline she sings, “Whoever said that it’s better to have loved and to lost/Than to not have loved at all/Should just shut up forever.” Alongside co-producers Rostam and Jenn Decilveo, the LA-based indie rock star takes aim at the lovers and lust-hungry obsessives throughout. On “Love Makes You Do Crazy Things,” guitars screech and shout before SASAMI rolls through with a metal-worthy solo during the introduction. “Bet it all on you, now I gotta leave town,” she sings, exposing the dark underbelly that exists beneath the surface of pop music’s romanticism. The album finds her moving away from the experimental songwriting of previous records like 2022’s *Squeeze*, instead turning in a streamlined and diamond-sharp ode to the parts of love that suck.
Following the critical and commercial success of 2023's ‘Grog,’ cult New York duo Frog return with ‘1000 Variations on the Same Song,’ their sixth album. '1000 Variations on the Same Theme' is an eclectic, emotional, and lyrically vivid collection. These songs see Daniel Batemanrefer to My Chemical Romance, Gucci, Stillwell deals, fatherhood, and the 6 train (“I was listening to a lot of Mozart, Kodak Black, and Prince, but it doesn't really sound like any of those.”). Musically, songs like “TOP OF THE POPS VAR. I” and “DOOMSCROLLING VAR. II” touch on the frenetic Indie Rock that defined their earlier work, while the idiosyncratic Alt. Country of ‘Count Bateman’ and ‘Grog’ can be heard on ‘WHERE U FROM VAR. III’ and ‘ARTHUR MCBRIDE ON THE LOWER EAST SIDE VAR. X.’ Singles like ‘JUST USE YR HIPS VAR. VI’ and December’s ‘DID SANTA COME VAR. IX’ also introduce a smoky lounge element to Frog’s sound. However, as Daniel explains it, these are all just variations on the same song: “1000 Variations on the Same Song is a theme and variations—there are times in your life as a songwriter where you'll start a bunch of stuff that all sounds alike, which can be a problem, something that you want to excise from yourself. This time, I decided to embrace it and take it as far as it could go. "The first four variations were recorded in one long take, ("HOUSEBROKEN") is the last one in that sequence. I added piano and doubled the vocals, etc, but basically, all those songs were done in one 15-minute stretch. If you’re working quickly and your goal is to finish an entire album or more in one night, amazing things can happen. How many songs can you write using the same chords? How many songs can you record and finish in one day? The answer to both is near-infinite with the right environment and mindset.” Since Frog returned from hiatus in 2023 with the addition of Daniel’s brother Steve Bateman on drums, they’ve received significant critical acclaim and enjoyed sold-out shows in the Tri-state area. In March, they will take their unique sound further afield with a nine-date North American tour. These shows will see the band joined by Frog co-founder Tom White on bass, and will take them to cities like Los Angeles, New York, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Ithaca, Hanover, and Boise (Treefort Music Fest) for some first-time-ever shows. The tour will also include a stop in the KEXP studios for a live radio session (with video to follow) on The Afternoon Show with Larry Mizell, Jr on March 25th.
A lot has changed for guitarist Royel Maddell and vocalist/guitarist Otis Pavlovic—collectively, Sydney duo Royel Otis—since their 2024 debut album, *PRATTS & PAIN*. On the back of that record and viral covers of Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s “Murder on the Dancefloor” and The Cranberries’ “Linger” they were propelled headfirst into a blur of overseas touring, high-profile festivals, and late-night TV appearances. That constant roadwork shaped album number two, *hickey*. “We were definitely more aware of how songs would come across when we played them live,” Maddell tells Apple Music. “We spent so much more time in front of crowds.” The experience, adds Pavlovic, contributed to the “simplicity” of the songs on *hickey*. Simple the songs may be, but sonically the album is a more diverse and textured effort than its predecessor, be it in the lush vocal harmonies of “come on home,” the joyous synths in “who’s your boyfriend,” the ’90s slacker vibe of “moody,” the ’80s-inspired pulse of “say something,” or the sumptuous, floating guitars that color “dancing with myself.” A by-product of what Pavlovic says was a desire to “not have any walls or boundaries with whatever we were trying to make,” the diversity also stems from the rich array of collaborators: Amy Allen (Sabrina Carpenter, Harry Styles); Jungle’s Lydia Kitto and Josh Lloyd-Watson; Omer Fedi (Lil Nas X, Sam Smith); Blake Slatkin (SZA, Justin Bieber); and Julian Bunetta (Teddy Swims, One Direction). Throughout, the duo’s dreamy musical optimism is contrasted by Pavlovic’s melancholy vocals, a neat vehicle for one of the album’s key themes, also inspired by the realities of life on the road. “There’s a few songs about saying goodbyes and missing people,” says Maddell. “I guess we were losing relationships.” Here, Maddell and Pavlovic walk Apple Music through *hickey*, track by track. **“i hate this tune”** Royel Maddell: “We wrote those lyrics for a different song, sitting in a pub drinking Guinness when we were recording *PRATTS & PAIN*. We made this instrumental track in Palm Springs with Blake and Omer and were trying to think of vocals, and then Otis started singing the lyrics we did in the UK.” Otis Pavlovic: “For some reason there’s a few songs, probably for both of us, that come on and remind us of a specific time or person. Can’t listen to it.” RM: “You love the song but you can’t not think of that time or person.” **“moody”** RM: “It’s kind of about a toxic relationship, not a girl in particular. The guy, the person singing, is the moody one as well ’cause they’re constantly saying something negative. We wrote that with Amy Allen.” **“good times”** OP: “That was the first song we did with Josh from Jungle. It just came out of an old demo we had. When you first meet someone and do a session, you’ve got to just break the ice and do something, and it’s the first idea we worked on. It is uplifting but then in the chorus it says, ‘In good times I doubt myself in front of you.’” RM: “It sounds fun but it’s negative.” **“torn jeans”** RM: “We did that with Chris Collins, and it was three guitar lines that I had and we just ended up weaving some vocals and stuff over it.” OP: “Just admiring someone’s torn jeans.” RM: “Just admiring the imperfections.” **“come on home”** RM: “It’s kind of about being far away from someone. Not really having control of where you are or where you could be. That was with Josh and Lydia from Jungle as well. Those harmonies are very Lydia-ish.” **“who’s your boyfriend”** RM: “The chords are really standard but we wanted to make them as least standard as possible, so added a capo to the guitar and tried to play them as weird as possible so it’s hard for people to figure out. Sonically, we were going for a mix between modern Cure and Joy Division. I don’t think we got anywhere close to either but that’s what we were going for.” **“car”** OP: “We did that one with Omer and Blake. We were talking about being with someone and trying to end \[the relationship\], but also not.” RM: “Not wanting the good parts to end.” OP: “\[And\] doing it in cars, which is something we’ve both experienced before, trying to break up in a car.” RM: “It’s weird wanting to break up with someone in a car because it’s claustrophobic and you’re in this small room. Why didn’t you just do it outdoors?” **“shut up”** OP: “We did this one with Blake Slatkin. It was the last song we did on the album. It came as a Hail Mary. That one is saying you don’t want someone to go away. Just shut up, don’t go away.” RM: “It’s also super dreamy, so it’s funny calling it ‘shut up.’” **“dancing with myself”** RM: “We went in wanting a disco Fleetwood Mac.” OP: “We wrote it in sections and you can kind of tell.” RM: “It’s \[about\] letting yourself be free and not worrying about what other people are thinking.” **“say something”** RM: “When we were planning on working with Blake and Omer, they asked what kind of song we want to make and as a joke, I said, ‘Take on Me’ by a-ha. That drumbeat is kind of a reference to ‘Take on Me.’” **“she’s got a gun”** OP: “We were doing it with Josh after working on ‘good times,’ just seeing what happens with it, throwing ideas down over the bassline. And I remember for the chorus we slowed the song down and sung stuff really slow to see what would happen, and the chorus melody came out of it. I don’t think we would have had that without doing that.” **“more to lose”** OP: “We’ve attempted to put melodies over that piano line since the start of the band.” RM: “Five years! We did it with Julian Bunetta and Omer. We were in Julian’s place in Calabasas, having fun making cocktails, and I just started playing it on the piano. Every time I sit at a piano I play it and just pray someone comes up with something. And that’s what happened.” **“jazz burger”** RM: “Jazz burger is a real thing. It’s from Jitlada in LA, this Thai restaurant, and you can get different levels of spiciness. We only went with four out of 10. It was so spicy my chest became mutated. I had this lump on my chest that was like a rhinoceros horn. And then we got ice cream and went back into the studio and made that.” OP: “Royel and I had just come from Sydney and said goodbye to some friends and some relationships.” RM: “It’s probably the realest song \[on the album\] with the fakest name; the most unrelated name.”
Aesop Rock does not talk or tour. He has not been on a stage since 2017 or been interviewed since 2020. Instead, what one of his generation’s most recognizable and masterful voices continues to do as he enters the back half of his forties is rap—four albums since 2020 alone, each filled with his most harrowing or humorous experiences and a seemingly dauntless supply of esoteric or obvious enthusiasms. When he barks, “Anomaly in the algorithm, do the algebralculus/I’m all of Alexandria’s information in aggregate” at the start of “Checkers,” from his sprawling *Black Hole Superette*, it feels like he’s supplying a thesis statement of one—to be one of rap’s great outsiders, his rhymes free to do whatever they want. Would anyone else dare, after all, to spend three minutes chronicling the exponential growth curve of the snail population inside the aquarium he bought for his girlfriend, as he does on the dazzling “Snail Zero”? Or to use his dog’s mutt status and his cat’s tumescence to form a sort of superhero posse, as on “Movie Night”? Aesop Rock gets from Francis Bacon to H Mart, from EPMD to shaving cream and Nautica parkas, from the escape of his childhood hamster to the survival of Lahaina’s banyan tree in a matter of a few rhythmically intricate verses over spring-loaded beats. “Whole worth wrapped in what you can make with your bare hands/When sitting independent of the greater square dance,” he offers at one point, as if sneering at the music industry from the perfect privacy of his own studio. Indeed, no one else sounds or moves like Aesop Rock; on *Black Hole Superette*, he’s perhaps never sounded more like himself. The landmark track here might be “John Something,” where Aesop relays a story from his college days in Massachusetts above a hard-edged piano cut between percolating hand drums. It’s the tale of a visiting artist, possibly named John, who shows up to class to share slides of his photos but mostly just extols the Foreman-versus-Ali documentary *When We Were Kings*. Aesop rushed out to see the film and then felt its rush of excitement for himself, as he understood how vivid and compelling good storytelling might be. The gift of that artist was not his own work, but the enthusiasm he passed along for great work. It is clear that Aesop Rock—who counts Lupe Fiasco, Armand Hammer, and Open Mike Eagle as guests here—has passed that energy along to his successors and peers, even as he has remained on the industry’s outskirts. Thing is, he happens to remain one of the best rappers working too.
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.
For over two decades, Natalia Lafourcade’s catalog has showcased her magnificent voice across a variety of styles, both as a stunning soloist and at the helm of skilled ensembles. Reuniting with her *De Todas las Flores* co-producer Adan Jodorowsky, the Veracruz-raised singer-songwriter taps into her home region’s musical history while drawing upon her wider discography for *Cancionera*. Perhaps most impressively, she recorded it entirely in one take, a feat that becomes more and more meaningful as the album persists. After a tone-setting instrumental introduction, she begins to shape the album’s fantastical broad narrative with the title track, portraying herself as an almost supernatural spirit of song. What follows is a series of memorable moments like the rumba-y-mezcal-enhanced “El Palomo y La Negra” and the fragile yet firm “Mascaritas de Cristal,” as well as moving duets like “Como Quisiera Quererte” with El David Aguilar and “Amor Clandestino” with flamenco singer Israel Fernández.
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.
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.”
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.
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.”
Nina Wilson, aka Central Coast-born DJ and producer Ninajirachi, was six or seven songs into writing her debut album when she noticed a through line. “I started to find little points that connected \[them\] being about my childhood, or being about my computer, so that was when I came up with the title,” she tells Apple Music. “From there, it made it really easy to finish the rest of the tracks because that was my scaffold.” With some ideas on the album stretching back to voice memos from 2019, Wilson has spent years methodically building a sonic world that incorporates elements of 2000s electroclash (“London Song”), trance (“Infohazard”), and club (“CSIRAC”) into her melodic dance-music blueprint. Also showing through is the influence of early 2010s Australian dance artists such as PNAU, Empire Of The Sun, and Miami Horror, particularly in songs such as “All I Am” and “iPod Touch.” “I guess that’s the palette or the world, but I also didn’t want to be too reverential,” she says. “That’s the music that was most inspiring to me when I started making music, but I’ve definitely wanted to make my own version of it.” Here, Wilson takes Apple Music through *I Love My Computer*, track by track. **“London Song”** “This was not about anything at first, it was just a voice memo. I wrote the singing part with the extra lyrics, and by that point I had the title of the album and was like, ‘OK, I need to make this about my computer.’ And the way I twisted it was, almost all the places I’ve been overseas is because I made music on a laptop. And that’s what allowed me to go there. So that’s the way I reframed the random voice memo—I would go with you \[to London\], with my computer that has afforded me that luxury.” **“iPod Touch”** “When I was in high school, I got really into electronic music, but also pretty niche SoundCloud electronic music, and I didn’t have any friends that were into it. It felt like all my favorite songs were my secrets, ’cause I didn’t have anyone to share them with. In that song, there’s a reference to a Porter Robinson track from 2012 that was my favorite song when I was 12 or however old I was.” **“F\*\*k My Computer”** “I use Ableton to produce my music. I was using other software before that, and when I landed on Ableton, I felt like it was the first interface I meshed with and I started becoming really fast. Sometimes, I think, ‘How could I get faster? How could I widen the bandwidth even more?’ It’s just a hardware limitation at this point, I just need to insert my brain into the computer. If we were just one entity, I wouldn’t have to lose ideas in translation.” **“CSIRAC”** “CSIRAC is the first computer in the world to ever \[play digital\] music. I felt like the album was missing more of a clubby, drummy, DJ moment, and I thought this could be that.” **“Delete”** “The song is about when you have a crush and you post a photo just for them to see it. It’s a little Gatsby-ish, like you put on this big show for just one person to see it. And then you’re like, ‘Have they seen it? Do they think I’m pretty?’ Then it’s the self-awareness of being like, ‘I’m so embarrassing!’” **“ฅ^•ﻌ•^ฅ”** “It’s a cat symbol. Internally we’ve been calling it ‘Cat Face.’ Or ‘Cat Interlude.’ It’s just an interlude to ‘All I Am.’ Originally, ‘All I Am’ had a long, progressive intro. But when it came to releasing it on its own, it felt too indulgent; it felt too much like two songs in one to work as a single. So I split that intro off to make it its own song.” **“All I Am”** “This was such a special song to make. It was a jam at Ben Lee’s house in LA with Ben, Jenna \[McDougall, aka Hevenshe\], Alex \[Greenwald, Phantom Planet\], and Maz \[DeVita, WAAX\]. We were literally recording anything. Then we had a break, and we had a little bit of a microdose, and had lunch, and then everyone got sleepy. We all got into this meditative state, and I just started looping certain parts of what we’d recorded and added my own elements on top of their audio, and it just built into this dance progression thing. I think a lot of the music I was listening to at the time, like PNAU, really leaked through in that second half of the session where I started working on it on its own.” **“Infohazard”** “I saw this artwork of this girl sitting next to a computer and she was cute, kind of Bratz doll style. And the text said, ‘Help, I’m online and I just saw a beheading.’ And I was like, ‘Oh yeah, that happened to me when I was a cute girl too.’ It just seemed like an interesting way to make light of what is probably a shared trauma amongst people of my generation. If not a beheading they’ve just been scrolling and been like, ‘Oh, I probably wasn’t meant to see that and I can’t forget about it now.’” **“Battery Death”** “I really wanted to have a halftime, more hip-hop-drums track so it wasn’t all just four-to-the-floor dance music. I think I was reading a lot about battery life, but no one was really talking about battery death. It just sounded like a funny title but worked in with the themes of the album.” **“Sing Good”** “It started as a gibberish jam, and I started mumbling, ‘I can’t really sing.’ I thought, that’s kind of funny. I don’t know if I’ve heard someone write about not being able to sing. I was writing music before I was producing it—like I say in the lyrics, I would get the lyric books of my favorite albums and be like, ‘What’s a verse? What’s a chorus? Oh OK, this is the formula,’ and that’s how I wrote about it. I would just write songs about going to the shops and stuff but never really show them to anyone ’cause I wasn’t a good singer.” **“It’s You” (with daine)** “daine was having a really bad day and we were trying to make music but they weren’t feeling super good. I was a little bit pushy—I was very gentle but I was like, ‘Let’s record something.’ So we just did this one little recording, this one gibberish take, and it ended up being the song. Later, when daine was feeling better, we put lyrics to it and rerecorded it. I’m so glad we pushed it that day.” **“All at Once”** “The verse at the end is about, I’m always at my desk in the dark, always working by myself late at night at the computer—that’s where I get the best work done a lot of the time. I wanted to send off the album with the last devotional nod to everything my computer had done for me, good and bad. It’s allowed me to have this crazy career that I wouldn’t have been allowed to have if I didn’t grow up in this decade. It would have been totally different.”
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.