Indieheads

There’s a sense of optimism that comes through Vampire Weekend’s fifth album that makes it float, a sense of hope—a little worn down, a little roughed up, a little tired and in need of a shave, maybe—but hope nonetheless. “By the time you’re pushing 40, you’ve hit the end of a few roads, and you’re probably looking for something—I don’t know what to say—a little bit deeper,” Ezra Koenig tells Apple Music. “And you’re thinking about these ideas. Maybe they’re corny when you’re younger. Gratitude. Acceptance. All that stuff. And I think that’s infused in the album.” Take something like “Mary Boone,” whose worries and reflections (“We always wanted money, now the money’s not the same”) give way to an old R&B loop (Soul II Soul’s “Back to Life”). Or the way the piano runs on “Connect”—like your friend fumbling through a Gershwin tune on a busted upright in the next room—bring the song’s manic energy back to earth. Musically, they’ve never sounded more sophisticated, but they’ve also never sounded sloppier or more direct (“Prep-School Gangsters”). They’re a tuxedo with ripped Converse or a garage band with a full orchestra (“Ice Cream Piano”). And while you can trainspot the micro-references and little details of their indie-band sound (produced brilliantly by Koenig and longtime collaborator Ariel Rechtshaid), what you remember most is the big picture of their songs, which are as broad and comforting as great pop (“Classical”). “Sometimes I talk about it with the guys,” Koenig says. “We always need to have an amateur quality to really be us. There needs to be a slight awkward quality. There needs to be confidence and awkwardness at the same time.” Next to the sprawl of *Father of the Bride*, *OGWAU* (“og-wow”—try it) feels almost like a summary of the incredible 2007-2013 run that made them who they are. But they’re older now, and you can hear that, too, mostly in how playful and relaxed the album is. Listen to the jazzy bass and prime-time saxophone on “Classical” or the messy drums on “Prep-School Gangsters” (courtesy of Blood Orange’s Dev Hynes), or the way “Hope” keeps repeating itself like a school-assembly sing-along. It’s not cool music, which is of course what makes it so inimitably cool. Not that they seem to worry about that stuff anymore. “I think a huge element for that is time, which is a weird concept,” Koenig says. ”Some people call it a construct. I’ve heard it’s not real. That’s above my pay grade, but I will say, in my experience, time is great because when you’re bashing your head against the wall, trying to figure out how to use your brain to solve a problem, and when you learn how to let go a little bit, time sometimes just does its thing.” For a band that once announced themselves as the preppiest, most ambitious guys in the indie-rock room, letting go is big.

The Smile, a trio featuring Radiohead prime movers Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood along with ex-Sons of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner, sounds more like a proper band than a side project on their second album. Sure, they’re a proper band that unavoidably sounds a *lot* like Radiohead, but with some notable distinctions—much leaner arrangements, bass parts by Greenwood and Yorke with a very different character from what Radiohead bassist Colin Greenwood might have laid down, and a formal fixation on conveying tension in their melodies and rhythms. Their debut, *A Light for Attracting Attention*, was full of tight, wrenching grooves and guitar parts that sounded as though the strings were coiling into knots. This time around they head in the opposite direction, loosening up to the point that the music often feels extremely light and airy. The guitar in the first half of “Bending Hectic” is so delicate and minimal that it sounds like it could get blown away with a slight breeze, while the warm and lightly jazzy “Friend of a Friend” feels like it’s helplessly pushed and pulled along by strong, unpredictable winds. The loping rhythm and twitchy riffs in “Read the Room” are surrounded by so much negative space that it sounds eerily hollow, like Yorke is singing through the skeletal remains of a ’70s metal song. There are some surprises along the way, too. A few songs veer into floaty lullaby sections, and more than half include orchestral tangents that recall Greenwood’s film score work for Paul Thomas Anderson and Jane Campion. The most unexpected moment comes at the climax of “Bending Hectic,” which bursts into heavy grunge guitar, stomping percussion, and soaring vocals. Most anyone would have assumed Yorke and Greenwood had abandoned this type of catharsis sometime during the Clinton administration, but as it turns out they were just waiting for the right time to deploy it.

The LA-by-way-of-Miami duo of Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin pick up where they left things on their debut, 2021’s *Mercurial World*, and make everything just a bit bigger. Opener “She Looked Like Me!” begins innocently enough, with hushed vocals from Tenenbaum backed by twinkling keys and a buzzing bass synth. Before long, though, massive drum hits give the song an unrelenting pulse, blending the energy of a hyperpop anthem with the rise-and-fall restraint of a classic-rock song. “Image” is a disco-inspired cut that dances around synths that speed up and slow down according to their own whimsy, as Tenenbaum’s voice floats effortlessly above the fray. “What\'s the best you’ve got?/I forgot all my common sense/I need all the common sense/Time to start the clock from the top,” she sings, letting the feel-good vibes of the club-ready instrumental imbue her abstract lyrics with visceral meaning. Even when the duo concoct songs that fear the future or suggest wariness at where the world is headed, the jams suggest that the AI apocalypse will still feature plenty of dancing.

When MGMT emerged in 2007 with “Time to Pretend”—a euphoric shooting star of a song that soundtracked every house party and HBO show for the next several years—the synth-pop duo, just out of college, became rock stars overnight. They were big in every sense: a major-label deal, a tour with Radiohead, a reputation for rock shows that felt like raves. But Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser never seemed wholly comfortable with their popularity, and their subsequent albums were far more eccentric and experimental. Then, during the pandemic, the band found themselves back in the spotlight for a reason nobody saw coming: One of their tracks blew up on TikTok. The sudden, explosive virality of “Little Dark Age,” a foreboding, vaguely political track from their 2018 album of the same name, took both men, now in their forties, by total surprise. And yet, when they began writing their fifth album a few months later, they found themselves circling themes of reinvention and rebirth. *Loss of Life* is, despite its title, openhearted and hopeful, and sheds some of the fussy self-seriousness that weighed down their recent records. The arrangements are streamlined. The melodies can breathe. The hooks stick. It isn’t that the band has reverted back to its high-flying, imperious roots; these songs have an emotional sincerity that you just didn’t get on “Electric Feel.” Rather, it feels like a weight has been lifted. Certain moments, like the Christine and the Queens duet “Dancing in Babylon,” even sound like surrender. The album was co-produced by longtime collaborators Patrick Wimberly and Dave Fridmann with additional support from Oneohtrix Point Never. The latter is often cited as someone who takes a curatorial approach to production, and *Loss of Life* asks a lot of big questions about what, ultimately, makes art good. Does it need to be serious to be taken seriously? Is optimism allowed? Tender lullabies like “Phradie’s Song,” the Simon & Garfunkel-esque “Nothing to Declare,” and the twinkling title track—one of those sweeping, distorted psychedelic numbers that feels designed for exploring spiritual frontiers—suggest that MGMT’s answers have softened with age. “Who knows how the painting will look in the morning/When the day is born and life is ending?” VanWyngarden sings on “Loss of Life.” The subtext, if we may: Our time here is short. What matters is that you paint.

Perhaps more so than any other Irish band of their generation, Fontaines D.C.’s first three albums were intrinsically linked to their homeland. Their debut, 2019’s *Dogrel*, was a bolshy, drizzle-soaked love letter to the streets of Dublin, while Brendan Behan-name-checking follow-up *A Hero’s Death* detailed the group’s on-the-road alienation and estrangement from home. And 2022’s *Skinty Fia* viewed Ireland from the complicated perspective of no longer actually being there. On their fourth album, however, Fontaines D.C. have shifted their attention elsewhere. *Romance* finds the five-piece wandering in a futuristic dystopia inspired by Japanese manga classic *Akira*, Paolo Sorrentino’s 2013 film *La Grande Bellezza*, and Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn’s *Pusher* films. “We didn’t set out to make a trilogy of albums but that’s sort of what happened,” drummer Tom Coll tells Apple Music of those first three records. “They were such a tight world, and this time we wanted to step outside of it and change it up. A big inspiration for this record was going to Tokyo for the first time. It’s such a visual, neon-filled, supermodern city. It was so inspiring. It brought in all these new visual references to the creative process for the first time.” Recorded with Arctic Monkeys producer James Ford (their previous three albums were all made with Dan Carey), *Romance* also brings in a whole new palette of sounds and colors to the band’s work. From the clanking apocalyptic dread of the opening title track, hip-hop-inspired first single “Starburster,” and the warped grunge and shoegaze hybrids of “Here’s the Thing” and “Sundowner,” it opens a whole new chapter for Fontaines D.C., while still finding time for classic indie rock anthems such as “Favourite”’s wistful volley of guitars or the Nirvana-like “Death Kink.” “Every album we do feels like a huge step in one direction for us, but *Romance* is probably a little bit more outside of our previous records,” says Coll. “It’s exciting to surprise people.” Read on as he dissects *Romance*, one track at a time. **“Romance”** “This is one that we wrote really late at night in the studio. It just fell out of us. It was one of those real moments of feeling, ‘Right, that’s the first track on the album.’ It’s kind of like a palate cleanser for everything that’s come before. It’s like the opening scene. I feel like every time we’ve done a record there’s been one tune that’s always stuck out like, ‘This is our opening gambit...’” **“Starburster”** “Grian \[Chatten, singer\] wrote most of this tune on his laptop, so there were lots of chopped-up strings and stuff—it was quite a hip-hop creative process. It’s probably the song that is furthest away from the old us on this album. This tune was the first single and we always try and shock people a bit. It’s fun to do that.” **“Here’s the Thing”** “This was written in the last hour of being in the studio. We had maybe 12 or 13 tracks ready to go and just started jamming, and it presented itself in an hour. \[Guitarist Conor\] Curley had this really gnarly, ’90s, piercing tone, and it just went from there.” **“Desire”** “This has been knocking around for ages. It was one of those tunes that took so many goes to get to where it was meant to sit. It started as a band setup and then we went really electronic with it. Then in the studio, we took it all back. It took a while for it to sit properly. Grian did 20 or 30 vocal layers on that, he really arranged it in an amazing way. Carlos \[O’Connell, guitarist\] and Grian were the main string arrangers on this record. This was the first record where we actually got a string quartet in—before, people would just send it over. So being able to sit in the room and watch a string quartet take center stage on a song was amazing.” **“In the Modern World”** “Grian wrote this song when he was in LA. He was really inspired by Lana Del Rey and stuff like that. Hollywood and the glitz and the glamour, but it’s actually this decrepit place. It’s that whole idea of faded glamour.” **“Bug”** “This felt like a really easy song for us to write. That kind of buzzy, all-of-us-in-the-same-room tune. I really fought for this one to be on the record. I feel like, with songs like that, trying to skew them and put a spin on them that they don’t need is overwriting. If it feels right then there’s no point in laboring over it. That song is what it is and it’s great. It’s going to be amazing live.” **“Motorcycle Boy”** “This one is inspired by The Smashing Pumpkins a bit. We actually recorded it six months before the rest of the album. This tune was the real genesis of the record and us finding a path and being like, ‘OK, we can explore down here...’ That was one that really set the wheels in motion for the album. It really informed where we were going.” **“Sundowner”** “On this album, we were probably coming from more singular points than we have before. A lot of the lads brought in tunes that were pretty much there. I was sharing a room with Curley in London, and he was working on this really shoegaze-inspired tune for ages. I think he always thought that Grian would sing it, but when he put down the guide vocals in the studio it sounded great. We were all like, ‘You are singing this now.’” **“Horseness Is the Whatness”** “Carlos sent me a demo of that tune ages and ages ago. It was just him on an acoustic, and it was such a powerful lyric. I think it’s amazing. We had to kind of deconstruct it and build it back up again in terms of making it fit for this record. Carlos had made three or four drum loops for me and it was a really fun experience to try and recreate that. I don’t know how we’re going to play it live but we’ll sort it out!” **“Death Kink”** “Again, this came from one of the jams of us setting up for a studio session. It’s another one of those band-in-a-room-jamming-out kind of tunes. On tour in America, we really honed where everything should sit in the set. This is going to be such a fun tune to play live. We’ve started playing it already and it’s been so sick.” **“Favourite”** “‘Favourite’ was another one we wrote when we were rehearsing. It happened pretty much as it is now. We were kind of nervous about touching it again for the album because that first recording was so good. That’s the song that hung around in our camp for the longest. When we write songs on tour, often we end up getting bored of them over time but ‘Favourite’ really stuck. We had a lot of conversations about the order on this album and I felt it was really important to move from ‘Romance’ to ‘Favourite.’ It feels like a journey from darkness into light, and finishing on ‘Favourite’ leaves it in a good spot.”

Jamie Smith’s 2015 debut solo album *In Colour* set the tone for an entire decade of left-of-center electronic music, but his long-awaited follow-up harbors zero pretension when it comes to trend-watching. Nine years later, *In Waves* sets its sights on the dance floor with glorious aplomb, the perfect complement to a string of body-moving singles that the iconic British producer has released in the preceding year and a half. “The collaboration element was helping me push things forward without having to think too much about myself on my own,” Smith tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. From there, the rest of *In Waves* came together in quick succession—and, suitably, the record’s rowdy and in-a-crowd feel was largely inspired by the solitude of the lockdown era, as well as dreams of how it would feel to play big tunes for huge audiences again. “I was starting to get excited about the idea of playing shows again,” Smith says. The guest list for this party is overflowing: Along with a practical reunion of his main outfit The xx on the dreamy “Waited All Night,” house music auteur and recent Beyoncé collaborator Honey Dijon lends her distinctive incantations to the squelch of “Baddy on the Floor,” while experimental-leaning vocalists Kelsey Lu and Panda Bear throw in on the soul-streaked and woozy “Dafodil.” But at the center of *In Waves* is a truly assured sense of confidence from Smith, who’s returned here with a set of club-ready cuts that’s truly crowd-pleasing—all without losing the distinctive touch that’s brought him so much deserved acclaim to this point. “One of the most inspiring things is to go out clubbing,” he says. “And I think you can have quite profound thoughts even in an altered state on the dance floor.”

“I know that my world is grown old,” Robert Smith says in “And Nothing Is Forever,” one of the many standout tracks on The Cure’s 14th studio album and first in 16 years. *Songs of a Lost World* deals almost exclusively in death, dying, and the relentless march of time; the songs move slowly, and many go on for minutes before Smith opens his mouth. There’s no pop hits, no hooks, and—let’s face it—no fun. It’s also some of the band’s most engrossing work, a statement that, like most great Cure songs, can’t be taken lightly. The glacially paced opener and lead single, “Alone,” is majestic and mournful, with string swells and apocalyptic lyrics about birds falling out of the sky. But mostly it’s about dying alone, the shattered pieces of a regret-filled life, and the forgone conclusion that is our mutual demise: “This is the end of every song that we sing.” On “A Fragile Thing,” a plinking piano gives way to a thudding bassline as Smith sings of heartbreak, distance, and fait accompli. It might be the closest the album comes to vintage ’80s Cure, but now the 65-year-old Smith’s customarily downbeat lyrics come with the weight of lived wisdom and cruel inevitability. “Warsong” twists the screws with a churning, droning meditation on domestic battles and bitter regret; at a bit over four minutes, it’s also the shortest song on the album. “Drone:Nodrone” is the catchiest and most upbeat of the bunch—musically speaking, anyway. Smith’s lyrics are no picnic, of course. They’re not a completely hopeless death spiral, but they certainly acknowledge a tumultuous relationship: “The answers that I have are not the answers that you want” and “I can’t anymore/If I ever really could.” The track also features squalling guitar leads from former Tin Machine/David Bowie sideman Reeves Gabrels, who joined The Cure in 2012 but makes his first studio appearance with the band here. “I Can Never Say Goodbye” laments the death of Smith’s brother Richard with the refrain “Something wicked this way comes,” a phrase popularized by the title of Ray Bradbury’s influential 1962 novel. (The Cure debuted the song in concert in 2022 in Poland, where Richard Smith apparently lived for many years.) Like much of *Lost World*, it’s a tearjerker. With all this loss and mortality, *Songs of a Lost World* recalls Bowie’s 2016 swan song, *Blackstar*. Finishing an album about death with a sprawling, gorgeous track called “Endsong” isn’t necessarily ominous, but who knows? For what it’s worth, Smith is already promising a follow-up to *Songs of a Lost World*. Hopefully, it won’t take 16 years.

The musician born Josh Tillman chose the title for his sixth album in a decidedly Father John Misty kind of way: He found the Sanskrit word in a novel by Bruce Wagner, who shares with the musician a certain impish LA mysticism. Mahāśmaśāna translates to “great cremation ground,” so it’s no surprise to find the singer-songwriter in “what’s it all mean?” mode, trawling tragicomic corners of the American Southwest in search of answers about life, death, and humanity. After trying his hand at big-band jazz on 2022’s *Chloë and the Next 20th Century*, Tillman returns to the big, sweeping ’70s-style pop rock that’s earned him a place among his generation’s most intriguing songwriters. He channels Leonard Cohen’s *Death of a Ladies’ Man* on the sprawling title track, whose swooning orchestration and ambitious lyrics take stock of, well, everything. “She Cleans Up” tells a rollicking tale involving female aliens, high-dollar kimonos, and rabbits with guns, and on dystopian power ballad “Screamland,” he offers an all-American refrain: “Stay young/Get numb/Keep dreaming.”

At just 25 years old, with four solo studio albums and three as guitarist for North Carolina band Wednesday under his belt, MJ Lenderman already seems like an all-timer. The vivid, arch songwriting, the swaying between reverence and irreverence for his forebears, steeped in modern culture while still sounding timeless—he evokes the easy comfort of a well-worn favorite and the butterflies of a new relationship with someone who is going to have a massive, rich, and argued-about discography for decades. The songs go down easy but are dark around the edges, with down-home strings and lap steel adorning tales of jerking off into showers and the existential loneliness of a smartwatch. But in a fun way. And just as 2021’s “Knockin” both referenced erstwhile golfer John Daly’s cover of Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” and lifted its chorus for good measure, “You Don’t Know the Shape I’m In” honors The Band’s classic while rendering it redundant. But album closer “Bark at the Moon” represents Lenderman’s blending of sad-sack character sketches and meta classic-rock references in its final form: “I’ve never seen the Mona Lisa/I’ve never really left my room/I’ve been up too late with Guitar Hero/Playing ‘Bark at the Moon.’” Then he punctuates the line with an “Awoo/Bark at the moon,” not to the tune of the Ozzy song, but to Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London.” Packing that many jokes into half a verse is impressive enough—more so that the impact is even more heartbreaking than it is funny.

Given that it evolved from an urge to do something—anything—creative during the pandemic, The Smile has turned out to be one of the most liberating and fruitful projects of Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood’s latter-day career. *Cutouts* is the third record in little more than two years from the trio, which also includes Sons of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner, and follows just 10 months after their captivating second album *Wall of Eyes*. Its creation mirrors the cross-pollination that occurred between a pair of classic Radiohead albums. In much the same way that 2000’s *Kid A* and 2001’s *Amnesiac* were made during the same recording sessions but inhabited different sonic spaces and textures, *Cutouts* contains songs committed to tape at the same time as *Wall of Eyes* in Oxford and London’s Abbey Road Studios with producer Sam Petts-Davies. Whereas *Wall of Eyes* mesmerized with a tightly wound, autumnal restraint, there’s an unfurling expanse at work on *Cutouts*’ 10 tracks. With its cascading riffs, soulful piano chords, and yearning vocals, “Eyes & Mouth” is the epic center around which everything else revolves. The record never settles in one spot for too long: “Instant Psalm,” featuring beatific strings from the London Contemporary Orchestra, is a hazy folk gem, and “The Slip” is a synth-laden banger, while the frantic punk-funk grooves of “Zero Sum” sound like they’re trying to wriggle out of themselves. It remains to be seen whether anything can be read into the trio clearing the decks with this collection of songs, some of which were played live around the time of their 2022 debut *A Light for Attracting Attention* (or in some cases, even deeper into the past—the title of contemplative closer “Bodies Laughing” can be traced back to Radiohead rehearsals in the mid-2000s). But if *Cutouts* is the end of an era for The Smile, it caps off a prolific, potent period for Yorke, Greenwood, and Skinner.

The White Stripes were nothing if not a formal exercise in exploring the possibilities of self-imposed limitation—in instrumentation, in color scheme, in verifiable biographical information. Since the duo’s dissolution in 2011, Jack White has continued playing with form (and color schemes), from the just-one-of-the-boys-in-the-band vibes of The Raconteurs to 2022’s sonically experimental *Fear of the Dawn* and its more restrained companion *Entering Heaven Alive*. Despite—or perhaps *to* spite—those who longed for a simpler, noisier, more monochromatic time, White tinkered away. The rollout for *No Name*, White’s sixth solo album, was characteristically mischievous: It first appeared as a white-label LP given away at Third Man Records before being posted online without song titles, sparking an excitement that felt fresh, largely because the sound did not. Meg White is not walking through that door anytime soon, but the 13 tracks here channel the unadorned, wild-eyed ferocity of the band that made him famous more efficiently and consistently than anything he’s done since. There’s plenty of swagger from top to bottom, but most of all there’s *hooks*: big, fat, noisy guitars played in the catchiest combinations possible. “That’s How I’m Feeling” may not relieve “Seven Nation Army” of its ubiquity anytime soon, but it is a ready-made capital-A anthem with a euphoric jump-scare chorus that sticks on first listen and doesn’t get unstuck. “Bless Yourself,” “Tonight (Was a Long Time Ago),” and “Number One With a Bullet” are just as infectious, while “Bombing Out” may be the fastest, heaviest thing White has ever put out in any of his many guises. The casualness of it all is a flex—as meticulous and exacting as White can be, *No Name*’s modest arrival is a reminder of how easily he could have kept churning out earworm White Stripes songs. Good for him that he didn’t want to; good for us that he does now.

Few artists have done more for carrying the banner of guitar rock proudly into the 21st century than St. Vincent. A notorious shredder, she cut her teeth as a member of Sufjan Stevens’ touring band before releasing her debut album *Marry Me* in 2007. Since then, her reputation as a six-string samurai has been cemented in the wake of a run of critically acclaimed albums and collaborations (she co-wrote Taylor Swift’s No 1. single “Cruel Summer”). A shape-shifter of the highest order, St. Vincent, aka Annie Clark, has always put visual language on equal footing with her sonic output. Most recently, she released 2021’s *Daddy’s Home*, a conceptual period piece that pulled inspiration from ’70s soul and glam set in New York City. That project marked the end of an era visually—gone are the bleach-blonde wigs and oversized Times Square-ready trench coats—as well as creatively. With *All Born Screaming*, she bids adieu to frequent collaborator Jack Antonoff, who produced *Daddy’s Home*, and instead steps behind the boards for the first time to produce the project herself. “For me, this record was spending a lot of time alone in my studio, trying to find a new language for myself,” Clark tells Apple Music’s Hanuman Welch. “I co-produced all my other records, but this one was very much my fingerprints on every single thing. And a lot of the impetus of the record was like, ‘Okay: I\'m in the studio and everything has to start with chaos.’” For Clark, harnessing that chaos began by distilling the elemental components of what makes her sound like, well, her. Guitar players, in many respects, are some of the last musicians defined by the analog. Pedal boards, guitar strings, and pass-throughs are all manipulated to create a specific tone. It’s tactile, specialized, and at times, yes, chaotic. “What I mean by chaos,” Clark says, “is electricity actually moving through circuitry. Whether it\'s modular synths or drum machines, just playing with sound in a way that was harnessing chaos. I\'ve got six seconds of this three-hour jam, but that six seconds is lightning in a bottle and so exciting, and truly something that could only have happened once and only happened in a very tactile way. And then I wrote entire songs around that.” Those songs cover the spectrum from sludgy, teeth-vibrating offerings like “Flea” all the way to the lush album cut (and ode to late electronic producer SOPHIE) “Sweetest Fruit.” Clark relished in balancing these light and dark sounds and sentiments—and she didn’t do so alone. “I got to explore and play and paint,” she says. “And I also luckily had just great friends who came in to play on the record and brought their amazing energy to it.” *All Born Screaming* features appearances from Dave Grohl, Warpaint’s Stella Mozgawa, and Welsh artist Cate Le Bon, among others. Le Bon pulled double duty on the album by performing on the title track as well as offering clarity for some of the murkier production moments. “I was finding myself a little bit in the weeds, as everyone who self-produces does,” Clark says. “And so I just called Cate and was like, ‘I need you to just come hold my hand for a second.’ She came in and was a very stabilizing force, I think, at a time in the making of the record when I needed someone to sort of hold my hand and pat my head and give me a beer, like, ‘It\'s going to be okay.’” With *All Born Screaming*, Clark manages to capture the bloody nature of the human experience—including the uncertainty and every lightning-in-a-bottle moment—but still manages to make it hum along like a Saturday morning cartoon. “The album, to me, is a bit of a season in hell,” she says. “You are a little bit walking on your knees through some broken glass—but in a fun way, kids. We end with this sort of, ‘Yes, life is difficult, but it\'s so worth living and we\'ve got to live it. Can\'t go over it, can\'t go under it, might as well go through it.’ It\'s black and white and the colors of a fire. That, to me, is sonically what the record is.”

The idea of method acting is that you “become” the character you’re playing and the lines between self and acting dissolve. On Nilüfer Yanya’s third album, she’s been considering how that relates to her own work. “There’s a parallel between not acting anymore and my relationship with music and writing and performing,” the London singer-songwriter says. “I don’t really feel like I do a performance, so I don’t really feel like I’m trying to be someone else. That’s why I find performing quite challenging sometimes because I just have to be myself on stage; there’s no costume or masks that I put on.” Maybe that’s why on *My Method Actor* things are getting a bit existential. The excitement of her debut—2019’s *Miss Universe*—and the desire to push against it by doing something totally different with 2022 follow-up *PAINLESS* had left her in a jarring place when she and her collaborator, producer Wilma Archer, got into the studio. Writing music was not glamorous, it was simply her job and her life. “It’s a weird one making a third album, because it’s like: ‘What is pushing me to do this?’” she says. “Where is that desire coming from? Where am I going with this? Where am I going to be on the other side of this?” But this is an album that revels in ruminating on these heavy questions, and we hear an artist—and a person—growing as a result. Teeming with beautiful, accomplished melodies, the album waxes and wanes between scuzzier sounds of frustration and something far more polished and freeing. “It’s a journey, but you don’t really know where it’s going,” she says. “But it’s about not worrying too much about the outcome; it’s learning to trust myself, to really listen to myself.” Across *My Method Actor*, Yanya dredges through all the feelings and upheavals, realizing that there might not be a linear, clear-cut happy ending. “Maybe it’s about letting go. Maybe there’ll never be a point where I feel totally comfortable on stage—or even being a person,” she says, laughing. “These transformations and realizations will happen so often you can’t let it upturn your whole world every time. You have to take it as it comes.” Read on as she guides us through that journey, track by track. **“Keep on Dancing”** “It feels like an introduction. It nearly didn’t make it to the album—it was going really well but it kind of hit a wall towards the end where it wasn’t leveling up the way some of the other songs were, so we restructured it. It starts by asking lots of questions, it sets up the tone of the record. There’s a bit of anger, a bit of resentment. It doesn’t feel like it’s trying too hard to be clever, it’s more like a natural flow of ideas. It’s an energy.” **“Like I Say (I runaway)”** “I had a really fun time writing over the initial idea that Will \[Archer\] had sent me, making all the bits fall in the right place, picking up on the instinctive harmonies and the rhythm of it. The chorus took us both by surprise—it took a while, it felt like it was gonna be really instant but it kept falling on its face. It’s quite a simple structure but the phrasing of it makes it interesting.” **“Method Actor”** “I felt like I was definitely constructing a character in my head, imagining I was in someone else’s life. It was like you’re a flower on the wall, but you’re the narrator at the same time. Feelings of anxiety, social anxiety…it also feels a bit violent to me. There’s a lot of violent imagery and it sounds a bit aggressive. It’s kind of like a dance in the first verse and then the chorus hits you, the guitar wakes you up. It’s quite visceral. There’s always a kind of release that comes with writing something a bit more aggressive. I try not to be an aggressive person, so maybe this is a nice way of letting it out. It feels a bit cathartic.” **“Binding”** “It started with the guitar loop which you hear first. ‘Binding’ was actually the demo name for this, but it really stuck with us because it sounds like a constant loop, constant binding, something twisting and turning. It was really instantly very pretty, and it was enjoyable trying to come up with melodies. It feels like you’re needing something more, wanting something more—something strong to numb the pain, or something stronger to feel. Like you’re numbing yourself on this weird journey. I always imagine it like you’re in a car, and the road’s going on and on and on—and it’s not necessarily an enjoyable journey.” **“Mutations”** “This one, I always imagine a siren—there’s kind of a warning going out. You’re being told to take cover or escape. There’s an urgency in the music and the message. Before the sunset, before the end of the day, before the lights, you need to find a way to disappear or to hide. It’s dark, but in the song you’re either receiving or sending the message—so you’re trying to help somebody, or they’re trying to help you. So there’s something nice about that. But there’s something sinister about the reality the song is set in—it’s very rhythmic, there’s not very many breaks, it’s tight and enclosed.” **“Ready for Sun (touch)”** “The song itself is quite cinematic—it’s sonically quite different to what’s come before, it’s a bit more modern, less grungy. It’s about being ready to step outside again, ready to be less concealed, more exposed. You wanna feel sun on your skin when you’ve been in the shade too long. I say ‘exposed,’ but also it’s about feeling safe enough to come out into the open. It’s wanting to feel touch again, wanting to feel things again. It’s raw feeling, raw emotion.” **“Call It Love”** “I was thinking about a phoenix bursting into flames. Metamorphosis. There’s a lot of talk about flames and fire in this album, but this one definitely fits with the journey themes of the record too. There’s a deep knowing that it’s OK to trust yourself and what you know to be true. It’s being your own guide. You have a sense of self and, even if it’s blurry, you have a center. The overlap of desire and shame, too—how we sometimes feel ashamed of acting on our desires. So the phoenix comes to mind because it’s about allowing your calling to guide you somewhere, to let that consume you and destroy you so you are born out from the ashes. It’s a bit dramatic. But sonically, it’s a lot more chilled out, there’s a groove to the way the guitars intertwine.” **“Faith’s Late”** “I feel like a lot of the questions I ask are quite intense, so I almost want to avoid it. This one is talking about identity. Even the word ‘faith’ feels quite loaded. It’s about belonging, or not belonging, to somewhere—never feeling like you belong somewhere. Always feeling like you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s also about being disappointed in the state of the world, and sort of wanting to give up. But the string arrangement at the end is particularly beautiful, I think. In contrast to the themes, you’re trying to make something beautiful out of something you’d prefer to avoid. And so there’s still life, there’s still beauty, even continuing out of the mess.” **“Made Out of Memory”** “This has a lighter touch. It has an ’80s pop kind of feel production-wise, but the core lyric is based off someone saying how humans are just made up of memories of other people. So when you’re trying to leave somebody behind or breaking up with somebody, if you’re not seeing someone anymore—even a friend or a family member—it’s kind of hacking off a piece of yourself each time. How do you break up with somebody without breaking up with yourself? There’s an art to that.” **“Just a Western”** “I remember Will sent me the guitar ages ago and I really liked it, but nothing was automatically clicking. But I liked the unusual chord pattern. I was thinking of the old Western movies that would come on daytime TV when I was younger. They’d be black-and-white films, cowboys riding off into the sunset. This song has that imagery in it for me; the sunset, something ending. One of the lyrics that jumps out for me is ‘I won’t call in a favour/Won’t do it for free anymore.’ It’s saying you’re not going to do somebody else’s dirty work for them, you’re stating your own new boundaries.” **“Wingspan”** “We were originally trying to make a full song, and it wasn’t really working in a long-form way. Realizing that the song was maybe a condensed version makes it more impactful. I don’t really write short songs like this. A lot of the lyrics are based on this poetry attempt from a couple years ago—so it was like a puzzle coming together, finally having a place for these words to go. It’s about realizing that you’ve ended up somewhere but it’s a port for another place to take off—are arrivals and departures the same thing?”

Justin Vernon was just a few years removed from self-releasing his now legendary debut—2007’s *For Emma, Forever Ago*, recorded in wintry solitude—when he won an actual Grammy Award for its more polished follow-up in 2012. He’d become famous enough to watch his backstory become a punchline and his likeness parodied by Justin Timberlake on *Saturday Night Live*. (Timberlake would attempt to borrow the same mystique for his 2018 album, *Man of the Woods*.) You can understand why Vernon would want to change the subject for a time. For nearly a decade, he’s obscured some part of himself, hidden behind symbols and numbers, bandannas and bandmates, vocoders and vast collages of bleep and bloop—not to mention a still astonishing list of celebrity collaborators to whom he’s been more than happy to cede the limelight, Taylor Swift chief among them. The three-song *SABLE,* EP is immediately notable because it finds Vernon running it back, returning to the sound and feel that launched his career, singing in the first person. It’s a deliberate move away from the maximalist collage of 2019’s *i, i*. “When I made this song, I was feeling a lot of guilt,” he told an Eras Tour audience of 90,000 at Wembley Stadium in 2022, before playing “S P E Y S I D E,” a song that sounds here as though it could have been lifted from the *For Emma* sessions—just him and his guitar and his hurt, his falsetto slicing through a layer of strings. “I know that I can’t make good,” he sings. “How I wish I could.” On “AWARDS SEASON,” all you hear for its first and final minutes is Vernon’s voice amid a mist of ambient synth. There is nowhere to hide. “What was pain now’s gained,” he sings. “You know what is great? Nothing stays the same.”

UK rock polymaths black midi accomplished so much in such a short time—and at such a young age—that the group’s sudden announcement of their indefinite hiatus in 2024 couldn’t help but raise questions. Geordie Greep’s solo debut *The New Sound* doesn’t so much provide answers as it does multiple pathways forward. black midi acolytes will recognize a few stylistic touches here and there that have carried over to Greep’s boundless musical map: jazz fusion breakdowns; multi-suite songwriting indebted to prog’s knotty weirdness; and Greep’s increasing penchant for all-caps storytelling, which previously reared its head on black midi’s swan-song-for-now *Hellfire* in 2022. Otherwise, *The New Sound* lives up to its title by reintroducing Greep as a musically omnivorous showman, as he leaps into the spotlight with outsized bravado and a wild-eyed sense of sonic fearlessness. Featuring an expansive cast of supporting players and session musicians—including black midi drummer Morgan Simpson—*The New Sound* is far-flung in locale and genre: Cobbled together over the course of a year from studio time in London and São Paulo, its 11 tracks are positively boundless in stylistic flourish. The easy bossa nova swing of “Terra” and the jazz-hands ascent of first single “Holy, Holy” recall Steely Dan bandleader Donald Fagen’s classic 1982 solo LP *The Nightfly*, while the two-wheeled angst of “Motorbike” isn’t far off from the discordant post-punk abstractions of the London-based Speedy Wunderground scene that black midi was often associated with. If that all sounds hard to pin down, just wait until you dig into the lyric sheet for this one, as Greep’s logorrheic maelstrom tackles the dark, impotent lasciviousness of male sexuality with explicit gusto. It’s provocative without being needlessly shocking, an impressive tightrope walk that marks *The New Sound*’s loopy idiosyncrasies as a whole.

When artists experience the kind of career-defining breakthrough that Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield enjoyed with 2020’s *Saint Cloud*, they’re typically faced with a difficult choice: lean further into the sound that landed you there, or risk disappointing your newfound audience by setting off into new territory. On *Tigers Blood*, the Kansas City-based singer-songwriter chooses the former, with a set of country-indebted indie rock that reaches the same, often dizzying heights as its predecessor. But that doesn’t mean its songs came from the same emotional source. “When I made *Saint Cloud*, I\'d just gotten sober and I was just this raw nerve—I was burgeoning with anxiety,” she tells Apple Music. “And on this record, it sounds so boring, but I really feel like I was searching for normal. I think I\'ve really settled into my thirties.” Working again with longtime producer Brad Cook (Bon Iver, Snail Mail, Hurray for the Riff Raff), Crutchfield enlisted the help of rising guitar hero MJ Lenderman, with whom she duets on the quietly romantic lead single (and future classic) “Right Back to It.” Originally written for Wynonna Judd—a recent collaborator—“365” finds Crutchfield falling into a song of forgiveness, her voice suspended in air, arching over the soft, heart-like thump of an acoustic guitar. Just as simple but no less moving: the Southern rock of “Ice Cold,” in which Crutchfield seeks equilibrium and Lenderman transcendence, via solo. In the absence of inner tumult, Crutchfield says she had to learn that the songs will still come. “I really do feel like I\'ve reached this point where I have a comfort knowing that they will show up,” she says. “When it\'s time, they\'ll show up and they\'ll show up fast. And if they\'re not showing up, then it\'s just not time yet.”

IDLES’ fifth album is a collection of love songs. For singer Joe Talbot, it couldn’t be anything else. “At the time of writing this album, I was quite lost,” he tells Apple Music. “Not musically, it was a beautiful time for music. But emotionally, my nervous system needed organizing, and I needed to sort my shit out. So I did. That came from me realizing that I needed love in my life, and that I had sometimes lost my narrative in the art, which is that love is all I’ve ever sung about.” From a band wearied by other people’s attempts to pin narrow labels like “punk” or “political” to their expansive, thoughtful music, that’s as concise a summary as you’ll get. It’s also an accurate one. The Bristol five-piece’s music has always viewed the world with an empathetic eye, processing the human effects and impulses around subjects as varied as grief, immigration, kindness, toxic masculinity, and anxiety. And on their fourth album, 2021’s *CRAWLER*, the aggression and sinew of earlier songs gave way to more space and restraint as Talbot turned inward to reckon with his experiences with addiction. For *TANGK*, that experimentation continued while the band’s initial ideas were developed with Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich in London during late 2022, before the record was completed with *CRAWLER* co-producer Kenny Beats joining the team to record in the south of France. They’ve emerged with an album where an Afrobeat rhythm played out on an obscure drum machine (“Grace”) or a gentle piano melody recorded on an iPhone (“A Gospel”) hit with as much impact as a gale-force guitar riff (“Gift Horse”). Exploring the thrills and the scars of love in multiple forms, Talbot leans ever more into singing over firebrand fury. “I’ve got a kid now, and part of my learning is to have empathy when I parent,” he says. “And with that comes delicacy. To use empathy is a delicate and graceful act. And that’s coming out in my art, because I’m also being delicate and graceful with myself, forgiving myself, and giving myself time to learn. I don’t want to lie.” Discover more with Talbot’s track-by-track guide to *TANGK*. **“IDEA 01”** “It was the first thing \[guitarist and co-producer Mark\] Bowen worked on, and Bowen, being the egotistical maniac that he is, called it ‘IDEA 01’ because he forgot that it was actually idea seven. But, bless him, he does like attention. But, yes, it was the first song that was written in Nigel’s studio. Bowen sat at the piano and started playing, and it was beautiful. ‘IDEA 01’ is different vignettes around old friends that I haven’t seen since Devon \[where Talbot grew up\], and the relationships I had with them and their families, and how crazy certain people’s families are. Bowen’s beautiful piano part reminded me of this song we wrote on the last album, ‘Kelechi.’ Kelechi was a good friend of mine who sadly passed away, and I hadn’t seen him since I waved him off to move to Manchester with his family. I just had this feeling I was never going to see him again. Maybe I’m writing that in my head now, but he was a beautiful, beautiful man. I loved him. I think maybe if we were still friends, part of me could have helped him, but that’s, again, fantasy I think.” **“Gift Horse”** “I was trying to get this disco thing going, so I gave Jon \[Beavis, drummer\] a bunch of disco beats to work on. And Dev \[bassist Adam Devonshire\] is bang into The Rapture and !!! and LCD Soundsystem, and he turned out that bassline real quick. I wrote a song around it, and it felt great. It was what my intentions of the album were: to make people dance and not think, because love is a very complex thing that doesn’t need to be thought. It can just be acted, and worked on, and danced with. I just wanted to make people move, and get that physicality of the live experience in people’s bones. I had this concept of a gift horse as a theme of a song, and it sang to me. I like that grotesque phrase, ‘Never look a gift horse in the mouth.’ It’s about my daughter, and I’m very grateful for her, and our relationship, and I wanted to write a beast of a tune around her.” **“POP POP POP”** “I read \[‘freudenfreude’\] online somewhere. It was like, words that don’t exist that should exist. Schadenfreude is such a dark thing, to enjoy other people’s misery, so the idea of someone enjoying someone else’s joy is great. Being a parent, you suddenly are entwined with someone else’s joys and lows. I love seeing her dance, and have a good time, and grow as a person, and learn, so I wanted to write a song about it.” **“Roy”** “It’s an allegorical story that sums up a lot of my behavior towards my partners over a 15-year period where I was in a cycle of absolute worship and then fear, jealousy and assholery. I wanted to dedicate it to my girlfriend, who I call Roy. She’s not called Roy. I wanted it to be about the idea of a man who is in love and then his fears take over, and he starts acting like a prick to push that person away. Then he wakes up in the morning with a horrible hangover, realizing what he’s done, and he apologizes. He is then forgiven in the chorus, and rejoicing ensues.” **“A Gospel”** “It’s a reflection on breakups, which I think are a learning curve. I think all my exes deserve a medal, and they’ve taught me a lot. It’s really a tender moment of a dream I used to have, then \[it\] dances between different tiny memories, tiny vignettes of what happened before, and me just giving a nod to those moments and saying goodbye, which is beautiful. No heartbreak, really. I’ve been through the heartbreak now. It’s just me smiling and being like, ‘Yeah, you were right. Thank you very much.’” **“Dancer” (with LCD Soundsystem)** “The best form of dance is to express yourself freely within a group who are also expressing themselves freely, the true embodiment of communion. The last time I had this sense of euphoria from that was an Oh Sees gig at the \[Sala\] Apolo in Barcelona. I closed my eyes and let the mosh push me from one side of the room to the other and back. I didn’t open my eyes once, I just smiled and was carried by this organism of beautiful rage. Dancing’s a really big part of my personality. I love it. My mum always danced. Even in her most ill days \[Talbot’s mother passed away during the recording of 2017 debut *Brutalism*\], she would always get up and dance, and enjoy herself. I dance with my daughter every day that I have her. I think it’s magic and important.” **“Grace”** “It all came out of nowhere. I had this beat in mind for a while—I was thinking of an aggro Afrobeat kind of track. But it didn’t come out like that. It came out like what happens when Nigel Godrich gets his hands on your Afrobeat stuff. I asked Nigel to make the beat, and he chose the LinnDrum \[’80s drum machine\]. The LinnDrum changes the sound of a beat, the tone of a drum, the cadence of a beat, it changed the beat completely. It’s a very, very delicate thing, a beat. It sounded like a different song to me. It sounded amazing. And that’s where the bassline came from. And then that’s where the vocals came from. It felt a bit uneasy for a long time because it came out of nowhere. Me and Bowen were like, ‘Is this right? Is this complete?’ I think it just has to feel like you, like it is part of you and what you mean at the moment, that’s all. An album’s an episode of where you’re at in the world in that point in time.” **“Hall & Oates”** “I wanted to write a glam-rock pounder about falling in love with your boys. My ex and I used to joke about this thing where you make love to someone for the first time, and then the next day, you’re walking on air, and it feels like Hall & Oates is playing. The birds are singing, you’re bouncing around and everything’s great. I wanted to use that analogy for when you make friends with someone for the first time, and they make you feel good, lighter, stronger, excited to see them again. And that’s what happened in lockdown: I made friends with \[Bristol-based singer-songwriter\] Willie J Healey and my mate Ben, and we went on bike rides whenever we could, getting out and feeling good post-lockdown. It gave me a sense of purpose again. It felt like I was falling in love.” **“Jungle”** “I was trying to write a jungle tune for ages. The guitar line was a jungle bassline that I had but it just never fit what we were writing. And then Bowen started playing the chords on the guitar and it transformed it into something completely different. It completely revitalized what I’d been dragging through the mud for five years. Bowen made it IDLES, made it real, made it believable, made it beautiful. And then it reminded me of getting nicked, so I wrote a song about different times that I’ve been in trouble.” **“Gratitude”** “This was a real struggle. Bowen was really obsessed about doing interesting counts with the beats. I just wanted to make people dance and create infectious beats. We were coming from very different angles, but we loved this song that Bowen had made. I was like, ‘I get it, Bowen. This is insane. I love it, but I can’t get it.’ We hung on to it for ages, and then Nigel really helped us out, he created spaces and bits here and there by turning things down and moving everything slightly. Then Kenny helped me out, and got rid of the stupid counts, I think, and helped me write it on a 4/4 beat. And then they changed it back. I just come in in weird places. Everyone chipped in, because everyone believed in the song.” **“Monolith”** “I was fascinated by films where four or five notes are repeated throughout and create this monolithic motif. There’s a sense of continuity but the mood changes depending on certain things like tone and instruments. I wanted to do that over a song, and we got our friend Colin \[Webster\] from \[London noise rock unit\] Sex Swing to do the sax, we did it on different instruments that Nigel had. Nigel went away and basically put it all through the hollow-body bass. It reminded me of a documentary from a series called *The Blues* that Martin Scorsese curated. *The Soul of a Man* \[directed by Wim Wenders\] is about a song \[Blind Willie Johnson’s ‘Dark Was the Night’\] getting sent into space. If any aliens get this capsule, they’ll hear this song being played from a blues artist. It created a really beautiful and deep picture in my mind. It felt like this monolith drifting in the ether. I started singing a blues riff behind it, a Skip James kind of thing. I think it’s a beautiful way to finish the album—us drifting in the ether.”

For Sam Herring, the lead singer of Baltimore’s indie mainstays Future Islands, the band’s seventh album *People Who Aren’t There Anymore* doesn’t fall neatly into the pre- or post-pandemic boxes. “The first half of the album was written within the pandemic,” he told Apple Music’s Hanuman Welch. “The second half was written after we did our first tour back. So this really elongated space with plenty of time to forget what we\'re going through, but still being in it. I think, collectively, the world is finally coming to terms with what happened between 2020 and 2022, and the sense of how much the world has changed.” Grappling with those profound changes partially made it into the band’s previous album, 2020’s *As Long As You Are*, but they come into sharper focus here. Herring mines the end of romantic relationships and the loss of friendships, and even parts ways with past iterations of himself that no longer serve a purpose, all while trying to balance the heft of grief with hard-won optimism. First single “The Tower” serves as a lynchpin between the two albums, bridging that era of what came before and what lies ahead. In true Future Islands fashion, the track fits into a familiar mythology for the band. “Within the Future Islands canon, it works perfectly, because so many songs of ours are at the sea, standing at the sea, having those thoughts,” Herring said. “I was separated from my partner, who was in Sweden, I was in the States, couldn\'t get back there, and I was just constantly fighting myself over that part of you that wants to give up. So it is a reflection of the past, and how we continue to still have those existential breakdowns, and these pivotal moments of our lives at the sea staring into the great gulf and hoping that someone\'s there.”

Chat Pile’s sludgy mix of nu metal and ’90s underground rock isn’t anything new, but it’s hard to imagine it existing so comfortably at any other time. Part of it’s their willingness to traverse what in another era would’ve been uncrossable cultural lines: Pledging your allegiance to the funny, post-punk surrealism of a band like Pere Ubu (“Camcorder”) at the same time as the single-entendre misery of Korn (“Funny Man”), for example. If metal is, on some level, guitar-country, Chat Pile is firmly set in its rhythm section, which is as rumbling and inescapable as the power lines and strip-mined hills of the Middle America outside their window, leaving the guitars primarily to peel paint. Where guys this misanthropic might’ve been considered social liabilities in their past (or at least dangers to their parents and church youth group), now they sound content to stay in their rooms and pig out on memes about the world they’ve always known was in ruin. “Tape” is the peak here not because it’s the hardest but because it’s the funkiest, whatever funk means to bands like this. Forget alienation—they’re laughing.

Everything Everything lead vocalist Jonathan Higgs thinks that the thread running all the way through the Manchester quartet’s catalog is the urge to encapsulate the effect on humanity of living in this time. “That’s really what all our albums are about,” Higgs tells Apple Music. “It’s a varying degree of looking inward and outward, observing how it feels to be alive in this place in this time. This one is very much looking outward for the most part.” “This one” is *Mountainhead*, Everything Everything’s seventh record and another astounding leap forward from one of the UK’s most inventive bands. It mixes pulsing synths and gleaming guitar licks, euphoric electro grooves and art-rock dynamism—music where the strange and the soothing seamlessly overlap. The album pairs a dystopian concept about a society which has built a huge mountain and its people live in the shadowed pit it has created at the bottom (a “Mountainhead” is someone who believes the mountain must continue to grow taller no matter the cost) with some of their most rhapsodic pop hooks yet. It’s all been created with the confidence that there is an audience for this sound. “It always feels like we’ve got a lot of goodwill from the last thing we did, so a lot of people are waiting for the next thing we do,” says Higgs. “I think people really liked the last record \[2022’s *Raw Data Feel*\] and this one’s better.” This is the sound of Everything Everything on the crest of a wave, confidently hitting new peaks seven albums into their career. Allow Higgs to guide you on a journey to the top of *Mountainhead*, track by track. **“Wild Guess”** “This was a little demo we made on tour with Foals back in 2017 or something. I put a vocal on it but it was all sung an octave up from what you hear, which was ridiculous. We happened to rediscover it and were like, ‘Remember how ridiculous this song was? Maybe it’s fine to do it now.’ There was just something about the confidence of that big fat solo beginning the record, no vocal for ages and it’s not very nicely played. It’s the same recording Alex \[Robertshaw, guitarist and keyboardist\] did backstage into his laptop all those years ago. It just felt like this was a good way to start a record, basically, like, ‘Fuck you. Here’s your big fat solo that sounds awful and you’re going to have to wait for your vocal.’” **“The End of the Contender”** “This is vaguely about Ronnie Pickering \[ex-boxer who went viral in 2015 for a road rage incident\] and people of his ilk, but it’s also about the creep of capitalism and how it’s seeping into everything. I’ve tried to put a reference to money or electricity on every song, so he talks a lot about it in that song—whoever ‘he’ is. Obviously, ‘It’s all about the Benjamins’ is quite a cheeky thing to sing in the chorus, but I don’t think I’m going to get sued for it.” **“Cold Reactor”** “This is setting out the stall of the record. It really hinges on the human element of it and the desperation of it. The ‘I haven’t left the house’ line, somebody being quite isolated and communicating through screens and emojis, felt very relatable. There’s a sad longing for connection that you can’t quite get to that runs through it and because it has this rushing feeling of everything coming to a point, it really emphasizes the desperation of it. It was a question of getting the right sort of heartbreaking-versus-hopeful tone and trying to get across a lot of exposition in the verses in quite a short time. It feels like a film script in terms of its simplicity.” **“Buddy, Come Over”** “This is about cancel culture a little bit, it’s got this dark-side- and underworld-type feeling to it. There’s a line, ‘Make me a website so I can completely ruin my life’ and that made the guys laugh quite a lot. Sometimes when that happens, we’re just like, ‘Yeah, let’s go down this path.’ It fell together quite easily, it was more like a really fun one to play live, like, ‘What can we play that feels good in the moment rather than trying to get all these tracks on the go.’” **“R U Happy?”** “This is about the effect of isolation, living in cities, living now and asking the question, ‘Are you happy? Does all this stuff make you happy?’ in the simplest way I could, which is to literally say, ‘Are you happy?’ over and over again. There’s definitely a through line of being an animal and the ‘dance in a skeleton way’ line was me saying if there’s a skeleton there, you’re dead but if there’s a skeleton there, you’re alive as well, talking about being alive and trying not to be sad all the time.” **“The Mad Stone”** “This is more about the religious element to the idea \[of the album\]. It’s more like a spiritual song in its presentation and its content. It sounds like an argument between two or three people who really believe in this idea of the mountain and people who are very doubtful about it. The thing on top of the mountain \[in the chorus\] is this big mirror that reflects you over and over again into infinity—that’s the more magical element of what might be at the top of the mountain. I was trying to come up with a metaphor for an idea of something that would be an actual goal that someone might want to get to, but it’s also really obviously selfish and self-aggrandizing. It took an afternoon of singing it to get the chorus right, getting it so it just didn’t sound silly—being understood and not sound like I’m mumbling.” **“TV Dog”** “This was a demo that Alex had made that he called ‘Coney Island’ and we all thought it sounded like a New York string quartet. Coupled with that title, it opened up a few little avenues on the record, some strings that appear on other songs. I had about twice as many lyrics and we were like, ‘Is this song going to develop into a bigger thing? Are we going to bring the drums in?’ and then we were like, ‘The most poignant thing you can do is just hear it for a minute and a half, a couple of good lines and then it’s gone.’ Alex went down to a cathedral and recorded loads of ambience in there and put that all over the track in the background, so you get this sense of it being in a huge space.” **“Canary”** “If some of the other songs feel like you’re on the mountain, this one’s very much in the pit, it’s being in the dark. It’s the canary in a coal mine, a warning song that just so happens to fit very well with the larger concept. It’s the darkest underbelly of the album and the imagery is the most fucked up. It feels like a warning about something bad that’s coming, which tends to be where I often find myself as a character in my songs—as a warning character. This was a big production number for Alex, I think he wanted it to be a bit Björk or something.” **“Don’t Ask Me to Beg”** “I started with layering up vocals, I was trying to make a kind of choir thing. I was listening to Massive Attack, even though they don’t really use choirs. We tried different rhythmic schemes for ages to try and get it sounding less white-boy funk and cool. It took us ages working on the drums, actually, and then trying to rerecord all of those cluster vocals. I think we just gave up in the end and used the demo ones, so no one knows how to sing those parts. If we have to do it live, we’re going to struggle!” **“Enter the Mirror”** “This is about a friend of mine who was struggling and I wasn’t sure if he was going to make it through. It’s a song about singing to him as if he was gone and remembering our childhood. I haven’t really worked out what it means yet. I think I wanted to say that we’re both the same deep down, even though there’s two of us. But there’s also the mirror on top of the mountain, which might be like you find yourself if you go into it. I don’t know, I’m still a bit too close to that song to even fully say.” **“Your Money, My Summer”** “This was another demo from around the same time as ‘Wild Guess,’ something that we thought was just a bit too silly to do something with back then and now, I guess we didn’t. In the past, we would have had a litany of reasons why we wouldn’t do that and now it was like, ‘This is good.’ It’s definitely the most relaxed track of ours you’ll ever find. You won’t find us playing like that anywhere else, a sort of Chili Peppers rhythm section. We would usually run a mile from that stuff but we were just like, ‘Why are we running?’ It’s an example of us being relaxed with each other.” **“Dagger’s Edge”** “This was an older demo. It always had that feeling of being a song of two halves. I think I wrote the second half and Alex wrote the first. We’d binned it because we thought it was too silly. It does sound pretty lighthearted in the first bit, but then the tone changes. I’m taking the piss out of somebody and saying a lot of ridiculous things and then suddenly just turn into this really desperate old wise man on a mountain. No other band could do that and I really believe that that’s very much our thing—a song that sounds like Dr. Dre and I’m taking the piss out of a guy, calling him those ridiculous names, and then suddenly, a harpsichord comes in and it’s turned into a really existential thing about everyone turning into bacon.” **“City Song”** “This is another one that’s got that New York strings thing going on. I wrote the demo and it was much more hip-hoppy. It’s got a hip-hop speed, but, stylistically, that’s been shed. I was trying to do like a David Byrne-style lyric, the sadness of mundanity or trying to make mundane things special. I think there was also some elements of the Mark Fisher book *Capitalist Realism*, where he was talking about how impersonal it can be to work for a big company where no one really knows each other. I wanted to get across that feeling of isolation, but also no one really knowing who you are and no one knowing each other, living under the lights of the city and it all being very anonymous.” **“The Witness”** “I’ve barely listened back to this because it makes me quite emotional. It was about witnessing somebody go through a weird transition, thinking that it might be a kind of religious experience. It was written on guitars but Alex swapped out the guitars for synths because it sounded like a Radiohead-type song, two guitars picking and a sad guy with a falsetto. It was just like, ‘People would like it but this is really music from 25 years ago that we could do standing on our heads.’ It’s what we were trained to do, we’re good at it, but it wasn’t pushing us in any direction. So we swapped out the guitars for synths and we made a few other weird changes.”

A band doesn’t reach the 26-album mark without its members feeling incredibly comfortable with each other. So it makes sense that Melbourne psych ensemble King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard set aside their usual album-corralling concepts this time to just capture six mates playing together in a room. More than that, leader Stu Mackenzie encouraged a pass-the-mic approach that sees every band member sing, including the vocal debut of drummer Michael Cavanagh on “Le Risque.” Fun little improvisations make the round-robin vibe feel all the more spontaneous—check out the scat section at the end of “Rats in the Sky”—as does each song launching into the next with no space in between. Musically, this material is more jaunty than heavy: Even when “Hog Calling Contest” shows off the band’s signature hairpin shifts, it’s in the service of a rustic romp. Equally rootsy is opener “Mirage City,” whose communal harmonies and twang evoke The Byrds and The Flying Burrito Brothers alike. Yet, darker themes lurk behind the band’s sunny exterior, as that first track finds solidarity in escapism via lyrics about parents fighting at home and being desperate to “leave this nightmare behind.” The closing “Daily Blues” similarly offsets its harmonica-licked roadhouse flair with the ominous refrain “Gettin’ fucked up daily.” Just because King Gizz is doubling down on camaraderie doesn’t mean Mackenzie and co can’t air their troubles for each other. In fact, isn’t that the essence of friendship?

In a short time, Claire Cottrill has become one of pop music’s most fascinating chameleons. Even as her songwriting and soft vocals often possess her singular touch, the prodigious 25-year-old has exhibited a specific creative restlessness in her sonic approach. After pivoting from the lo-fi bedroom pop of her early singles to the sounds of lush, rustic 2000s indie rock on 2019’s star-making *Immunity* and making a hard pivot towards monastic folk on 2021’s *Sling*, the baroque, ’70s soul-inflected chamber-pop that makes up her third album, *Charm*, feels like yet another revelation in an increasingly essential catalog. *Charm* is Cottrill’s third consecutive turn in the studio with a producer of distinctive aesthetic; while *Immunity*’s flashes of color were provided by Rostam Batmanglij and Jack Antonoff worked the boards on *Sling*, these 11 songs possess the undeniable warmth of studio impresario and Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings founding member Leon Michels. Along with several Daptone compatriots and NYC jazz auteur Marco Benevento, Michels provides the perfect support to Cotrill’s wistful, gorgeously tumbling songcraft; woodwinds flutter across the squishy synth pads of “Slow Dance,” while “Echo” possesses an electro-acoustic hum not unlike legendary UK duo Broadcast and the simmering soul of “Juna” spirals out into miniature psychedelic curlicues. At the center of it all is Cottrill’s unbelievably intimate vocal touch, which perfectly captures and complements *Charm*’s lyrical theme of wanting desire while staring uncertainty straight in the eye.

It was instant bromance when Xavier de Rosnay and Gaspard Augé met at a house party in early-2000s Paris: two young French graphic designers who loved good old American rock ’n’ roll. What they lacked in technical expertise, they made up for in taste—and not exactly the “good taste” of the French artists du jour. “When we started, French house music was really about precision, and we arrived and had no idea what we were doing,” de Rosnay tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. To the world of groovy French filter house, the duo known as Justice brought AC/DC energy, punishing distortion, and a giant neon cross that towered over Marshall speaker stacks at their famously wild live shows. Three studio albums, three live albums, and two Grammys later, the Justice boys have traded their skintight leather jackets for sharply tailored suits, but though the songs on their fourth album, *Hyperdrama*, are generally less punishing than early eardrum-destroyers like “Waters of Nazareth” or “Stress,” the duo have yet to lose their edge. Eight years after their last studio release, 2016’s unprecedentedly tender *Woman*, Augé and de Rosnay return to the tensions that animated their 2007 debut. “\[Contrast\] has been the motor of what we do since the beginning, because there is some kind of radicality and violence that we love in electronic music, and we are also blue-eyed soul and yacht rock fans.” On *Hyperdrama*, saccharine disco and blistering electronics don’t just coexist—they duke it out, often within the same track, as on “One Night/All Night,” whose stomping beat tugs against plaintive vocals from Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker. “Generator” nods to the brutalism of their early hits, the sax-forward “Moonlight Rendez-vous” evokes the camp of George Michael’s “Careless Whisper,” and “Dear Alan” (named for French electronic legend Alan Braxe) is the kind of blissful filter house they once stood out from like two leather-clad sore thumbs. The duo’s songwriting has aged like fine French wine, but as always, they lead with their gut. “Really often we find that decisions in production and engineering are on the side of style and sensation more than, ‘Does it sound perfect by the standards of hi-fi?’” Augé explains. “If the good thing is that thing that was ripped 10 times and is so downgraded that it has this sort of bitcrush and glow to it, then we should go for that.”

The grace of Khruangbin’s dusty, evocative groove music is that it feels both totally effortless and impeccably put together. Arriving after the group spent a few years exploring collaboration (including 2022’s *Ali* with the Malian guitarist Vieux Farka Touré and the R&B-centric *Texas Sun* and *Texas Moon* EPs with singer Leon Bridges), *A La Sala* goes back to the bass/guitar/drum-and-occasional-distant-vocals setup they managed to get so much mileage out of in the first place. The collection conjures the psychedelia of spaghetti western soundtracks (“Ada Jean”), the pop of West African funk (“Pon Pón”), and the whispered intimacy of indie folk (“May Ninth“) in strokes so minimal it almost breezes by. Of course, breezing is what this band does by design, and in their range, they give you an album as varied as a mixtape and as gently communicative as a great lamp—you know, the kind of thing that can change the whole mood just by turning it on.

“We weren’t really expecting it at such a rate,” The Last Dinner Party’s guitarist and vocalist Lizzie Mayland tells Apple Music of the band’s rise, the story of which is well known by now. After forming in London in 2021, the five-piece’s effervescent live shows garnered an if-you-know-you-know kind of buzz, which went into overdrive when they released their stomping, euphoric debut single “Nothing Matters” in April 2023. All of which might have put a remarkable amount of pressure on them while making their debut record (not least given the band ended 2024 by winning the BRITs Rising Star Award then topped the BBC’s new-talent poll, Sound of 2024, in January). But The Last Dinner Party had written, recorded and finished *Prelude to Ecstasy* three months before anyone had even heard “Nothing Matters.” It meant, says lead singer Abigail Morris, that they “just had a really nice time” making it. “It is a painful record in some ways and it explores dark themes,” she adds, “but making it was just really fun, rewarding, and wholesome.” Produced by James Ford (Arctic Monkeys, Florence + the Machine, Jessie Ware), who Morris calls “the dream producer,” *Prelude to Ecstasy* is rooted in those hype-inducing live shows, its tracklist a reflection of the band’s frequent set list and its songs shaped and grown by playing them on stage. “We wanted to capture the live feels in the songs,” notes Morris. “That’s the whole point.” Featuring towering vocals, thrilling guitar solos, orchestral instrumentation, and a daring, do-it-all spirit, the album sounds like five band members having an intense amount of fun as they explore an intense set of emotions and experiences with unbridled expression and feeling. These songs—which expand and then shrink and then soar—navigate sexuality (“Sinner,” “My Lady of Mercy”), what it must be like to move through the world as a man (“Caesar on a TV Screen,” the standout, celestial “Beautiful Boy”), and craving the gaze of an audience (“Mirror”), as well as loss channeled into art, withering love, and the mother-daughter relationship. And every single one of them feels like a release. “It’s a cathartic, communal kind of freedom,” says Morris. “‘Cathartic’ is definitely the main word that we throw about when we talk about playing live and playing an album.” Read on as Morris and Mayland walk us through their band’s exquisite debut, one song at a time. **“Prelude to Ecstacy”** Abigail Morris: “I was thinking about it like an overture in a musical. Aurora \[Nishevci, keys player and vocalist\] composed it—she’s a fantastic composer, and it has themes from all the songs on the record. I don’t believe in shuffle except for playlists and I always liked the idea of \[an album\] having a start, middle, and end, and there is in this record. It sets the scene.” **“Burn Alive”** AM: “This was the first song that existed in the band—we’ve been opening the set with it the entire time. Lyrically, it always felt like a mission statement. I wrote it just after my father passed away, and it was the idea of, ‘Let me make my grief a commodity’—this kind of slightly sarcastic ‘I’m going to put my heart on the line and all my pain and everything for a buck.’ The idea of being ecstatic by being burned alive—by your pain and by your art and by your inspiration—in a kind of holy-fire way. What we’re here to do is be fully alive and committed to exorcising any demons, pain or joy.” **“Caesar on a TV Screen”** AM: “I wrote the beginning of this song over lockdown. I’d stayed over with my boyfriend at the time and then, to go back home, he lent me a suit. When I met him, I didn’t just find him attractive, I wanted to *be* him—he was also a singer in another band and he had this amazing confidence and charisma in a specifically masculine way. Getting to have his suit, I was like, ‘Now I am a man in a band.’ It’s this very specific sensuality and power you feel when you’re dressing as a man. I sat at the piano and had this character in my head—a Mick Jagger or a Caligula. I thought it would be fun to write a song from the perspective of feeling like a king, but you are only like that because you’re so vulnerable and so desperate to be loved and quite weak and afraid and childlike.” Lizzie Mayland: “There was an ending on the original version that faded away into this lone guitar, which was really beautiful, but we got used to playing it live with it coming back up again. So we put that back in. The song is very live, the way we recorded it.” **“The Feminine Urge”** AM: “The beginning of this song was based on an unreleased Lana Del Rey song called ‘Driving in Cars With Boys’—it slaps. I wanted to write about my mother and the mother wound. It’s about the relationship between mothers and daughters and how those go back over generations, and the shared traumas that come down. I think you get to a certain age as a woman where your mother suddenly becomes another woman, rather than being your mum. You turn 23 and you’re having lunch and it’s like, ‘Oh shit, we’re just two women who are living life together,’ and it’s very beautiful and very sweet and also very confronting. It’s the sudden realization of the mortality and fallibility of your mother that you don’t get when you’re a child. It’s also wondering, ‘If I have a daughter, what kind of mother would I be? Is it ethical to bring a child into a world like this? And what wound would I maybe pass on to her or not?’” **“On Your Side”** LM: “We put this and ‘Beautiful Boy’—the two slow ones—together. Again, that comes from playing live. Taking a slow moment in the set—people are already primed to pay attention rather than dancing.” AM: “The song is about a relationship breaking down and it’s nice to have that represented musically. It’s a very traditional structure, song-verse-chorus, and it’s not challenging or weird. It’s nice that the ending feels like this very beautiful decay. It’s sort of rotting, but it sounds very beautiful, but it is this death and gasping. I really like how that illustrates what the song’s about.” **“Beautiful Boy”** AM: “I come back to this as one that I’m most proud of. I wanted to say something really specific with the lyrics. It’s about a friend of mine, who’s very pretty. He’s a very beautiful boy. He went hitchhiking through Spain on his own and lost his phone and was just relying on the kindness of strangers, going on this beautiful Hemingway-esque trip. I remember being so jealous of him because I was like, ‘Well, I could never do that—as a woman I’d probably get murdered or something horrible.’ He made me think about the very specific doors that open when you are a beautiful man. You have certain privileges that women don’t get. And if you’re a beautiful woman, you have certain privileges that other people don’t get. I don’t resent him—he’s a very dear friend. Also, I think it’s important and interesting to write, as a woman, about your male relationships that aren’t romantic or sexual.” LM: “The flute was a turning point in this track. It’s such a lonely instrument, so vulnerable and so expressive. To me, this song is kind of a daydream. Like, ‘I wish life was like that, but it’s not.’ It feels like there’s a deeper sense of acceptance. It’s sweetly sad.” **“Gjuha”** AM: “We wanted to do an aria as an interlude. At first, we just started writing this thing on piano and guitar and Aurora had a saxophone. At some point, Aurora said it reminded her of an Albanian folk song. We’d been talking about her singing a song in Albanian for the album. She went away and came back with this beautiful, heart-wrenching piece. It’s about her feeling this pain and guilt of coming from a country, and a family who speak Albanian and are from Kosovo, but being raised in London and not speaking that language. She speaks about it so well.” **“Sinner”** LM: “It’s such a fun live moment because it’s kind of a turning point in the set: ‘OK, it’s party time.’ I was quite freaked out about the idea of being like, ‘This is a song about being queer.’ And I thought, ‘Are people going to get that?’ Because it’s not the most metaphorical or difficult lyrics, but it’s also not just like, ‘I like all gendered people.’ But people get it, which has been quite reassuring. It’s about belonging and about finding a safe space in yourself and your own sense of self. And marrying an older version of yourself with a current version of yourself. Playing it live and people singing it back is such a comforting feeling. I know Emily \[Roberts, lead guitarist, who also plays mandolin and flute\] was very inspired by St. Vincent and also LCD Soundsystem.” **“My Lady of Mercy”** AM: “For me, it’s the most overtly sexy song—the most obviously-about-sex song and about sexuality. I feel like it’s a nice companion to ‘Sinner’ because I think they’re about similar things—about queerness in tension with religion and with family and with guilt. I went to Catholic school, which is very informative for a young woman. I’m not a practicing Catholic now, but the imagery is always so pertinent and meaningful to me. I just thought it was really interesting to use religious imagery to talk about liking women and feeling free in your sexuality and reclaiming the guilt. I feel like Nine Inch Nails was a really big inspiration musically. This is testament to how much we trust James \[Ford\] and feel comfortable with him. We did loads of takes of me just moaning into the mic through a distortion. I could sit there and make fake orgasm sounds next to him.” LM: “I remember you saying you wanted to write a song for people to mosh to. Especially the breakdown that was always meant to be played live to a load of people throwing themselves around. It definitely had to be that big.” **“Portrait of a Dead Girl”** AM: “This song took a long time—it went through a lot of different phases. It was one we really evolved with as a band. The ending was inspired by Florence + the Machine’s ‘Dream Girl Evil.’ And Bowie’s a really big influence in general on us, but I think especially on this one. It feels very ’70s and like the Ziggy Stardust album. The portrait was actually a picture I found on Pinterest, as many songs start. It was an older portrait of a woman in a red dress sitting on a bed and then next to her is a massive wolf. At first, I thought that was the original painting, but then I looked at it again and the wolf has been put in. But I really loved that idea of comparing \[it to\] a relationship, a toxic one—feeling like you have this big wolf who’s dangerous but it’s going to protect you, and feeling safe. But you can’t be friends with a wolf. It’s going to turn around and bite you the second it gets a chance.” **”Nothing Matters”** AM: “This wasn’t going to be the first single—we always said it would be ‘Burn Alive.’ We had no idea that it was going to do what it did. We were like, ‘OK, let’s introduce ourselves,’ and then where it went is kind of beyond comprehension.” LM: “I was really freaked out—I spent the first couple of days just in my bed—but also so grateful for all the joy it’s been received with. When we played our first show after it came out, I literally had the phrase, ‘This is the best feeling in the world.’ I’ll never forget that.” AM: “It was originally just a piano-and-voice song that I wrote in my room, and then it evolved as everyone else added their parts. Songs evolve by us playing them on stage and working things out. That’s definitely what happened with this song—especially Emily’s guitar solo. It’s a very honest love song that we wanted to tell cinematically and unbridled, that expression of love without embarrassment or shame or fear, told through a lens of a very visual language—which is the most honest way that I could have written.” **“Mirror”** AM: “Alongside ‘Beautiful Boy,’ this is one of the most precious ones to me. When I first moved to London before the band, I was just playing on my own, dragging my piano around to shitty venues and begging people to listen. I wrote it when I was 17 or 18, and it’s the only one I’ve kept from that time. It’s changed meanings so many times. At first, one of them was an imagined relationship, I hadn’t really been in relationships until then and it was the idea of codependency and the feeling of not existing without this relationship. And losing your identity and having it defined by relationship in a sort of unhealthy way. Then—and I’ve never talked about this—but the ‘she’ in the verses I’m referring to is actually an old friend of mine. After my father died, she became obsessed with me and with him, and she’d do very strange, scary things like go to his grave and call me. Very frightening and stalker-y. I wrote the song being like, ‘I’m dealing with the dissolution of this friendship and this kind of horrible psychosis that she seems to be going through.’ Now this song has become similar to ‘Burn Alive.’ It’s my relationship with an audience and the feeling of always being a performer and needing someone looking at you, needing a crowd, needing someone to hear you. I will never forget the day that Emily first did that guitar solo. Then Aurora’s orchestral bit was so important to have on that record. We wanted it to have light motifs from the album. That ending always makes me really emotional. I think it’s a really touching bit of music and it feels so right for the end of this album. It feels cathartic.”

On the first Foster the People album in seven years, the band led by Mark Foster aims to channel the 1970s to help energize his band’s direction, and the result is an album that pays tribute to a number of styles but is indebted to none. Opener “See You in the Afterlife” is a disco thriller that pulls inspiration from Prince and Chic alike. “Let Go” begins with warm keyboard chords before a shuffling drum groove and guitar melodies that sound like a long lost Parliament outtake enter the fray. The band’s pop instincts are never far away, though, like on “Sometimes I Wanna Be Bad,” which shuffles along thanks to a dancing bassline and a horn part that ushers in a vocal melody that remains intoxicating, despite Foster’s morose lyrics. Even when Foster is at his lowest, the melodies the band conjures up lift the music to joyous heights. The sun is still shining, even when Foster sings: “Sometimes I wanna be sad and let the loneliness come and be my friend.”

Sam Shepherd’s not-quite-techno is the 21st-century equivalent of good progressive rock or jazz fusion: sophisticated, intelligent music whose outward sense of exploration mirrors an almost psychedelic journey within. Inspired by his teenage epiphanies with techno in Manchester in the late ’90s and early 2000s, *Cascade* is easily his most immediate album: “club bangers” (“Key103”), acid bass (“Afflecks Palace”), even a little Giorgio Moroder-style Eurodisco for good historical measure (“Birth4000”). The beats are nakedly 4/4 and the surrounding ambience the kind of moody, infinitely cascading synth tapestries you might find on a psytrance mix, rendered with a grace that makes them feel paradoxically subtle. Having done complicated, Shepherd makes it simple.

More than 20 years into his career, Dan Snaith continues to shape-shift as an artist. His sixth proper album as Caribou finds the 46-year-old electronic pop polymath diving headlong into big-room dance sounds, more so than ever before: French-touch-indebted synths, city-flattening wub-wub basslines, and the type of clipped-vocal UK garage melodies that pop artists like PinkPantheress have favored as of late. Snaith is taking clear inspiration from his acclaimed full-length under his dance-floor-focused Daphni moniker, 2022’s *Cherry*, as well as the recent stadium-pleasing gestures from left-of-center contemporaries Jamie xx and Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden. The result is the sound of an artist newly invigorated and truly having fun with the music they’re making. *Honey* isn’t the first time that Snaith has turned his attention towards body-moving music. 2010’s *Swim* fused techno’s intensity with his career-long penchant for all things psychedelic and heady, while *Our Love* from 2014 found Snaith rubbing elbows with the melodic bass music explosion that marked much of early-2010s electronic music, all the while applying his intimate and resolutely human songwriting point of view. If those albums felt like a combination of his established tendencies with dance music, then *Honey* feels like a complete breakthrough into pure pop territory. The warm synth waves of “Come Find Me” sound lovingly ripped from Daft Punk’s astral playbook, while Snaith’s soft-focus vocals on “Over Now” are centered in the midst of a spangly disco beat that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Dua Lipa record. Of course, this is a Caribou record, so he has plenty of dazzling and trippy tricks up his sleeve regardless; bear witness to the perpetually ascendant “Dear Life,” which chops up vocal samples in a flurry of glistening synth trickles, or the endless melodic ziggurats of “Climbing,” which recall Nordic space-disco greats like Todd Terje and Hans-Peter Lindstrøm. Every time Snaith seems like he might be touching terra firma, he seemingly blasts off thousands of miles into the stratosphere instead—a dazzling bait-and-switch that makes *Honey* endlessly replayable, as well as one of his most pure and potent works to date.

The dream of the mid-2000s is alive in New York City, where Harrison Patrick Smith (better known as The Dare) has become the figurehead for a revivalist movement of a certain Myspace-era jouissance. The DJ, producer, and one-man electroclash band blew up in 2022 with “Girls,” a raunchy throwback to DFA Records’ heyday in feverish celebration of the ladies of the demimonde: “I like the girls that do drugs/Girls with cigarettes in the back of the club.” His first full-length as The Dare refracts the touchstones of the indie-sleaze era: Blog Haus’ sawtooth synths, LCD Soundsystem’s sardonic punk funk, Peaches’ unrepentant horniness, Benny Benassi’s electro scuzz. “I’m in the club while you’re online!” Smith crows on “Good Time,” a Lower East Side jock-jam that doesn’t skimp on cowbell; “Open Up” and “You’re Invited” further extol the healing powers of touching grass. Glimmers of “Guess,” the Dare-produced Charli xcx bonus track, echo through the charmingly louche “Perfume.” Now, throw on your best vintage American Apparel and don’t come home ’til sunrise.

There was a point early in the creation of the swaggering second record by Yard Act when the Leeds quartet realized they were holding themselves back and needed to let go. “We were putting some drones and synths on the track ‘Fizzy Fish,’ which was the first one we wrote for the record, and someone raised the point that we weren’t going to be able to do it live,” vocalist James Smith tells Apple Music. “But we quickly agreed we’d worry about that later. Once we cut our losses with the idea of how we could do it, there was no real discussion on the areas the album went to.” That sense of daring is at the heart of *Where’s My Utopia?*. The four-piece has emerged with a kaleidoscopic pop record that dramatically builds upon the playful post-punk of their 2022 debut *The Overload*, its expansive sound taking in Gorillaz-meets-Ian Dury future funk, art-rock wigouts, orchestral epics, careening disco punk, and explosive indie sing-alongs. *The Overload* earned them a Mercury nomination and the chance to rerecord 2022 single “100% Endurance” with star fan Elton John, and its follow-up finds Smith searching for meaning in the wake of all his dreams coming true. “The record is about me realizing that the thing I’d wanted since being a teenager wasn’t going to magically solve all the problems that I live with,” Smith explains, “and the idea that everyone just has problems regardless of what position they’re in. I’m starting to wonder now if we just create them for ourselves because it shouldn’t be this hard.” It’s a narrative arc delivered with Smith’s trademark humor but always laced with poignancy, their anthemic hooks even sharper than those that fired their debut to success. *Where’s My Utopia?* is a bold, brilliant second album from one of the decade’s most imaginative bands. Smith guides us through it, track by track. **“An Illusion”** “This song definitely sets the score for ‘This isn’t a minimalist guitar post-punk album this time.’ The chorus lyric really sets up the whole premise of the situation I ended up in—that I’m in love with an illusion—and the idea that being in a successful band would solve my problems. Then, whilst my head was so buried in this world that I couldn’t get out of because of how much energy and time it was sucking out of me, all my other principles fell by the wayside. This song’s probably harder on myself than most are. The verses are about me being pissed, which I was for 18 months, and basically being just a bit useless, which I’ve got out of now. I stopped drinking off the back of the touring, I learned that I had to.” **“We Make Hits”** “This was one of the last songs written. We wrote it in Ryan \[Needham, bassist\]’s spare bedroom in a break from touring. I think Ryan had been going for that kind of French disco, Daft Punk, Justice vibes and everything fell out of me quite fast. I started by writing the story of me and Ryan and how we started the band. With this song, we were acknowledging that we’d always had ambition and we’d always wanted to do something bigger with music. Even though, at our core, all we wanted to do was make music, we always knew we would quite like to see what it was like on the other side and achieve something.” **“Down by the Stream”** “This was written in Turin. Everyone else had gone out for a meal and I decided to stay in the hotel room and wrote it using Jay \[Russell, drummer\]’s laptop. I’ve been looking back on my childhood a little bit more since my son was born and projecting him into scenarios I was in, even though historical truth and accuracy is a vague thing in terms of songwriting. It’s not literal, but it draws on my childhood. I was framing myself as this struggling person who was having a bit of a rough time, doing the woe-is-me thing about being in a successful band. I realized that if I was going to ask that empathy of the listener, then I should make sure that there was some corruption within me as well and highlight that I’m not some innocent person. It’s me dragging myself through the mud to let people know that I’m capable of being a dickhead just like everyone else.” **“The Undertow”** “‘Down by the Stream’ starts by the stream and then the stream leads to the sea, and that’s where the sharks start circling. We’ve ended up at sea on ‘The Undertow.’ The stream is the journey into adulthood and the sea is the murky open waters of adulthood and being out on your own in the big, bad world, then getting caught by the undertow of the industry. This is a thank-you note to my wife, really, who’s supported me through this entire caper that I’ve ended up on and been solid as a rock through it. There’s a part of me that’ll never be able to understand why I was selfish enough to do this for a living and leave my family behind to do it, so I’ll always live with that.” **“Dream Job”** “I caught myself writing the chorus in an interview when we were in Europe. Someone asked how it felt to have done a song with Elton John and have a Mercury nomination and all these things and I wasn’t really in the room and I just went, ‘Yeah, it’s ace, it’s wicked.’ I just started listing all these positive words without actually taking stock of what they were saying. It’s funny because I don’t really know how those things have affected me. I definitely wanted them and I’m glad I got them but they just happen and you move on. You get asked about them a lot, and the truth is that you don’t really think of them. I feel like the second you start wearing your achievements with pride, you’re dead in the water. I think the whole album is trying to strike that balance between being cynical and maybe a bit arsey, but also going, at the same time, ‘Things are great!’ It can be both, and it is both for us, and that’s life, even if it’s your life or my life in this band I’m in.” **“Fizzy Fish”** “The lyrics changed a lot on this one—I was literally writing about Fizzy Fish sweets for about three verses originally. With those seeds, you don’t really know where you’re going with them a lot of the time, but you let your mind chase after it and see where it goes. The Fizzy Fish, it was nostalgia, it was going back to the playground and that’s me having a conversation with another version of me from my childhood or a parallel universe. Again, it’s set in a lake, going with the water theme, because that’s a stagnant body of water that’s separate from the sea. It stands alone from the rest of the album. It’s set in my subconscious. ‘The Undertow’ through to ‘Grifter’s Grief’ is one narrative arc that follows me going into this successful Yard Act. ‘Fizzy Fish’ is me learning to cope with this newfound spotlight and who I am, whether I’ve changed from who I was, whether that’s positive or negative and the fact you have to create new masks to deal with a public-facing job because you don’t want to give too much of yourself away but, ultimately, to connect with people is the entire reason you’re making music.” **“Petroleum”** “This is based on an incident that happened at a gig at Bognor Regis at the start of 2023, the point within the story where I hit the bottom. I bottled the gig. Not anything drastic, we got through a set, but I was really disappointed in myself and my performance that night. I told the audience I was bored and I didn’t want to be there. We’d bitten off more than we could chew and I hadn’t had a break in 18 months, and I had a bad gig. This looks at the idea of what is expected of musicians when they perform live and this consumerist demand that they deliver. I realized that people don’t actually want honesty, they want the version of honesty they’ve paid to see. It’s learning to deal with these extra masks that we develop. I was trying to get to the core of ‘How can I channel a true version of how I’m feeling into an enjoyable performance that people deserve to see?’ This whole song reignited my passion for playing live and I’ve since learned how to process my emotions and funnel them into a performance that creates something that I’m proud of.” **“When the Laughter Stops” (feat. Katy J Pearson)** “It’s maybe a reaction to a lot of people saying, ‘Oh, Yard Act is the fun band, the jokers, and they don’t take it too seriously,’ and we don’t—because you can’t—but it’s that whole sad-clown complex. We’re not base level: We feel things just the same as everyone else! A lot of this album is rooted in that paranoia of not being able to maintain this—because it felt like I couldn’t do it if what it took to make a living from this job was those first 18 months over and over again. Fortunately, it’s changed, it’s fine but it has to stay at this level for it to be OK. If it drops back below, it’s hard work being in a band.” **“Grifter’s Grief”** “This is to do with the fact that my entire job now is based around sucking electricity out of giant venues and getting on aeroplanes and constantly burning up road miles and air miles and sea miles just to selfishly make a living whilst the planet burns. I spoke to my dad about it and he was kicking off about something and I was like, ‘Yeah but, Dad, I do that, I get on planes all the time.’ He went, ‘Yeah, but you need to do it to work.’ And I was like, ‘But I don’t. I could get a job that doesn’t involve that.’ It’s that everyone’s selfish inherently, I think.” **“Blackpool Illuminations”** “This is probably the most important song on the album. When we do the zany and comical stuff, we’re always trying to do it so you can pull the rug from under people with a song like this and prove what we’re capable of if we really put our minds to it. We supported Foals in Blackpool in May 2022. I had such nostalgic memories of Blackpool from going as a kid. My wife and son came and joined us for those two nights with Foals, and we had a couple of days and weekend in Blackpool because I wanted to show my baby where I had holidays as a child. Seeing him walking along the promenade, I saw myself in him and realized that he was just following the exact same footsteps that I did when I was a kid. \[The song\] follows my journey through childhood to that moment, really—these footprints of the past that we leave and then the future treads over them in a very similar way.” **“A Vineyard for the North”** “This is the note of hope that comes at the end. Climate change punctuates the album but I didn’t want to write too heavily about it. I read an article that French vineyard owners are starting to buy land in the south of England—because of the rising temperature, the south of England is now \[in\] prime condition for growing grapes for champagne. I was thinking how, as it gets hotter, it works its way up the country. It’s clutching at straws in a sense but it’s more to do with human nature and our ability to adapt and problem solve. I don’t think the answer is that everyone in the north starts buying vineyards and growing grapes. But, in essence, it is that things will change and we’ll have to adapt, and there’s hope and there are avenues we can always take.”

On *Big Ideas*, Remi Wolf gives us grade-A pop music viewed through a funhouse mirror—familiar shapes twisted into kaleidoscopic new forms. Doubling down on the quirky charisma and unabashed joy of her debut LP, the boundary-pushing pop artist’s sophomore album reveals the true scope of her artistic vision: There are husky soul excursions (“Motorcycle”), cacophonous indie anthems (“Wave”), helium-filtered disco cuts (“Slay Bitch”), and splashes of electro and jazz. These explorations never feel scattershot or unsure of themselves. Wolf’s magic is that she knows exactly who she is. Her songwriting is more sophisticated here—but still genuinely funny—and covers a lot of emotional ground. Ping-ponging between vulnerability and cheeky bravado, she takes listeners inside the hyperactive brain of a Gen Z twentysomething—overstimulation, searching, sarcasm, and all. “So good the sound of crypto bros/Eating cubanos by myself,” she quips on “Alone in Miami,” an upbeat song about the isolation of celebrity. “The walls are closin\' in on me in this Art Deco museum/Daughters in thongs are roamin\' freely, pop stars in my DMs.” It’s this carefree combination of power and sensitivity—she’s both the life of the party and the friend you break down to at 3 am—that makes *Big Ideas* more than a collection of bops. Rather, it’s a dizzying, stream-of-consciousness snapshot of what it feels like to be young in 2024, searching for depth and meaning in an increasingly material world.

“It feels like a new beginning for us,” Real Estate singer-songwriter Martin Courtney tells Apple Music of the indie rock veterans\' sixth album, after 15 years together as a band. “I’ve learned a lot about how to write songs and my own process through the first five records we made. This album is me taking stock of that and being like, ‘What if I tried something totally different?’” Less concerned about how *Daniel* would fit in with the rest of their catalog, Courtney wanted to simplify his songwriting by writing bright pop music that felt warm and welcoming. The final result is opposite to their last release, 2020’s *The Main Thing*, which had an intentionally dense and murky sound. “We made this messy album that was full of ideas,” Courtney adds, “but this was more about precision and stripping things away—keeping things to the point and concise.” Recorded in nine days at RCA Studio A in Nashville, famously known for hosting legendary artists such as The Beach Boys and Dolly Parton, *Daniel* benefits from the band trying a series of firsts, whether by enlisting a new producer outside of their usual circles (Daniel Tashian, co-writer/co-producer on Kacey Musgraves’ *Golden Hour*) or having a group of session musicians at their disposal if needed. These songs—which expand on their sound with a wide array of instruments like pedal steel guitar, organ, and piano—navigate themes of existential rumination (“Interior”), overcoming uncertain times (“Haunted World”), and the music they grew up listening to (“Water Underground”). One landmark ’90s record inspired Courtney more than most. “I\'m really obsessed with the R.E.M. album *Automatic for the People*,” says Courtney. “I wanted to use an acoustic and sonic palette similar to that album, just use a lot of instruments that felt very organic but without it feeling country or Americana.” Read on as Courtney walks us through the album, one song at a time. **“Somebody New”** “It feels good as an opener. It thematically sets up this vibe, which runs throughout the record, about coming to terms with the fact that I\'m a different person now than I was before, trying to figure out who that person is and being okay with that. It has this looping thing, which I kind of ripped off of my bloody valentine—they do that a lot where the timing is just a little off, but not in a way that is overt. It gives it this kind of propulsion where it feels like it never ends.” **“Haunted World”** “We were in Nashville recording with people that work a lot on country music, and we were like, ‘I think pedal steel would sound really good on this track.’ We had access to this amazing world-class pedal steel player, a Nashville session guy named Justin Schipper. He adds this element that you can\'t really put your finger on, more like sound effects using these ethereal-sounding chords, which is kind of magical.” **“Water Underground”** “Initially, I just came up with the phrase ‘water underground.’ I thought it sounded good for a chorus, but then I had to figure out what it meant. I wrote the whole song without really understanding what I was writing about, but I thought about it later and it came to me: ‘Oh, it\'s like your subconscious.’ People always refer to water as it being associated with your subconscious, so to me it\'s the creative flow of your brain in getting an idea and then trying to hold on to it and not forget it. You\'re just living your everyday life, and then you find some kind of inspiration and try to turn that into something.” **“Flowers”** “I wrote this song in three hours, which is funny since it usually takes me at least a couple of days. I wrote the guitar part thinking it was cool, but then I had to drive two hours to play a solo show in New Jersey and I wrote the rest of the song on the way there. I played it at the show that night, which was pretty fun. It feels very different for me for this band—it kind of sounds like Tom Petty or Sheryl Crow, like this radio-rock vibe. There\'s this one part where the drums are just hitting the kick drum. Our bass player Alex Bleeker would keep jokingly making this ‘Come on, boys!’ Bruce Springsteen impression during this vamp. I was like, ‘You’re making me hate this song right now. Please stop. It\'s too much.’” **“Interior”** “I wrote it and then thought it sounded like Big Star, but I couldn’t figure out which song. It took me a long time to realize it’s ‘September Gurls,’ the little guitar turnaround that starts the song. When we recorded it, it was way more straight. It had the same general shape: the build and the parts added throughout the song with the drums gradually coming in with this big guitar solo in the middle. But after recording it that way, Daniel Tashian thought it would be cool if there was a super funky drumbeat happening the whole time, with the bass just grooving with the drums.” **“Freeze Brain”** “If you heard the demo, it sounds nothing like what\'s on the record. What I recorded was like, again, a my bloody valentine song in that it’s very fast and very distorted and heavy. We were about to record it that way, and as we were setting up in the studio getting ready to record this song, Sammi \[Niss\] started playing this groove to test her drums and get some levels. We started playing the song along to the groove, just joking around, and thought it sounded really cool. We recorded it like that with the intention of doing it like this first and then doing the other version that we had practiced, but then we were just moving so fast. We forgot and moved on to the next song, and this is the version we ended up with.” **“Say No More”** “Throughout our career, our band has come up with working titles that are some other band\'s name. We\'ve probably had five songs called \'The Feelies,\' and this is one of them in that it\'s got that sort of soft intensity. I\'ve had multiple people tell me that it feels like a standout track to them, which is great. Because honestly, this album has 11 songs, and I would\'ve been really happy with 10. But I was like, if I was going to cut a song, it probably would\'ve been this one. Right after we finished it, I thought it felt unfinished somehow, or that it just needs something. Which is weird, because it has a pretty well-thought-out arrangement, and there\'s a lot of different parts to it. But anyway, now I feel better about it. I’m glad we didn\'t cut it.” **“Airdrop”** “I got this little Mellotron keyboard, and I was just having fun with brass sounds. I wrote the little riff that opens the song on that keyboard, thinking it sounded sort of classical and Baroque. It was the trickiest one to nail down on the album, because I wasn\'t really happy with it, so we kept cutting and moving things around. I don\'t think you can tell in the final recording. I actually am really happy with it now, but I was really ready to just abandon it, since it was a nightmare to make.” **“Victoria”** “We all switched instruments on this one. I’m not even sure how we\'re going to do it live, honestly. Everyone in the band is more than welcome to contribute songs, but a lot of times I\'m the only one, or I write the most. On the last record, Bleeker wrote a song, but when he wasn\'t happy with it, he wouldn’t end up finishing it. He didn\'t end up having a song on the record last time, but Julian \[Lynch, guitarist\] did. And then the opposite happened this time: Julian wrote a song for this one, and I was really into it, but once we were in the studio, he felt it wasn’t ready.” **“Market Street”** “It’s one of the early ones that I wrote for this record. It Informed a lot of what I wanted in terms of the style of songwriting. More simple verse-chorus form, but the parts are catchy. I remember Julian was attempting to record a solo, and I kept telling him that it’s got to be bigger. It has to be a stupid guitar solo, dumb but powerful. And he was like, ‘Do you want to try?’ I gave it a try and I\'m happy with my solo. The only thing is I do this vibrato wiggle at the end that I kind of wish I hadn\'t done. It\'s almost too over the top. Still, I really like that song in that it has a Neil Young driving kind of vibe. It ended up being the only time I play electric guitar on the album.” **“You Are Here”** “It\'s the only song on the record that strays from this concise pop thing that we were trying to do, with this long extended outro. I play piano on this one, which I think is the first time. It’s another one I wrote on guitar where the original demo almost sounds like a garage rock song. We were messing around with it when we were rehearsing before we went to the studio, but it didn’t feel like it fit with the rest of the songs. We came up with this baggy beat where it was organ-driven, sort of like Yo Tengo’s \'Autumn Sweater\'—that was one of the inspirations for the arrangement. It\'s built around a drum loop, which is also new for us. Sammi was playing that beat the whole time, so we thought of looping it with an almost hip-hop thing to it. It does get a little psychedelic, but it felt right to do it like that.”

Listening to Adrianne Lenker’s music can feel like finding an old love letter in a library book: somehow both painfully direct and totally mysterious at the same time, filled with gaps in logic and narrative that only confirm how intimate the connection between writer and reader is. Made with a small group in what one imagines is a warm and secluded room, *Bright Future* captures the same folksy wonder and open-hearted intensity of Big Thief but with a slightly quieter approach, conjuring visions of creeks and twilights, dead dogs (“Real House”) and doomed relationships (“Vampire Empire”) so vivid you can feel the humidity pouring in through the screen door. She’s vulnerable enough to let her voice warble and crack and confident enough to linger there for as long as it takes to get her often devastating emotional point across. “Just when I thought I couldn’t feel more/I feel a little more,” she sings on “Free Treasure.” Believe her.

“I wanted the album to feel really fun,” Amyl and The Sniffers vocalist Amy Taylor tells Apple Music of *Cartoon Darkness*, the Australian quartet’s third full-length. That goal does, however, come with a caveat: “I wanted it to feel fun without putting up the blinkers and being like, everything’s sweet, all good. Things are really weird and things are pretty bad and there’s a lot of things to be stressed about, but there’s the balance of it. Not to encourage people to ignore the bad, but to try and find more of a balance.” So while *Cartoon Darkness* finds Taylor confronting issues such as body positivity, the ills of social media, the climate crisis, and capitalism’s impact on society and people’s wellbeing, she does so with an unrelenting lust for life and an indefatigable spirit that, on songs such as “Jerkin’” and “Motorbike Song,” adheres to the adage that life is for the living. Recorded with Nick Launay (Midnight Oil, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds) at Dave Grohl’s Studio 606, which boasts the same mixing desk on which Nirvana recorded *Nevermind* and Fleetwood Mac did *Rumours* (“I really didn’t want to spill anything on it,” laughs Taylor), the band approached *Cartoon Darkness* with a specific sonic goal in mind. “Bryce \[Wilson, drums\] and Declan \[Martens, guitar\] were really keen to try and explore different sounds and make it feel a bit more like a studio album,” says Taylor. Adds Martens: “In the past we’ve tried to see how everything would relate to when we perform it live. And even though a lot of these songs will be included in the set, I think we just wanted to make sure the focus was on making the best listening experience at home rather than making the best songs to be taken live.” A typically fiery slice of raw punk rock, albeit one that takes a breather on the gentler “Big Dreams” and “Bailing on Me,” the end result is what Taylor calls “the first album we feel really proud of from the get go.” Here, Taylor and Martens walk Apple Music through *Cartoon Darkness*, track by track. **“Jerkin’”** Amy Taylor: “It’s a tongue-in-cheek poke at keyboard warriors, at the haters in general. It’s just a fuck you to anyone who’s down to accept it.” Declan Martens: “This was conceived earlier than the intense writing period. We came up with it in the early half of 2023. It has a good intensity. Despite this being our attempt at a studio album it does replicate what we do live, which is straightaway energy.” AT: “I really wanted to write a song that big-upped yourself while bringing down the haters. I wanted it to be like, ‘I’m sick, you’re shit.’” **“Chewing Gum”** AT: “So much of life is just a carrot dangled in front of your head, like you’re just around the corner from being able to take a break, or the goodness is always just around the corner. And it’s so much hard work. Under capitalism you’re just constantly working for goals you can never seem to hit. I feel that robs people of themselves and robs people of happiness and joy. Something else that robs people of those things is criticism and judgment. I think with social media, a lot of people are constantly bombarded with how they should be and what they could do and what they might be and how bad they are. I feel that robs people of the joy of making mistakes, and making mistakes is so important for growing up. I want to make the wrong decision sometimes, and I want to have fun and I want to feel love even if that’s a wrong decision, even if that’s a dumb decision, because what else is the point?” **“Tiny Bikini”** AT: “I always try and consciously surround myself with women, but sometimes it doesn’t work out. Even in the studio I was the only lady of maybe eight dudes in the room. So I was just channeling that energy going, ‘Yeah it’s technically my space, but I’m the only one here in a bikini.’ I think a lot of my experience in life is being the only lady, and I feel like, for me, I love expressing myself in slutty ways. The world is a boring place, and to dress up or to be scantily clad or just be interesting is something I value, so that song is going, ‘That’s what I like.’” **“Big Dreams”** DM: “I write a whole scope of heavy and soft songs, and finding the softer songs’ place in Amyl and The Sniffers has always been a challenge; I’ve had a fear of doing it. So I showed it to Amy and she really enjoyed it and encouraged it. I think a lot of the misconception is that it’s experimenting, but I feel like these sorts of songs have always been in us. I prefer to refer to it as exploring rather than experimenting.” AT: “A lot of people in my life have really big dreams and they are really talented, and they are trying to make something of themselves. The world is a harsh place, and even if they’re super talented, it’s really difficult because of the cost of living and the oversaturation of everything. And it’s like we’re all getting older and a lot of people’s dreams may not happen, but that internal energy, it’s still swirling inside you.” **“It’s Mine”** DM: “The guitar \[has\] a really odd tuning that I’d never used before. Me and Nick \[Launay\] had worked to get this really direct, harsh, aggressive guitar sound, and that’s what makes it unique—it makes it sound like you’ve just stuck your head in a bucket of bees swarming.” AT: “Lyrically, it’s a subconscious dump trying to explore lots of different themes—the pressures of bodies to be perfect, and it’s saying it might not be perfect but it’s mine. And dipping into the confusion of consumerism and getting swept up and wanting to buy stuff. It’s a big mix of that.” **“Motorbike Song”** AT: “It’s a yearning for freedom. Life can be so stuffy, especially with screens and technology, so much of it is sitting still and looking at a screen for hours. I just saw a motorbike driving along and I wanted to embody the motorbike. I don’t want to ride it, I want to be the motorbike.” DM: “When we were working it out it felt like a So-Cal, ’80s punk song and it developed into more of a Motörhead-type thing. It’s fun, it’s got my most guitar solos on one song ever.” **“Doing in Me Head”** DM: “I was trying to write a disco song. I wanted it to be like The Gap Band. But I guess when you bring it to some Australian punks it comes out as ‘Doing in Me Head.’” AT: “This song kind of embodies the whole of *Cartoon Darkness*. Like it touches on the fact we all use our phones and social media, and they favor outrage, and subconsciously the system floods us with negative emotions and then it profits off that. It kind of dictates our life, not the other way around. You have to favor the algorithm, it won’t favor you. And talking about how spoon-fed our generation especially is and the lack of critical thinking.” **“Pigs”** AT: “Sometimes people are like, I know more so, therefore, I’m better than you and you’re an idiot. I don’t agree with that, because I’ve been on both sides of knowing stuff and not knowing stuff, and being an idiot and being a legend. So this song is saying, ‘We’re all pigs, you’re not better than me, we’re all just pigs in the mud.’” DM: “I’m really fond of the chorus. It’s a recycled riff that I wrote before our self-titled album that we jammed on but never became a song. Now, with my new knowledge in music, five or six years on, I found a way to make it interesting. I remember seeing that excitement in Amy’s face when I first started playing it differently.” **“Bailing on Me”** AT: “I was really struggling to write lyrics to it and figure out what to say and Declan was like, ‘I think it’s a sexy song, try and make it horny.’ I was trying to do that but was like, ‘I really don’t get that vibe from this song.’ So I ended up making it a heartbreak song.” DM: “I think it’s interesting that my intention was horny and Amy interprets heartbreak. I think that’s a funny way of looking at it.” **“U Should Not Be Doing That”** AT: “So much of my experience in the music world has been people trying to hold me back with their negativity and their limitations. Because they’ve made limitations for themselves that I don’t subscribe to. They might be saying you shouldn’t be doing that and I can’t believe you’re doing that, but I am doing it, and you’re not. I’m over here experiencing this with the choices that I’ve made, and you’re down in Melbourne having a bitch while you’re doing lines at 4am with other 50-year-olds, bitching about a 24-year-old. There are Facebook groups with old rockers being like, ‘I don’t like that band, she’s crap.’ Kiss my arse!” **“Do It Do It”** AT: “For some reason I always imagine some random athlete trying to listen to this to gee up, so that’s what it’s about. Someone being like, ‘Yeah I’ll fuckin’ get up and run.’” DM: “This was the last riff I came up with before moving to the US. The working title for it was ‘Pornhub Awards’ because, the night before, I found a free ticket to the Pornhub Awards. I didn’t win anything.” **“Going Somewhere”** AT: “Anyone can find dirt, but it takes hard work to find gold. It’s the easiest thing in the world to criticize. People are just lazy, and they’re not trying hard enough to find the good in stuff. There’s no perfect world and there’s not going to be utopia, because utopia would be dystopia anyway. It’s just saying I’m going to go somewhere, hopefully you can come there too.” **“Me and The Girls”** DM: “Amy sent me this hip-hop song that had like an Eddie Van Halen sort of guitar sample in it, and I was like, ‘I’ve got a riff that’s super repetitive, almost like a sample, a loop, and I wrote it when I was 21. It’s called ‘Fry Pan Fingers,’ because I used to stick my fingers on the frying pan to callous them before gigs when I was young.’ So I was like, ‘All right, Amy, here’s this repetitive \[riff\], like a hip-hop loop that I’ve got.’” AT: “I needed a lyric for the chorus, so I was like, ‘Declan, now’s your chance, do you want to do a duet?’ I said, ‘Me and the girls are drunk at the airport,’ and he’s like, ‘I can’t believe that it’s an open bar,’ and I loved it, but everyone else was like, this is a bit weird. We’d been listening to a lot of Beastie Boys so we were like, let’s add in the vocoder \[on his voice\] and make it sound like that.”