Few artists have had a bigger decade than Jack Antonoff. And really, those who have (Taylor Swift, Lorde, Lana Del Rey, The 1975) eagerly credit at least *some* of their success to his artistic genius. *Bleachers*, the self-titled fourth album from Antonoff’s Springsteen- and John Hughes-worshipping New Jersey rock band, arrives 10 years after their spirited debut and feels like the start of a new era. It isn’t so much that their sound has changed—they’re still making life-affirming Turnpike anthems laced with various strands of nostalgia (the sha-la-la ’60s, the fist-pumping ’80s)—so much as their lens has shifted. While much of the band’s prior work dealt with grief (Antonoff’s sister died from cancer when he was 18), here, they plant their feet firmly in the present: He’s newly married, turning 40, and, per the project’s tone-setting opener, “right on time.” “I tend to work with people who have a gut feeling about something and just want to find it,” Antonoff tells Zane Lowe. “That\'s all making an album is. The music I\'m writing and the stories I\'m telling, the magic is *right now*.” *Bleachers* is brimming with those stars and stories: Lana Del Rey, Clairo, Florence Welch, Matty Healy, St. Vincent, and his new wife Margaret Qualley all make low-key appearances on songs that embrace things we too often lament (getting older, feeling smaller, the suburbs). On “Isimo,” he captures the weight of lifelong commitment. “I see marriage and partnership in a very intense way,” he tells Lowe. “It\'s easy to share the fun stuff with someone, but will you share the really ugly parts of yourself? It\'s not an attractive part of myself; I can spin an attractive concept that sounds poetic about someone dealing with grief, but the day-to-day of that is not fun and attractive. I wanted to celebrate that in that song.” But the best, most unexpected cameo is from professional skateboarder Rodney Mullen, one of Antonoff’s childhood idols, who speaks philosophically about passion, perseverance, and awe. Antonoff told Lowe that Mullen’s monologue, sampled from Tony Hawk’s 2022 documentary *Until the Wheels Fall Off*, “codified” the album’s whole concept: finding peace in the everyday. Antonoff, afloat in marital bliss and on top of the world, is doing just that. “You dance around the apartment,” he sings on “Ordinary Heaven,” “and I just get, I just get, I just get, I just get to be there.”
Based on the energy of Charly Bliss’ third album, *Forever*, the New York quartet decided at some point between this 2024 release and its predecessor, 2019’s *Young Enough*, to turn things up to 11, expanding upon the scuzzy, DIY pop punk they conjured on those first two records, and making everything bolder, louder, and more intentional. “Calling You Out” is a yearning and clever portrait of a relationship in distress, with vocalist Eva Hendricks pleading, “I wanna be the one to love you, not calling you out.” Acoustic guitars intermingle with synths, providing the song with intoxicating interplay between the synthetic and organic. “I’m Not Dead” features guitars taken from the alt-rock ’90s, but Hendricks infuses the song with a declaration that demands living life to the fullest: “I’m not, I’m not dead/Even if I was/I’d wish that I’d fucked up/At least twice as much and had like double the fun.”
While Marika Hackman was making her fifth album *Big Sigh*, she kept thinking about, well, big sighs. “It’s quite cringingly something that me and my partner say to our dogs quite a lot when they do a big sigh,” the British singer-songwriter tells Apple Music. “Which then was being said at me quite a lot. \[The title\] was actually born out of there being a lot of sighing happening during the making of the record.” Because creating this album, says Hackman, was anything but easy. After 2019’s *Any Human Friend*, a “cocktail of different factors”—including the pandemic, a lack of inspiration, and “a constant hum of stress”—stunted her creativity. “It was like crawling through mud,” she says of trying to claw it back. “It was the biggest struggle I’ve had with that aspect of my career since I started.” Yet she found an upside, eventually. “Once you’ve got that far down the rabbit hole, it was like, ‘I’m here now and I’m going to make this record exactly how I want to make it. Even if that takes more time, money, stressful situations, I can’t be half-arsed about this,’” she says. Listen to the opening moments of *Big Sigh*, and it quickly feels like this is going to be a different kind of Marika Hackman record. After the largely guitar-led indie of *Any Human Friend* and 2017’s *I’m Not Your Man*, *Big Sigh* features swirling strings, piano, instrumental interludes, and horns, but also distorted vocals, industrial sounds, and electronic music. Plus, plenty of dark, arresting lyricism, and the minor-chord melodies that Hackman has always excelled in (“I feel like I have resting bitch face and I have resting sad voice,” she deadpans). It’s raw, immersive, and cinematic—both a leap forward and a culmination of everything Hackman has done before. “It feels like a bit of a turning point for me as an artist,” she says. “It feels very honest. I’m not trying to hide behind anything on this record at all. It’s exploratory, but in the way that a child explores—a really pure, honest exploration.” It also feels like another big sigh. “Once the record was done, the sense of relief, the whole process that it had taken to go through, it felt like a big sigh,” she says. “The song subjects, the themes, the sonics of it—it’s like this big, big release.” Read on as Hackman takes us inside the making of her fifth album, one song at a time. **“The Ground”** “I always like the first song to be the door opening. It sets the tone and gets you in the right mood. I wanted it to sound almost like a Vaughan Williams composition and then break down into something that felt really industrial. I’d written ‘The Ground’ long before \[starting the album\], but I just never thought it would end up on anything. Once I’d accepted that it wasn’t going to be a song and that I could just have it as an instrumental, that was a really exciting prospect. It takes guts for someone like me to do that, because it’s really flexing arrangement and composition as opposed to hiding behind my voice or lyrics. Then I was like, ‘I want to bring aspects of all of this throughout the record.’” **“No Caffeine”** “\[The piano\] is relentless in quite a light way. A little bit like a broken child’s toy or something that could start to make you feel quite uneasy. I had the music written for ages but it took a really long time to write the lyrics. At some point along the way, it occurred to me that it should be a song about the relentlessness of anxiety and how it’s inescapable. What about a big to-do list of all the stuff that I do? Then it became really fun to write—you can kind of be really playful and cheeky with it. And then it was the idea that, ‘This was only supposed to happen one time, a one-night stand, and now you’ve moved in with me and you’re my wife and you’re giving me hell every single day.’ I’ve always written quite gnarly lyrics alongside quite playful melodies. I’ve always found that a really fun collision.” **“Big Sigh”** “Flipping between the major and minor has always really got me. But this one was just one of those lightning-bolt songs, so I wasn’t thinking about it much. I was just messing around on my guitar at home and that initial riff came out. I listened to a lot of Alex G around that time and you can hear that. It’s that thing again of pushing the chords into quite weird places but then having quite a catchy chorus on top of that, which was fun. I think any song that comes to you that you don’t have to try for always feels like a really big release. This one came so naturally, you can kind of hear the relief in it, I think. When it came to being in the studio, it was like, ‘This has got to be big slamming guitars. Let’s just lean into it.’ I will always take my direction from the song itself, and it was just screaming for it. So I was like, ‘Yeah, here we go.’” **“Blood”** “Those lyrics are pretty brutal. It’s obviously all about ex-relationships and that idea of being held to a certain standard that you didn’t even set for yourself so that you’re basically constantly disappointing people. Or that people will create an image of you in their head and they’ll be in love with that image, but it’s not real. And when that mask starts to slip, it gets very painful and stressful. I kept it pretty simple. I didn’t want to overdevelop it. Then it just releases rather than giving you a big sing-along moment, which suits it great. That’s all it needs.” **“Hanging”** “Whether it’s a song or a poem or whatever, I’m all for a bit of candid, sort of domestic, lyricism. But it’s also the point to really take it somewhere even deeper and darker—the furthest you can go. That’s what I was doing on this one. It was a relationship I’d been in that had gone on for a while—you kind of lose yourself a little bit and you don’t even realize that it’s happening. It’s the pain of that stifling feeling. With the huge release at the end, it’s like, ‘Yeah, you were part of me. I’m so relieved it hurts.’ And it hurts because it’s ended, and that’s a relief as well. There’s a lot to unpack, but at the core of it, it’s a pretty classic reflection on a relationship that didn’t work with just some hella strong dark imagery to really bring home the gnarlier aspects of that. I’m very, very proud of it as a song. The structure of it, the way that it flows, to me, is a top level of my capabilities as a songwriter.” **“The Lonely House”** “I was just plinking around on the piano and came up with a little motif and decided to expand into it. Having written ‘The Ground,’ I wasn’t too scared of having a moment without any vocals. I think the record is cinematic, and it was a nicer moment to reflect and have a little bit of space to breathe amongst all this quite devastating stuff. I’m quite a basic pianist, but it’s now opened up another part of my brain going forward that I’m excited to flex a little bit more.” **“Vitamins”** “My mum has never actually said any of the stuff \[in the lyrics\] to me. She’d be absolutely devastated, I think, if she thought that anyone thought that! But it’s supposed to be a reflection on how one sees themselves through the lens of the mother, the father, the partner—the people closest to you—and how that reflects back onto you. It’s about self-doubt: ‘I’m not going to be who I thought I was going to be. I’m not going to be this kind of successful or that kind of successful.’ I knew I wanted this big, growing outro that was kind of dark and menacing after this quite meditative track. I’m almost loathe to call it a track—it doesn’t feel like a song to me in the way that I write songs. It was just really, really instinctive.” **“Slime”** “Something a bit more uplifting and a little bit funner—and much more aligned with my last record. I was quite open at this point. I’d cracked myself open and it was like everything was coming pretty quickly, so it was a very easy song to write. I love writing music like that. You don’t have to deep dive in a way that makes you feel like you’re on the cusp of tears. It’s like you get to just be quite poetic and a bit risqué and kind of cheeky with it. It feels more like playing with your craft as opposed to skinning yourself.” **“Please Don’t Be So Kind”** “This is sort of a partner to ‘Blood.’ I love how simple and repetitive it is, then you’ve got all these horns coming in. It feels funereal and that’s the concept. The idea of this is, ‘If you were just being a massive asshole, it would make life so much easier rather than actually being someone that I like.’ Not a fun situation to be in. It had the potential to be a releasing-doves-into-the-air, boy-band single if you treated it the wrong way. We found that taking it away from being on the guitar and piano and putting most of it onto a horn section was the perfect curveball, because it saps anything cheesy from it.” **“The Yellow Mile”** “I felt like I was just chatting. I wanted it to feel really raw and honest, but not at the cost of beauty. You listen to that first verse, it’s like you can’t help but see every single one of those images in your head. The trick is kind of making it feel like I haven’t actually said any of that, that you’ve just thought it for yourself. I’m talking about the sadness, again, of a relationship that doesn’t work. This was the last song I wrote for the record—it’s the end of a journey. I felt like I needed a song that needed to feel quiet and intimate and not produced and just raw.”
“How long is too long to be stuck in a memory?” That eternally unquantifiable question defines Sophie Allison’s fourth album as Soccer Mommy, a record marked by loss and grief. *Evergreen* marks a perspective shift from Allison’s 2022 album *Sometimes, Forever*. “When I started writing songs for this album, I was very clearly in a completely different headspace and wanted to write something that felt more intimate and up front, and not kind of shrouded by having all this fun making it,” Allison tells Apple Music. “The feelings that I was expressing on this album were a lot about loss and grief, because that’s what I was going through at the time—a lot of changes. It was scary and different, and everything felt kind of sudden. So I was just grappling with all of that.” The result is a richly melodic work that, with the production touch of Ben H. Allen (Animal Collective, Belle and Sebastian), feels cavernous in its scope while retaining intimacy. There are moments when Allison cranks up the volume and rips into the riffage—witness the chunky chords on “Driver,” or the shape-shifting guitar lines that stretch across “Salt in Wound”—but elsewhere Allison achieves a magic trick of making nuanced, close-to-the-vest songwriting sound one million miles wide. The closing title track is draped in stretches of strings not unlike generational counterpart beabadoobee’s work, while on “M” she laments, “I hear your voice in all my favorite songs.” It’s a raw admission on an album full of them.
It can be dangerous, Nick Cave says, to look back on one’s body of work and seek meaning in the music you’ve made. “Most records, I couldn\'t really tell you by listening what was going on in my life at the time,” he tells Apple Music. “But the last three, they\'re very clear impressions of what life has actually been like. I was in a very strange place.” In the years following the 2015 death of his son Arthur, Cave’s work—in song; in the warm counsel of his newsletter, The Red Hand Files; in the extended conversation-turned-book he wrote with journalist Seán O’Hagan, *Faith, Hope and Carnage*—has been marked by grief, meeting unimaginable loss with more imagination still. It’s made for some of the most remarkable and moving music of his nearly 50-year career, perhaps most notably the feverish minimalism of 2019’s *Ghosteen*, which he intended to act as a kind of communique to his dead son, wherever he might be. Though Cave would lose another son, Jethro, in 2022, *Wild God* finds the 66-year-old singer-songwriter someplace new, marveling at the beauty all around him, reuniting with The Bad Seeds, who—with the exception of multi-instrumentalist songwriting foil Warren Ellis—had slowly receded from view. Once a symbol of post-punk antipathy, he is now open to the world like never before. “Maybe there is a feeling like things don\'t matter in the same way as perhaps they did before,” he says. “These terrible things happened, the world has done its worst. I feel released in some way from those sorts of feelings. *Wild God* is much more playful, joyous, vibrant. Because life is good. Life is better.” It’s an album that feels like an embrace. That much you can hear in the first seconds of “Song of the Lake,” a swirl of ascendant synths and thick, chewy bass (compliments of Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood) upon which Cave tells a tale of brokenness that never quite resolves, as though to fully heal or be put back together again has never really been the point of all this, of being human. The mood is largely improvisational and loose, Cave leaning into moments of catharsis like a man who’d been waiting for them. He offers levity (the colossal, delirious title track) and light (“Frogs,” “Final Rescue Attempt”). On “O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is),” a tribute to the late Anita Lane, his former creative and romantic partner, he conjures a sense of play that would have seemed impossible a few years ago. “I think that it\'s just an immense enjoyment in playing,” he says of the band\'s influence on the album. “I think the songs just have these delirious, ecstatic surges of energy, which was a feeling in the studio when we recorded it. We\'re not taking it too seriously in a way, although it\'s a serious record. We were having a good time. I was having a really good time.” There is no shortage of heartbreak or darkness to be found here. But “Joy,” the album’s finest moment (and original namesake), is a monument to optimism, a radical thought. For six minutes, he sounds suspended in twilight, pulling words out of thin air, synths fluttering and humming and flickering around him, peals of piano and French horn coming and going like comets. “We’ve all had too much sorrow, now is the time for joy,” he sings, quoting a ghost who’s come to his bedside, a “flaming boy” in sneakers. “Joy doesn\'t necessarily mean happiness,” Cave says upon reflection. “Joy in a way is a form of suffering, in the sense that it understands the notion of suffering, and it\'s these momentary ecstatic leaps we are capable of that help us rise out of that suffering for a moment of time. It is sort of an explosion of positive feeling, and I think the record\'s full of that, full of these moments. In fact, the record itself is that.” While that may sound like a complete departure from its most recent predecessors, *Wild God* shares a similar intention, an urge to communicate with his late children, from this world to theirs. That may never fade. “If there\'s one impulse I have, it’s that I would like my kids who are no longer with us to know that we are okay, that \[wife\] Susie and I are okay,” Cave says. “I think that\'s why when I listened to the record back, I just listened to it with a great big smile on my face. Because it\'s just full of life and it\'s full of reasons to be happy. I think this record can definitely improve the condition of my children. All of the things that I create these days are an attempt to do that.” Read on as Cave takes us inside a few highlights from the album: **“Wild God”** “I was actually going to call the record *Joy*, but chose *Wild God* in the end because I thought the word ‘joy’ may be misunderstood in a way. ‘Wild God’ is just two pieces of music chopped together—an edit. That song didn\'t really work quite right. So we thought, ‘Well, let\'s get someone else to mix it.’ And me and Warren thought about that for a while. I personally really loved the sound of \[producer Dave Fridmann’s work with\] MGMT, and The Flaming Lips, stuff—it had this immediacy about it that I really liked. So we went to Buffalo with the recordings and Dave did a song each day, disappeared into the control room and mixed it without inviting us in. It was the strangest thing. And then he emerges from the studio and says, ‘Come in and tell me what you think.’ When we came in it sounded so different. We were shocked. And then after we played it again, we heard that he traded in all the intricacies and stateliness of The Bad Seeds for just pure unambiguous emotion.” **“Frogs”** “Improvising and ad-libbing is still very much the way we go about making music. ‘Frogs’ is essentially a song that I had some words to, but I just walked in and started singing over the top of this piece of music that we\'d constructed without any real understanding of the song itself. There\'s no formal construction—it just keeps going, very randomly. There\'s a sort of freedom and mystery to that stuff that I find really compelling. I sang it as a guide, but listening to it back was like, ‘Wow, I don\'t know how to go and repeat that in any way, but it feels like it\'s talking about something way beyond what the song initially had to offer.’” **“Joy”** “‘Joy’ is a wholly improvised one-take without me having any real understanding of what Warren is doing musically. It’s written in that same questing way of first takes. I\'m just singing stuff over a kind of chord pattern that he\'s got. I sort of intuit it in some way that it’s a blues form to it, so I’m attempting to sing a blues vocal over the top, rhyming in a blues tradition.” **“Final Rescue Attempt”** “That was a song that we weren\'t putting on the record. It was a late addition, just hanging around. And I think Dave Fridmann actually said, ‘Look, I\'ve mixed this song. It doesn\'t seem to be on the record. What the fuck?’ It feels a little different in a way to me. But it\'s a very beautiful song, very beautiful. And I guess it was just so simple in its way, or at least the first verse literally describes the situation that I think is actually in the book, *Faith, Hope and Carnage*, where Susie decided to come back to me after eight months or so, and rode back to my house where I was living, on a bicycle. It’s a depiction of that scene, so maybe I shied away from it for that reason. I don\'t know. But I\'m really glad.” **“O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is)”** “That song is an attempt to encapsulate what Anita Lane was like, and we all loved her very much and were all shocked to the core by her death. In her early days when we were together, she was this bright, shiny, happy, laughing, flaming thing, and we were the dark, drug-addicted men that circled around her. And I wanted to just write a song that had that. She was a laughing creature, and I wanted to work out a way of expressing that. It\'s such a beautifully innocent song in a way.”
Hiatus Kaiyote’s fourth album finds the Melbourne quartet in a playful mood. “BMO Is Beautiful” is a 41-second appreciation of the *Adventure Time* character BMO, featuring its voice actor Niki Yang on vocals. “Longcat” is a woozy tribute to “the longest cat in the world.” It’s fitting, then, that the band’s trademark jazz/R&B/future soul excursions are unshackled from traditional song structure in favor of a looser, more improvised form that emerged from late-night jam sessions, steering the album from cacophonous freak-outs like closer “White Rabbit” to the celestial opener “Dreamboat” and elastic jazz of “Make Friends.” Vocalist Nai Palm draws her lyrical inspiration from a diverse well. The Brazilian and sambalike rhythms of “Telescope” lay the foundation for a journey into space, the song inspired by photographs from the Hubble telescope on each band member’s birthday. “Cinnamon Temple,” a schizophrenic, head-bending mélange of noise, funk, and jazz that’s been in the band’s live set since 2015, takes its title from the mud-brick mosques in Mali, which look like they have cinnamon stuck in them, while “Make Friends” riffs on deep platonic love, with its one verse repeated three times, each from a different gender perspective. Acclaimed Brazilian producer Mario Caldato Jr. (Beastie Boys, Björk, Beck) proves himself a willing accomplice, harnessing the band’s devil-may-care, genre-bending approach to arrive at a record that is equal parts engrossing, befuddling, and intoxicating, but never, ever dull.
Where the ’60s-ish folk singer Jessica Pratt’s first few albums had the insular feel of music transmitted from deep within someone’s psyche, *Here in the Pitch* is open and ready—cautiously, gently—to be heard. The sounds aren’t any bigger, nor are they jockeying any harder for your attention. (There is no jockeying here, this is a jockey-free space.) But they do take up a little more room, or at least seem more comfortable in their quiet grandeur—whether it’s the lonesome western-movie percussion of “Life Is” or the way the featherlight *sha-la-la*s of “Better Hate” drift like a dazzled girl out for a walk among the bright city lights. This isn’t private-press psychedelia anymore, it’s *Pet Sounds* by The Beach Boys and the rainy-day ballads of Burt Bacharach—music whose restraint and sophistication concealed a sense of yearning rock ’n’ roll couldn’t quite express (“World on a String”). And should you worry that her head is in the clouds, she levels nine blows in a tidy, professional 27 minutes. They don’t make them like they used to—except that she does.
Declan McKenna’s music has always been thought-provoking. Ever since the UK singer-songwriter broke through in 2015 with an indie-pop single about corruption in soccer (“Brazil”), his songs have meditated on big questions. He explored youth alienation, police brutality, and media misrepresentation of the transgender community on 2017 debut *What Do You Think About the Car?*, before 2020’s *Zeros* investigated environmental issues, the toxicity of modern life, and class divides. For his third record though, he began to lean into the idea that, sometimes, you can overthink things—that ideas he might previously have dismissed as not serious or focused enough should be pursued. “Maybe in the past, I’ve wanted to think about and plan out what I’m doing,” he tells Apple Music. “But part of what’s sculpted the sound has been following what feels good and what feels right—letting \[the album\] become itself, not chaining it down, and just going with the flow.” That instinctive spirit is strikingly evident on a record that mooches around in psychedelic pop (“Nothing Works,” “Sympathy”) and funk (“Mulholland’s Dinner and Wine”) and recalls Beck at his most loose-limbed and lo-fi (“I Write the News”) and the questing sounds of *13*-era Blur (“Breath of Light”). That’s not to say McKenna has abandoned his thoughtful perspective on the world though. Here, he’s asking questions about the very modern phenomena of truth and its online manipulation, phone dependency, and the contrasts between your authentic self and the person you present to the world. It’s just that, this time, he’s been more abstract and spontaneous in his lyrics, opening up opportunities for listeners to forge their own interpretations. “That is quite a natural thing when you’re working on music,” he says. “You’ve created a backdrop for a track and you start riffing little ideas that align. It’s very natural to come out with things that feel in that world and shape them into what feels like a weird story that has a simple message at the heart of it. That’s what a lot of the music I listen to does. Sometimes I find out what the lyrics mean and I’m like, ‘What the heck?’ because you kind of build your own little world and that’s maybe what this album does. It’s not just all fun and games. There’s little moments where the vulnerability cuts through and I think that’s really nice as well. Feels human.” Step further into the world of *What Happened to the Beach?* with Declan McKenna’s track-by-track guide. **“WOBBLE”** “I wrote ‘WOBBLE’ with Neil Comber, who’s someone I’ve worked with a lot over the years. He played those drums that are really jagged and weird, and this guitar part, which is probably one of my favorite guitar parts I’ve ever written, just came out. It came out of a period where it was still a little bit restricted in terms of going out, seeing people, and stuff \[after lockdown\]. But we were able to get into the studio, me and Neil, so it has this bit of sweetness to it. It does feel like something being a bit unleashed. It feels like the biggest step into the world of the new album because it combines a lot of things which are at the heart of it: the balance of emotions, the melancholy, but also the really playful ideas. The main thing, which I feel was at the heart of the album, was having this human and organic-feeling stuff combined with digital recording process and digital sounds.” **“Elevator Hum”** “It’s a real statement piece for the album. I almost originally thought it might be the first song on the album because it’s kind of asking you to open up and just let go while you’re listening to the album. ‘I want you to believe/You’re just like me,’ to become one with me right now. There’s something really freeing about the song.” **“I Write the News”** “I wrote it in my sister’s old room at my parents’ house when I was there for a bit during one of the lockdowns. I’d decided that her old room would be my studio. I just had an acoustic guitar and my laptop really. I think I was spending a lot of time looking online or reading stuff on Twitter \[now X\] and seeing a lot of arguments that had no way of reaching any kind of goal because everyone’s got their own version of the truth and their own idea of what’s real. A lot of the time it feels like there’s no unifying truth anymore and multiple different people can just—outside of opinion—believe that the facts are different on different issues. It’s a really, really bizarre thing to watch. So I came up with the idea to write a song where I’m going, ‘I write the news and this is what’s going on.’ It’s like, ‘I write the news.’ ‘No, I write the news.’ It’s stayed quite similar to the original demo I made with my phone—I think the iPhone recording is still what’s on the record for that first section.” **“Sympathy”** “It’s funny how it follows on from ‘I Write the News.’ I mean, it’s completely intentional, but it has the opposite side of things, like, you don’t need to be clever, you don’t need to show everyone how smart you are, open up and listen to each other and to your mind. Find some value in that. It’s a bit peace-and-love and I can imagine some people might see it as a little idealistic. But that’s what this album’s all about: those simple ideas that can still be very powerful.” **“Mulholland’s Dinner and Wine”** “I didn’t really know about Mulholland Drive when I went to L.A. \[to record with producer Luca Buccellati in 2022\], but I did know about Mulholland Wines \[a liquor store in Hove, on England’s south coast\]. The idea came together when we were driving around L.A. and pointing out things to draw inspiration from. So we got the golf carts, we got Mulholland Drive, we got this sort of weird, cool-guy party talk and stuff like that, which we observed at different parties. And it became a song that isn’t really set in one place or the other, but draws inspiration from both. I guess it feels more L.A. than Hove, but I liked it being based around an off licence \[liquor store\]. L.A. is such an interesting big place and there’s so many people searching for something there. And that’s really what ‘Mulholland’s…’ is—searching for good in the wrong places.” **“Breath of Light”** “It was just a weird little jam that me and my friend Jake Passmore did together and, gradually over time, it kind of formed into a song. We had these goblin-ish chants going on and these weird sounds and it was a gradual combination of ideas over time that went into what it is. Now it just feels like a song from Hell, a big chant or someone being pulled down to Hell. The lyrics are almost saying, ‘Welcome to Hell.’” **“Nothing Works”** “It started in L.A. with Luca, the chorus and pre-chorus. When I was back working on some stuff in the UK, I had Jake in the studio and we started writing the verse for it. The conversation that was being had at the time \[in L.A.\] was about what the singles were going to be on the album \[and whether he wanted to add something more reminiscent of his previous records to the album\]. But I already thought there were singles, because the album was pretty much done in my eyes. I was happy with what was there. I guess there can sometimes be a bit of fear if you’re moving on from an older sound, people might not want to listen to it or people might need the same sort of ideas to latch onto. But it doesn’t make any sense because, as a lover of music myself, I just want people to express themselves in as free a way as possible because you want to hear something you haven’t heard before, at the end of the day. So that was quite a direct moment for the album because it was putting a full stop on the end of it and being like, ‘Right, we’re done now.’” **“The Phantom Buzz (Kick In)”** “The inspiration came from the feeling that your phone is buzzing but it’s not. It was almost turning it into a disease or something, like, ‘I’ve got the phantom buzz.’ I think I had a lot of time on my hands at home working on different ideas and this one came out—and for a sort of erratic tune as it is, it needed a weird lyrical idea.” **“Honest Test”** “It feels like a love song, I guess. And it was quite spontaneously written. Quite a lot of the lyrics just jumped out, a lot of this album really just jumped out of me and I didn’t really think about it too much because it felt really good.” **“Mezzanine”** “This took a really long time. It came from a dance track me and my friend Will Bishop made quite a while ago with this saxophone/trumpet/Mellotron riff. And gradually, through various things, it became ‘Mezzanine.’ It’s one of the ones that jumps from world to world because it was really the amalgamation of lots of different ideas and pulling them all together. It’s got the dreamy essence of the record. Maybe it’s friends with ‘Elevator Hum’ in that way.” **“It’s an Act”** “It just felt like the album needed something like this to ground it and bring it down to earth at the end. It leaves you with a really different note. A little bit like ‘Nothing Works,’ it’s a look behind everything else. Sometimes I think in performance, as in life, it can kind of all just feel like a bit of an act or you’re sort of putting your face on to do what you’re doing. It came out of a time where I was thinking about that a lot and feeling perhaps it was quite hard to really feel like I was being myself. I think a lot of artists get that, whether it’s, as I say, on stage or just being around in life really, it’s a constant feeling sometimes. So it’s a sadder one, but it’s nice to sort of bring it to that point. And it felt important to the record.” **“4 More Years”** “\[The title wasn’t originally in reference to upcoming elections\], I actually wrote it when England got knocked out of the \[2022\] World Cup. And that was it really. But it feels like more than that \[now\]. Sometimes you’ve just got to take the inspiration when it jumps out and maybe it then doesn’t feel like that on the record, but serves a different purpose.”
Like most things Stephen Malkmus touches, this meeting of four gracefully aging indie rockers—Malkmus, Matt Sweeney (Superwolf, Chavez), Emmett Kelly (Bonnie “Prince” Billy, The Cairo Gang), and Dirty Three drummer Jim White—feels both totally unambitious yet perfectly refined. They know their influences and wear them with the weathered cool of a patch-covered jean jacket: the cocky glam of Sweet (“Earth Hater,” “Action for Military Boys”), the shambling power pop of Big Star (“Rio’s Song,” “Our Hometown Boy”), the psychedelia of early Pink Floyd (“Chrome Mess”). But the musicianship is great, the songs fun and characteristically oblique (“Six Deaf Rats”), and the sense of nostalgia joyful without ever getting cute or overbearing. Having collectively played on dozens if not hundreds of albums since the early ’90s, they make the kind of cool, used-bin curiosity that might’ve turned them on as “kids.” What better tribute to your love of the game?
What doesn’t get mentioned often enough about The Jesus Lizard’s relentlessly ugly music is how fragile it is. They can make a stumbling noise riff sound like a broken music box (“Hide & Seek”) and a man ranting about giving birth to a perfectly trained dog feel like a secret wish (“Swan the Dog”)—strange, private moods rendered in noisy, explosive music. Like “Louie, Louie,” The Stooges, and Nirvana (whose Kurt Cobain was a vocal and devoted fan), they are both caveman-simple and savant-smart, or at least in touch with a force beyond our earthly realm. Part of what makes *Rack* such an unsettling listen—26 years after 1998’s *Blue*—is realizing how prophetic their version of America turned out to be: a violent, mysterious place where the biggest threat is probably that guy next door.
“It’s quite a strange album,” Nia Archives tells Apple Music about her debut, *Silence Is Loud*. The award-winning artist, producer, and DJ—credited with spearheading a mainstream revival of jungle music—is the first to acknowledge that the sonic landscape of the album is an eclectic departure from her early sound. While elements of the production will be familiar to fans of Archives—including jungle pioneer Goldie and global superstar Beyoncé—*Silence Is Loud* rings with Britpop, Motown, and alternative rock influences, resulting in a wholly original listening experience that exposes the unconventional edge to her artistry. Co-produced with rising talent Ethan P. Flynn, whose credits include FKA twigs and slowthai, the record is beholden to the late-’90s/early-2000s era of organic, experimental pop dominated by William Orbit—albeit charged with the frenetic energy of drum patterns still firmly rooted in jungle. While tracks like “Cards on the Table,” “Crowded Roomz,” and “F.A.M.I.L.Y” see Archives explore recurring themes of loneliness, self-acceptance, parental estrangement, and love—both unconditional and unrequited—with her characteristic lyrical candor, *Silence Is Loud* leaves fewer places for the intensity of her words to hide behind. This reality is most clearly evidenced on the reprise of the title track, which strips away her typical percussive camouflage. “Jungle is so chaotic and intense that nobody really pays attention to the lyrics that much,” says Archives. “The drums take up a lot of space in the music—they’re like the heart, and when you take that away, it’s like the brain. Which is a bit much sometimes.” For all the risk Archives has taken in releasing a body of work that resists the urge to chase trends in favor of presenting a true reflection of her own journey, *Silence Is Loud* succeeds in alchemizing its disparate parts into audio gold. “I played in a pub in London the other day and the people were singing along so loudly it made me think this isn’t just a viral-TikTok-moment album. It’s an album that people have to listen to, and then listen to again to take it in…\[because\] it’s something weird and new,” she says. “But I think I’ve got good taste in music, so that gives me a little bit of confidence in myself.” Read on to find out more about each track in Archives’ own words. **“Silence Is Loud”** “I wrote this song about my little brother, who is my little baby. He’s getting older and our relationship has changed so much. He’s changed so much, I’ve changed so much. I wanted to write about how I love him no matter what, and that is what unconditional love is to me. There’s no ifs or buts, it’s just pure love. I wrote it in bed and then I took it to Ethan. It’s the first song we made together. One of my favorite albums is *Aha Shake Heartbreak* by Kings of Leon, I’m so inspired by the lo-fi \[sound\] in their music. I really wanted a Kings of Leon-meets-Radiohead moment because *In Rainbows* is also one of my favorite albums.” **“Cards on the Table”** “I wanted to make a really hardcore Britpop jungle tune. It’s quite stripped-back breaks. I was hugely inspired by Blur, Pulp, Oasis, all that kind of vibe. I love Damon Albarn. If there’s anyone I would love to listen to the album, it would probably be him. Again, I wrote this in bed—I had a bit of a situationship with an Irish boy I met after a show in Dublin last year, so it’s a real story and my first time writing a song like this. I don’t really write love songs, but I was trying to have a bit of a Natasha Bedingfield moment. I’ve really tried to think of all the best songwriters to come out of the UK and focused on studying a lot of people. This was the first time I wrote a song and I felt like it was a ‘proper’ song.” **“Unfinished Business”** “This is the only song I’m worried about having to sing live because I’d just come back from a festival and I’d lost my voice, which is why it sounds so hoarse and rock ’n’ roll—I don’t know if I can re-sing it like that. I wrote it about realizing that everybody else has their own life before they’ve met you. Before you even say hello, they’ve already had so many experiences that have shaped them as a person. That’s actually quite positive. The production is quite four-four because I’ve been making loads of four-four music recently. And I also really wanted to make a Foo Fighters-inspired jungle tune because I loved the Foo Fighters when I was 14.” **“Crowded Roomz”** “We made this in the studio and it was a bit overwhelming. I was talking about loneliness—chronic loneliness. I feel like a lot of people my age experience loneliness. For me, with what I do—where it’s really high or low—it’s so heightened and you experience that a little bit more. And it was like, ‘Oh my god, this is actually a bit much, I can’t listen,’ because we listen to the same song on loop for four hours and it’s an intense one to listen to over and over again. The next day, we were like, ‘Oh, this is actually really good.’ I’ve been playing this one out and everyone screams the words, so I’m hoping that will be the vibe across the album. More of my sets have turned from hardcore jungle to a pop concert, which is cool.” **“Forbidden Feelingz”** “I feel like there’ll be a lot of people discovering me \[through this new sound\] and I really want them to hear where I’ve come from and how I got to this point. This is a nice moment for a switch-up, to be like, ‘I do this as well and, if you want, you can go back and discover all that stuff.’ I can never recreate this song, it’s one of my favorite songs I’ve ever made, so I didn’t want it to not be a part of an album that will hopefully shape the next few years of my life.” **“Blind Devotion”** “This is the longest project I’ve made in my life. I’m usually a 20-minute person, max. Towards the end I was like, ‘Oh my god, for an album to be an album it has to be 35 minutes, I need three \[more\] minutes to complete this thing, let’s make one more song.’ It’s one of the only new songs with the ‘old me’ sound, where it’s really clubby. We were going for that Massive Attack kind of vibe. We made this one at my studio and mine’s not got a lot of equipment. I try not to spend money on too much stuff. I’ve got 10 plug-ins, which is really weird as a producer, but I’d rather be the master of what I’ve got than have everything and not know how to use any of it. As a creative, you want a challenge and to feel like, ‘I’ve only got this, how do I make it sound interesting?’” **“Tell Me What It’s Like?”** “I said to Ethan that I wanted to make a song a bit like The Cranberries. The middle section, which is so happy, comes from another beat—the only song that didn’t make it on to the album. The rest of the song is quite dark and it was Ethan’s idea to put the two together. It’s about unrequited love, but not necessarily in a relationship sense, more related to my own life, but I guess people will take it however they want to take it. When I wrote it, I was inspired by Natalie Imbruglia’s kind of vibe. I sampled this voice note that Goldie sent me, because he sends me voice notes every week. He’s been a great listening ear and a real supporter. He’s someone I’m so inspired by and look up to—not just as a musician but as a person. He was quite gassed about it when I sent it to him.” **“Nightmares”** “I had my heart broken in Tokyo, which is hilarious and random. It’s like something out of a film. I came back from Asia and I was really sad, and the only way I can process my emotions is by making music. I wrote this song at home and then Ethan’s label let us use their spare studio, and he brought his guitar. I’d been listening to loads of Fleetwood Mac to get over my upset and I wanted to make something with that vibe. I thought ‘Nightmares don’t just happen when you’re sleeping’ was quite a funny play on words because what was happening felt like a real-life nightmare, which is so dramatic. This is the only song I kind of regret. I’ve never been really mean on a song in my life and the person I wrote about hasn’t heard it. I hope they don’t hate me because we’re kind of friends again now. But it’s a good song, so what can you do?” **“F.A.M.I.L.Y”** “I wrote this about my personal experience and my relationship with my family. This song is the end of that era, for me. I’m 25 this year, I feel like there’s only so many times you can be so caught up in things that cause you stress or upset you, so I really just wanted to say my piece and that’s it. There’s a little bit of acceptance within the song, understanding this is just the way things are and that’s OK, I guess. It was quite therapeutic. We recorded it in Ethan’s flat with me screaming and Ethan’s friend Felix \[Stephens\] playing the viola. My main inspiration was Estelle, ‘1980.’ There’s just a feeling I get when I listen to that song…I don’t know how to explain it. Even the video, where she’s sat on the stairs. It’s just a whole vibe I really wanted to capture with this song. It’s quite theatrical and I feel like the production reflects the drama.” **“Out of Options”** “I’d just been to the Motown Museum in Detroit for the first time and it was amazing. I love Motown. All the productions they made, just with what they had in those times, is actually crazy. It was such a booming Black industry that I’ve always been so inspired by. And I love The Ronettes, one of my favorite girl groups of all time. So I was really intensely listening to that kind of music and wanted to explore that sound. It was the only song I wrote on the spot and didn’t really have much that I wanted to say, but it was really fun recording how they would have recorded—standing in different spots in the room to create that big sound.” **“Silence Is Loud (Reprise)”** “Ethan suggested we do a reprise and I was kind of like, ‘Oh, I don’t know about that. Feels a little bit weird.’ But I trusted his gut. This was the only song we didn’t make in the UK. I was in L.A. on tour, and I hate making music in L.A., but we were at Sound Factory and we had all kinds of equipment and he was really having fun with the sound design. Throughout this album, I wanted to have loads of voice notes and anecdotes from people who mean something to me. So the voice talking at the start is my brother. In the middle, it’s loads of different voice notes from my friends, my friends’ parents who have become a really big part of my life, and my manager Tom, who’s my best friend. At the end is a sample of a video of all my friends from my birthday dinner. It’s quite emotional actually.” **“Killjoy !”** “I had a really nasty interaction with somebody who was quite close to me and this was me expressing that. It was the first time I was trying to think about how to make the words interesting and I love the way I wrote it. I made it at home and took it to Ethan, and what he brought to it was so cool—Massive Attack vibes with a bit of old-school IDM and jungle.” **“So Tell Me…”** “Another moment from a previous project. If I didn’t make \[2023 EP\] *Sunrise Bang Ur Head Against Tha Wall*, this song would have been on the album anyway—it felt like a good end.”
When KAYTRANADA left the 2021 Grammys with two awards (Best Dance/Electronic Album for 2019’s *BUBBA* and Best Dance Recording for “10%”), he made history as the first Black and first openly gay artist to win the former category. The industry recognition was long overdue for the producer, who had been building a devout following for nearly a decade. “In my mind I was finally a true artist,” he tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. After relocating to Los Angeles, he channeled that confidence into making his third solo album, *TIMELESS*: “It felt more serious—more legit. I was still having fun making *TIMELESS*, but making *BUBBA* was another type of fun where I didn’t really take it seriously.” Like its predecessor, *TIMELESS* is a collection of club grooves for catching a vibe. It’s packed with guests who effortlessly acclimate to KAYTRANADA’s singular sound while imprinting their own touch. PinkPantheress’ saccharine voice is richer on the squiggly house beat of “Snap My Finger,” Ravyn Lenae offers breathy seductions on the hard-edged R&B of “Video,” and Thundercat delivers comical disses in soothing falsetto on the jazzy hip-hop of “Wasted Words.” Back-to-back tracks “Do 2 Me” (featuring Anderson .Paak and SiR) and “Witchy” (featuring Childish Gambino) hit an energy peak, their tales of late-night infatuation framed by sultry, body-enveloping production. If *BUBBA* was about finding KAYTRANADA’s sound, *TIMELESS* expands it. The producer is in what he calls his “experimental bag,” and Channel Tres joins him in it on the incendiary “Drip Sweat.” Channel’s trademark baritone drifts in and out of disembodied Auto-Tune, dropping bars over punchy drums and breaks sampled from Lyn Collins’ “Think (About It).” “We were just making the funkiest thing, like how it would sound if we did new jack swing today,” KAYTRANADA says. “What is that Bobby Brown energy? We were trying to give it that.” He tries out AI sampling on the breezy instrumental “Seemingly.” He also sings on a track for the first time on the Weeknd-inspired “Stepped On,” creating his version of ’80s New Wave with strobing synths and a dark disposition. With a new skill unlocked, *TIMELESS* makes room for another KAYTRANADA evolution.
When A. G. Cook announced the closing of his beloved PC Music label in 2023—a project synonymous with the giddy, synthetic sound sometimes known as hyperpop—it was the end of one chapter and the beginning of another. Like his 2020 debut *7G*, 2024’s *Britpop* has the rangy feel of an artist good at writing songs (the warped doo-wop of “Greatly”; the gorgeous, melancholic “Serenade”) but even better at expressing atmospheres and ideas, whether it’s contrasting the gabber thump of “Out of Time” with sparkling ambience or how “Luddite Factory Operator” turns its chilly glitches into something you could take home to mom and dad. His central argument—that pop can be weird and still be pop—has been proven by clients and collaborators from Charli XCX to Beyoncé, but if you want to drink from the source, it’s here.
On previous album covers for Lorely Rodriguez’s alt-pop project Empress Of, the musician assumed a straightforward pose, casually stunting if not smiling. For the cover of her fourth album, which shares a cheeky title with the awards season campaign slogan, the Honduran American singer-producer throws her hair back as she straddles a shooting star, Los Angeles sprawled out behind her. She’s described it as something of a Hollywood album in all its sordid glam; the aching title track reflects on the end of a relationship with a showbiz scenester (“You wrote the script; your words, not mine”). That sheen of glitzy fantasy shimmers gently over Rodriguez’s club-ready explorations on love’s fleeting nature, running the gamut between heartbreak and hedonism and switching seamlessly between Spanish and English. She longs for “*un hombre femenine, un latine, que baile pa\' mi y solo pa\' mi*” on thumping house jam “Femenine,” wonders about the owner of an unfamiliar pair of earrings on infidelity banger “Lorelei,” and finds redemption in a wild night out on “Cura.” Rodriguez’s lyricism is at times abstract and poetic (“The rumors there, the mirror shows, the cards don’t lie, the boys all know—what type of girl am I?”) and at others sharply seductive (“*Yo soy fácil, fácil de comer, fácil de amar*”). The small handful of guests are like-minded in their boundary-pushing, occasionally messy avant-pop: Rina Sawayama on the love-drunk “Kiss Me” and fellow Angelenos MUNA on the searching “What’s Love.”
The hip-hop polymath built a reputation on witty freestyles that befitted her Philadelphia roots, then broke through in 2017 with “MUMBO JUMBO,” a purposefully unintelligible trap ditty that brought new resonance to the term “mumble rap” with a Grammy-nominated video that should come with a warning for those with dentophobia. Her debut album, 2018’s *Whack World*, crammed an LP’s worth of ideas into the time it takes to brew a pot of coffee: 15 sharp, surrealist minute-long tracks that veered from slapstick vocal hijinks to straight-ahead spitting, each accompanied by its own micro music video. The world Whack built was carnival-esque, all funhouse mirrors and sensory overload, with a darkness lingering at the edges. Aside from a trio of three-song EPs (the tentatively titled *Rap?*, *Pop?*, and *R&B?*) released in 2021, Whack kept a puzzlingly low profile in the years that followed. The colorful critical darling who’d had so much to say in so little time had more or less gone quiet. Then, six years after *Whack World*, she announced *WORLD WIDE WHACK*, billed as the rapper’s real full-length debut. Early videos continued the high-concept ideas and cartoonish costumes, but listen awhile and you heard something new: naked vulnerability, almost shocking in its rawness. “I can show you how it feels when you lose what you love,” Whack sing-songs on the twinkling “27 CLUB,” looking like a cross between Pierrot the clown and Bootsy Collins. The hook was one word, drawn out into a wistful melody: “Suiciiiiide…” In other words, there’s more to Whack’s world than you might expect. (“Might look familiar, but I promise you don’t know me,” she reminds you on the minute-and-change “MOOD SWING.”) Over the 15 songs of *WORLD WIDE WHACK*, the rapper grapples with real life, where echoes of abandonment and instances of suicidal ideation coexist with bursts of cockiness, uncertainty, lust, loneliness. The constant is her voice, thoughtful and brimming with ideas as ever. “BURNING BRAINS” is an expression of depressive thinking filtered through Whack’s imagistic lens: “Soup too hot, ice too cold, grass too green, sky too blue.” And there’s a great deal of whimsy, too, as on “SHOWER SONG,” a space-funk bop on the joys of singing in the bathroom.
Cage the Elephant’s *Neon Pill* arrives five years after their 2019 Grammy-winning global breakthrough *Social Cues*. Brothers and bandleaders Matt and Brad Shultz lost their father in the interim, the group mourned the death of friends, and Matt spent time in the hospital with severe depression. This tragedy, fight, spirit, and resolve is messily and triumphantly wrapped into *Neon Pill*, an album that finds the band forging their own sound devoid of outside influence, channeling their rollicking live show into a meditation on life, death, and music’s healing power. Take the psych-folk-leaning title track, which tells the story of Matt’s battle with mental illness, looking for answers but only finding more questions. As the band so often does, they mask dark and searching lyrics with melodic candy, making these philosophical queries go down more easily. On the track, Matt sings: “It\'s a hit and run, oh no/Double-crossed by a neon pill/Like a loaded gun, my love/I lost control of the wheel/Double-crossed by a neon pill.” Just like the story of the band over the past five years, the track includes a phoenix-like resurgence: “Knocked down, not out, let\'s roll.”
