The freak-folk mavericks venture boldly into an even newer, weirder America on their eighth studio album, the sister duo’s first full-length since 2020’s *Put the Shine On*. Now 20-plus years into their collaborative career, Bianca and Sierra Casady sound as whimsically baroque and more-than-slightly creepy as ever on *Little Death Wishes*, wondering exactly whose dream they’re living in on existential synth-pop jam “Cut Stitch Scar,” and tinkering with children’s toys on the grisly “Yesterday.” (The duo also deserve some credit for their hand in pioneering the folksy affect known as “cursive singing,” which has permeated the past 15 years of pop vocals.) There’s an unexpected cameo from Chance the Rapper on the sickly-sweet “Girl in Town,” but the highlight is “Least I Have You,” a celebration of the sisters’ enduring bond: “If no one in the world understands, at least I have you.”
The secret to Aya Sinclair’s uneasy mix of harsh noise and club music is its intimacy: No matter how blown out or mechanistic it gets, you always feel the presence of a regular old person behind it. The product of a teenage diet of Aphex Twin and Autechre on one hand and screamo and nu metal on the other, *hexed!* is, first and foremost, a therapeutic endeavor, fragile and balladic here (“droplets”), ragey there (“I am the pipe I hit myself with”), beautiful (“peach”) and spooky (“Time at the Bar”), and above all, extreme. And for music Sinclair has said was in some respects about her sobriety, it’s refreshingly funny (“off to the ESSO”). She isn’t reflecting on her nightmarish bad times—she’s bringing them back to life with clarity and power.
Hope Tala’s debut album has been a long time coming. The British singer-songwriter released her first single, “Blue,” in 2018, showcasing her timeless soul vocal over punchy production, while ensuing track “All My Girls Like to Fight” earned a spot on Barack Obama’s favorite music of 2020 list while she also featured on his 2022 and 2024 summer playlists. Now, after three years in the making, her first album, *Hope Handwritten*, is ready for release. “It’s a coming-of-age record,” she tells Apple Music. “It’s epic in scope and charts a really important period of my life from my early to mid-twenties.” Touching on themes of depression, despair, love, and hopefulness, the resulting 16 tracks are a remarkably mature depiction of selfhood. From the guitar-strumming soul of “Growing Pains” to the strings-laden heartbreak standard “Breaking Isn’t What a Heart Is For” and defiant anthem of self-acceptance “Lights Camera Action,” the album plays out the triumphant sound of Hope Tala’s arrival. “It’s my story but I wanted to write something that felt timeless,” she says. “A record of experiences so many of us go through.” Read on for Hope Tala’s in-depth thoughts on the album, track by track. **“Growing Pains (Prologue)”** “There are only two songs that survived the first draft of the record, ‘Growing Pains’ and ‘Jumping the Gun.’ I wrote this during my first trip to LA, and it’s about spending time away from family for the first time and feeling vulnerable. It sets the theme of the record as a coming-of-age narrative, so it always felt ideal as a starting point.” **“Jumping the Gun”** “As soon as I wrote ‘Jumping the Gun’ on the same trip to LA, I never questioned it and it’s never left each draft of the record that came since. I love the song in a visceral way since it’s about unrequited feelings and impulsiveness—how you can interrogate yourself when you experience a connection to another person. It features the sound of a clicking pen as part of the percussion, which also perfectly ties it to the title of the record.” **“Lights Camera Action”** “I went into writing this track wanting to empower myself. It’s about people doubting you and wanting to show them they’re wrong—it’s a ‘fuck you’ song! I was inspired by how social media often makes you feel like you need external validation, so I sing that I don’t need a picture or caption to have a good time. It’s one of the last songs I ended up writing for the album.” **“Magic or Medicine”** “I’ve always felt drawn to songs that are upbeat but have a sad theme, like ‘Teardrops’ by Womack & Womack. I wanted to make a brutally honest song about how I often experienced my life, where I would feel rubbish every day and not know how to make it better. It’s a track about searching for light at the end of the tunnel and knowing there’s something out there that will help me.” **“Breaking Isn’t What a Heart Is For”** “Most of my lyrics I write completely alone but, during the making of this album, I did a few co-writing sessions where I learned a lot and also felt very uncomfortable in the process! I would have never written this by myself but, when I was in a session with the writer Mozella and producer Greg Kurstin, he played me these chords and Mozella said we should write a standard to them. I was going through a horrible breakup at the time and the song reflects that pain. I’m a sucker for the beautiful strings that are on the track and my parents also loved it when I played it to them and that’s why it’s on the album.” **“I Can’t Even Cry”** “This is the crux of the album and a real turning point for me. I wrote it in December 2021, a year into writing the album, and it’s the first song I ever wrote with someone who I was already friends with. I was in a session with my friend Anoop \[D’Souza\], and I fell in love with these guitar chords he played me and this song about heartbreak just fell out, which felt so honest and vulnerable. Exactly what I was feeling in the moment translated into the song, which rarely happens.” **“Thank Goodness”** “‘Thank Goodness’ covers the same breakup as ‘I Can’t Even Cry’ but I wrote it months later when I was able to see more humor and light in the situation. I used the phrase ‘thank goodness’ when I was telling my co-writer Caroline Ailin the story and she said we should build the song around it. Every time I listen to the song now it feels so good to me—it’s a bit of fun amid the darkness.” **“Survival”** “I really wanted to write a song that dealt in some way with slavery, since I’ve long been processing my family history and ancestry—the traumatic things that ended up bringing us to the UK. I also read Toni Morrison’s *Beloved* for the first time when I was writing this and the song ended up sitting in conversation with that incredible book, thinking about what it means to survive.” **“Phoenix”** “I wrote this song about my best friend who was with me every day when I was going through hard times during the making of the record. I wanted to write about all types of love on the album, not just romantic, and she was integral to my survival. It was initially intended to be given to her as a gift but, when it came together, I realized it had to be on the album.” **“Fall Too Hard”** “This song marks a transition in the record from the end of a relationship to the beginning of a new one. I had such a good time writing it with Mozella and Greg Kurstin, and it’s all about the fear of falling for someone and the risk involved in letting that happen. When I performed it live for the first time in March 2022, everyone mentioned it to me afterwards, so I knew it had to be on the record. It’s my brother’s favorite too!” **“Lose My Mind”** “‘Fall Too Hard’ is about risk and fear, whereas ‘Lose My Mind’ is about the buzz and positive energy of falling for someone. This was one of the first songs I wrote with Anoop, and it was written for my partner as a birthday gift. She gave me her blessing to release it, since I thought it could be so cool for someone else to send it to their crush once it’s out in the world.” **“Bad Love God”** “I wrote this while I was playing a lot of live shows and I really wanted something that people could dance to. I was working with the duo Social House, who also produced ‘Jumping the Gun,’ and as soon as they played this idea to me I knew it would be so fun to perform. All the songs I write are honest but this one has more embellishment and storytelling to it, asking whether I’m drawn to people that are bad for me.” **“A Story to Tell/Where I Begin”** “My cut-off point for the album was 16 songs because I felt any more would be too much for people to digest. Keeping it to that number meant I had to put these two tunes together since I love them both so much. ‘A Story to Tell’ was written with Anoop in 2022 when I was feeling frustrated that nothing good was coming out during a session. I had the title phrase in my mind and decided to write a song about songwriting and how storytelling has been such an important part of my life. The transition into ‘Where I Begin’ also comes from the audio of a home video where I’m a kid rollerskating in the house and my mum is talking to me. It’s lovely to have her on the album.” **“Miracle”** “This is another song written for my partner about how falling in love with someone can make you feel that a higher power exists, since it’s such an otherworldly feeling. It came together very slowly over two full days. I almost abandoned it many times but something told me to keep going with it and I’m glad I did—it’s one of my favorites.” **“Shiver”** “‘Shiver’ has similar sentiments to ‘Miracle’ and, for a long time, I questioned whether they were too similar to both be on the album but I loved them too much to let one go. It’s about the hurtling feeling of falling in love and it’s the best song to perform live since it’s such a classic love song. I’m so happy it made it onto the final record.” **“Heartbeat (the end)”** “These last three tracks feel like a trilogy of love songs. This is the last of them because it’s about hope and the main goal of the album is to feel hope in the darkness. I wrote it with romantic love in mind but the more I listen to it, the more I feel it’s about a higher power, or about all the love I feel around me from my ancestry and family and friends—the glimmers of light that keep me going.”
Though Becca Harvey rose to alt-pop fame with her 2022 debut album, *When I’m Alone*, she felt as if she were working in the shadow of her collaborators, writing along to their melodies. For its follow-up, the Atlanta singer-songwriter rethought her creative approach, trusting her own lyrical and melodic instincts. The resulting songs are bittersweet and raw (despite the album’s deceptively sweet title), telling the story of a four-year relationship and its aftermath in bleary vignettes. On “I Just Do!” she draws the blackout curtains and sleeps through a flight in the arms of a new crush; next thing you know, she’s looking at old photo-booth strips, wondering how it all went wrong. The 26-year-old’s lyrics are wide-open and bemused, countering her grief with a shrug or a wink; on “Windows,” she slips in a knowing reference to Fleetwood Mac’s iconic breakup banger: “You are my silver spring/No matter what you do/You will always hear me sing.”
For their second album, Canadian metalcore phenoms Spiritbox found inspiration at home. In fact, vocalist Courtney LaPlante and guitarist Mike Stringer’s home island of Victoria, British Columbia, *was* the inspiration. “When we were trying to get this band off the ground, we were feeling really stuck and hopeless,” LaPlante tells Apple Music. “I was thinking back to that time, and it brought back this subconscious dread, because we’re near all the scary tectonic plates on the West Coast. Since we were little kids, everyone’s been telling us about how ‘the big one’ is coming.” Of course, a massive earthquake at sea would cause a massive tsunami. “A tsunami is a horrible natural disaster that can’t be helped, but imagine if the entire ocean was a tsunami, not just one small part of it,” LaPlante offers. “It felt like such an over-the-top, perfect example of the drama you feel when you’re depressed. And that was my mental state at the time. But even saying I was depressed is embarrassing to me because I’ve achieved the life I’ve always wanted to achieve, so it feels like a moral failing to be depressed. In that way, the album became a score for my life.” Below, she comments on each song. **“Fata Morgana”** “When Michael and \[producer\] Dan \[Braunstein\] were making this at our house, I was frantically cleaning the bathroom while our puppy was taking a nap, because I knew I only had about 30 minutes before he’d wake up. But I could hear everything they were doing, and Michael just started playing this hypnotizing riff. Right away, I knew it was the intro track and the mission statement for the whole record. I started writing in my head right there in the bathroom. I thought, ‘My god, I cannot wait to walk out onstage to this song.’ The other fun fact about this one is that the vocal pattern was inspired by Busta Rhymes.” **“Black Rainbow”** “One of the reasons I wanted to call this song ‘Black Rainbow’ is because the director \[Panos Cosmatos\] that made *Beyond the Black Rainbow* is from our island. He moved here as a teenager, like I did, and I’ve just always felt a bit of camaraderie with anyone that’s left the island—people like Pamela Anderson and Nelly Furtado. But that movie was very disturbing to me, and it’s basically about someone dropped into something where they become completely disoriented. Which is how I feel sometimes.” **“Perfect Soul”** “This song feels very pop to me, though I never intended it to be that way. It’s very sincere and dramatic. It’s a song about someone who’s kind of saying, ‘You’ve taken everything from me. There’s nothing more to take, so just leave me here.’ It’s a relationship that’s so far gone that there’s nothing we can do to repair it. Instead of having a traditional breakdown like we’d normally do, this one is cool because Michael uses an EBow on his guitar and takes a full minute to bend a note. It’s a bit of an homage to one of his favorite artists, Cloudkicker, and it’s one of my favorite parts of the album.” **“Keep Sweet”** “I moved to the island from Alabama when I was 15. In Alabama, I was around people that were very conservative and extremely traditional. More so than the friends I made in Canada, I think I was exposed to how religion is used to subjugate women. I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of ‘keeping sweet,’ which is something that exists throughout different types of Christianity and other religions. It basically just means that women need to maintain their femininity, which in our society is softness, kindness, and empathy—but also humbleness and meekness. It’s kind of a mantra that’s repeated to us. We’re socialized to be complacent, which is what the song is about.” **“Soft Spine”** “I don’t really know the people that are part of my peer group. I don’t go to parties and meet people and hang out and stuff. But there’s so many nasty people in the music industry, and they probably know who I am, but they probably don’t know that I think they’re bad people and I don’t want to know them. This song is saying ‘fuck you’ to them. It’s my fantasy of having the leverage and power to negatively impact their wallets. I can’t beat anybody up or kick anyone’s ass, but the narrator in the song can, and they’re not scared to do it.” **“Tsunami Sea”** “I love this song so much. Before there were lyrics, I knew this one would be the title song. But I wanted to think of a more intimate reason for the album to be called *Tsunami Sea* that I could use for this song—rather than just the big, bold, theatrical idea of a natural disaster destroying everything. Here, it’s a metaphor to explain panic attacks or when you’re so sad and depressed and low, and you can’t stop crying. I thought about how many teardrops it would take to fill up a whole ocean of tsunamis. I’m using that to destroy everything and drown myself rather than deal with my problems.” **“A Haven with Two Faces”** “Conceptually, the haven with two faces is our town. It makes you unique and creative and different because you have to overcome a lot to get off the island and be an artist, but at the same time, it really hinders you because you just feel misunderstood. It’s extra weird living here because of the physical isolation combined with the normal isolation that you might feel. It’s got that small-town feeling, but then you can’t drive out of it. At the same time, it’s a beautiful place to grow up.” **“No Loss, No Love”** “On this song, I’m imagining a person in the middle of the ocean on a life raft. It’s after the tsunami has destroyed everything. They have no food, no drink. Everything they love is gone. But it’s the eye of the storm, so everything seems calm and safe. It’s like a person who feels secure in their mental health even though they stopped taking their medication. It’s that false clarity you feel when you’ve been deep, deep down and now all your endorphins and serotonin are shooting back up. The person on the raft thinks they see an abundant island, a safe place to get off, but it’s actually dangerous.” **“Crystal Roses”** “This is a gentler version of the scariness of ‘No Loss, No Love.’ You’re floating across the ocean, thinking, ‘Whatever will be will be.’ All these mystical elements of the supernatural world are beckoning the raft this way or that way. Michael wrote this because he wanted to make something completely out of left field, and the drum loop just put me in a trance. One of the things I’ve been wanting to do for a couple years now is to use a live formant to pitch my voice up and down in real time. I like it because it takes any gender out of my voice. Is it a guy? A girl? Is it me? You can’t tell.” **“Ride the Wave”** “When I heard Michael and Dan working on the chorus, I knew I had to get my Jimmy Eat World on. I love that band, but our bass player, Josh \[Gilbert\], is the ultra-mega Jimmy Eat World stan. When he joined the band, that’s one of the ways we really bonded. He knows all the lore, so I’ve learned more about Jimmy Eat World in the last two years than I had ever known in my life. One of the things I love about that band is that the harmony vocal is just as important as the melody. So, the chorus of this is my voice and Josh’s voice together, and the harmony isn’t just supportive.” **“Deep End”** “This song was originally called ‘Deep Dish.’ We wrote the first half years ago, when we were working on our *Rotoscope* EP. Afterwards, we went out and celebrated with deep-dish pizza at a spot down the road from the studio. Towards the end of the meal, we were like, ‘What are we going to name the song?’ We looked at our food and agreed: ‘Deep Dish.’ And this song is the final goodbye for the album. It’s about a person making all these excuses for their own shortcomings, tying themselves down with it and admitting defeat. It’s a very sad song, but it’s uplifting musically. It’s got my favorite riff that Michael has ever made.”
Louie Pastel and Felix actually hail from Los Angeles, borrowing their name from the title of Wim Wenders’ 1984 road movie. But beyond showing their movie-geek bona fides, the choice also speaks to their fondness for juxtaposing elements that might not typically go together—let’s say, West Coast G-funk and sneering punk rock, which they meld seamlessly on “Dogma 25,” where they deliver the odd cinephiliac bar (“Stanley Kubrick, how I’m making a scene”) in matching growls that do Tumblr-era Tyler, the Creator justice. Since their 2018 debut EP, *I’ll Get My Revenge in Hell*, the duo have earned comparisons to alternative rap groups like Death Grips and clipping. But *They Left Me With the Sword*, their third official EP, suggests that they’re equally inspired by blog-era cult faves The Cool Kids, whose retro-futuristic minimalism they channel on “Holy Spinal Fluid” and “El Camino.” (The latter, with its vocoder balladry and tight lyricism, showcases the pair at their best.)
