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.
Kae Tempest says that *Self Titled* is a record borne out of synchronicity. The South Londoner is a master of many arts—he’s a rapper, poet, spoken word act, novelist, and more—but something didn’t feel right as he approached making what he thought would be his fifth solo album. Seeking an outside take on it, Tempest played some of the songs to Fraser T. Smith, with whom he’d collaborated on the Dave and Adele producer’s Future Utopia project, and Smith’s feedback opened up a whole new way forward. “He just said, ‘This isn’t right for right now, this just isn’t quite it, there’s something else I think that needs to come out of you right now,’” Tempest tells Apple Music. “He said, ‘Why don’t you just park this and come into the studio and let’s see what happens?’” What happened is *Self Titled*, a career peak that takes in menacing hip-hop grooves, jubilant, expansive pop, jagged beats, and bombastic soundscapes. By some margin, it is Tempest’s most ambitious musical work to date. Working with Smith unlocked something. “It brought out the bigness of my sound, my intentionality around songwriting, wanting to be more concise, more driven, wanting bigger sound,” Tempest says. “Fraser is a big songwriter.” The process of making the record, he explains, felt like being swept up in a strong current. “We were just going with it, and the minute we tried to lead and not flow, it wouldn’t quite work. If I tried to get something to happen, it just wouldn’t happen.” *Self Titled* is very much the album that Kae Tempest was meant to make right now. Let Tempest guide you through it, track by track. **“I Stand on the Line”** “This is a statement piece. It’s huge. The orchestral instrumentation, the expansiveness of the sound and the production. This was that moment when I said to Fraser, ‘I want big sound. I want to make big songs,’ and this was his response. Lyrically, Fraser was encouraging me to tell my story. My natural place when I’m writing lyrics is to write from character perspectives or zoom in on one very specific thing but retain some kind of abstract relationship with the object of the poem or the lyric. But with this, Fraser was encouraging me to tell my story. I realized this is what appeals to me in songs, when you get this insight into somebody’s truth.” **“Statue in the Square”** “I was wondering whether to follow ‘I Stand on the Line’ with this because, in some ways, they tread some of the same ground lyrically, but in other ways, it’s a one-two punch that is so satisfying. I played Fraser Megan Thee Stallion’s ‘HISS’ and Run The Jewels. I was like, ‘I just want something so simple, but I want it to be so big, but so clear in each of its parts.’ I liked the idea of creating something on the piano that felt like an old loop but we’re just playing it now in the room. Lyrically, the first draft went on for ages and ages. The verses were really long, but the chorus jumped out and I thought, ‘OK, I know what this song wants me to do now, I just have to minimize and reduce and distill what I’m saying.’” **“Know Yourself”** “In my late teenage years, I was going through some heavy stuff, I felt at a bit of a crossroads. What I understood to be my older self came into my head and basically instructed my younger self to keep writing, to focus on creativity rather than destruction, and to know myself. That older self was what I understood my lyrics were coming from. Each time I wrote lyrics, it was advice I was getting from my older self. As I got older, I was like, ‘Well, it wasn’t me, I haven’t gone back, so who the fuck was that?’ Writing ‘Know Yourself,’ I was like, ‘This is the moment, this is when I went back,’ and it’s because that kid did what they did, that I can do what I’m doing. Fraser said, ‘Oh, that’s crazy,’ because he wrote this beat with Tom Rowlands from The Chemical Brothers. They went to school together but they didn’t see each other for 30 years. Tom went to Fraser’s house, they talked about their lives for about 10 minutes, then Fraser picks up a guitar, Tom’s on a drum machine. He said it was like, ‘Suddenly we’re 15 again.’ So lyrically, I’m talking to my younger self, musically, Fraser’s talking to his younger self.” **“Sunshine on Catford”** “I feel very strongly about dynamic and pace and gradient, I love to position albums and live shows, the journey of it all is very important. The idea is that once you know yourself, then you can know love and then in comes this beautiful love song, it’s like a thank you. It’s just a little gratitude prayer to a beautiful moment. We were blessed with the vocal of the fairy godfather of the album who came and sprinkled a bit of magic Pet Shop Boys dust on the record \[Neil Tennant is a guest vocalist on the track\]. This is a hymn of thanks to the small moments when you are trying to make a life with someone, when things just feel great.” **“Bless the Bold Future”** “The lyric began years ago. I always set myself this rule that I mustn’t write backwards because I thought if I ever went back, I wouldn’t be able to go forwards. I always went into the studio with a blank notebook and started from wherever I was at. After writing ‘Know Yourself’ and going back and sampling \[an\] old lyric, I was like, ‘Actually, maybe this is the moment where I can go back into older material with this new perspective.’ This lyric had been floating around and I couldn’t let go of it. There was something about it that I thought was interesting. It never quite found its home before, then we found this fucking absolutely rolling monster beat. It was beautiful.” **“Everything All Together”** “In my live show, I like to take a line from each of the songs at some point in the set and weave them all together and start repeating things that people have heard before. It gives this cumulative trance-like power to the whole experience. As the album was finished, I was saying to Fraser, ‘I want to make this kind of master poem,’ so I took a line from each of the songs and wove them together. We got all the session files up and took the horn line from that song, the snare from that song, one little piano part from that song, so there’s something from every single song and we put it on a grid almost like it was artwork rather than music work. We did it by eye rather than listening to it and then pressed play on that loop. It’s like the soul of the album speaking. It tells you everything that you’ve just heard and everything you’re about to hear.” **“Prayers to Whisper”** “This came out of me experimenting with form, four lines and the repeated fifth line three times. Obviously, it’s about something that’s close to my heart, the death of a friend. The chords Fraser found for it were quite somber. I was like, ‘No, no, no, no.’ Lyrically and musically, if the two things are going the same way, it’s death. We need uplift in the music. We need celebration. Fraser found these beautiful chords and it felt massive. It felt anthemic, which is how you want it to feel. It’s tough to feel optimistic in the face of somebody leaving, but there is this push and pull, if you lose somebody to something where they were suffering, to illness, to something painful, then there is some sense of release. I wanted the music to embody that and then it became this huge ballad, big pop song.” **“Diagnoses”** “I wanted to make something playful, celebratory, a summer banger about fucking antipsychotics and HRT. Why the fuck not? That’s your life. You still want to fucking dance. You’re still dancing. It’s another example of the lyric and the music pushing against each other. That’s what creates the good feeling. That’s what I like. It’s like, if this is your life, it’s no big deal. It’s a massive deal. You’re fucked. Life is just mental, of course. But at the same time, it’s just your life. And we are all just dealing with the fallout of what we’re in.” **“Hyperdistillation”** “I loved the beat but I was struggling to find the lyrical shape. It’s a love song to London, to my city, and there were these little hooky moments and I was like, ‘I need something in that hook.’ I went to Raven Bush, the string player from Speakers Corner Quartet, and said, ‘Can you write me a violin line that almost sounds like a soaring melody, like a vocal hook?’ He wrote this beautiful string part. It’s amazing, but it wasn’t enough. I wanted more of an uplift. Then I remembered \[singer-songwriter\] Connie Constance, who I’d bumped into a few times backstage and who I just love. She came down to the studio and wrote this amazing part. These fractured pieces suddenly came together in this perfect moment, which is what the song’s about.” **“Forever”** “This started as a love song about the uncertainty of a relationship and having this idea that let’s just fucking enjoy this for all that it is. And then Fraser was saying, ‘I know I was encouraging you to tell your story, but actually I feel like now the album needs more of your outward perspective.’ I totally agreed but I’d grown attached to that hook. If I tried to write a song about the world, I would never have written a hook so tender. The way that hook is addressed to a lover enables it to be more honest and truthful about the world, you escape the narrative trap of ‘I’m going to write a song about everything, which means you can write a song about nothing.’” **“Breathe”** “This is when I knew that the album wanted to be born. This was when Fraser had said to me, ‘Tell your story.’ I loved the beat, I wrote it, scribbled it out, went in the studio. This is the first time I did it. I could barely read the paper, my hands were shaking, and it is like a freestyle, wrote it, rapped it, that’s it. I haven’t quite got my head around what it is that I’m even trying to say, but the rush of that feeling, it is irreplaceable. Getting Young Fathers on there was amazing because within the world of that song I’m talking about, when *Everybody Down* \[Tempest’s 2014 Mercury-nominated debut\] came out, they were there, we were labelmates. They’ve been a part of this journey and it felt like a massive blessing to have them there on this song.” **“Till Morning”** “I wanted it to feel like the morning was coming, the sun was coming out, it was getting warmer, it’s getting brighter. When the chords come in at the end, it’s like the light. By the time we’d got our heads around that arrangement, it was two in the morning. I went in to put the vocal on it and I’d been metabolizing the lyric quite a lot and the take that I did was quite angry. Fraser said there was a tenderness in the original guide vocal because I was being very tentative with it. Sometimes, when something’s really new, you don’t even dare to say it, so I went back in and I did it like that. More gentle, more optimistic, more hopeful, more loving, less raging—and what you get is this very beautiful song about survival and about what comes after, about the possibility, a declaration of love. I thought, ‘How lucky I am to have met Fraser and to be in this relationship with somebody who can give a note like that, that can just shine a light on your performance?’”
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.”
When an artist christens herself Gelli Haha and kicks off her debut album with a perky synth-pop number called “Funny Music,” it’s clear she’s not taking herself too seriously. And with *Switcheroo*, the LA singer born Angel Abaya successfully translates the irreverent theatrics and technicolor pageantry of her buzz-building live performances into an immersive play-at-home musical experience. Welcome to (as one track dubs it) the “Gelliverse,” an all-night party where the venue deploys every trick—dry ice, foam baths, confetti cannons—to amplify the sense of dance-floor delirium. “Spit” channels the indie-sleaziest 2000s electro with *Yo Gabba Gabba!*-level participatory exuberance; “Tiramisu” is jacked-up ’90s house spiked with Le Tigre attitude. *Switcheroo* is the sort of non-stop hit parade that offers nary a chance for a breather—but, in lieu of a bathroom break, Gelli delivers an extended NSFW monologue about urinating into a jar in front of her friends at a party (“Piss Artist”) without skipping a dirty-disco beat.
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.
Since the early 2010s, the shadowy British collective Snapped Ankles has been raging against 21st-century malaise with harsh electronics and urgent beats. Clad in ghillie suits—outfits designed to resemble moss-covered foliage and other curios of nature—that seem more suited for hiding in a post-apocalyptic landscape than the present day, they create cracked anthems that feel like dispatches from a ruined future. Their fifth album’s title, which is borrowed from a 2010 collection of American author Alice Walker’s poetry, sums up how Snapped Ankles defy what they view as a complacent world. *Hard Times Furious Dancing* is not just their latest manifesto, though; it’s a noisy, up-front invitation to join the group’s pseudonymous members on the dance floor as they bellow big, society-shaping questions like “How we gonna pay the rent?” and “What happened to humanity?” Snapped Ankles combine the fitful rhythms of post-punk with a battery of synths that flutter and strobe, offering a glaring reflection for the confusion and unease outlined in the group’s sloganlike lyrics. At times, they echo their forebears from the ’70s and ’80s, updating the musical tracts of then with added noise and maximized vexation that’s appropriate to the present day. “Personal Responsibilities” tilts a crooked finger toward “very large corporations” amid a clamor that recalls British art-rock legends The Fall, while the grinding arpeggiated synths of the tech-skeptic call “Smart World” bring to mind Tubeway Army’s existentially bothered 1979 single “Are \'Friends\' Electric?” “Hard times require furious dancing,” Walker wrote in the preface to her poetry collection 15 years ago. “Each of us is the proof.” Snapped Ankles bear out that declaration with music that is furious in both intent and execution, fueled by wrath and ready to command an audience to seethe and spit alongside them.
Though Jason Singer has been making music under the Michigander moniker since 2014, the Kalamazoo-bred songwriter’s self-titled effort from 2025 marks his first full-length endeavor. Early releases like 2018’s *Midland* EP and “Misery” from the following year helped establish Singer’s emo-leaning folk compositions. His songs center his passionate, yearning vocal performances against hard-charging drum grooves and shredding guitar melodies. It’s a style he updates on his first full-length, presenting his sound in its most polished state yet. “Breaker Box” is built around a morose piano line that accents Singer’s longing lyrics and drum fills that reverberate against the swelling string runs. Elsewhere, on “Episode,” the band lightens the mood, incorporating playful vibraslaps and hand percussion that neatly juxtapose Singer’s declaration that all might not end well: “I think I know/How this is gonna go,” he sings.
“How can I ever write anything again?” That was Self Esteem—aka Rebecca Lucy Taylor’s—first thought when it came to following up her second album, 2021’s *Prioritise Pleasure*, with its five-star reviews and album of the year accolades. But after she followed an exhausting bout of touring in 2023 with almost six months of playing Sally Bowles in West End show *Cabaret*, Taylor packed herself off to Margate and got down to business. The result is *A Complicated Woman*, a massive album full of joy, anger, and humor which is made to be blasted out of stadiums. Except Taylor opted for an intimate theater run in London to showcase it to fans. Complicated, indeed. “I’m proud of how it’s come out,” Taylor tells Apple Music. “It’s dense and it’s complicated, because this time in my life is dense and it’s complicated.” The sound is big and unapologetic. “This is the first time I’ve had access to a proper choir and string arrangement, which was amazing,” she says. “I’m not one of those people who goes into the studio and jams, but if you leave me alone to think I can do it. Back in the day, I would try and write from nine to five, but it doesn’t work like that for me.” *A Complicated Woman* is a collection of songs that stop you in your tracks, from uplifting anthems (“If Not Now, It’s Soon”) to pounding electronica (“69”) and vulnerable confessions (“The Deep Blue Okay”). Eating cheesy chips and rewatching *Gladiator* gave Taylor an unlikely moment of inspiration: “The way he \[Oliver Reed’s character Proximo to Russell Crowe’s Maximus\] goes, ‘Win the crowd and you’ll win your freedom’—with *Prioritise Pleasure* doing how it did, and then that Glastonbury show (her 2022 performance at a packed-out John Peel Stage), that felt like I’d won the crowd. Before that, it always felt like you needed a moment on TikTok or you need this or you need this ad campaign or you need...all these things. Then I was like, ‘Oh, it was all here already. It’s your people.’” A lot of positivity sits alongside the anger on the album and Taylor is conscious she doesn’t have all the answers. “Women are still meant to be this one thing,” she says. “You can have everything, but you have to stay in line. It’s a kind of collection of national anthems for that idea.” Read on as Taylor takes you through it, track by track. **“I Do and I Don’t Care”** “The point of the album is that things are shit, but you have to just keep finding those little pockets of resistance, even if they’re tiny, and then try and be OK. This lyric came when I went home to Sheffield and someone asked how I was and I probably was whinging. But I thought, ‘Of course we’re complaining. What else are we going to do? You would be too if the system wasn’t moving for you in the way that it does.’ I suppose my ethos is I’m a complainer, I’ll always whinge, even when I’ve got what I want. But I’ll always meet it with some action. Whinging and doing nothing about it: bad. Whinging and trying: good.” **“Focus Is Power”** “‘Focus Is Power’ is a bit feel-good and I’m trying to say, ‘Keep going, keep trying, keep your eye on the prize.’ Not in a cheesy way. But I do wonder, ‘Am I a modern-day M People?’ For so long I wanted to be in the middle of the stage with the lights on me, I wanted to wear the clothes and have the shit and be invited to all the things. Then obviously I’ve learned that that’s all bollocks, and the best bit by a mile is helping people and having them go, ‘Oh, I feel like that too.’ I felt so alone until I was 35, and now I get to feel less alone by doing this. People have really responded to this song and been like, ‘Fucking hell, I needed to think like that again.’ And so do I.” **“Mother”** “This isn’t just about men and women, but it’s about the way that in heteronormative relationships it’s so often you teaching the man, and then you break up and some other fucker benefits from them being better dressed and not as much of a twat. It’s just so annoying. A lot of gay men are really responding to the track as well. It’s just relationships, isn’t it? One person is mother. I don’t want to be in control—I would absolutely fucking love to be some swooning, looked-after thing, but it’s not going to happen unless I fundamentally change everything about myself.” **“The Curse”** “I didn’t want to get bogged down in singles but then, for me, ‘The Curse’ could be one. It’s about when I was partying after *Prioritise Pleasure* came out. I was having to go to these red carpet dos and I’ve never had a problem with booze, but it’s the first time I realized I was drinking to be able to do things. Since writing that song, I’ve had a really good relationship with alcohol. I feel like if I’d have heard it a couple of years ago that would have made something click. So again, it’s another song where I’m like, ‘This helped me so it might help you.’” **“Logic, Bitch!” (feat. Sue Tompkins)** “I’m really proud of this song—it’s about realizing just because love is no longer romantic doesn’t mean it’s not valid. I hate hearing and being a woman that’s like, ‘I just can’t find a relationship and that means I’m sad.’ I love watching *Love Island* and *Love Is Blind*, but then I’m like, ‘Why is having a relationship still front and center to everyone’s existence?’ The song features Sue Tompkins from Life Without Buildings, who I think is really cool. We’ve never met, she did it on her phone from Scotland—it started out as a long-form piece but we couldn’t fit it all on there.” **“Cheers to Me”** “This is about skinny indie boys who make women feel crazy and unwanted. I’m worried about people saying, ‘Why are you mentioning body type?’ But it’s about those men who are like, ‘I’m not the problem because I read’ or ‘I watch arthouse films.’ And it’s about how the word ‘lonely’ is overused. Being on your own is fucking brilliant. Alone time is wonderful. But it’s on the tip of people’s tongues to be like, ‘I’m lonely.’ And it’s like, ‘I don’t think you are. You’re having a nice time, but you just don’t have a boyfriend.’” **“If Not Now, It’s Soon”** “You know that Elbow song, ‘One Day Like This’? I wanted to make something like that, with a Team GB feeling. It was definitely a conscious decision to make it feel hopeful, but trying to make a video for it was really hard until I figured it out. It’s basically a very big group hug of women who are like, ‘Same time next week?’ And it’s personal and political, so when I’m at my lowest, it’s a reminder to be patient and persistent. The speech originally comes from Julie Hesmondhalgh \[Coronation Street, *Happy Valley*, and *Mr Bates vs The Post Office* actor\] at an NHS rally saying, ‘Change is in the air’. She and I spoke through it and wrote it together, then she recorded this powerfully rousing speech in her kitchen.” **“In Plain Sight” (with Moonchild Sanelly)** “I hate being like this, but it does feel like women are judged to such a different standard to men. And men’s behavior gets explained away—and so much more easily than women’s. I did feel like a lot of things in my life have been harder because I’m a woman and I didn’t realize it—I grew up not knowing there was any difference. This song is special to me. Moonchild Sanelly wrote the poem in 10 minutes, and what you hear is the first time she read it out loud. She cried, I cried. It was a really special moment in my life. We’d done ‘Big Man’ together and obviously she was comfortable in that space, and I don’t fully know her story and she doesn’t know mine, but it’s that feeling-seen thing.” **“Lies” (feat. Nadine Shah)** “I’ve been a fan of Nadine Shah for years and then met her and we became buddies. And I wanted to start a girl band with her and Florence, but obviously, no one’s got any time. I do have an ambition to make a version of ‘Lies’ with 20 women doing a verse each. It’s one of those songs that has polish, but then you undercut it with the hardcore lyrics. None of the songs are meant to be background music—you can’t work to them, you have to stop and listen. I don’t want to be making music unless it’s like that.” **“69”** “I’d like to write Christina Aguilera’s ‘Dirrty’ for today, but ‘69’ isn’t that. The lyrics just fell out of me. I’d had an idea for ages to do a dance song that is just listing sex positions and rating them out of 10, then it augmented into what you now see before you. A lot of people have been like, ‘Oh, it’s very brave to put that out.’ I was like, ‘I didn’t even notice.’ It’s pretty political to do a sexy song, but it’s instructive and it’s inherently not sexy. I’m saying it without the MO being to turn men on. So many overwhelming responses have been like, ‘Finally, someone said it.’ What else are we mass nodding along to and pretending we like here? Like heels.” **“What Now”** “This is an idea I’ve had in my head for such a long time of getting everything you want and then it still not being all right. Disney created happy ever after and that’s a fallacy. Worse than that, I really do still adhere in my soul to feeling like, ‘Oh, well, when I’ve got that, I’ll be all right. And when my hair’s down to here, it’ll be better.’ And then you realize, you get somewhere and then it’s just more and then you’ll die. So it’s more dense than that. I don’t think the album is all female-based issues, it’s finding the world a bit tough and not getting everything as seemingly as quick as everyone else does, and no one admits it. We’re all still faking it.” **“The Deep Blue Okay”** “This is one of the most important songs I’ve ever written. It had to be the final track on the album, so it might suffer from people not bothering to listen to it. When I was writing this, I thought, ‘What’s my version of LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends”?’ I wrote it in about 10 minutes and it’s insanely emotional. It’s so personal to me, but everyone is finding their own journey in it. I’m conscious that people-pleasing felt like it kept me safe and I’d love to be able to have more conflict and say what I mean more. The songs sound like they do, but in my actual life you wouldn’t believe how scared and shy I am about saying what I want.”