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.
On their 2020 debut *925* and 2022 follow-up *Anywhere But Here*, London’s Sorry hammered together a sometimes jarring collision of sounds that took in everything from lo-fi bedroom pop and indie to glitch and drum ’n’ bass. On their third album, Sorry’s mutant hybrid holds together much more coherently. That’s in part due to core duo Louis O’Bryen and Asha Lorenz leaning into their more unsettling qualities, with the resulting atmosphere binding everything under its dark spell. With Lorenz’s childlike vocals shifting between panic-attack anxiety and creepy playground taunts, *COSPLAY* skips and lurches through a shadowy sonic underworld coloured by clanking industrial noise (“Jetplane”’s frenetic collision of beats), haunting gothic nightmares (the Cure-like miasma-swamping “Love Posture”), and desolate folk (the O’Bryen-fronted “Life in This Body”). While the album’s title might suggest dressing up in someone else’s style, on *COSPLAY*, Sorry have fashioned something truly unique.
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.
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.
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.
The Norwegian art-pop duo (Henriette Motzfeldt and Catharina Stoltenberg) met in high school in their hometown of Oslo, then moved to Copenhagen for school—in Motzfeldt’s case, the Rhythmic Music Conservatory, the incubator for some of the most forward-thinking pop music of the 2020s, from Erika de Casier to ML Buch. Since their 2016 debut EP *Okey*, the pair have entered into something of a creative mind-meld, occasionally writing songs from one another’s perspectives. On *Big city life*, their second studio album (following 2021’s *Believer*), Motzfeldt and Stoltenberg swagger through the cityscape of their own cheeky fantasies, a flirty neon pleasure dome where anything can happen. On “Roll the dice” and “Feisty,” they spit cool, campy bars about making friends in crowded bathroom lines and drunk taxi rides: “’Cause you’re a girl in the city/You just know how it is/You’re a professional, logistics, you just know this business,” they hype themselves up over a minimal drum-synth-piano riff. “You got time and I got money,” with its playfully swooning lyrics and sweeping string arrangements, plays out like the last karaoke number of the night.
“Ultimately—and I only discovered this after the whole album was written—this album is about opening yourself up to a lover, or a person, or the entire world, giving them every single part of yourself,” Laufey tells Apple Music about her third album, *A Matter of Time*. “It’s about acknowledging that it’s just a matter of time until you find out every single part of me.” She began working on the project while touring behind her breakthrough album *Bewitched* in 2024, inspired by a host of factors—particularly balancing her hectic schedule as an in-demand pop star with falling in love for the first time. Laufey worked on *A Matter of Time* with her longtime collaborator Spencer Stewart and new creative partner Aaron Dessner (of The National and Big Red Machine, and a regular collaborator of Taylor Swift’s). “It was that new experience that I was craving for an album,” she says. “I wanted to be so careful for this album about staying true to myself, and staying true to my roots, and staying true to my philosophy, which is ultimately keeping jazz music and classical music alive through my own music. But I was craving a level of speed and shine and newness for this album, and I knew I had to find one partner to work with who would bring that out in me.”
