Scott Hansen\'s 2019 LP under the Tycho moniker, *Weather*, marked a significant shift in the San Francisco producer’s songwriting: It was his first to prominently feature vocals (specifically those of Texan artist Saint Sinner) amid his reliably chill brand of melodic electronic music. As he hinted at with *Weather*’s 2020 vocal-free companion, *Simulcast*, his focus on purely instrumental music would never truly take a back seat. *Infinite Health*, Hansen\'s seventh proper album, is a return to that gloriously sunny optimism—but it’s also a nod to his influences. For every spacey synth arpeggio (“Phantom,” “Devices”) there’s a post-rock guitar or bass riff from collaborator Zac Brown (“Consciousness Felt,” “Green”). On most of these tracks, those two worlds live together, suggesting that the key to the album title’s generous wish is that thing that every Tycho album manages to achieve: balance.
Historically, the Drops series of EPs has served as a platform for Little Simz to express her more immediate creative thoughts and inner feelings, parallel to—and sometimes in concert with—her fully realized, full-length projects. *Drop 7* presents a curious window into the rapper’s current moment in time, spread across seven snapshots seemingly snatched in the well-timed flash of strobe lights. When she last checked in on a Drops release (battling through lockdown isolation and a bout of self-doubt to create *Drop 6* in 2020) Simz was still a year away from *Sometimes I Might Be Introvert*, the game-changing album that garnered the long-overdue recognition meritorious of such a singular talent. Undeniably at the top of her game right now, Simz channels that potent self-confidence through the fervent, primal Jakwob production—the powerfully still eye in a storm of commanding drums and reverberating echoes. Opening track “Mood Swings” foreshadows the pendulum sweep that occurs between “SOS” and “I Ain’t Feelin It,” separating the EP into two neatly opposing halves. The first is front-loaded with heart-pounding, club-ready beats and an untouchable, unrelenting Simz: “Torch” borrows the signature Jersey-bounce squeak, “Fever” marks a return to São Paulo (the setting for 2021’s collaboration between Jakwob and Simz, “Rollin Stone”) for a bilingual, baile-funk-infused flirtation. The back end sees Simz floating her meditations on the less palatable side of success over intricate, yet reserved instrumentation, closing out with “Far Away,” a lovelorn lament that drenches the racing percussion in melancholic piano chords. Whether or not *Drop 7* is a one-off experiment or an intriguing hint at a new direction, it’s electrifying to experience new facets of Simz’s consummate artistry. She proves herself as compelling as ever.
Arooj Aftab’s star-making 2021 album *Vulture Prince* was marked by a distinct and undeniable sadness—a chronicle of grief following the death of Aftab’s younger brother Maher, whom the record was dedicated to. Despite its many contributors, *Vulture Prince* felt nearly monastic in sound and focus, conjuring images of someone processing pain alone and amidst the cosmos, and since its release, the Pakistani American singer and composer has opened up her sonic world to increasingly thrilling effect. *Love in Exile*, released in 2023, found Aftab expanding the jazz side of her sound in collaboration with jazz pianist Vijay Iyer and multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily, and now her fourth solo album *Night Reign* reflects her biggest leap yet. It’s the kind of record that makes you realize that Aftab can, when it comes to songwriting and style, do pretty much anything—from smoldering balladry à la the late Jeff Buckley and Sade’s endless-sounding quiet storm to trip-hop’s shadowy iridescence—without losing an ounce of raw emotion. Similar to *Vulture Prince*, *Night Reign* features a bevy of notable musicians pitching in throughout: Moor Mother delivers raw incantations over the foreboding structure of “Bolo Na,” while Iyer’s keystrokes are deeply felt across the patient tapestry of “Saaqi” and guitarist Kaki King lends her considerable talents to the refracted jazz-folk of “Last Night Reprise.” But it’s Aftab’s voice—rich, resonant, malleable, and instantly recognizable—that provides the true gravitational pull at the center of *Night Reign*’s universe, echoing through the sparse rustling of “Raat Ki Rani” and shimmering on the surface of the devastating closer “Zameen.” In the press materials for *Night Reign*, Aftab expresses a desire to “make music with and for everybody,” and this record is undoubtedly the fullest realization of those aims yet, revealing new contours in her songwriting and further cementing her as a singular talent in popular music.
On this follow-up to their international breakthrough, 2019’s *Bismillah*, Peter Cat Recording Co.’s lead singer Suryakant Sawhney hands over the mic to multi-instrumentalist Kartik Pillai and bassist Dhruv Bhola on three tracks. Proving that the group are practically a genre unto themselves, each of the 13 tunes—co-composed by all five members—sounds quintessentially PCRC in that they cannily draw on decades-spanning influences to generate something familiar yet fresh. Among the standouts are the buoyantly bitter “People Never Change”, singalong “Seed”, heady rock-out “Connexion” and modern jazz ballad “A Beautiful Life”.
“This album definitely feels like a rebirth,” Empire of the Sun vocalist/guitarist Luke Steele tells Apple Music. It’s an apt description given that the Australian electronic duo—completed by Nick Littlemore—had, for all intents and purposes, quietly called it quits some years earlier. “After the pandemic it was like, everything was abandoned—the Empire is over, it’s finished,” says Steele. “I’m leaving the castle, I don’t care if it becomes overgrown, or bears break in and steal my guitars. I just walked away. That was a great feeling after working together for 20 years to just go, I don’t need it anymore.” Steele pursued his solo album, 2022’s *Listen to the Water*, while Littlemore focused on his longstanding dance project PNAU. Somewhere along the way, though, via phone calls and “little breadcrumbs here and there,” the two halves of the duo reconnected. “You just start realizing what was so special about it in the first place and what was so special about your friendship and how you make music, and what it means to the world as well,” says Steele. The years apart provided a fresh perspective on their creative goals. “We’re much wiser now. We’ve gone through having the worldwide success and through all that mess of trying to remake what was the hit \[‘Walking on a Dream’\]. I think all the trials and tribulations and understanding what was happening, how the band was breaking down and getting kind of diffused and distorted before, we’ve gone through that and understand that now. We feel recharged post-pandemic. We’re back.” Though writing for *Ask That God* began in 2022, Empire revived some of the songs they’d begun working on following the release of 2016 predecessor *Two Vines*. Closing tracks “Rhapsodize” and “Friends I Know” reach back to a series of 2017 sessions in Tokyo (“It was going to be this whole techno Tokyo album, which we scrapped”). “Music on the Radio” hails from 2016, while “Revolve” dates back to the *Two Vines* sessions when they were working with Wendy Melvoin of Prince’s Revolution. The end result hues close to the band’s trademark brand of cosmic indie pop, while incorporating elements such as ’80s British synth-pop (“The Feeling You Get”) and disco (“Music on the Radio”). Here, Steele breaks down some of the key tracks on *Ask That God*, its title a reference to the fact that everyone has a different entity that guides them, spiritual or otherwise. **“Changes”** “This is a collab with Swedish writers Vincent Pontare and Salem Al Fakir \[Madonna, Katy Perry\]. It was obvious that this was what was happening with Empire of the Sun after so many moons. We’re literally evolving into a new phase. And it just sounds like an Empire comeback. It’s got to be the first track!” **“Cherry Blossom”** “I was in Stockholm and we were writing with Fat Max \[Gsus, aka Swedish musician Max Grahn\], who is one of Max Martin’s writers. The first thing he said to me was, ‘All these damn Christians wanting to get people into Heaven. Why don’t they get Heaven into people?’ It took me back a bit. That’s sort of how the theme of the song came about—it’s about realizing the paradise that lies before our eyes and getting Heaven into people as opposed to spending time trying to get people into Heaven.” **“Music on the Radio”** “This is just such a hip jam that Nick brought in, and it’s got his quintessential Nick Littlemore cryptic lyricism, which is so cool. It’s kind of like a rave to the underground, and I instantly fell in love with it. I cut the vocal in two days. It’s quite a snappy song.” **“The Feeling You Get”** “I live in this small fishing town, and I went to an open mic night. Andrew Fagan from \[Aotearoa New Zealand band\] The Mockers had come in and he was dressed as the Statue of Liberty, and he had a spray bottle filled with water. He’s walking around spraying everyone saying, ‘This is the holy water.’ He got up and performed a few songs. He was just so drunk and would fall over into the amp, but get back up. The next day, I basically wrote ‘The Feeling You Get,’ and it was influenced by that. You don’t know sometimes what you do, why you do things, why you should do something and why you don’t do something, but you do. It’s just the feeling you get.” **“Happy Like You”** “What a beautiful song. You really value joy after you’ve been through a massive depression. I really value peace now after living in America. When you go through those depressions and you look at someone smiling, your heart just breaks. You’re like, I just want to feel like that without this heavy burden on my shoulders.” **“Revolve”** “It was when I’d come back to Los Angeles after leaving, and feeling the whole city shake and the ground shake and realizing, ‘I’m not meant to live here anymore.’ It’s quite obvious.” **“Ask That God”** “One of our best fans on socials would message us on every single post. She went into hospital because she was sick, and then died in hospital. It was a real shock. At the time, we were in the studio writing a song called ‘Eternal.’ But we wrote ‘Ask That God’ pretty much that night.” **“Rhapsodize”** “We’re always fascinated by the toys of Japan and them sort of \[having\] a life of their own. The narrator \[*Avatar: The Last Airbender*’s André Sogliuzzo\] is basically telling the robot words and teaching him languages, and then he starts going through the different animals that God’s made, and you slowly hear the robot getting its tongue around them.” **“Friends I Know”** “‘Friends I Know’ was written from the perspective of sitting in those small Japanese bars late at night. We’ve had that song forever, and I got my son to do that ‘Goodnight, my friend, sweet dreams’ \[line at the end\]. And it felt like such a beautiful closer, that sentiment, like everyone’s kind of your friend. It touches a little bit on that bent sort of Japanese element that we wanted to bring in with ‘Rhapsodize.’”
“I live in a weird world,” Allie X declares at the start of her third album, but really, it’s a line she could’ve sung at any point in her career to date. Though her penchant for electropop earworms has put her in the writers’ room for major artists like BTS and Troye Sivan, the chameleonic LA-based singer/producer has always a harbored the soul of a misfit, an outsider identity cultivated by a lifetime battle with an autoimmune illness and her formative years in Toronto’s late-2000s indie-rock scene. Allie’s semi-autobiographical 2020 album, *Cape God*, was a testament to her alt/pop-crossover savvy, pulling in guest features from Sivan and Mitski and contributions from songwriting pros like Simon Wilcox and JP Saxe. But *Girl With No Face* is all Allie: During the pandemic, Allie was forced to go the DIY route behind the boards—a steep learning curve that accounts for the album’s nearly four-year gestation. But within those technical limitations, she found the freedom to be her truest self—*Girl With No Face* is an in-your-face hit of futurist pop informed by the icy synthscapes of Kraftwerk and post-goth textures of New Order as much as the empowering dance-tent anthems of Madonna and Lady Gaga. “This is probably the most cohesive thing that I\'ve done,” Allie tells Apple Music. “It just happened naturally, because it was only me, and it was only my taste. I definitely was intentional about this sound—it sort of became an antidote to a lot of the commercial pop world that I literally live inside of in Los Angeles. So this is where I\'ve been musically, just loving that UK post-punk spirit of the early ’80s a few years now. I just can\'t get enough of it.” Here, Allie X peels back the layers on *Girl With No Face*, track by track. **“Weird World”** “This was written at the beginning of the pandemic, when there was this uncertainty and dystopian feeling that I think everybody had. But I was also coming to terms with the reality of my career. The *Cape God* period had been so busy and then it all just came to a halt very quickly, so I was able to look under the hood of the car and realize everything was very tangled and twisted and not sustainable. So \'Weird World\' sort of coincided with this decision I made to make a lot of changes and transitions both creatively and within my business. The \'weird world\' is this idea of seeing things as they actually are, and how that can actually be an empowering moment, even though it\'s a sad moment.” **“Girl With No Face”** “I\'ve been trying to figure out who this song is about. It just flowed sort of through me when I co-wrote it with my partner, George Pimentel. I got a sense that she was like this sort of vengeful figure who\'s maybe kind of witty. But now I think of \'the girl with no face\' as this presence that emerged as I was alone in a room for years writing this record. She’s like this layer of myself, or this ghost or this voice in the room with me that could be heard but not seen, and she gave me the strength and the aggression that I needed to get through this project. She’s my invisible muse—my cunty muse!” **“Off With Her Tits”** “It\'s hard for me to get too in detail on this one, because I just like this song to speak for itself. The best thing I can say about the song is that it’s a ridiculous satirization of torturous thoughts, where I felt like I could take some power back by just making fun of them.” **“John and Jonathan”** “I was at a fan meet-and-greet in New York in 2018, and two fans came up and were like, \'Hi, I\'m John, and this is my boyfriend, Jonathan. We love your music!\' And I was like, ‘Wait—your names are John and Jonathan? Okay, I gotta write a song called “John and Jonathan”!’ I was on a walk in \[the Toronto suburb of\] Oakville near my parents’ house with my boyfriend, and I remember being on a pier and it just came to me: \'John and Jonathan/Are on the town.\' I got so excited and went back home and just started recording right away. I\'ve written so many of my most successful songs in Oakville at my parents\' dining room table.” **“Galina”** “I have really bad eczema in my inner elbows, and I found this Russian lady named Galina at this naturopathic clinic in Toronto. For years, she made me this cream in her kitchen that worked better than steroids. She would always say, \'It cost me more to make this than I\'m charging you. I get this man in the Swiss Alps to gather these herbs and I make you this cream.\' She was pretty old, so I always worried: \'What happens when Galina retires? It\'s not like this is some patented product.\' So sure enough, in the summer of 2022, I returned to the clinic, and I was like, \'Could I place an order for the cream from Galina?\' And the lady was like, \'Oh, Galina has retired.\' And I was like, ‘What!?! Did she tell anyone the recipe?\' And she was like, \'No, she won\'t tell. There\'s nothing we can do—Galina has lost her memory.\' So the song is about somebody that you\'ve come to rely on who just coldly leaves your life without something that you need.” **“Hardware Software”** “This was not something I thought about intentionally, I just sort of improvised it. And I imagine those words came out because I had been spending so much time in front of a computer. I just remember doing that silly rap and cracking myself up, by myself.” **“Black Eye”** “I\'ve never dealt with physical domestic abuse; my abuse comes more from just the way that I treat myself and my own body. I always feel like I\'m almost willing to throw myself out of a building for the sake of art or for the sake of my career. That\'s what this song is about: my life experience of having a body that is quite fragile. It\'s not supposed to do a lot of the stuff that I make it do. There\'s all this stress and all these physical challenges that I subjected myself to over and over. So \'Black Eye\' is about how it almost starts to feel natural doing that. And it starts to feel like a high—and that\'s when it gets really scary, when these things that are definitely bad for you start to feel good in a way. But there\'s also wit in those lyrics and in the idea of, like, ‘Yeah, bring it on.’” **“You Slept on Me”** “This song was inspired by a tweet that I\'ve seen over and over throughout my career: ‘Y’all are sleeping on Allie X.’ So I thought I\'d just have a bit of fun with that.” **“Saddest Smile”** “I think I\'m commenting on my tendency to be melancholic, and the idea that if there isn\'t some pain behind a smile, I don\'t believe it. Like, I don\'t believe it in myself, and I don\'t believe it in others. Unfortunately, I believe in the struggle—that\'s so deeply ingrained in me. I have this core belief that things aren\'t worth it unless there was some painful journey to get there. It\'s a belief that I\'d like to get rid of—I\'ve discussed it in therapy. It\'s very strong in me.” **“Staying Power”** “I wrote this after having a really rough year, health-wise. \'Staying Power\' is an acknowledgment of my superpower as I see it, which is a really high pain tolerance. It\'s very direct and very sarcastic. This feels like me having a conversation with someone that I\'m really close and comfortable with.” **“Truly Dreams”** “This was a co-write with my partner, and it has a funk in there that wouldn\'t have been there if I had written it myself. So because of the bounciness of the song, I just went to this more optimistic disco kind of place. I always had drag queens in mind when I wrote this. I really relate to drag queens, and this idea that we can put on our look and get out there and live our fantasy. Like ‘Staying Power,’ it\'s a perseverance song, but in a more fantastical way.”
In the early 2000s, few would have bet on The Libertines making it to a fourth album album at all, let alone one as robust as *All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade*. Intra-band strife, prison, and Pete Doherty’s well-documented drug problems seemed to have scuppered the mercurial talent shown on 2002 debut *Up the Bracket* and 2004’s self-titled follow-up for good. However, following 2015’s galvanizing reformation album, *Anthems for Doomed Youth*, *All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade* finds the good ship Albion coming ashore with one of the strongest sets of songs of the band’s career. On an album recorded at The Albion Rooms, the group’s studio-cum-hotel in (UK seaside town) Margate, Kent, the ramshackle charm which sometimes felt like their songs could collapse at any moment has been bolstered by something far more muscular and sturdy. Rollicking opening track “Run Run Run” lands like The Clash at their anthemic peak, while closer “Songs They Never Play on the Radio” transforms a tune Doherty has been tinkering with in various forms for years into a swooning, Beatles-esque ballad. Where Libertines songs of old sprung from a mythical vision of England conjured from Doherty and fellow singer/guitarist/songwriter Carl Barât’s imagination, here they’re more rooted in the here and now. “Mustangs” is populated by a litany of colorful characters observed around Margate, Barât singing about day-drinking mums, day-dreaming nuns, and 24/7 ne’er-do-wells over a glorious Stones-y groove. While “Merry Old England” looks at a land of discarded crisp packets and B&B vouchers from the perspective of migrants traveling to the UK looking for work. “It’s a rich tapestry,” Doherty tells Apple Music. “It’s not just about Margate, it’s about England. I don’t think the English realize how the rest of the world gazes upon us with curiosity and wonder and bafflement, really.” Read on for Doherty and Barât’s track-by-track guide. **“Run Run Run”** PD: “It’s a bit of a belter that one, I love it. It’s got a bit of a Squeeze thing going on.” CB: “The song doesn’t have to be about running away from your past. It’s about running because that’s what you do. It can be in terror, or it can be a thing of great elation or purpose.” PD: “It’s just how you get your kicks, baby.” CB: “Yeah. It can be processing a trauma or getting your kicks. Either way.” **“Mustangs”** PD: “We spent an endless amount of time trying to get this together which isn’t normally our style. At one point it had 10 verses.” CB: “It was like a Velvet Underground epic. It was my \[T.S. Eliot poem\] ‘The Waste Land.’ It took a lot of shuffling in the sand to get that one to settle. It’s got a summer air to it, that kind of looseness. It’s got a Lou Reed-y narrative to it about all these characters in Margate.” **“I Have a Friend”** CB: “That’s a topical song given it’s about war and what’s going on in Ukraine.” PD: “It’s hard to look away from that. A few of us in the band have got Russian and Ukrainian roots. It was too much for me to take, we had to sit down and talk about it which merged into ‘I Have a Friend.’ It was just a desperate cry from all the darkness and confusion of all of this. I kept saying, ‘NATO are going to step in any day, are we too old to enlist?’ I said to my wife, ‘We can’t just sit here and watch it, we’ve got to go!’ She said, ’We’ve got a two-week-old baby.’” **“Merry Old England”** PD: “The people who travel here and risk life and limb to come to England and try and make a life for themselves is something we spend quite a lot of time talking about. A lot of these people are trained doctors, they speak four or five languages. It’s not that I’m pro-illegal immigration, I’ve just got this thing against borders. It’s very easy to create fear and anger and hostility about people.” CB: “It’s about discussing something that’s topical. There’s no didactic approach from us. Maybe we do have opinions, but it’s just a good song.” **“Man With the Melody”** CB: “That’s as old as time, that song.” PD: “From back when we were in Kentish Town. We didn’t have a B&B or our own recording studio or a bar. All we had was John \[Hassall, bassist\]’s basement with our little amps. He’d sit there in his skintight Dairy Queen T-shirt and his cowboy boots strumming this mad little song. We were secretly jealous of it because it was so melodic. So we took it apart, stripped it down and put it back together, put our own bits in and gave it a lick of paint. It’s got this creeping, gothic, Bram Stoker-ish element to it.” CB: “That’s Gary \[Powell, drummer\]’s singing debut. I think it’s the first time we’ve all sung on a song and shared it like that.” **“Oh Shit”** CB: “It’s essentially about the proprietor of The Albion Rooms and her husband. It’s about these young people jacking in their lives and just doing something different and worlds apart. It’s that sort of romance of the road, having no regard for their own immediate safety or life past what’s just straight in front of their faces, and being in love and all the experiences that come with that.” **“Night of the Hunter”** PD: “There’s a lot of references to tattoos. I’ve always been fascinated by that thing of ‘love’ and ‘hate’ tattooed on the knuckles. When we play it live it really slows down and I like this idea of all these people singing along to ‘ACAB’ which stands for ‘All coppers are bastards,’ which is an old skinhead tattoo. Prison is mostly full of young men, but you always get that old lag in there and they’ve got these weird tattoos and you make the mistake of asking, ‘Oh, what do those dots mean?’ Then you’re like, ‘Oh, fuck…’ You hear some really dark stuff.” **“Baron’s Claw”** PD: “That was mostly born in The Albion Rooms. We were all sleeping there and trying to put the album together. I had these chords and I was playing them and Carl’s room is directly above where I was sitting. It was six or seven in the morning and I was playing it louder and louder, just hoping that it would somehow penetrate his dreams. So I opened the window and then I was playing it on the stairs. He finally came down a bit grumpy, as he tends to be in the morning, and I thought, ‘I’ll wait for him to say something…’ And he didn’t. I waited and waited and then finally I got a little ‘So, was that a new tune, then?’ \[from him\]. Because I don’t think he believed it was.” CB: “You’re lucky. In the old days, if you were playing outside my window I would have told you to shut the fuck up.” PD: “The song’s about this quite shameful episode in our history when we \[Britain\] funded the White Russians against the Bolsheviks. This guy is over there with a unit of White Russians fighting the Red Army and then comes back without a hand. Is it based on a true story? Why not? It could have happened!” **“Shiver”** PD: “If you did a DNA test on that song it would be 23 percent me, 25 percent American bully, a bit of sausage dog, a bit of Scottish terrier, a dash of dachshund…It went on a lot of weird deviations that song.” CB: “We were in Jamaica and we wrote a really misty-eyed ballad about 25 years of friendship and going from rack and ruin and dreams and reasons for staying alive. We cut it down and used the middle eight for ‘Shiver’ and the other song got thrown on the scrapheap. That’s how decadent art can be.” PD: “It turns out with ‘Shiver’ that we’ve actually made a half-decent pop song. That song’s had more radio play in its first month than \[debut single\] ‘What a Waster’ has had in 25 years.” **“Be Young”** PD: “The message of this song was to be young and fall in love, because we were coming out with all this depressing data about the planet’s impending doom. We wrote it in Jamaica as this hurricane was crashing through the Caribbean. We just thought, ‘Well, we’ve got all this stuff in here about being born astride a grave and the world boiling in oil, so let’s throw in a chorus about just being young and in love.’” CB: “It’s difficult to write a song like that. Jim Morrison could say, ‘I just want to get my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames.’ But he died in 1971, do you know what I mean? Now, you can’t have that mentality. You can’t say, ‘Just be young and fall in love.’” PD: “A lot of people do though, a lot of them just don’t give a fuck.” CB: “And more fool them.” **“Songs They Never Play on the Radio”** PD: “We got that song together years ago, at the very beginning. It’s got a checkered past. It’s like an old mate who you really believed in and you’ll always have a place for him in your heart, but he just sort of seemed to fade away. But then, it turns out he’s written the jingle for the new Audi advert and he’s sitting in a fucking mansion.” CB: “The bastard.” PD: “I took it under my wing and made it all jangly and jazzy. I could never quite do it with Babyshambles and I could never quite do it on my own, so I brought it to the table for this one. And then John said, ‘Why don’t you try it like this?’ He turned it into this Beatles thing, and it completely turned it on its head. I was aghast. We wrote another verse, gave it a lick of paint and here it is.”
Faye Webster’s fifth album marks the point of full immersion when it comes to the Atlanta songwriting prodigy’s sly, shifting aesthetic. The tones are richer and deeper; the arrangements expand and breathe like massive lungs; her voice layers over itself and ripples, decadent and deeply felt. Webster’s genre-blending approach may have been slightly overstated in the past—a result of her early association with Atlanta’s rascally, defunct hip-hop crew Awful Records—but her sonic playfulness has never been more fully realized than it is on on *Underdressed at the Symphony*. Slinky, flute-dotted R&B is situated up against sumptuous country pop and grungy flips on ’50s sock-hop rock music; longtime friend and rap chameleon Lil Yachty pops up on “Lego Ring” as the pair switch off from a Weezer-esque chug to spacey, astral psych-rock. Lyrically, *Underdressed at the Symphony*—which was written and recorded coming off of a breakup—carries Webster’s now-trademarked mixture of emotional intimacy and straightforward humor. She finds potency in simple sentiments (“Thinking About You,” “He Loves Me Yeah!”), and on the sparse hyperpop “Feeling Good Today,” she details the small pleasures that come with moving through one’s daily existence. “I used to be self-conscious/Well, really, I still am/I’m just better at figuring out why,” Webster ruminates over the lush guitars of “Wanna Quit All the Time,” one of several songs that feature Wilco guitarist Nels Cline. This is music that’s as mesmerizing as it is disarmingly personal, and *Underdressed at the Symphony* represents an artist who, similar to cosmic kin Cass McCombs, seems increasingly intent on proving she really can do anything.
Veteran LA noise-rock trio HEALTH’s 2023 LP *RAT WARS* builds on their noise-centric industrial exercises, accentuating their hardcore tendencies with dance grooves, haunted synths, and wall-of-sound guitar lines. Taking influences from Nine Inch Nails, Ministry, and contemporaries like A Place to Bury Strangers, HEALTH builds deeply twisted odes to sweaty nights on the club floor and long mornings trying to fend off the sun. Like its predecessor, 2019’s *VOL. 4 :: SLAVES OF FEAR*, *RAT WARS* blends pain and catharsis, emptiness and ecstasy. On “UNLOVED,” the trio of Benjamin Miller, Jake Duzsik, and John Famiglietti cook up a track built around military-grade snare drums, gnarling synths, and hi-hats that slosh like boots in deep rain puddles. Duzsik takes the vocal lead, conjuring up a deeply dark tale as he croons in an almost-snarl, “And it was not my fault you were unloved when you were a child/I wasn\'t there.”
“If I was stuck in the studio and needed lyrics, we would sit in the pub and have a beer,” Royel Otis singer-guitarist Otis Pavlovic tells Apple Music of Pratts & Payne, the pub he and Royel Maddell named their debut album after. “And it would kind of work itself out from there.” The pub was located in South London—don’t go looking for it, it doesn’t exist anymore—just around the corner from producer Dan Carey’s studio. Working with the man who’s helmed albums by Fontaines D.C., Wet Leg, and Foals was a by-product of the Sydney duo’s desire to experiment. “We’d always worked with the same people, so I think we wanted to see what it was like to work with someone else in a completely different environment,” says guitarist Maddell. “He’s a wizard. He’s so cool. He’s very intimidating, but he’s the sweetest intimidating guy in the world.” During three weeks of recording, Carey embellished Royel Otis’ loose-limbed, woozy indie pop with samples, loops, and synths, though never at the expense of the band’s musical DNA. Here, Maddell and Pavlovic take us through *PRATTS & PAIN*, track by track. **“Adored”** Otis Pavlovic: “Sonically, I think it\'s a good opener to the record. It\'s a bit fast and hard-ish. It just talks about self-care and promoting self-pleasure.” Royel Maddell: “Masturbation. It’s something you shouldn\'t be ashamed of.” **“Fried Rice”** RM: “It\'s about being at a party, but the party is an orgy that you didn\'t realize you were getting yourself into, and you want to leave with the one girl but they want to stay and really take it all in.” OP: “She wants multiple slices of the cake.” RM: “Is it based on experience? Yeah, there was a New Year\'s Eve party one time. There was a lot of inspiration drawn from that.” **“Foam”** RM: “That one just started with a bass riff. During COVID I bought a bass, \[and\] it was an exercise I was doing to get better and it ended up being a decent riff. And we built from there. And then I think one of us got a message that annoyed us. We were just like, ‘Are you fucking serious? Why is this person even talking about me right now?’ It’s a pretty aggressive song, but sung in a melodic way that\'s not aggressive.” OP: “If you read the lyrics you’d probably think this is a hectic song, but it doesn’t really come across that way.” **“Sonic Blue”** RM: “I was seeing a girl for a little bit, and she didn\'t drink, didn\'t do drugs. She had her head together and was really career-driven, while I was just a bit of a mess and being like, I’ve got to get my shit together. But it was making me depressed that I didn\'t have my shit together. It\'s a spiral.” **“Heading for the Door”** RM: “It was something we used to jam on quite a bit. I think we were even doing it for the first EP, but we just didn\'t quite get the vocal parts done. But that\'s about the realization that your relationship might be failing, and the nonsensical arguments that you have.” **“Velvet”** RM: “‘Velvet’ is like the entire evolution of a failing relationship.” OP: “Dan’s \[11-year-old\] nephew plays drums on it. We recorded it all live, pretty much.” RM: “He had a really bombastic way of playing. He was like a mini Ringo Starr. He was real cool and excited and hit hard.” **“IHYSM”** OP: “It talks about \[dating\] someone \[who’s\] too into it and then becomes a bit of a hassle.” RM: “Just being pestered by someone who won\'t leave you alone. Even the people you love can be so annoying.” OP: “It’s about feeling the weight of someone.” RM: “Feeling like they\'re putting too much pressure on you.” **“Molly”** RM: “We were doing all these sessions with all these different producers, just seeing if it gelled, and we met up with James Ford \[Arctic Monkeys\] and worked on this. And he had this crazy harp thing that we played with a bow to make that distressing string sound, and it became really dark. We didn\'t quite have it finished and we took it to Dan, and Dan showed us this instrument that he invented that could hit really crazy low notes, and we tried to make it as sinister as possible. It’s just kind of depressing.” **“Daisy Chain”** OP: “This \[came\] after we recorded the album with Dan. And we were like, maybe there\'s space for a more positive, uplifting song, so we recorded this in Byron and then sent it over to Dan and he mixed it and added a bunch of things.” RM: “We did it with Chris Collins. He\'s amazing.” **“Sofa King”** RM: “That\'s about feeling like you\'re not moving as fast as other people. People are having careers or buying a house or getting married—all that Disney shit—while you\'re just sitting on the couch, enjoying some Netflix.” **“Glory to Glory”** RM: “I think we got the name when we were in an Uber on the way to Dan’s studio. I think it was on a laundromat or something. I don\'t think it said ‘Glory to Glory,’ but it looked like it did. That was one we came up with in the morning before heading to the studio, and then we just had fun with it. Dan plays bass on it, and he\'s an amazing bass player. It’s my favorite track on the album. And I think that’s a lot to do with how it came out and how easy it happened.” **“Always Always”** OP: “That was one of the first ones we ever worked on together. Roy had a little sunroom where he’d set up his computer and recording stuff. But I think that’s about someone being away and not being near them. Like you’re living different lives, but you can still think about them a bit.” **“Big Ciggie”** RM: “I\'ve noticed that everyone says the same thing at funerals. And I just think you shouldn\'t shy away from saying something shit about someone at a funeral. Be honest. Not everyone\'s the greatest and the warmest and the kindest and most thoughtful. So at a funeral, be like, ‘They were shit, but they were endearing and I loved them the way they were.’ I think it\'s more important loving someone the way they are even though they\'ve got shit qualities, rather than just loving them only if they’re perfect.”
British producer Jon Hopkins has long been interested in how music and other forms of art or meditation might assist a person in achieving altered states of consciousness. His last solo studio album was entitled *Music for Psychedelic Therapy*, its tracks bathed in hazy, dewlike static, bits of birdsong, and some spoken word from New Age guru Ram Dass. Not long after making it, Hopkins was commissioned to compose an audio piece for an art exhibit involving a Dreamachine—a stroboscopic light machine that, when experienced with eyes closed, had the potential to trigger a psychedelic response (or the occasional convulsion, but enough about that!) in its user. That soundtrack sowed the seeds for *RITUAL*, which serves as a partner of sorts to the gauzy, ethereal *Music for Psychedelic Therapy*. But while it keeps in a similar vein of music to facilitate forms of transcendence, *RITUAL* is decidedly more active. Produced with an icier sound palette, a slightly darker edge, and some percussive, rhythmic elements that were absent in the previous album, these connected pieces build and contract as they move over peaks and into valleys. Tracks such as “palace / illusion” and “transcend / lament,” both produced with musician and healing-arts practitioner Vylana, offer moments of sunny daybreak, but they’re always counterbalanced with almost sneaky, minor-key undercurrents. The latter suitably segues into “the veil”—a gothy, weighty piece that could alternately soundtrack a spiritual experience or a cinematic one—before moving toward the climactic “solar goddess return.” Electronic musicians often speak of their compositions or DJ mixes as sonic journeys. Without explicitly doing so himself, Hopkins’ albums actually are.
In the video for Sleater-Kinney’s “Untidy Creature,” freediver Amber Bourke spends two and a half minutes on her back, eyes closed, holding her breath under the water of a full bathtub. That peaceful-seeming setup, juxtaposed with Bourke\'s re-oxygenating gasps, is an apt metaphor for the tension, anxiety, vulnerability, and catharsis that characterize the Portland, Oregon, band’s 11th LP (and second as a duo following the departure of longtime drummer Janet Weiss), *Little Rope*. “The album is playing with ideas and feelings and sentiments that could be either or both,” guitarist/vocalist Carrie Brownstein, one half of the duo alongside vocalist/guitarist Corin Tucker, tells Apple Music. “So a little rope could signify the darkest moment for someone, a desire to end it all, but it could also conversely be the thing that someone throws to you to rescue you, to pull you from the muck and the mud.” Over the last couple of years, Sleater-Kinney has experienced a lot more than just muck and mud. In late 2022, just as the band had started writing the album, Brownstein\'s mother and stepfather died in a car accident while traveling overseas. “There was a sense of fragility and also disorientation,” Brownstein says of that time. “So the act of playing guitar, I understood that ritual. I knew what to do with my hands. So Corin brought me songs instead of baking cakes or bringing me food. Part of it was just tending to this world that we have spent nearly three decades building—and songs were something that were still very much alive. And because the stakes felt higher, I just wanted every song to be perfect.” Here Brownstein and Tucker explain how they made that happen. **“Hell”** Corin Tucker: “This song really came about organically when I was in a record store listening to music in LA. It was one of those moments where the lyrics just started coming to me and the emotion of feeling like I was having this revelation about what we normalize in our society, the way that we normalize violence, the way that we have accommodated it. It\'s supposed to be a moment of shock of waking up to that and realizing it in that moment.” **“Needlessly Wild”** Carrie Brownstein: “I\'ve always been a scrappy, irascible person, and I think this song reckons with outsize emotions that no longer feel sanctioned and that feeling of continual clumsiness, or confusion, or almost being feral. I kept wanting to change the lyrics from the demo version, which said \'needlessly wild\' over and over again. But Corin and John Congleton, our producer, liked it better when it was more lyrically austere. And I finally realized that the repetition was the song—that the whole point was that there wasn\'t an escape route, and that we\'re not going to find a different end to this repetitive line, just like we can\'t write alternative endings for things that we don\'t want or like the outcomes to.” **“Say It Like You Mean It”** CT: “This song is about when you realize that your time with the people you care about the most, it will come to an end, and you may not know exactly when that\'s going to be or how it\'s going to take shape, but you definitely will be saying goodbye. And it\'s about the wide range of emotions that come with that: acceptance, the tender feelings, and also a feeling of frustration and even anger in the imperfection of the intimacy that we have together during the time that we have.” **“Hunt You Down”** CB: “I was listening to a podcast that featured an interview with a poet, an undertaker named Thomas Lynch. And he was talking about a meeting he had with a father as they were planning the burial of this man\'s child, and the father said to Thomas Lynch, \'The thing you fear the most will hunt you down.\' It was such a striking and devastating line, and it had such an axiomatic quality to it. It is just the truth. This sounds very depressing, but the music of the song—the rhythm, the vocal melody—it\'s catchy. The more you sing something—even if there\'s pain or sadness in the lyrics—when you put that over something that actually buoys you, it can change the meaning of what that is until there\'s freedom in letting go of that great fear.” **“Small Finds”** CT: “When we started playing this song, it was just kind of like a jam on guitar. It’s a weird song. It definitely comes from our love of discordant guitar—bands like Television and Sonic Youth—and music that has some real grit to it. And then the fun of it is making a puzzle that works as a song. With the lyrics and the vocals, I wanted to do something that gave it a bit of swing into a catchier song, so that it had a story to it that wasn\'t just bits and pieces. So the character in it is a dog, and it\'s about taking away all of that cerebral angst that we live with every day, and we worry about things and getting into our bodies and thinking about, ‘Well, what is meaningful in the everyday life? What is some joy I can seek out?’” **“Don\'t Feel Right”** CB: “This is that duality between dark and light. To me, when I was writing it, we needed a fast song. I like songs that feel like songs you drive around to. It\'s such a classic way of listening to music. And I wanted a song that you could sit inside and go on a journey with, musically. It has that repeating riff and this just constant drive to it. When we sing the chorus, it really conjures Tom Petty to me, who I think is very good at taking heartbreak and heartache and turning it into something melodious.” **“Six Mistakes”** CT: “I think it was something that we were messing around with sonically to have it be like a New Wave or Devo song. But as we got into the studio with the rest of the songs and the emotion and the rawness of everything, it took it to this very heightened level, where it\'s a song about feeling outside of being loved, and outside of being seen. So it\'s almost a character of a woman who can\'t understand why people can\'t see her. That\'s something that I think comes up on this record a lot: aging and feeling like a woman—your identity really changes over time, and taking back your power with that and playing with it.” **“Crusader”** CB: “There\'s a handful of methodologies with which we work, and one is just Corin and I still sitting in a room together playing guitar, and you can hear that on this song or \'Small Finds,\' just that very fundamental, central Sleater-Kinney quality of intertwining, angular guitar lines. Thematically this song zooms out a little bit, surveys the landscape, grappling with this harsh reality that\'s sometimes unimaginable and that\'s grown dire. And just the idea that someone\'s very existence is a threat to someone else, and the trespasses on bodily autonomy. I think the song imagines that instead of shrinking, you grow to possess something grander and brighter. It\'s a little bit of a hype song in the middle of a broader narrative—of this album that is about resistance and grappling with smallness and self-effacement.” **“Dress Yourself”** CB: “This song speaks to the modern-day predicament of somehow getting out of bed and getting ourselves prepared for the day, despite all of the existential threats. It\'s almost shocking what great pretenders we all are, and the normalcy and steadiness that we can project out into the world. It\'s a rallying cry for those of us who can\'t believe we\'re upright every day.” **“Untidy Creature”** CT: “This one’s meant to be a very personal story about feeling trapped in a relationship, but it\'s also meant to look out as a window on what women are going through in this country in the past couple of years, losing our bodily autonomy, losing our sense of being able to control our own destiny. And so it\'s meant to mirror the personal and the broader world at the same time.”
Callahan comes alive in Chicago, with Jim White, Matt Kinsey and special guests Nick Mazzarella, Pascal Kerong'A, Nathaniel Ballinger and Natural Information Society’s Joshua Abrams & Lisa Alvarado. Why, Bill? “Songs tend to mutate after they've been recorded. These songs were mutating faster than usual. Like whatever happened to Bruce Banner in the lab – I knew these songs were about to get superpowers… this change needed to be documented.”
Charley Crockett is a rare talent. His voice is one of country music’s finest, a rich baritone with a natural ache and emotion-wringing agility. That he pairs such a voice with an equally powerful flair for storytelling lands him among the ranks of the genre’s new saviors, like Tyler Childers or Sturgill Simpson, but with a style and sound all his own. That sound owes a lot to Crockett’s home state of Texas, which often serves as a character in his narrative-driven songs. On *$10 Cowboy*, Crockett found inspiration on the road, writing much of the album while touring in support of its predecessor, 2022’s concept record *The Man From Waco*. That journeyman’s perspective brings us stories of hitting rock bottom (“Gettin’ Tired Again”), chasing Lady Luck (“Ain’t Done Losing Yet”), and hanging on to love while “empire…rule\[s\] the world” (“Diamond in the Rough”). A can’t-miss tune on the record is “America,” a plainspoken, heart-wrenching lament of a fearsome, unforgiving country. Crockett cut *$10 Cowboy* live to tape at Austin’s Arlyn Studios with his longtime band and a string of ringers, with Billy Horton co-producing.
On Wallows’ third LP, *Model*, the alternative trio from LA wanted to prove how far they’d come since their emergence in 2017 and early albums like 2019’s *Nothing Happens*. That record, plus its follow-up, *Tell Me That It\'s Over*, positioned the group as one of alt-rock’s most restless groups. In *Model*, they take that philosophy and extend it a step forward, joyfully moving from anthemic pop to post-punk to odes to heartbreak. Take the album’s first track, “Your Apartment,” which features a galloping drum groove that lands somewhere between the dance punk of LCD Soundsystem and the propulsive beat of Bloc Party. Piano chords highlight Dylan Minnette’s yearning vocals as he sings: “Who said I don\'t understand or that I probably won\'t remember/Time in the palm of your hand, we both let go together/But I promise, I get your sentiment/I wonder who\'s been at your apartment.” He’s equal parts defiant and heartbroken, creating a complex, emotive ass-kicker of an album opener. On its follow-up, “Anytime, Always,” they capture the crisp precision of The Strokes, and the specificity with which they arrange instrumentations signals a clear growth for the band.
“We’re very lucky to move here and we’ve been loving it,” Confidence Man’s Sugar Bones—Aidan Moore—tells Apple Music, reflecting on the act’s relocation to London. “\[We’re\] figuring it out and just having lots of fun in a new place. And it really rubbed off on this album.” Energetically co-fronted by Moore and fellow vocalist Janet Planet (Grace Stephenson) over dynamic, nostalgic backing from producers Reggie Goodchild and Clarence McGuffie, Confidence Man taps into that fresh thrill of exploring a new place on its third album. From the nocturnal headiness of the title track to the bratty festival fun of “BREAKBEAT”—on which Planet announces that she’s not dropping the pill in her pocket until she hears the titular rhythmic flourish—the record celebrates partying at any hour in any setting. Read on as Moore takes us behind the scenes on five extra-playful tracks in particular. **“WHO KNOWS WHAT YOU’LL FIND?”** “This song took a while to piece together. But once we figured out that we had to smash two songs together, it happened really quick, and we knew we were onto something good. It’s just a really dreamy track. It has a nice float to it—and also that killer riff. The perfect setting for this would be if you’re in bed really, really relaxed, and you’ve got the best set of headphones, and you’re getting a foot rub and watching a movie set in London. Yeah, that’s probably it.” **“I CAN’T LOSE YOU”** “It’s about being out of it and wasted in a strange situation, but managing to find a connection amongst it—and just that human urge to find other people and stick with them. We actually thought this beat was someone else’s: we hit them up to try and get the stems, and then realized that it was actually just one of Reggie’s old beats. So props to Reggie for forgetting such a good beat. Then it came really quickly. It goes off live. It’s just got that big pop energy, and the crowd seems to start bouncing when it starts hitting. We wanted this track to be a big, anthemic, festival pop moment.” **“SICKO”** “We went out to the bush for a couple of days \[near Melbourne\] and set up our studio, and that track came out of nowhere. But it was shelved for a while, until we were back in London six months later. We pulled it off and gave it another run, and it scrubbed up so well. We really just wanted to push that dark, creepy, kind of sexy angle. If you wanted the perfect setting for this, you’d be strutting down an alleyway and there’s thousands of photographers peering out the buildings, taking photos of you from the storeys above, and you are just looking so damn good.” **“JANET”** “‘Janet’ is a bit more light-hearted. We just wanted to capture our weird relationship and put it down on paper. We really wanted something fun and light and summery with this track. It’s actually based off a sample, which the astute dance connoisseur will probably be able to pick up. Can you figure it out?” **“3AM (LA LA LA)”** “This is another late-night venture that’s really just trying to capture that hysteria and energy and sort of angst that you can feel in those early hours, especially when you’ve had a few. We haven’t played this song live yet but it’s a big band favorite, so I know when we do it’s going to be absolutely nuts. We realized with this song that it would be a journey track from the start. It’s just got that deeper vibe to it: a little less pop, but it’s just so moody. You should probably listen to this one not in the sun at all, \[but\] in a deep, dark club somewhere underground. With your friends still but, yeah, no sun for this one.”
