KCRW's 21 Best Albums of 2021

“I don’t like to agonize over things,” Arlo Parks tells Apple Music. “It can tarnish the magic a little. Usually a song will take an hour or less from conception to end. If I listen back and it’s how I pictured it, I move on.” The West London poet-turned-songwriter is right to trust her “gut feeling.” *Collapsed in Sunbeams* is a debut album that crystallizes her talent for chronicling sadness and optimism in universally felt indie-pop confessionals. “I wanted a sense of balance,” she says. “The record had to face the difficult parts of life in a way that was unflinching but without feeling all-consuming and miserable. It also needed to carry that undertone of hope, without feeling naive. It had to reflect the bittersweet quality of being alive.” *Collapsed in Sunbeams* achieves all this, scrapbooking adolescent milestones and Parks’ own sonic evolution to form something quite spectacular. Here, she talks us through her work, track by track. **Collapsed in Sunbeams** “I knew that I wanted poetry in the album, but I wasn\'t quite sure where it was going to sit. This spoken-word piece is actually the last thing that I did for the album, and I recorded it in my bedroom. I liked the idea of speaking to the listener in a way that felt intimate—I wanted to acknowledge the fact that even though the stories in the album are about me, my life and my world, I\'m also embarking on this journey with listeners. I wanted to create an avalanche of imagery. I’ve always gravitated towards very sensory writers—people like Zadie Smith or Eileen Myles who hone in on those little details. I also wanted to explore the idea of healing, growth, and making peace with yourself in a holistic way. Because this album is about those first times where I fell in love, where I felt pain, where I stood up for myself, and where I set boundaries.” **Hurt** “I was coming off the back of writer\'s block and feeling quite paralyzed by the idea of making an album. It felt quite daunting to me. Luca \[Buccellati, Parks’ co-producer and co-writer\] had just come over from LA, and it was January, and we hadn\'t seen each other in a while. I\'d been listening to plenty of Motown and The Supremes, plus a lot of Inflo\'s production and Cleo Sol\'s work. I wanted to create something that felt triumphant, and that you could dance to. The idea was for the song to expose how tough things can be but revolve around the idea of the possibility for joy in the future. There’s a quote by \[Caribbean American poet\] Audre Lorde that I really liked: ‘Pain will either change or end.’ That\'s what the song revolved around for me.” **Too Good** “I did this one with Paul Epworth in one of our first days of sessions. I showed him all the music that I was obsessed with at the time, from ’70s Zambian psychedelic rock to MF DOOM and the hip-hop that I love via Tame Impala and big ’90s throwback pop by TLC. From there, it was a whirlwind. Paul started playing this drumbeat, and then I was just running around for ages singing into mics and going off to do stuff on the guitar. I love some of the little details, like the bump on someone’s wrist and getting to name-drop Thom Yorke. It feels truly me.” **Hope** “This song is about a friend of mine—but also explores that universal idea of being stuck inside, feeling depressed, isolated, and alone, and being ashamed of feeling that way, too. It’s strange how serendipitous a lot of themes have proved as we go through the pandemic. That sense of shame is present in the verses, so I wanted the chorus to be this rallying cry. I imagined a room full of people at a show who maybe had felt alone at some point in their lives singing together as this collective cry so they could look around and realize they’re not alone. I wanted to also have the little spoken-word breakdown, just as a moment to bring me closer to the listener. As if I’m on the other side of a phone call.” **Caroline** “I wrote ‘Caroline’ and ‘For Violet’ on the same, very inspired day. I had my little £8 bottle of Casillero del Diablo. I was taken back to when I first started writing at seven or eight, where I would write these very observant and very character-based short stories. I recalled this argument that I’d seen taken place between a couple on Oxford Street. I only saw about 30 seconds of it, but I found myself wondering all these things. Why was their relationship exploding out in the open like that? What caused it? Did the relationship end right there and then? The idea of witnessing a relationship without context was really interesting to me, and so the lyrics just came out as a stream of consciousness, like I was relaying the story to a friend. The harmonies are also important on this song, and were inspired by this video I found of The Beatles performing ‘This Boy.’ The chorus feels like such an explosion—such a release—and harmonies can accentuate that.” **Black Dog** “A very special song to me. I wrote this about my best friend. I remember writing that song and feeling so confused and helpless trying to understand depression and what she was going through, and using music as a form of personal catharsis to work through things that felt impossible to work through. I recorded the vocals with this lump in my throat because it was so raw. Musically, I was harking back to songs like ‘Nude’ and ‘House of Cards’ on *In Rainbows*, plus music by Nick Drake and tracks from Sufjan Stevens’ *Carrie & Lowell*. I wanted something that felt stripped down.” **Green Eyes** “I was really inspired by Frank Ocean here—particularly ‘Futura Free’ \[from 2016’s *Blonde*\]. I was also listening to *Moon Safari* by Air, Stereolab, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Tirzah, Beach House, and a lot of that dreamy, nostalgic pop music that I love. It was important that the instrumental carry a warmth because the song explores quite painful places in the verses. I wanted to approach this topic of self-acceptance and self-discovery, plus people\'s parents not accepting them and the idea of sexuality. Understanding that you only need to focus on being yourself has been hard-won knowledge for me.” **Just Go** “A lot of the experiences I’ve had with toxic people distilled into one song. I wanted to talk about the idea of getting negative energy out of your life and how refreshed but also sad it leaves you feeling afterwards. That little twinge from missing someone, but knowing that you’re so much better off without them. I was thinking about those moments where you’re trying to solve conflict in a peaceful way, but there are all these explosions of drama. You end up realizing, ‘You haven’t changed, man.’ So I wanted a breakup song that said, simply, ‘No grudges, but please leave my life.’” **For Violet** “I imagined being in space, or being in a desert with everything silent and you’re alone with your thoughts. I was thinking about ‘Roads’ by Portishead, which gives me that similar feeling. It\'s minimal, it\'s dark, it\'s deep, it\'s gritty. The song covers those moments growing up when you realize that the world is a little bit heavier and darker than you first knew. I think everybody has that moment where their innocence is broken down a little bit. It’s a story about those big moments that you have to weather in friendships, and asking how you help somebody without over-challenging yourself. That\'s a balance that I talk about in the record a lot.” **Eugene** “Both ‘Black Dog’ and ‘Eugene’ represent a middle chapter between my earlier EPs and the record. I was pulling from all these different sonic places and trying to create a sound that felt warmer, and I was experimenting with lyrics that felt a little more surreal. I was talking a lot about dreams for the first time, and things that were incredibly personal. It felt like a real step forward in terms of my confidence as a writer, and to receive messages from people saying that the song has helped get them to a place where they’re more comfortable with themselves is incredible.” **Bluish** “I wanted it to feel very close. Very compact and with space in weird places. It needed to mimic the idea of feeling claustrophobic in a friendship. That feeling of being constantly asked to give more than you can and expected to be there in ways that you can’t. I wanted to explore the idea of setting boundaries. The Afrobeat-y beat was actually inspired by Radiohead’s ‘Identikit’ \[from 2016’s *A Moon Shaped Pool*\]. The lyrics are almost overflowing with imagery, which was something I loved about Adrianne Lenker’s *songs* album: She has these moments where she’s talking about all these different moments, and colors and senses, textures and emotions. This song needed to feel like an assault on the senses.” **Portra 400** “I wanted this song to feel like the end credits rolling down on one of those coming-of-age films, like *Dazed and Confused* or *The Breakfast Club*. Euphoric, but capturing the bittersweet sentiment of the record. Making rainbows out of something painful. Paul \[Epworth\] added so much warmth and muscularity that it feels like you’re ending on a high. The song’s partly inspired by *Just Kids* by Patti Smith, and that idea of relationships being dissolved and wrecked by people’s unhealthy coping mechanisms.”

“Sometimes I’ll be in my own space, my own company, and that’s when I\'m really content,” Little Simz tells Apple Music. “It\'s all love, though. There’s nothing against anyone else; that\'s just how I am. I like doing my own thing and making my art.” The lockdowns of 2020, then, proved fruitful for the North London MC, singer, and actor. She wrestled writer’s block, revived her cult *Drop* EP series (explore the razor-sharp and diaristic *Drop 6* immediately), and laid grand plans for her fourth studio album. Songwriter/producer Inflo, co-architect of Simz’s 2019 Mercury-nominated, Ivor Novello Award-winning *GREY Area*, was tapped and the hard work began. “It was straight boot camp,” she says of the *Sometimes I Might Be Introvert* sessions in London and Los Angeles. “We got things done pronto, especially with the pace that me and Flo move at. We’re quite impulsive: When we\'re ready to go, it’s time to go.” Months of final touches followed—and a collision between rap and TV royalty. An interest in *The Crown* led Simz to approach Emma Corrin (who gave an award-winning portrayal of Princess Diana in the drama). She uses her Diana accent to offer breathless, regal addresses that punctuate the 19-track album. “It was a reach,” Simz says of inviting Corrin’s participation. “I’m not sure what I expected, but I enjoyed watching her performance, and wrote most of her words whilst I was watching her.” Corrin’s speeches add to the record’s sense of grandeur. It pairs turbocharged UK rap with Simz at her most vulnerable and ambitious. There are meditations on coming of age in the spotlight (“Standing Ovation”), a reunion with fellow Sault collaborator Cleo Sol on the glorious “Woman,” and, in “Point and Kill,” a cleansing, polyrhythmic jam session with Nigerian artist Obongjayar that confirms the record’s dazzling sonic palette. Here, Simz talks us through *Sometimes I Might Be Introvert*, track by track. **“Introvert”** “This was always going to intro the album from the moment it was made. It feels like a battle cry, a rebirth. And with the title, you wouldn\'t expect this to sound so huge. But I’m finding the power within my introversion to breathe new meaning into the word.” **“Woman” (feat. Cleo Sol)** “This was made to uplift and celebrate women. To my peers, my family, my friends, close women in my life, as well as women all over the world: I want them to know I’ve got their back. Linking up with Cleo is always fun; we have such great musical chemistry, and I can’t imagine anyone else bringing what she did to the song. Her voice is beautiful, but I think it\'s her spirit and her intention that comes through when she sings.” **“Two Worlds Apart”** “Firstly, I love this sample; it’s ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy’ by Smokey Robinson, and Flo’s chopped it up really cool. This is my moment to flex. You had the opener, followed by a nice, smoother vibe, but this is like, ‘Hey, you’re listening to a *rap* album.’” **“I Love You, I Hate You”** “This wasn’t the easiest song for me to write, but I\'m super proud that I did. It’s an opportunity for me to lay bare my feelings on how that \[family\] situation affected me, growing up. And where I\'m at now—at peace with it and moving on.” **“Little Q, Pt. 1 (Interlude)”** “Little Q is my cousin, Qudus, on my dad\'s side. We grew up together, but then there was a stage where we didn\'t really talk for some years. No bad blood, just doing different things, so when we reconnected, we had a real heart-to-heart—and I heard about all he’d been through. It made me feel like, ‘Damn, this is a blood relative, and he almost lost his life.’ I thank God he didn’t, but I thought of others like him. And I felt it was important that his story was heard and shared. So, I’m speaking from his perspective.” **“Little Q, Pt. 2”** “I grew up in North London and \[Little Q\] was raised in South, and as much as we both grew up in endz, his experience was obviously different to mine. Being a product of an environment or system that isn\'t really for you, it’s tough trying to navigate that.” **“Gems (Interlude)”** “This is another turning point, reminding myself to take time: ‘Breathe…you\'re human. Give what you can give, but don\'t burn out for anyone. Put yourself first.’ Just little gems that everyone needs to hear once in a while.” **“Speed”** “This track sends another reminder: ‘This game is a marathon, not a sprint. So pace yourself!’ I know where I\'m headed, and I\'m taking my time, with little breaks here and there. Now I know when to really hit the gas and also when to come off a bit.” **“Standing Ovation”** “I take some time to reflect here, like, ‘Wow, you\'re still here and still going. It’s been a slow burn, but you can afford to give yourself a pat on the back.’ But as well as being in the limelight, let\'s also acknowledge the people on the ground doing real amazing work: our key workers, our healers, teachers, cleaners. If you go to a toilet and it\'s dirty, people go in from 9 to 5 and make sure that shit is spotless for you, so let\'s also say thank you.” **“I See You”** “This is a really beautiful and poetic song on love. Sometimes as artists we tend to draw from traumatic times for great art, we’re hurt or in pain, but it was nice for me to be able to draw from a place of real joy in my life for this song. Even where it sits \[on the album\]: right in the center, the heart.” **“The Rapper That Came to Tea (Interlude)”** “This title is a play on \[Judith Kerr’s\] children\'s book *The Tiger Who Came to Tea*, and this is about me better understanding my introversion. I’m just posing questions to myself—I might not necessarily have answers for them, I think it\'s good to throw them out there and get the brain working a bit.” **“Rollin Stone”** “This cut reminds me somewhat of ’09 Simz, spitting with rapidness and being witty. And I’m also finding new ways to use my voice on the second half here, letting my evil twin have her time.” **“Protect My Energy”** “This is one of the songs I\'m really looking forward to performing live. It’s a stepper, and it got me really wanting to sing, to be honest. I very much enjoy being around good company, but these days I enjoy my personal space and I want to protect that.” **“Never Make Promises (Interlude)”** “This one is self-explanatory—nothing is promised at all. It’s a short intermission to lead to the next one, but at one point it was nearly the album intro.” **“Point and Kill” (feat. Obongjayar)** “This is a big vibe! It feels very much like Nigeria to me, and Obongjayar is one of my favorites at the moment. We recorded this in my living room on a whim—and I\'m very, very grateful that he graced this song. The title comes from a phrase used in Nigeria to pick out fish at the market, or a store. You point, they kill. But also metaphorically, whatever I want, I\'m going to get in the same way, essentially.” **“Fear No Man”** “This track continues the same vibe, even more so. It declares: ‘I\'m here. I\'m unapologetically me and I fear no one here. I\'m not shook of anyone in this rap game.’” **“The Garden (Interlude)”** “This track is just amazing musically. It’s about nurturing the seeds you plant. Nurture those relationships, and everything around you that\'s holding you down.” **“How Did You Get Here”** “I want everyone to know *how* I got here; from the jump, school days, to my rap group, Space Age. We were just figuring it out, being persistent. I cried whilst recording this song; it all hit me, like, ‘I\'m actually recording my fourth album.’ Sometimes I sit and I wonder if this is all really true.” **“Miss Understood”** “This is the perfect closer. I could have ended on the last track, easily, but, I don\'t know, it\'s kind of like doing 99 reps. You\'ve done 99, that\'s amazing, but you can do one more to just make it 100, you can. And for me it was like, ‘I\'m going to get this one in there.’”

That motherhood is transformative is an understatement. For those who have the experience, it can change who they are and how they perceive the world, with fresh eyes, an open heart, and a devotion so deep it feels like being unmade. Thus, it\'s fitting that Cleo Sol’s *Mother* begins with a monument to maternal love—its abundant patience and grace for which she has a new understanding. “The train never stopped, never had time to unpack your trauma,” the British singer-songwriter croons gently on the opening track, “Don’t Let Me Fall.” “Keep fighting the world, that’s how you get love, mama.” Likewise, “Heart Full of Love” is an ode to her own child (who adorns the cover) that strives to portray both the power of that singular feeling and the gratitude that’s leveled her in its presence: “Thank you for sending me an angel straight from heaven, when my hope was gone, you made me strong...Thank you for being amazing, teaching me to hold on.” The rest of *Mother* unfurls like a letter addressed to a little one who, once removed from the safety of the womb, may come to know cruelty more often than mercy. On the piano-laden centerpiece “We Need You,” she pours into whoever may hear it a reminder of their worth, while a choir summons the divine. “We need your heart, we need your soul,” they sing, “we need your strength through this cold world, we need your voice, speak your truth.” Similar affirmations pepper the album, as Cleo imbues the lyrics with a tenderness that lands like a hug; her voice itself is so elegant and serene these songs, despite the lushness of the instrumentation, nearly resemble lullabies. It’s easy to be given to pessimism, but what she offers here is a balm, brimming with the kind of compassionate optimism that only new life can bring.

In August of 2018, Helado Negro mastermind Roberto Carlos Lange found himself in Berlin, collaborating and performing with more than 150 other artists as part of the PEOPLE festival, a weeklong artist residency founded by Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon and The National’s Bryce and Aaron Dessner. Afterward, on his way home to New York, he spotted multi-instrumentalist and new age pioneer Laraaji seated nearby at the airport. “I don\'t like bugging people like that in public spaces,” Lange tells Apple Music, “but I did it. And then, as I was telling him what we’d been up to in Berlin, he was like, ‘Oh, wow. Far in.’” That expression stayed with him—so much so that it became a title and kind of unifying principle for his full-length follow-up to 2019 breakthrough *This Is How You Smile*. A reaction to what he calls the “implied grooves” of his previous work, *Far In* finds him moving away from the ethereal towards arrangements whose drums and bass are noticeably “present” throughout. Written in Brooklyn and Marfa, Texas—during a stay extended by the pandemic’s first lockdown—it’s a bilingual set of moody, psychedelic folk and pop that even at its dreamiest has a strong sense of place, whether he’s conjuring the fragrant citrus groves of his native South Florida or the spiritual expanse of a desert vista. “What I\'ve tried to do—and I think what I\'ve always tried to do—is make sure each song is its own world,” he says. “*Far In* was the best way for me to describe it, the way for me to talk about how I wanted to express a lot of different places and sounds that I know how to get to, but I maybe haven\'t shared before. I had to just look further in.” Here, he walks us through a number of the album’s songs. **“Wake Up Tomorrow” (feat. Kacy Hill)** “There\'s something about it that is a complete mystery. It feels like it\'s a doorway or it\'s just some kind of path somewhere out in some overgrown, shrubby path that\'s leading you somewhere, to some light. I think a lot of it has to do with Kacy\'s vocals on it, this humming melody that she does. It\'s just haunting.” **“Gemini and Leo”** “I\'m a Leo, my wife is a Gemini. I was working on this really funny loop that I wasn\'t sure was going to go anywhere. And then, the melody just clicked. A lot of times I shape the lyrics phonetically, in terms of trying to find what melodies attach. I don’t know why I was just thinking about us, but ‘her and I’—that was the hook. And then I was like, ‘Shit. Now I’ve got to make a song around this. Let\'s find a way to design a little story that talks about this relationship.’” **“There Must Be a Song Like You”** “There\'s different ways to look at it, and I think one of them is looking at somebody that you don\'t necessarily see eye-to-eye with. But another thing that I was thinking about was, how do you define this person, or how do you define this thing, because ‘you’ doesn\'t really have to be a person. ‘You’ could be you confronting a feeling, trying to describe what that feeling is, and maybe the only place you can find it is in the song.” **“Hometown Dream”** “It was one of the first songs I wrote when I got back to Brooklyn from Marfa, and a lot of those songs were responding to being forced into living somewhere else for six months, and really realizing that the world is beautiful everywhere. In a way, the idea of a hometown is just a dream. This idea of being a native anything. I think it\'s just a fantasy, more than anything, and that\'s kind of the feeling that I\'m trying to convey with this.” **“Outside the Outside”** “That breakdown was a moment of inspiration. I was using this synth that I was really getting into, the OP-Z. And that moment in the song, it\'s one of those happy accidents, where I didn\'t extend some edits and everything had dropped out except for the synth and I was like, ‘Oh, shit.’ It kind of pushed the whole theme of being outside the outside. It\'s almost like the further outside the outside you are, you\'re going far in. Not to put the joke on it, but it\'s true.” **“Brown Fluorescence”** “It\'s an interlude. It\'s a song, too. It’s a field recording I made, of some voices that I was able to record. They’re all chopped up and processed, but there was a glow about it. When I talk about music, it\'s more in colors and shapes and textures. It has nothing to do with synesthesia or anything like that—it’s a vocabulary I use because I didn\'t go to music school or anything. So there was something about this idea of something having a brown fluorescence, and that was the feeling I got when I was making that song. It was like this funny glow, something that was not like a fluorescent light, but almost like if there was a brown rock that was fluorescent and you just found it in nature.” **“Wind Conversation”** “The theme—which is a thread that runs through the whole album—was kind of this feeling towards climate change, towards the earth, being spiritually moved by being in Marfa. I had never really experienced the desert before. But the song’s also going deeper into thinking about not so much impending doom, but impending changes that are going to cause a lot of hardships. It takes place under this tree that my wife Kristi and I would go to sometimes, to have lunch under in this park, essentially, surrounded by the desert. It was just us, laying back, looking out to the cliffs, daydreaming.” **“Thank You For Ever”** “It\'s another play on this idea—it’s not \'thank you forever,\' it\'s \'thank you forever, dot, dot, dot.\' And I think that\'s kind of what the song is about, this expansiveness. I think that\'s the first song I\'ve ever written that really feels like the desert. That one was a dream. I just woke up, went to the studio, and it kind of just ignited out of me. It all happened in one day, in one sitting.” **“La Naranja”** “‘Naranja’ means orange, and it\'s kind of like a cousin to another song on the record, ‘Agosto.’ It’s this abstract idea, thinking about how there used to be all these orange trees around me growing up in South Florida. It was something that we would experience in a life cycle: There would be the blossoms and then there would be the oranges and then the oranges would hit the ground and then they\'d be rotting and then it would stink. There was this abundance, and then it was gone—they cut down all the trees. It’s about this era that we\'ve grown up in, how we\'ve had access to everything, and knowing that it\'s not going to last forever. ‘You and I can stop time. You and I can save the world together’: That\'s what the song says in Spanish.” **“Telescope” (feat. Benamin)** “It\'s a song that I wrote for my mom, this idea of how we\'re Zooming or FaceTiming, but how it’s been like a telescope. You\'re only seeing this person through this way of seeing, and it just doesn\'t feel tangible. It doesn\'t feel like the person you know. You\'re seeing this person as if you\'re reading about them in a book or something.”

Brittany Howard’s 2019 debut solo album *Jaime* is her most personal, autobiographical work yet. Named for her late sister, the LP draws on the stories and people that shaped the Alabama Shakes’ frontwoman’s lived experiences, from “Goat Head,” which recalls a traumatic, racist experience her parents endured when she was small, to love songs like “Georgia” and “Stay High,” which throw to first crushes and lasting romance. It’s also her most ambitious and experimental work to date, with the revered singer and guitarist embracing R&B, funk, folk, hip-hop, and good ol’-fashioned rock ’n’ roll to push herself to new, exquisite heights in her songwriting. Now, *Jaime (Reimagined)* keeps this spirit of reinvention going. Each track has been remixed or reinterpreted from a crew of veritable performers. Childish Gambino’s falsetto gives Howard’s high notes a run for their money on “Stay High,” while on “Short and Sweet,” Bon Iver layers Howard’s voice over a surreal soundscape that trades her guitar for electronic flourishes. Michael Kiwanuka’s soulful rendering of “13th Century Metal” offers a moody contrast to the deafening crashes of its predecessor, and EARTHGANG and Syd offer bars of their own to updated versions of “Goat Head” and “Baby,” respectively. It’s a kaleidoscopic view of Howard’s opus, one that encourages deeper listening—to this vivid tribute, but also the stunning original.

“I think we approach releasing music like one would approach dating someone,” The Marías frontwoman María Zardoya tells Apple Music about wanting to take it slow with their debut LP. “At the beginning of a relationship, you don\'t want to throw all your cards out there. You don\'t want to give away too much of yourself until you get to know the person.” If the double-volume *Superclean* EPs allowed the LA-based bilingual band to give us a first taste of their lush indie pop, then *CINEMA* expands on their vision with a new set of influences and experiences. Recorded in fits and starts before and during the 2020 quarantine, the album flows with a clear sense of cohesion—like watching a film where, in Zardoya\'s own words, “each song is its own individual scene in its own individual world.” Zardoya also believes her relationship with her partner and bandmate, producer/multi-instrumentalist Josh Conway, strengthens their songwriting. “Our relationship, and our love, is very karmic,” she says. “I think we complement each other in the best ways, and we\'re always pretty much on the same page about the songs and about the creative end. And if we\'re not, we embrace those differences.” Here, Zardoya and Conway take us on a cinematic journey, track by track. **“Just a Feeling”** María Zardoya: “When we came up with the title and the concept of the album, which ties back to our roots of making music together, we knew that we wanted lots of lush string arrangements. And in some of our favorite movies, you can see this motif throughout where they use the same melody, but make different arrangements of it. I just love it so much. During quarantine, we became obsessed with the soundtrack for this ’60s Italian movie called *Amore mio aiutami*. Throughout its soundtrack, there’s this theme that\'s mainly always strings, but also other instruments as well. We heard how lush one of the tracks was on that soundtrack, and that\'s how we wanted it to feel to set the tone for the album as a whole.” **“Calling U Back”** Josh Conway: “‘Calling U Back’ was the first one on *CINEMA* that, once the first idea was written, we were like, ‘Okay, we\'ve got an album coming.’” MZ: “The bark you hear in the beginning is our dog Lucy. You get this really beautiful lush string arrangement. And then, right after, you get this in-your-face dog bark followed by an in-your-face chorus hook. That was definitely very intentional. We wanted to shock the listener in a sense.” **“Hush”** MZ: “In terms of the song’s overall message, there\'s always someone with something to say about what you\'re doing or how you\'re living your life. And this was a song where it was basically telling them to just shut the fuck up and hush. It\'s like, ‘Okay, you\'ve got all these opinions, I\'m going to write a revenge song for you.’ It also has a futuristic sort of feel to it, and so we definitely leaned into that with the visuals for it as well.” **“All I Really Want Is You”** MZ: “This song was written during quarantine while we were putting the finishing touches to the album, working day in and day out on the videos and editing them at 1 or 2:00 in the morning. There was a lot going on during the time that this song was written, so we wanted to go back in time to a month or two prior where Josh and I decided to go on a little LSD journey throughout our neighborhood. We couldn\'t leave or travel in a sense—so we decided to go on a mental trip or a mental journey. We were tripping, just enjoying nature and the stars at night.” **“Hable con Ella”** MZ: “*Hable Con Ella*, or *Talk to Her*, is my all-time favorite film by Pedro Almodóvar. At this point, I think it\'s common knowledge, because he just inspires me so much and I want the world to know about him. There\'s a particular scene in the movie where Caetano Veloso is singing \'Cucurrucucú paloma.\' Obviously, that moment can never be recreated by anybody, but we wanted to recreate the feeling of that beautiful moment with the layered trumpets and this sort of mystic melody.” **“Little by Little”** MZ: “It\'s a classic Marías love song about self-reflection in a relationship and knowing that you need to change things about yourself, but not putting the pressure on yourself to change everything at once. I think it\'s just taking things slow, not putting so much pressure on yourself all at once.” **“Heavy”** JC: “We do this game sometimes where I\'ll pull up some good pictures online, from Pinterest, maybe, and I\'ll show them to María and tell her to sing a melody or anything that comes to mind when she sees it. I pulled up the picture of a woman in a desert, I believe. And María says, ‘I\'m heavy, I\'m nice-eyed.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, okay, here we go.’ And within minutes, we had the verse and the chorus there. This one’s more about wanting to be alone and not wanting to deal with anyone or anything at all. Anyone knocking at your door, you\'re just like, ‘Just go away, let me be alone here.’” **“Un Millón”** MZ: “We approached ‘Un Millón’ like, ‘What would it sound like if The Marías made a reggaetón-inspired song?’ I grew up listening to reggaetón. In my first job ever, at 15, all I wanted to do was save enough money to go to reggaetón concerts with my brother in the VIP section. I ended up saving enough money for Don Omar and Daddy Yankee concerts. It was a huge part of my life and it’s in my blood. We had never made a reggaetón-inspired song, so we were like, ‘Let\'s just try it.’ ‘Un Millón’ happened, and then everybody wanted it on the album.” **“Spin Me Around”** MZ: “It’s definitely our psychedelic ‘what would we listen to while on acid’ song. It’s got that trippiness and waviness that we needed, because psychedelics is a huge part of our life. And we wanted our fans to experience how we feel on psychedelics.” JC: “I think it was the last song written for the album. I personally felt like it needed something a little more open and lighthearted with an indie-rock-type vibe as far as production goes. I\'m stoked that it made it onto the album, because I feel like without it, the album feels a little synth-heavy and very electronic in certain ways. It kind of took those fears of mine away.” **“The Mice Inside This Room”** MZ: “It\'s our most abstract song on the album. Conceptually, it\'s sort of about paranoia. Sometimes, even to this day, I can\'t fall asleep by myself if I don\'t have a light on or hear white noise. I hear one thing and my mind just races. Any little sound could be this mouse inside my room that\'s preventing me from sleeping and from my sanity. It could also be symbolic in how there\'s internal voices, and internal and external chatter, that get in the way from you being completely calm and being able to think clearly.” JC: “It\'s definitely our most Radiohead-inspired song. I think we\'re both very aware of that. Luckily, we didn\'t infringe on anything on it.” **“To Say Hello”** JC: “It was another late one to the album party. María probably spent a good hour and a half recording the vocals to it. I vividly remember there was a moment, about 30 minutes in, when she’s saying the entire first verse—with lyrics and a pre-chorus—and I just remember thinking, ‘This is the song right here.’ After she was done riffing, we went back and I was like, ‘Yo, did you realize that you sang the entire first verse and chorus of this song?’” MZ: “A lot of times when we riff, it\'s subconscious thoughts that need to be released. And I think this one was a subconscious release of me making the shift in moving to LA and leaving my life in Atlanta behind. So when the chorus says, ‘I belong in here,’ it\'s ‘I belong here in LA.’ This is my life, and sometimes I can call you and say hi, but I belong here in LA. It\'s kind of the duality of cities and moving.” **“Fog as a Bullet”** MZ: “This one was written at the start of 2020. I remember sitting in our apartment on a Friday. It was really foggy out on the hills. I was thinking, ‘Wow, this is so beautiful. I just love when it\'s foggy in LA.’ And just how inspiring that was. And then, two days later, Kobe Bryant and his daughter passed away on the helicopter because of the lack of visibility due to that same fog. I was thinking to myself, ‘Wow, something that, just two days ago, I found so beautiful can cause so much destruction.’ I was just feeling the pain of the city and feeling sad, of being in LA and of him being such an iconic figure.” **“Talk to Her”** JC: “One night, María was reading some poetry from her little tour diary. She was reading it and all the guys in the band were there. It was about being on tour. We were all totally taken aback by it because none of us had ever heard that before.” MZ: “It was just my tour notebook, where I would write random thoughts on. I think we all share very difficult moments on that particular tour. You get to see inside our minds during that time, because I don\'t know if a lot of people know how difficult touring is for, I think, most artists. We didn\'t have a lot of money for things.” JC: “There\'s so many ups and downs. There\'s not really any middle ground. It\'s either, as Eddie \[Edward James, The Marías keyboardist\] says, ‘peaks and pits.’ The line towards the end where it says to don’t stop giving up is restorative too. It’s a call and response, like a train of thought that tells you to not stop and that it’ll be fine.”

There’s a handful of eyebrow-raising verses across Tyler, The Creator’s *CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST*—particularly those from 42 Dugg, Lil Uzi Vert, YoungBoy Never Broke Again, Pharrell, and Lil Wayne—but none of the aforementioned are as surprising as the ones Tyler delivers himself. The Los Angeles-hailing MC, and onetime nucleus of the culture-shifting Odd Future collective, made a name for himself as a preternaturally talented MC whose impeccable taste in streetwear and calls to “kill people, burn shit, fuck school” perfectly encapsulated the angst of his generation. But across *CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST*, the man once known as Wolf Haley is just a guy who likes to rock ice and collect stamps on his passport, who might whisper into your significant other’s ear while you’re in the restroom. In other words, a prototypical rapper. But in this case, an exceptionally great one. Tyler superfans will remember that the MC was notoriously peeved at his categoric inclusion—and eventual victory—in the 2020 Grammys’ Best Rap Album category for his pop-oriented *IGOR*. The focus here is very clearly hip-hop from the outset. Tyler made an aesthetic choice to frame *CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST* with interjections of shit-talking from DJ Drama, founder of one of 2000s rap’s most storied institutions, the Gangsta Grillz mixtape franchise. The vibes across the album are a disparate combination of sounds Tyler enjoys (and can make)—boom-bap revival (“CORSO,” “LUMBERJACK”), ’90s R&B (“WUSYANAME”), gentle soul samples as a backdrop for vivid lyricism in the Griselda mold (“SIR BAUDELAIRE,” “HOT WIND BLOWS”), and lovers rock (“I THOUGHT YOU WANTED TO DANCE”). And then there’s “RUNITUP,” which features a crunk-style background chant, and “LEMONHEAD,” which has the energy of *Trap or Die*-era Jeezy. “WILSHIRE” is potentially best described as an epic poem. Giving the Grammy the benefit of the doubt, maybe they wanted to reward all the great rapping he’d done until that point. *CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST*, though, is a chance to see if they can recognize rap greatness once it has kicked their door in.

In the wake of 2017’s *MASSEDUCTION*, St. Vincent mastermind Annie Clark was in search of change. “That record was very much about structure and stricture—everything I wore was very tight, very controlled, very angular,” she tells Apple Music. “But there\'s only so far you can go with that before you\'re like, ‘Oh, what\'s over here?’” What Clark found was a looseness that came from exploring sounds she’d grown up with, “this kind of early-’70s, groove-ish, soul-ish, jazz-ish style in my head since I was a little kid,” she says. “I was raised on Steely Dan records and Stevie Wonder records like \[1973’s\] *Innervisions* and \[1972’s\] *Talking Book* and \[1974’s\] *Fulfillingness’ First Finale*. That was the wheelhouse that I wanted to play in. I wanted to make new stories with older sounds.” Recorded with *MASSEDUCTION* producer Jack Antonoff, *Daddy’s Home* draws heavily from the 1970s, but its title was inspired, in part, by recent events in Clark’s personal life: her father’s 2019 release from prison, where he’d served nearly a decade for his role in a stock manipulation scheme. It’s as much about our capacity to evolve as it is embracing the humanity in our flaws. “I wanted to make sure that even if anybody didn\'t know my personal autobiography that it would be open to interpretation as to whether Daddy is a father or Daddy is a boyfriend or Daddy is a pimp—I wanted that to be ambiguous,” she says. “Part of the title is literal: ‘Yeah, here he is, he\'s home!’ And then another part of it is ‘It’s 10 years later. I’ve done a lot in those 10 years. I have responsibility. I have shit I\'m seriously doing. It’s playing with it: Am I daddy\'s girl? I don\'t know. Maybe. But I\'m also Daddy, too, now.” Here, Clark guides us through a few of the album’s key tracks. **“Pay Your Way in Pain”** “This character is like the fixture in a 2021 psychedelic blues. And this is basically the sentiment of the blues: truly just kind of being down and out in a country, in a society, that oftentimes asks you to choose between dignity and survival. So it\'s just this story of one really bad fuckin’ day. And just owning the fact that truly what everybody wants in the world, with rare exception, is just to have a roof over their head, to be loved, and to get by. The line about the heels always makes me laugh. I\'ve been her, I know her. I\'ve been the one who people kind of go, ‘Oh, oh, dear. Hide the children\'s eyes.’ I know her, and I know her well.” **“Down and Out Downtown”** “This is actually maybe my favorite song on the record. I don\'t know how other people will feel about it. We\'ve all been that person who is wearing last night\'s heels at eight in the morning on the train, processing: ‘Oh, where have we been? What did I just do?’ You\'re groggy, you\'re sort of trying to avoid the knowing looks from other people—and the way that in New York, especially, you can just really ride that balance between like abandon and destruction. That\'s her; I\'ve been her too.” **“Daddy\'s Home”** “The story is really about one of the last times I went to go visit my dad in prison. If I was in national press or something, they put the press clippings on his bed. And if I was on TV, they\'d gather around in the common area and watch me be on Letterman or whatever. So some of the inmates knew who I was and presumably, I don\'t know, mentioned it to their family members. I ended up signing an autograph on a receipt because you can\'t bring phones and you couldn\'t do a selfie. It’s about watching the tables turn a little bit, from father and daughter. It\'s a complicated story and there\'s every kind of emotion about it. My family definitely chose to look at a lot of things with some gallows humor, because what else are you going to do? It\'s absolutely absurd and heartbreaking and funny all at the same time. So: Worth putting into a song.” **“Live in the Dream”** “If there are other touchpoints on the record that hint at psychedelia, on this one we\'ve gone completely psychedelic. I was having a conversation with Jack and he was telling me about a conversation he had with Bruce Springsteen. Bruce was just, I think anecdotally, talking about the game of fame and talking about the fact that we lose a lot of people to it. They can kind of float off into the atmosphere, and the secret is, you can\'t let the dream take over you. The dream has to live inside of you. And I thought that was wonderful, so I wrote this song as if you\'re waking up from a dream and you almost have these sirens talking to you. In life, there\'s still useful delusions. And then there\'s delusions that—if left unchecked—lead to kind of a misuse of power.” **“Down”** “The song is a revenge fantasy. If you\'re nice, people think they can take advantage of you. And being nice is not the same thing as being a pushover. If we don\'t want to be culpable to something, we could say, \'Well, it\'s definitely just this thing in my past,\' but at the end of the day, there\'s human culpability. Life is complicated, but I don\'t care why you are hurt. It\'s not an excuse to be cruel. Whatever your excuse is, you\'ve played it out.” **“…At the Holiday Party”** “Everybody\'s been this person at one time. I\'ve certainly been this person, where you are masking your sadness with all kinds of things. Whether it\'s dressing up real fancy or talking about that next thing you\'re going to do, whatever it is. And we kind of reveal ourselves by the things we try to hide and to kind of say we\'ve all been there. Drunk a little too early, at a party, there\'s a moment where you can see somebody\'s face break, and it\'s just for a split second, but you see it. That was the little window into what\'s going on with you, and what you\'re using to obfuscate is actually revealing you.”

“I don\'t think it\'s an incredible, incredible album, but I do think it\'s an honest portrayal of what we were like and what we sounded like when those songs were written,” Black Country, New Road frontman Isaac Wood tells Apple Music of his Cambridge post-punk outfit’s debut LP. “I think that\'s basically all it can be, and that\'s the best it can be.” Intended to capture the spark of their early years—and electrifying early performances—*For the First Time* is an urgent collision of styles and signifiers, a youthful tangling of Slint-ian post-rock and klezmer meltdowns, of lowbrow and high, Kanye and the Fonz, Scott Walker and “the absolute pinnacle of British engineering.” Featuring updates to singles “Sunglasses” and “Athens, France,” it’s also a document of their banding together after the public demise of a previous incarnation of the outfit, when all they wanted to do was be in a room with one another again, playing music. “I felt like I was able to be good with these people,” Wood says of his six bandmates. “These were the people who had taught me and enabled me to be a good musician. Had I played the record back to us then, I would be completely over the moon about it.” Here, Wood walks us through the album start to finish. **Instrumental** “It was the first piece we wrote. So to fit with making an accurate presentation of our sound or our journey as musicians, we thought it made sense to put one of the first things we wrote first.” **Athens, France** “We knew we were going to be rerecording it, so I listened back to the original and I thought about what opportunities I might take to change it up. I just didn\'t do the best job at saying the thing I was wanting to say. And so it was just a small edit, just to try and refine the meaning of the song. It wouldn’t be very fun if I gave that all away, but the simplest—and probably most accurate—way to explain it would be that the person whose perspective was on this song was most certainly supposed to be the butt of a joke, and I think it came across that that wasn\'t the case, and that\'s what made me most uncomfortable.” **Science Fair** “I’m not so vividly within this song; I’m more of an outsider. I have a fair amount of personal experience with science fairs. I come from Cambridge—and most of the band do as well—and there\'s many good science fairs and engineering fairs around there that me and my father would attend quite frequently. It’s a funny thing, something that I did a lot and never thought about until the minute that the idea for the song came into my head. It’s the sort of thing that’s omnipresent, but in the background. It\'s the same with talking about the Cirque du Soleil: Just their plain existence really made me laugh.” **Sunglasses** “It was a genuine realization that I felt slightly more comfortable walking down the street if I had a pair of sunglasses on. It wasn\'t necessarily meditating on that specific idea, but it was jotted down and then expanded and edited, expanded and messed around with, and then became what it was. Sunglasses exist to represent any object, those defense mechanisms that I recognize in myself and find in equal parts effective and kind of pathetic. Sometimes they work and other times they\'re the thing that leads to the most narcissistic, false, and ignorant ways of being. I just broke the pair that my fiancée bought for me, unfortunately. Snapped in half.” **Track X** “I wrote that riff ages and ages ago, around the time I first heard *World of Echo* by Arthur Russell, which is possibly my favorite record of all time. I was playing around with the same sort of delay effects that he was using, trying to play some of his songs on guitar, sort of translate them from the cello. We didn\'t play it for ages and ages, and then just before we recorded this album, we had the idea to resurrect it and put it together with an old story that I had written. It’s a love story—love and loss and all that\'s in between. It just made sense for it to be something quieter, calmer. And because it was arranged most recently, it definitely gives the most glimpse of our new material.” **Opus** “‘Opus’ and ‘Instrumental’ were written on the same day. We were in a room together without any music prepared, for the first time in a few months, and we were all feeling quite down. It was a highly emotional time, and I think the music probably equal parts benefits and suffers from that. It\'s rich with a fair amount of typical teenage angst and frustration, even though we were sort of past our teens by that point. I mean, it felt very strange but very, very good to be playing together again. It took us a little while to realize that we might actually be able to do it. It was just a desire to get going and to make something new for ourselves, to build a new relationship musically with each other and the world, to just get out there and play a show. We didn\'t really have our sights set particularly high—we just really wanted to play live at the pub.”

“Straight away,” Dry Cleaning drummer Nick Buxton tells Apple Music. “Immediately. Within the first sentence, literally.” That is precisely how long it took for Buxton and the rest of his London post-punk outfit to realize that Florence Shaw should be their frontwoman, as she joined in with them during a casual Sunday night jam in 2018, reading aloud into the mic instead of singing. Though Buxton, guitarist Tom Dowse, and bassist Lewis Maynard had been playing together in various forms for years, Shaw—a friend and colleague who’s also a visual artist and university lecturer—had no musical background or experience. No matter. “I remember making eye contact with everyone and being like, ‘Whoa,’” Buxton says. “It was a big moment.” After a pair of 2019 EPs comes the foursome’s full-length debut, *New Long Leg*, an hypnotic tangle of shape-shifting guitars, mercurial rhythms, and Shaw’s deadpan (and often devastating) spoken-word delivery. Recorded with longtime PJ Harvey producer John Parish at the historic Rockfield Studios in Wales, it’s a study in chemistry, each song eventually blooming from jams as electric as their very first. Read on as Shaw, Buxton, and Dowse guide us through the album track by track. **“Scratchcard Lanyard”** Nick Buxton: “I was quite attracted to the motorik-pedestrian-ness of the verse riffs. I liked how workmanlike that sounded, almost in a stupid way. It felt almost like the obvious choice to open the album, and then for a while we swayed away from that thinking, because we didn\'t want to do this cliché thing—we were going to be different. And then it becomes very clear to you that maybe it\'s the best thing to do for that very reason.” **“Unsmart Lady”** Florence Shaw: “The chorus is a found piece of text, but it suited what I needed it for, and that\'s what I was grasping at. The rest is really thinking about the years where I did lots and lots of jobs all at the same time—often quite knackering work. It’s about the female experience, and I wanted to use language that\'s usually supposed to be insulting, commenting on the grooming or the intelligence of women. I wanted to use it in a song, and, by doing that, slightly reclaim that kind of language. It’s maybe an attempt at making it prideful rather than something that is supposed to make you feel shame.” **“Strong Feelings”** FS: “It was written as a romantic song, and I always thought of it as something that you\'d hear at a high school dance—the slow one where people have to dance together in a scary way.” **“Leafy”** NB: “All of the songs start as jams that we play all together in the rehearsal room to see what happens. We record it on the phone, and 99 percent of the time you take that away and if it\'s something that you feel is good, you\'ll listen to it and then chop it up into bits, make changes and try loads of other stuff out. Most of the jams we do are like 10 minutes long, but ‘Leafy’ was like this perfect little three-minute segment where we were like, ‘Well, we don\'t need to do anything with that. That\'s it.’” **“Her Hippo”** FS: “I\'m a big believer in not waiting for inspiration and just writing what you\'ve got, even if that means you\'re writing about a sense of nothingness. I think it probably comes from there, that sort of feeling.” **“New Long Leg”** NB: “I\'m really proud of the work on the album that\'s not necessarily the stuff that would jump out of your speakers straight away. ‘New Long Leg’ is a really interesting track because it\'s not a single, yet I think it\'s the strongest song on the album. There\'s something about the quality of what\'s happening there: Four people are all bringing something, in quite an unusual way, all the way around. Often, when you hear music like that, it sounds mental. But when you break it down, there\'s a lot of detail there that I really love getting stuck into.” **“John Wick”** FS: “I’m going to quote Lewis, our bass player: The title ‘John Wick’ refers to the film of the same name, but the song has nothing to do with it.” Tom Dowse: “Giving a song a working title is quite an interesting process, because what you\'re trying to do is very quickly have some kind of onomatopoeia to describe what the song is. ‘Leafy’ just sounded leafy. And ‘John Wick’ sounded like some kind of action cop show. Just that riff—it sounded like crime was happening and it painted a picture straight away. I thought it was difficult to divorce it from that name.” **“More Big Birds”** TD: “One of the things you get good at when you\'re a band and you\'re lucky enough to get enough time to be together is, when someone writes a drum part like that, you sit back. It didn\'t need a complicated guitar part, and sometimes it’s nice to have the opportunity to just hit a chord. I love that—I’ll add some texture and let the drums be. They’re almost melodic.” **“A.L.C”** FS: “It\'s the only track where I wrote all the lyrics in lockdown—all the others were written over a much longer period of time. But that\'s definitely the quickest I\'ve ever written. It\'s daydreaming about being in public and I suppose touches on a weird change of priorities that happened when your world just gets really shrunk down to your little patch. I think there\'s a bit of nostalgia in there, just going a bit loopy and turning into a bit of a monster.” **“Every Day Carry”** FS: “It was one of the last ones we recorded and I was feeling exhausted from trying so fucking hard the whole recording session to get everything I wanted down. I had sheets of paper with different chunks that had already been in the song or were from other songs, and I just pieced it together during the take as a bit of a reward. It can be really fun to do that when you don\'t know what you\'re going to do next, if it\'s going to be crap or if it\'s going to be good. That\'s a fun thing—I felt kind of burnt out, so it was nice to just entertain myself a bit by doing a surprise one.”

The jazz great Pharoah Sanders was sitting in a car in 2015 when by chance he heard Floating Points’ *Elaenia*, a bewitching set of flickering synthesizer etudes. Sanders, born in 1940, declared that he would like to meet the album’s creator, aka the British electronic musician Sam Shepherd, 46 years his junior. *Promises*, the fruit of their eventual collaboration, represents a quietly gripping meeting of the two minds. Composed by Shepherd and performed upon a dozen keyboard instruments, plus the strings of the London Symphony Orchestra, *Promises* is nevertheless primarily a showcase for Sanders’ horn. In the ’60s, Sanders could blow as fiercely as any of his avant-garde brethren, but *Promises* catches him in a tender, lyrical mode. The mood is wistful and elegiac; early on, there’s a fleeting nod to “People Make the World Go Round,” a doleful 1971 song by The Stylistics, and throughout, Sanders’ playing has more in keeping with the expressiveness of R&B than the mountain-scaling acrobatics of free jazz. His tone is transcendent; his quietest moments have a gently raspy quality that bristles with harmonics. Billed as “a continuous piece of music in nine movements,” *Promises* takes the form of one long extended fantasia. Toward the middle, it swells to an ecstatic climax that’s reminiscent of Alice Coltrane’s spiritual-jazz epics, but for the most part, it is minimalist in form and measured in tone; Shepherd restrains himself to a searching seven-note phrase that repeats as naturally as deep breathing for almost the full 46-minute expanse of the piece. For long stretches you could be forgiven for forgetting that this is a Floating Points project at all; there’s very little that’s overtly electronic about it, save for the occasional curlicue of analog synth. Ultimately, the music’s abiding stillness leads to a profound atmosphere of spiritual questing—one that makes the final coda, following more than a minute of silence at the end, feel all the more rewarding.

In the lexicon of jazz band configurations, the trio is perhaps most challenging. Triangulating compositions through just three instruments, there is ample space for each member to either sink or fly. For New York-based composer, professor and pianist Vijay Iyer, it\'s the perfect setting in which to showcase his intuitive, emotive approach to improvisation, one that feeds off collaboration as much as it is propelled by uncompromising individual thought. Despite having spent the past decade playing informally with bassist Linda May Han Oh and two decades recording and performing with drummer Tyshawn Sorey, *Uneasy* is his first in this trio configuration. “The impetus behind this album wasn’t necessarily a theme—it was just about the three of us playing together,” Iyer tells Apple Music. “As soon as we sat down together in 2019, I realised our playing had its own energy and drive, it demanded its own space for a project.” The result is eight reimagined compositions from the past 20 years of Iyer’s work, as well as a tribute to his long-time mentor and friend Geri Allen and a reinterpretation of the jazz standard “Night and Day”. *Uneasy* takes its title from a 2011 collaboration with choreographer Karole Armitage, and its reference to the emotions of anxiety and discontent come to epitomise the ensuing narrative of the record as a whole. “We want you to inhabit this slightly turbulent space of the album, since life is not stable, as is increasingly revealed to us every day,” Iyer says as he guides us through each of *Uneasy*\'s tracks. **“Children of Flint”** \"I had been invited in 2019 to write a piece for a classical music context, and the theme was \'the year of water\'. Immediately, I thought, ‘The year of water for whom? What about people who don\'t have it?’ In the US context, it becomes a political question, and with the Flint crisis, this was a moment where a political disaster caused an environmental disaster that disproportionately affected communities of colour. So I wrote a piece for solo viola called \'Song for Flint\', which had a mournful and harrowing quality to it. There was a fragment of it that kept haunting me, and I wanted to keep that sense of rage and to direct energy and money to that community. When it came to the trio, I included this piece called \'Children of Flint\' on the record, as it is both a child of the \'Song for Flint\' and I imagined it playing for children or giving it to children.\" **“Combat Breathing”** \"This was originally created for the occasion of a Black Lives Matter protest that we did at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2014, which was the year of the birth of the movement. That year, things came to a boil and we all wanted to divert energy in the direction of the people on the ground who were doing the work. With the trio’s interpretation, it has a sense of urgency to it, but then it also has a space where it imagines a different reality and it stretches out. Something that this group does best is to stretch out without too much provocation, to allow the music to blossom into a river of energy.\" **“Night and Day”** \"Joe Henderson made a version of this Cole Porter composition in 1966, which remakes the song. Musicians in the jazz lineage have always repurposed and reinvented pre-existing material on their own terms. It’s a transformative tradition of creating something else using a found text as a vehicle. With the trio, we wanted to capture the very colourful, bright energy of Henderson and McCoy Tyner’s version. I\'ve been listening to that recording for 30 years and I\'ve studied McCoy Tyner, trying to understand how he sets things in motion, how he anchors the sound and how he creates this spectrum of colours. Since he passed away last year, this is a tribute to him.\" **“Touba”** \"The poet Michael Ladd and I collaborated on an album called *In What Language?* in 2003, and there is a piece on there called \'Plastic Bag\', which is based around a poem about a Senegalese street vendor in New York. He was part of this community that practised a version of Islam called Mouride; their mythic homeland is called Touba, and wherever they settle and build community, like in Harlem, you\'ll find these businesses called Touba. They carry this sense of home with them throughout the diaspora. That piece was called \'Plastic Bag\' because this guy carried all his earthly belongings in this gigantic plastic sack, and this version is a travelling blues.\" **“Drummer’s Song”** \"I\'ve been a fan of Geri Allen’s music and her playing since the late ’80s. I first heard her when I was 16, and later, in the early 2000s, I got to know her better, and she\'s been a hero to me ever since. She became a very nurturing and endlessly generous member of our community. Very few of us knew that she was suffering when she died of cancer at the age of 60 in 2017. I wanted to continue to study her music and to perform it and uphold her legacy as best as I can. Playing this composition of hers for the record was a nice challenge. It\'s really hard to pull off in the trio context because there\'s a lot of polyphony going on and everyone has to cover a lot of bases. She always made it look effortless.\" **“Augury”** \"For this track, we were all done with the recording sessions. Tyshawn and Linda went home and I just asked the engineer to hit record. In those moments, especially after a long day of recording, you\'re depleted and in a vulnerable state, which attunes you intuitively to certain things. I went in with no real agenda; I didn\'t know if I would make anything worth salvaging, I just decided to play something. This was what came out in that moment, and I call it ‘Augury\' because it feels like a certain kind of divination. In that moment at the end of 2019, at the cusp of a disastrous year, what am I hearing?\" **“Configurations”** \"It had been almost 20 years since I\'d last performed this piece with Tyshawn and I dared him to play it to see if he remembered, and of course he did—he has a genius memory. We had fun pulling it together, particularly trying to do it as a trio because it has a challenging structure, but Linda and Tyshawn always rise above any challenge and make it into something better. It ended up becoming a set piece for us where there\'s all this energy being passed around rapidly and then there is a wild ending referencing different rhythmic techniques from South Indian music.\" **“Uneasy”** \"This piece was written for a collaboration with a dance company in 2011, and we were thinking about what it was to be an American 10 years after 9/11. It was the thick and thin of the Obama years—optimism and surveillance, truth and deception. \'Uneasy’ was the word for how none of that felt quite right. We were asking with the piece, what does it mean to come together with a certain kind of exuberance and yet to also know that there\'s something sinister beneath the surface that we are not talking about yet? Now, 10 years on, it still fits well with the current moment—perhaps even better. In American life, we\'re living in the echo of that time.\" **“Retrofit”** \"I wrote this originally for my sextet, since I wanted to make something that was dealing with new ideas rhythmically and harmonically. Reducing it to the trio format meant that it could be split open differently to become an interactive vehicle for us. Especially in the last few minutes, it becomes molten—it keeps changing shape, and that\'s something that we can do with the trio because we’re a rhythm section. A lot of what is happening in our work is rhythm being expressed and then shifting.\" **“Entrustment”** \"So often with the trio, we\'re creating an intimate version of something more grand, which is the case with ‘Entrustment’, a composition I wrote as part of a larger suite for a string orchestra. The suite was called ‘City of Sand’ and it was inspired by me visiting the site of an incredible network of several hundred Buddhist cave temples in the Gobi Desert. It was this crossroads of all these different cultures, and ‘Entrustment’ was the closing meditation, a processional embrace of that kind of openness, expansiveness and emptiness. It\'s only two chords—it’s made of almost nothing, it\'s just those qualities coming together.\"

The Pakistani musician began writing her second album, and then her younger brother died. And so, instead of the dark, edgy dance record she’d intended on making, Aftab turned to the Urdu ghazals she grew up with—an ancient form of lyric poetry centered around loss and longing. On *Vulture Prince*, Aftab makes the art form her own, trading the traditional percussion-heavy instrumentation for heavenly string arrangements (harp, violin, upright bass); she even ventures into reggae territory on “Last Night,” a slinky rendition of a Rumi poem. She translates another poem, this time by Mirza Ghalib, on “Diya Hai,” the last song she performed for her brother Maher, and a haunting expression of all-encompassing grief.

“I wanted to get a better sense of how African traditional cosmologies can inform my life in a modern-day context,” Sons of Kemet frontman Shabaka Hutchings tells Apple Music about the concept behind the British jazz group’s fourth LP. “Then, try to get some sense of those forms of knowledge and put it into the art that’s being produced.” Since their 2013 debut LP *Burn*, the Barbados-raised saxophonist/clarinetist and his bandmates (tuba player Theon Cross and drummers Tom Skinner and Eddie Hick) have been at the forefront of the new London jazz scene—deconstructing its conventions by weaving a rich sonic tapestry that fuses together elements of modal and free jazz, grime, dub, ’60s and ’70s Ethiopian jazz, and Afro-Caribbean music. On *Black to the Future*, the Mercury Prize-nominated quartet is at their most direct and confrontational with their sociopolitical message—welcoming to the fold a wide array of guest collaborators (most notably poet Joshua Idehen, who also collaborated with the group on 2018’s *Your Queen Is a Reptile*) to further contextualize the album’s themes of Black oppression and colonialism, heritage and ancestry, and the power of memory. If you look closely at the song titles, you’ll discover that each of them makes up a singular poem—a clever way for Hutchings to clue in listeners before they begin their musical journey. “It’s a sonic poem, in that the words and the music are the same thing,” Hutchings says. “Poetry isn\'t meant to be descriptive on the surface level, it\'s descriptive on a deep level. So if you read the line of poetry, and then you listen to the music, a picture should emerge that\'s more than what you\'d have if you considered the music or the line separately.” Here, Hutchings gives insight into each of the tracks. **“Field Negus” (feat. Joshua Idehen)** “This track was written in the midst of the Black Lives Matter protests in London, and it was a time that was charged with an energy of searching for meaning. People were actually starting to talk about Black experience and Black history as it related to the present, in a way that hadn\'t really been done in Britain before. The point of artists is to be able to document these moments in history and time, and be able to actually find a way of contextualizing them in a way that\'s poetic. The aim of this track is to keep that conversation going and keep the reflections happening. I\'ve been working with Joshua for 15 years and I really appreciate his perspective on the political realm. He\'s got a way of describing reality in a manner which makes you think deeply. He never loses humor and he never loses his sense of sharpness.” **“Pick Up Your Burning Cross” (feat. Moor Mother & Angel Bat Dawid)** “It started off with me writing the bassline, which I thought was going to be a grime bassline. But then in the pandemic lockdown, I added layers of horns and woodwinds. It took it completely out of the grime space and put it more in that Antillean-Caribbean atmosphere. It really showed me that there\'s a lot of intersecting links between these musics that sometimes you\'re not even aware of until you start really diving into their potential and start adding and taking away things. It was really great to actually discover that the tune had more to offer than I envisioned in the beginning. Angel Bat Dawid and Moor Mother are both on this one, and the only thing I asked them to do was to listen to the track and just give their honest interpretation of what the music brings out of them.” **“Think of Home”** “If you\'re thinking poetically, you\'ve got that frantic energy of \'Burning Cross,\' which signifies dealing with those issues of oppression. Then at the end of that process of dealing with them, you\'ve got to still remember the place that you come from. You\'ve got to think about the utopia, think about that serene tranquil place so that you\'re not consumed in the battle. It\'s not really trying to be a Caribbean track per se, but I was trying to get that feeling of when I think back to my days growing up in Barbados. This is the feeling I had when I remember the music that was made at that time.” **“Hustle” (feat. Kojey Radical)** “The title of the track links back to the title of our second album, *Lest We Forget What We Came Here to Do*. The answer to that question is to hustle. Our grandparents came and migrated to Britain, not to just be British per se, but so that they could then create a better life for themselves and their families and have the future be one with dignity and pride. I gave these words to Kojey and he said that he finds it difficult to depict these types of struggles considering that he\'s not in the present moment within the same struggle that he grew up in. He felt it was disingenuous for him to talk about the struggle. I told him that he\'s a storyteller, and storytelling isn\'t always autobiographical. His gift is to be able to tell stories for his community, and to remember that he\'s also an orator of their history regardless of where his personal journey has led him.” **“For the Culture” (feat. D Double E)** “Originally, we\'d intended D Double E to be on \'Pick Up Your Burning Cross.\' But he came into the studio and it really wasn\'t the vibe that he was in. We played him the demo of this track and his face lit up. He was like, \'Let\'s go into the studio. I know what to do.\' It was one take and that was it. I think this might be one of my favorite tunes on the album. The reason I called it \'For the Culture\' is that it puts me back into what it felt like to be a teenager in Barbados in the \'90s, going into the dance halls and really learning what it is to dance. It\'s not just all about it being hard and struggling and striving; there is that fun element of celebrating what it is to be sensual and to be alive and love music and partying and just joyfulness.” **“To Never Forget the Source”** “I gave this really short melody to the band, maybe like four bars for the melody and a very repeated bassline. We played it for about half an hour, where the drums and bass entered slowly and I played the melody again and again. The idea of this, when we recorded in the studio, is that it needs to be the vibe and spirit of how we are playing together. So it wasn\'t about stopping and starting and being anxious. We need to play it until the feeling is right. The clarinets and the flutes on this one is maybe the one I\'m most proud of in terms of adding a counterpoint line, which really offsets and emphasizes the original saxophone and tuba line.” **“In Remembrance of Those Fallen”** “The idea of \'In Remembrance of Those Fallen\' is to give homage to those people that have been fighting for liberation and freedom within all those anti-colonial movements, and remember the ongoing struggle for dignity within especially the Black world in Africa. It\'s trying to get that feeling of \'We can do this. We can go forward, regardless of what hurdles have been done and of what hurdles we\'ve encountered.\' But, musically, there\'s so many layers to this. I was excited with how, on one side, the drums are doing what you\'d describe as Afro-jazz, and on the other one, it\'s doing a really primal sound—but mixing it in a way where you feel the impact of those two contrasting drum patterns. This is at the heart of what I like about the drums in Kemet. Regardless of what they\'re doing, the end result becomes one pulsating, forward-moving machine.” **“Let the Circle Be Unbroken”** “I was listening to a lot of \[Brazilian composer\] Hermeto Pascoal while making the album, and my mind was going onto those beautiful melodies that Hermeto sometimes makes. Songs that feel like you remember them, but they\'ve got a level of harmonic intricacy, which means that there\'s something disorienting too. It\'s like you\'re hearing a nursery rhyme in a dream, hearing the basic contour of the melody, but there\'s just something below the surface that disorientates you and throws you off what you know of it. It\'s one of the only times I\'ve ever heard that midtempo soca descend into brutal free jazz.” **“Envision Yourself Levitating”** “This one also features one of my heroes on the saxophone, Kebbi Williams, who does the first saxophone solo on the track. His music has got that real New Orleans communal vibe to it. For me, this is the height of music making—when you can make music that\'s easy enough to play its constituent parts, but when it all pieces together, it becomes a complex tapestry. It\'s the first point in the album where I do an actual solo with backing parts. This is, in essence, what a lot of calypso bands do in Barbados. So when you\'ve got traditional calypso music, you\'ll get a performer who is singing their melody and then you\'ve got these horn section parts that intersect and interact with the melody that the calypsonian is singing. It\'s that idea of an interchange between the band backing the chief melodic line.” **“Throughout the Madness, Stay Strong”** “It\'s about optimism, but not an optimism where you have a smile on your face. An optimism where you\'re resigned to the place of defeat within the big spectrum of things. It\'s having to actually resign yourself to what has happened in the continued dismantling of Black civilization, and how Black people are regarded as a whole in the world within a certain light; but then understanding that it\'s part of a broader process of rising to something else, rising to a new era. Also, on the more technical side of the recording of this tune, this was the first tune that we recorded for the whole session. It\'s the first take of the first tune on the first day.” **“Black” (feat. Joshua Idehen)** “There was a point where we all got into the studio and I asked that we go into these breathing exercises where we essentially just breathe in really deeply about 30 times, and at the end of 30, we breathe out and hold it for as long as you can with nothing inside. We did one of these exercises while lying on the floor with our eyes shut in pitch blackness. I asked everyone to scream as hard as we can, really just let it out. No one could have anything in their ears apart from the track, so no one was aware of how anyone else sounded. It was complete no-self-awareness, no shyness. It\'s like a cathartic ritual to really just let it out, however you want.”

“I really wanted to make a whole cohesive project,” Genesis Owusu tells Apple Music of his debut album. “I wanted to make something akin to *To Pimp a Butterfly* and *Food and Liquor* and all the awesome concept albums that I grew up listening to.” The Ghanaian Australian artist named Kofi Owusu-Ansah’s debut LP is a powerful concept album that tackles depression and racism in equal measure, characterized here as two black dogs. “‘Black dog’ is a known euphemism for depression, but I’ve also been called a black dog as a racial slur. So I thought it was an interesting, all-encompassing term for what I wanted to talk about.” The music itself is vibrant and boundaryless, with elements of soul, hip-hop, post-punk, pop, and beyond, showcasing not only Genesis Owusu’s remarkable talent and creativity, but the influence of each band member he worked with to write and record, including Kirin J Callinan on guitar, Touch Sensitive (Michael Di Francesco) on bass, Julian Sudek on drums, and Andrew Klippel on keys—all of whom brought their backgrounds and influences to the table. “The album’s eclectic sound is a reflection of all of us as human beings, and also their interpretation of me from their own musical backgrounds,” he says. *Smiling With No Teeth* is split into two thematic halves, each focusing on one of the two black dogs. Owusu-Ansah talks through the entire concept in the track-by-track breakdown below. **On the Move!** “Up to this point in my career, I feel like I\'ve been categorized as ‘the funk guy,’ but a lot of those songs were created within the same two-week span. After those two weeks I was on to other stuff, but because the process of releasing music is so slow, that perception lingered about. So I wanted the intro to shatter that as soon as you press play. It’s explosive. You know something is coming.” **The Other Black Dog** “This song introduces the internal black dog character. Instrumentally, it feels like a movie chase scene. The internal black dog is chasing me through cracks and alleys, trying to be everywhere at once, reaching out, trying to engulf and embrace me. It was a very intentional, conceptual choice to have these songs sound upbeat, dancy, and sexy. But it\'s all a facade, it\'s all a fake smile when you really delve into it.” **Centrefold** “It’s told from the perspective of the black dog, as a sort of distorted love song from the place of an abuser. It doesn\'t respect you at all. It wants to consume you and use you for its own pleasure. And it manifests itself in this distorted love song that sounds groovy and sexy and alluring.” **Waitin’ on Ya** “It’s a sister track to ‘Centrefold.’ The through line has the same story.” **Don\'t Need You** “It’s back from the Genesis Owusu perspective, where the black dog has tried to lure you in, but you reach a point where you realize you can live without it. You don\'t need it, you can break free of those chains. It’s like an independence anthem: You’re breaking free from its clutches for the first time.” **Drown (feat. Kirin J Callinan)** “It continues on from ‘Don\'t Need You,’ analyzing the relationship from a more detached aspect, where you\'re realizing the black dog’s mannerisms. You can separate yourself from it so you\'re two individual beings. You can realize it’s a part of you that you have to let go. You are not your depression. You can make changes and separate yourself. Which leads to the chorus line, ‘You\'ve got to let me drown.’” **Gold Chains** “As an artist, I feel like I\'m just starting to turn some heads and break out, but I\'ve been touring and playing for years. Going from city to city in a van. Playing to no one. But so many people are like, ‘Oh, you\'re a rapper, right? Where\'s your gold chain? How much money do you have?’ So the song plays into the perception versus the reality—‘It looks so gold, but it can feel so cold in these chains.’ The music industry can exacerbate mental health issues and stuff like that, when you\'re overworked or commodified. Instead of an artist creating a product, you become the product.” **Smiling With No Teeth** “This is the center point. It’s encompassing the themes of the album from the narrator’s perspective rather than the black dog. It’s an intermission between Act One and Act Two.” **I Don\'t See Colour** “So much of Act One had honey and sweetness and upbeat tracks, but now we rip all that away. It showcases the personality of the next black dog, which is much more direct and brutal. They\'ve faced the brunt of racism and there’s no more sugarcoating. The extremely minimal instrumental is intentional, so you can completely focus on the lyrics, which are much more scathing. Being a Black person in white society and having to experience the brunt of racism, I\'m often also expected to be the bigger person and the educator. So this arc is validating the emotions and the venting that should be allowed. It’s therapeutic when you\'re faced with those circumstances.” **Black Dogs!** “It was produced by Matt Corby. This one and ‘Easy’ were the only two not produced by the band. It’s a straight-to-the-point song encompassing a day in the life of me, or just any Black person in Australia. It’s not that I\'m getting abused by police every day, but it\'s all the little microaggressions. Sonically speaking, it plays into how I feel every day, going into white spaces and feeling a bit paranoid.” **Whip Cracker** “It’s the ‘I\'ve had enough’ moment. The lyrics—‘Spit up on your grave/Hope my thoughts behave/We\'re so depraved’—play into the bogeymen that people want to see, but obviously as a satirical guise. And then it goes into bigots of all facets, essentially saying enough is enough, times have changed, it\'s over. And musically speaking, halfway through, it just explodes into this funk-rock section. It was very ‘What would Prince do?’” **Easy** “This one was produced by Harvey Sutherland. I was in Melbourne with him doing sessions, and I\'d just gone to the Invasion Day protest, so it was sparked from that. It’s about the relationship between Indigenous or native communities or just people of color, and the colonized country they\'re living in. One partner—the person of color—is fighting their way through a relationship with the very abusive partner that says they care about them and that they\'ll do things for them, but it\'s all lip service.” **A Song About Fishing** “This song started out as a jokey freestyle in the studio, but it turned into this weird parable about perseverance in dire circumstances. I feel like these last three songs are like Act Three of the album. They’re about both of the black dogs. Even though the circumstances seem so dire in the realms of depression and racism, I’m still getting up every day, trying my best and going to this lake where I can never catch any fish, but hoping that one day I\'ll snag something.” **No Looking Back** “It’s a pop ballad about how I\'ve gone through this journey and now I\'m finally ready to put these things behind me, enter a new phase of my life, and be a bigger and better person. It\'s like the transcendental conclusion of the album. And it\'s kind of a mantra: There’s no looking back. Like we\'ve gone through this and we\'re done, we\'re ready to move on.” **Bye Bye** “‘No Looking Back’ was going to be the final track of the album. It was going to end on a very positive note, but it was too much of a Hollywood ending for me. It felt unrealistic. I\'ve learnt a lot throughout my journey, but there’s no point where you can dust your hands off and be like, okay, racism over, depression over. So with ‘Bye Bye,’ the themes are crawling back to you. It signifies that this is an ongoing journey I\'m going to have to face. I had to be clear and real about it.”

Even the influential Consequence of Sound knows: as soon as Meskerem Mees (22) starts to sing, magic kicks in. With just her voice, an acoustic guitar and the cello of her sister in arms Febe Lazou, she has the ability to turn any song into an irresistible folk pop gem. Debut single ‘Joe’ was a big commercial and critical success in Belgium and its neighbouring countries, follow-up singles ‘Seasons Shift’ and ‘Astronaut’ confirmed her status as one of Europe’s biggest talents in music. A status that brought her to some of the most beautiful places in Europe, from Hamburg to Paris, and to top it off she won the prestigious Montreux Jazz Talent Award on the shoreline of Lake Geneva. Now we can proudly present ‘Julius’, her debut album and a collection of 13 timelessly beautiful songs, whose melodies and choruses effortlessly find their way to the musical epicentre in your head. Meskerem also has the skill to pull you right into the story of each song with just the right amount of well-chosen words – sometimes to the point, at other times poetic. These are songs that could’ve easily been written by, say, Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell half a century ago. It takes a master such as Koen Gisen to know exactly what to do with solid gold like this: not too much. Less is more. His sparse and, as always, superb production turns the spotlights exactly where they need to be: on Meskerem’s disarming lyrics and the amazing interaction with Febe. The result is nothing less than an instant classic. ‘Julius’ has what it takes to do what an illustrious namesake didn’t quite accomplish centuries ago: to conquer the whole of Europe. And who knows, the world.

The origins of Clairo (born Claire Cottrill) hold their own modern mythos: 2017’s lo-fi bedroom pop track “Pretty Girl” went viral, and a major-label record deal with Fader/Republic followed. Then came her debut LP, *Immunity*, and its sardonic indie pop punctuated by jazzy instrumentation, soft-rock harmonies, and diaristic revelations. On her sophomore album, *Sling*, produced by Jack Antonoff in a remote and rural part of upstate New York, Clairo has mined deeper into her well of self-possessed folk. The outdoors seems to have grounded her; even moments of ornate orchestration are stripped down to their emotional core, like in the fluttery horns and xylophone of “Wade,” the herd of violins on “Just for Today” and “Management,” or their psychic opposite—the heartbreaking piano ballad intro on “Harbor,” and the campfire stopper “Reaper.” Standout first single “Blouse” features backing vocals from Lorde, and borrows a familiarly devastating chord progression (think Big Star’s “Thirteen”). Everywhere you turn on *Sling*, there are careful, restrained, and wise observations on the human condition.

When IDLES released their third album, *Ultra Mono*, in September 2020, singer Joe Talbot told Apple Music that it was focused on being present and, he said, “accepting who you are in that moment.” On the Bristol band’s fourth record, which arrived 14 months later, that perspective turns sharply back to the past as Talbot examines his struggles with addiction. “I started therapy and it was the first time I really started to compartmentalize the last 20 years, starting with my mum’s alcoholism and then learning to take accountability for what I’d done, all the bad decisions I’d made,” he tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “But also where these bad decisions came from—as a forgiveness thing but way more as a responsibility thing. Two years sober, all that stuff, and I came out and it was just fluid, we \[Talbot and guitarist Mark Bowen\] both just wrote it and it was beautiful.” Talbot is unshrinkingly honest in his self-examination. Opener “MTT 420 RR” considers mortality via visceral reflections on a driving incident that the singer was fortunate to escape alive, before his experiences with the consuming cycle of addiction cut through the pneumatic riffs of “The Wheel.” There’s hope here, too. During soul-powered centerpiece “The Beachland Ballroom,” Talbot is as impassioned as ever and newly melodic (“It was a conversation we had, I wanted to start singing”). It’s a song where he’s on his knees but he can discern some light. “The plurality of it is that perspective of *CRAWLER*, the title,” he says. “Recovery isn’t just a beautiful thing, you have to go through a lot of processes that are ugly and you’ve got to look at yourself and go, ‘Yeah, you were not a good person to these people, you did this.’ That’s where the beauty comes from—afterwards you have a wider perspective of where you are. And also from other people’s perspectives, you see these things, you see people recovering or completely enthralled in addiction, and it’s all different angles. We wanted to create a picture of recovery and hope but from ugly and beautiful angles. You’re on your knees, some people are begging, some people are working, praying, whatever it is—you’ve got to get through it.” *CRAWLER* may be IDLES’ most introspective work to date, but their social and political focus remains sharp enough on the tightly coiled “The New Sensation” to skewer Conservative MP Rishi Sunak’s suggestion that some people, including artists and musicians, should abandon their careers and retrain in a post-pandemic world. With its rage and wit, its bleakness and hope, and its diversions from the band’s post-punk foundations into ominous electronica (“MTT 420 RR”), glitchy psych textures (“Progress”), and motorik rhythms butting up against free jazz (“Meds”), *CRAWLER* upholds Talbot’s earliest aims for the band. In 2009, he resolved to create something with substance and impact—an antidote to the bands he’d watched in Bristol and London. “They looked beautiful but bored,” he says. “They were clothes hangers, models. I was so sick of paying money to see bored people. Like, ‘What are you doing? Where’s the love?’ I was at a place where I needed an outlet, and luckily I found four brothers who saved my life. And the rest is IDLES.”