Les Inrocks' Top 100 Albums of 2020

A general observation: You don’t go see Rick Rubin at Shangri-La if you’re just going to fuck around. For their sixth LP, The Strokes turn to the Mage of Malibu to produce their most focused collection of songs since 2003’s *Room on Fire*—the very beginning of a period marked by discord, disinterest, and addiction. Only their fourth record since, *The New Abnormal* finds the fivesome sounding fully engaged and totally revitalized, offering glimpses of themselves as we first came to know them at the turn of the millennium—young saviors of rock, if not its last true stars—while also providing the sort of perspective and even grace that comes with age. “Bad Decisions” is at turns riffy and elegiac, Julian Casablancas’ corkscrewing chorus melody a close enough relative to 1981’s “Dancing With Myself” that Billy Idol and Tony James are credited as songwriters. Though not as immediate, “Not the Same Anymore” is equally toothsome, a heart-stopping soul number that manages to capture feelings of both triumph and deep regret, with Casablancas opening himself up and delivering what might be his finest vocal performance to date. “I was afraid,” he sings, amid a weave of cresting guitars. “I fucked up/I couldn’t change/It’s too late.” For a band that forged an entire mythology around appearing as though they couldn’t be bothered, this is an exciting development. It’s cool to care, too.

There aren’t many bands who undergo drastic sonic transformations *before* they’ve released their debut album. But Working Men’s Club’s music reflects the restless, push-it-forward energy of their leader Sydney Minsky-Sargeant. Originally a trio dealing in jerky New Wave, the band’s direction was diverted when Minsky-Sargeant took charge of the creative reins during the making of this self-titled debut. “I wanted to make a dance record, but I didn’t want to pigeonhole it as just being a dance record,” Minsky-Sargeant tells Apple Music. The frontman’s knack for snarling melodies remains, now beefed up with a sound that harks back to the dance floors of late-’80s Manchester, a heady mix of pulsing beats, acid house pianos, and bold synths. “I started off writing music on my own, then it became more collaborative, then back to being solo again,” says Minsky-Sargeant. “I’m grateful that I was given a chance to do it on my own, because that was always the route it was going.” Here, Minsky-Sargeant makes sense of the record, track by track. **Valleys** “The way that it starts very barren, selectively adding overt components and instrumentation, I thought it was a good buildup to the start of the record and a good opening track. It\'s about where I\'m from and how isolating it can feel to be in a small town in the North of England sometimes. It\'s quite a secluded, claustrophobic place sometimes. But I think everyone can relate to that in some way, wherever you live.” **A.A.A.A.** “It’s a funny tune. It blew me away how Ross Orton \[producer\] interpreted it and then how he made it. It was just a bass guitar and the same drumbeat, but with more brutal and normal-sounding drums. All the elements were there, but we chose to interpret it more electronically. Ross was using the synths to make drum sounds, and then we basically made that tune all on one synthesizer, which was really cool, and showed how minimal it could be.” **John Cooper Clarke** “I think John Cooper Clarke is a Northern icon. One of the last survivors of that era, going back into that period of time where he lived with Nico and lived in Hebden Bridge, which is down the road from me. He\'s just a proper punk, and one of the last remaining punks there is. Now Andrew Weatherall\'s dead, and people like that have fallen, he\'s still going. He just does it how he wants to do it, and I think that\'s quite admirable, as a creative.” **White Rooms and People** “It’s the poppiest, most indie-sounding tune on the record. It\'s hooky and captures that era of what we were doing when we started—but it\'s reinterpreted and much glossier. It feels like an older song to me. We did go back and reimagine it and put electronic drums on it, which I think really beefed it up and made it fit with the record.” **Outside** “This was an old demo of mine and we just made it sound better. It was the first tune that we did because we didn\'t know how to tackle it. We sped it up and just tried to really produce it, and it worked. It\'s quite a joyous tune, when the rest of the album is quite dark.” **Be My Guest** “I feel like there\'s two sides to this record and this is the first tune on the B-side. It’s the side of the record where it becomes more aggressive in stages. And this, I guess, is the most kind of nasty, brutal tune that there is on the record. It\'s all about the guitars for me, because I was really set on making sure that, especially that bit after the chorus where it goes into that big drop into those really high-pitched guitars, it just had to really carry.” **Tomorrow** “It\'s one of the last tunes I wrote before recording. It’s quite repetitive, maybe obnoxiously repetitive. I think when you\'re making that sort of repetitive music, it has to build throughout the backing. I guess it’s quite a polished, nice song in regard to the rest of the album. It’s more on the poppier side of things.” **Cook a Coffee** “We had to come back to this because the initial recording we did was really bare. I\'m pretty sure even the guitars might have been out of tune or something, so we went back and redid all the guitars, and put more synths on. We had to revisit it and beef it up. But we definitely got there in the end. Those synths at the end make it more anthemic and pulled it all together.” **Teeth** “When we put ‘Teeth’ out as a single, there was a lot of back-and-forth discussion over which mix would go out. Me and Ross had worked quite closely on this tune together, and for me and him, the wrong mix went out. So as soon as we got in the studio, it was like, ‘We\'ve got to change that mix for the record.’ And we did. It just drives it a lot more. It makes it a lot more cinematic than just guitars on top of synths. When we do stuff it\'s all so finely tuned, everything has its own place.” **Angel** “We play this second to last when we play it live, but in terms of the album, it had to be the last tune. I think it\'s just quite a pompous way to end it, isn\'t it? It\'s quite ridiculous. Whenever you read books about records and how they were done, it always seems that the last song\'s the last song that they recorded. And it felt like during the process of recording the album, we were putting it back–we knew it was maybe going to be a bit harder to capture. But it was actually fine. It was a nice way to end the recording process.”

Fontaines D.C. singer Grian Chatten was with bandmates Tom Coll and Conor Curley in a pub somewhere in the US when the words “Happy is living in a closed eye” came to him. It was possibly in Chicago, he thinks, and certainly during their 2019 tour. “We were playing pool and drinking some shit Guinness,” he tells Apple Music. “I was drinking an awful lot and there was a sense of running away on that tour—because we were so overworked. The gigs were really good and full of energy, but it almost felt like a synthetic, anxious energy. We were all burning the candle at both ends. I think my subconscious was trying to tell me when I wrote that line that I was not really facing reality properly. Ever since I\'ve read Oscar Wilde, I\'ve always been fascinated by questioning the validity of living soberly or healthily.” The line eventually made its way into “Sunny” a track from the band’s second album *A Hero’s Death*. Like much of the record, that unsteady waltz is an absorbing departure from the rock ’n’ roll punch of their Mercury-nominated debut, *Dogrel*. Released in April 2019, *Dogrel* quickly established the Irish five-piece as one of the most exciting guitar bands on their side of the Atlantic, throwing them into an exacting tour and promo schedule. When the physical and mental strains of life on the road bore down—on many nights, Chatten would have to visit dark memories to reengage with the thoughts and feelings behind some songs—the five-piece sought relief and refuge in other people’s music. “We found ourselves enjoying mostly gentler music that took us out of ourselves and calmed us down, took us away from the fast-paced lifestyle,” says Chatten. “I think we began to associate a particular sound and kind of music, one band in particular would have been The Beach Boys, that helped us feel safe and calm and took us away from the chaos.” That, says Chatten, helps account for the immersive and expansive sound of *A Hero’s Death*. With their world being refracted through the heat haze of interstate highways and the disconcerting fog of days without much sleep, there’s a dreaminess and longing in the music. It’s in the percussive roll of “Love Is the Main Thing” and the harmonies swirling around the title track’s rigorous riffs. It drifts through the uneasy reflection of “Sunny.” “‘Sunny’ is hard for me to sing,” says Chatten, “just because there are so many long fucking notes. And I have up until recently been smoking pretty hard. But I enjoy the character that I feel when I sing it. I really like the embittered persona and the gin-soaked atmosphere.” While *Dogrel*’s lyrics carried poetic renderings of life in modern Dublin, *A Hero’s Death* burrows inward. “Dublin is still in the language that I use, the colloquialisms and the way that I express things,” says Chatten. “But I consider this to be much more a portrait of an inner landscape. More a commentary on a temporal reality. It\'s a lot more about the streets within my own mind.” Throughout, Chatten can be found examining a sense of self. He does it with bracing defiance on “I Don’t Belong” and “I Was Not Born,” and with aching resignation on “Oh Such a Spring”—a lament for people who go to work “just to die.” ”I worked a lot of jobs that gave me no satisfaction and forced me to shelve temporarily who I was,” says Chatten. “I felt very strongly about people I love being in the service industry and having to become somebody else and suppress their own feelings and their own views, their own politics, to make a living. How it feels after a shift like that, that there is blood on your hands almost. You’re perpetuating this lie, because it’s a survival mechanism for yourself.” Ambitious and honest, *A Hero’s Death* is the sound of a band protecting their ideals when the demands of being rock’s next big thing begin to exert themselves. ”One of the things we agreed upon when we started the band was that we wouldn\'t write a song unless there was a purpose for its existence,” says Chatten. “There would be no cases of churning anything out. It got to a point, maybe four or five tunes into writing the album, where we realized that we were on the right track of making art that was necessary for us, as opposed to necessary for our careers. We realized that the heart, the core of the album is truthful.”

“You say you can\'t hold anything back/It\'s a habit,” Helena Deland sings on the aptly titled “Truth Nugget”—which her first full-length album is full of. The Montreal art-pop experimentalist revels in uncomfortable conversations about relationship dynamics and gender norms, often positioning herself in the crosshairs. On “Dog,” she’s an obedient partner submitting herself to the patriarchy (“I hate to be your dog/But I got everything to gain from your hand on my head/Like I’m about to be trained”), while on “Pale,” she toes the line between ennui and self-loathing, staring at the mirror to declare, “Spending this much time in my naked body is not making it familiar to me.” But on *Someone New*, it’s not just the cutting words that throw you off balance: Deland’s deconstructed dream pop presents a shape-shifting bricolage of bedroom-indie confessionals, jarring drones, and mutant drum-machine beats that vividly reflect the unsettled mindset of someone barely holding it all together.

On his first LP of original songs in nearly a decade—and his first since reluctantly accepting Nobel Prize honors in 2016—Bob Dylan takes a long look back. *Rough and Rowdy Ways* is a hot bath of American sound and historical memory, the 79-year-old singer-songwriter reflecting on where we’ve been, how we got here, and how much time he has left. There are temperamental blues (“False Prophet,” “Crossing the Rubicon”) and gentle hymns (“I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You”), rollicking farewells (“Goodbye Jimmy Reed”) and heady exchanges with the Grim Reaper (“Black Rider”). It reads like memoir, but you know he’d claim it’s fiction. And yet, maybe it’s the timing—coming out in June 2020 amidst the throes of a pandemic and a social uprising that bears echoes of the 1960s—or his age, but Dylan’s every line here does have the added charge of what feels like a final word, like some ancient wisdom worth decoding and preserving before it’s too late. “Mother of Muses” invokes Elvis and MLK, Dylan claiming, “I’ve already outlived my life by far.” On the 16-minute masterstroke and stand-alone single “Murder Most Foul,” he draws Nazca Lines around the 1963 assassination of JFK—the death of a president, a symbol, an era, and something more difficult to define. It’s “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” that lingers longest, though: Over nine minutes of accordion and electric guitar mingling like light on calm waters, Dylan tells the story of an outlaw cycling through radio stations as he makes his way to the end of U.S. Route 1, the end of the road. “Key West is the place to be, if you’re looking for your mortality,” he says, in a growl that gives way to a croon. “Key West is paradise divine.”

Gorillaz began making their seventh studio album with the specific intention of not making an album. Instead, the Song Machine project was conceived as a series of monthly stand-alone singles that would be created in the moment, without the constraints or concepts that come with shaping an album. “That’s the definition of contemporary, isn’t it?” Remi Kabaka Jr.—producer, drummer, percussionist, and Gorillaz’s third member alongside Damon Albarn, and Jamie Hewlett—tells Apple Music. “It’s more interesting working in this episodic format because it’s easier to respond to a moment than trying to remember your response to the moment. You are a bulletin—a responder in the moment, not a reporter of the moment.” Songs were forged in intensive bursts, as quickly as ideas and collaborators could be brought together. The series launched with “Momentary Bliss,” a linkup with the insurrectionary voices of slowthai and Slaves, in January 2020 before lockdown changed the cadence of releases to every few weeks. Nevertheless, work continued across all available forms of communication and the music kept coming. “I don’t know if \[lockdown\] changed the process of making songs, I think it changed the subject matter,” says Kabaka. “You like an artist, you play them a track whether it’s online or IRL, if they like it, you’ll work together. Technology is just a music delivery system; it hasn’t radically changed the creative process for Gorillaz. If you can get in touch with someone and you have something to write about, then boom! You just go from there.” The list of collaborators is as rich and as stellar as it’s ever been on a Gorillaz project, with Elton John, The Cure’s Robert Smith, Georgia, 6LACK, and Malian singer-songwriter Fatoumata Diawara all drawn into the band’s orbit. “Song Machine is a universe of sound, and I think there is more university of sound than there ever was,” says Kabaka. “In a way, Song Machine as a whole has become more cellular.” Gorillaz’s magic is to fuse those various cells together into a new, cohesive whole. Collaborators were chosen for the way they could inspire or evolve a song as much as how they might fit ideas that were already brewing. “The music can loudly choose the artist, *or* the artists can choose the idea you hadn’t actually thought of,” he says. “You have to have multiple ideas and options; you can’t be scared of losing an idea. That’s part of being agile and in the moment—you have to go in with as little preconception as possible, and as much possibility as you can. You have to respond to the needs of the artist—they’re the ones with the master plan. Surprise is why we invited them. You have to hope they can surprise you.” The results are still unmistakably Gorillaz: off-kilter pop that’s playful, melancholy, worldly, and tethered to sharp melodies. It eventually became clear that there was a very good album to be pieced together from these free-standing songs. And it’s one that reflects the turbulence and trauma of 2020. On “The Valley of the Pagans,” Beck sends strutting dispatches from a “land of the permanent sun/Where the flowers are melted and the future is fun.” ScHoolboy Q bounds across the spongy funk of “Pac-Man,” asking, “How can I trust truth?” And, with customary edginess, The Cure’s Robert Smith alludes to our “surgical glove world” in the title track—a song that manages to be both a call to the dance floor and the sound of humanity locked in an ominously downward spiral. But there’s plenty of optimism and positive energy too, running from the yearning trilingual pop of “Désolé” to the certain assertion that “We could do so much better than this” on “Momentary Bliss.” “Strange isn’t bad, it’s just weird,” says Kabaka. “We’re intelligent enough to recognize that mutation changes how the world develops, and change is good.” In the 20 years between this album and Gorillaz’s first EP, *Tomorrow Comes Today*, the world has mutated in unimaginable ways. Gorillaz, though, remain a vibrant and inventive bulletin of their times. “The essence \[of Gorillaz\] is the same as it’s always been,” says Kabaka. “It’s still weird and it’s still wonderful. But maybe we have changed.”

“I wanted to make a small, punk, club album,” Ela Minus tells Apple Music about her sharp-edged debut full-length *acts of rebellion*. Punk is the key word here; the Colombian-born, Brooklyn-based electronic producer, who cut her teeth playing drums in Bogotá’s DIY scene, wrote the album partly as a rallying cry for the current political moment. *rebellion*, which is at once fiercely turbulent and disarmingly tender, fuses techno’s communal energy with the cerebral introspection that comes with more solitary moments on the dance floor. “These songs are gritty, sweaty, and in the moment; they have an active spirit,” Minus says. “To me, punk and electronic music come from the same rebellious place. They say, ‘The world is kind of fucked up and we’re going to change it.’” Read the inside story behind every song on the album below. **N19 5NF** “This track begins with a breath, and that’s very symbolic. It’s titled after the zip code from a London hospital where I had been sick and had a close call. Essentially, it’s where I believe my life before this album ended and the new life began. This is the first song of the first album of that new life. It felt like a new beginning, like I was born again. Long before any of that had happened, I’d made this track with a bunch of samples from my favorite philosophy podcasts. But after a while, I muted them and realized, ‘Ah, this works way better.’ The samples were just extremely literal. I like to send a message with my music, but if you do it right, the spirit of the messages will still be there.” **they told us it was hard, but they were wrong.** “I wanted to make a hymn for weirdos, for everybody who is told that their ideas won’t work or can’t be done. That has happened to me so many times in my life and I’ve had to just say, ‘Fuck everybody. I can do whatever I want.’ For me, the fact that I was sitting in my house, completely free to make the album that I wanted to make, with time to breathe and everything...it felt like a huge achievement. It felt like I finally had the life that I wanted.” **el cielo no es de nadie** “This is the most direct—and maybe the only—love song on the album. With this whole project, I\'m trying to give everybody an alternative, another way of doing things or another perspective. In this song, I sing in Spanish about what it means to really love someone. I say, ‘Everybody goes to the moon and back to show someone how much they love them, but anybody can do that. Not everybody can give you their time every single day, consistently. So if you love me, don\'t give me the moon or grand gestures. Be there every single day.’ It’s a call for all of us to seek and give real love.” **megapunk** “I made this entire album at night. I’d record before bed and edit when I woke up. With this song, I remember having so much fun making it and then waking up the next day thinking, ‘Okay, maybe too much fun.’ It’s ‘megapunk’ after the demo because it was so loud and ten minutes long. But clearly it was very healing to me. I was angry. I wanted to write a motivating anthem for people to step up, organize, and march. I had this image in my head of a group of women getting together to march for feminism, and I wanted to relay a sense of empowerment while also inviting them to act.” **pocket piano** “When I’m playing live, I never stop. I keep going, and in between songs I leave empty space. I have the ability to leave all my machines running even though no sound is coming out so I can improvise and play whatever I want. One night, I played this track intuitively during a transition at a show. I remember thinking I wanted to ground everybody a little bit. I had gone too fast and too loud for too long, and it was time for a group hug. That’s what I think it does in this album, too. The whole song has just one synth, and it’s one I actually made myself years ago and named pocket piano.” **dominique** “This is the most autobiographical song on the album. I was very deep into writing and had basically lost all sense of time. I was doing everything alone, and because I could do whatever I wanted, my days and schedule slowly shifted. One day, I woke up at 7 pm and just felt bad and confused. So I made myself some coffee, pulled up the music from the night before, found the track without the lyrics and wrote, ‘I just woke up/It\'s 7 pm/My brain feels like it\'s going to break.’” **let them have the internet** “I\'m a geek and I love technology, and for a long time I think we all thought about it romantically. Then, it became the total opposite, where it’s ruled by capitalism, corporations, and banks just like everything else. But one day I had an uplifting thought: The more that all greed takes over the internet, the more the offline world will become less capitalized. The more our money goes digital, the less it interrupts the physical world. In a way, it’s never been easier to disconnect from everything. You can turn your phone off and be present without anyone selling you anything. This song was a way for me to acknowledge that freedom. To say, ‘Let them have the internet, because we have everything else.’” **tony** “This song follows that idea of being present, but on a more personal level. Whenever you meet someone you’re interested in, the beginning of any relationship is always texting. And the truth is, I don’t actually like talking that much. I’m awkward. If I want to get to know someone, I\'d rather go for a walk with them or go to a show, and share a physical space where we can spend time together. I want to say to people, ‘Let’s just meet up and dance all night and see where that goes instead.’ ‘tony’ is an invitation to conquer our fear of human interaction.” **do whatever you want, all the time.** “I was initially attracted to dance music because it felt rebellious. I grew up in the punk scene, and that\'s what I\'ve always been drawn to, that community for outsiders. It makes you feel like you have a say in your life and the world. So much of contemporary club music is fun...but it’s soft. It isn’t pointed. I was craving something with a point of view. I really believe that if we just did whatever we wanted all the time, the world would be a better place. Suppression is a very dangerous thing. One of the most rebellious things you can do is follow your tastes and instincts wherever they lead.” **close \[feat. Helado Negro\]** “This song is like a little candy. It\'s so sweet, it’s a jar of honey. I made it on a quiet, hot night and remember thinking that it felt like I had channeled my eight-year-old self and made a song she would like. A friend said she thought it should be a duet, and it was already a cheesy song, so I thought, why not go for it? A few months before, I had worked with Helado Negro on his album *This Is How You Smile*, and we both thought our voices sounded really nice together. I\'m a huge fan of his; he’s a godfather of Latin artists in New York and is just incredibly wise and generous. I think it’s a beautiful symbol that it’s the only feature on the album, which was really a very insular experience. I did everything myself, on my own. To have a guest on the last song feels like the end of that period of solitude. Maybe in the next album, I’ll be more open to working with other musicians I love.”

Ela Minus’ debut album is a collection about the personal as political and embracing the beauty of tiny acts of revolution in our everyday lives. Throughout, a sense of urgency and a call to arms is mixed with this love and appreciation for reality—because even revolutionaries need to leave space for simple human interaction.

On album four, the French pop duo balances darkness with hope.

“I want to get to that point where I can just write one lyric and people understand what I’m about,” IDLES singer Joe Talbot tells Apple Music. “Maybe it’s ‘Fuck you, I’m a lover.’” Those words, from the song ‘The Lover,’ certainly form an effective tagline for the band’s third album. The Bristol band explored trauma and vulnerability on second album *Joy as an Act of Resistance.*, and here they’re finding ways to heal, galvanize, and move forward—partly informed by mindfulness and being in the present. “I thought about the idea that you only ever have now,” Talbot says. “\[*Ultra Mono*\] is about getting to the crux of who you are and accepting who you are in that moment—which is really about a unification of self.” Those thoughts inspired a solidarity and concision in the way Talbot, guitarists Mark Bowen and Lee Kiernan, bassist Adam Devonshire, and drummer Jon Beavis wrote music. Each song began with a small riff or idea, and everything that was added had to be in the service of that nugget. “That’s where the idea of an orchestra comes in—that you try and sound, from as little as possible, as big as you can,” Talbot says. “Everyone hitting the thing at the same time to sound huge. It might also be as simple as one person playing and everyone else shutting the fuck up. Don’t create noise where it’s not needed.” The music’s visceral force and social awareness will keep the “punk” tag pinned to IDLES, but *Ultra Mono* forges a much broader sound. The self-confidence of hip-hop, the communal spirit of jungle, and the kindness of jazz-pop maestro Jamie Cullum all feed into these 12 songs. Let Talbot explain how in this track-by-track guide. **War** “It was the quickest thing we ever wrote. We got in a room together, I explained the concept, and we just wrote it. We played it—it wasn’t even a writing thing. And that is about as ultra mono as it gets. It had to be the first track because it is the explosion of not overthinking anything and *being*. The big bang of the album is the inner turmoil of trying to get rid of the noise and just be present—so it was perfect. The title’s ‘War’ because it sounded so violent, ballistic. I was really disenfranchised with the internet, like, ‘Why am I listening to assholes? You’ve got to be kind to yourself.’ ‘War’ was like, ‘Yeah, do it, actually learn to love yourself.’ That was the start of a big chapter in my life. It was like the war of self that I had to win.” **Grounds** “We wanted to write a song that was like AC/DC meets Dizzee Rascal, but a bit darker. It’s the march song, the start of the journey: ‘We won the first battle, let’s fucking do this. What do you need to stop apologizing for?’ That’s a conversation you need to have when all these horrible people come to the forefront. I was being criticized for speaking of civil rights–whether that be trans rights or gay rights or Black rights, the war on the working classes. I believe in socialism. Go fuck yourselves. I want to sleep at night knowing that my platform is the voice of reason and an egalitarian want for something beautiful—not the murder of Black people, homophobia at the workplace, racist front lines. We were recording in Paris and Warren Ellis \[of The Bad Seeds and Grinderman\] popped in. He sat with us just chatting about life. I was like, ‘It would be insane if I didn’t ask you to be on this record, man.’ I just wanted him to do a ‘Hey!’ like on a grime record.” **Mr. Motivator** “\[TV fitness guru\] Mr Motivator, that’s my spirit animal. We wrote that song and it felt like a train. I wanted to put a beautiful and joyous face to something rampantly, violently powerful-sounding. ‘Mr. Motivator’ is 90% lethal machine, 10% beautiful, smiley man that brings you joy. The lyrics are all cliches because I think *The Guardian* or someone leaned towards the idea that my sloganeering was something to be scoffed at. So I thought I’d do a whole song of it. We’re trying to rally people together, and if you go around using flowery language or muddying the waters with your insecurities, you’re not going to get your point across. So, I wanted to write nursery rhymes for open-minded people.” **Anxiety** “This was the first song where the lyrics came as we were writing the music. It sounded anxiety-inducing because it was so bombastic and back-and-forth. Then we had the idea of speeding the song up as you go along and becoming more cacophonous. That just seemed like a beautiful thing, because when you start meditating, the first thing that happens is you try to meditate–which isn’t what you’re supposed to do. The noise starts coming in. One of the things they teach you in therapy is that if you feel anxious or scared or sad or angry, don’t just internally try to fight that. Accept that you become anxious and allow yourself the anxiety. Feel angry and accept that, and then think about why, and what triggered it. And obviously 40-cigarettes-a-day Dev \[Adam Devonshire\] can’t really sing that well anymore, so we had to get David Yow of Jesus Lizard in. He’s got an amazing voice. It’s a much better version of what Dev used to be like.” **Kill Them With Kindness** “That’s Jamie Cullum \[on the piano\]. We met him at the Mercury Prize and he said, ‘If you need any piano on your album, just let us know.’ I was like, ‘We don’t, but we definitely do now.’ I like that idea of pushing people’s idea of what cool is. Jamie Cullum is fucking cooler than any of those apathetic nihilists. He believes in something and he works hard at it—and I like that. When I was working in a kitchen, we listened to Radio 2 all the time, and I loved his show. And he’s a beautiful human being. It’s a perfect example of what we’re about: inclusivity and showing what you love. I didn’t write the lyrics until after meeting him. It was just that idea that he seemed kindhearted. Kindness is a massive thing: It’s what empathy derives from, and kindness and empathy is what’ll kill fascism. It should be the spirit of punk and soul music and grime and every other music.” **Model Village** “The part that we wrote around was something that I used to play onstage whenever Bowen was offstage and I stole his guitar. So it had this playfulness, and I wanted to write a kind of take-the-piss song. I’m not antagonistic at all, but I do find things funny, like people who get so angry. I wanted this song to be taking yourself out of your own town and looking at it like it’s a model village. Just to be like, ‘Look how small and insignificant this place is. Don’t be so aggressive and defensive about something you don’t really understand.’ It’s a call for empathy—but to the assholes in a non-apologetic way.” **Ne Touche Pas Moi** “I was getting really down on tours because I felt a bit like an animal in a cage. Dudes are aggressive, and it’s boring when you see it in a crowd. Someone’s being a prick in the crowd and people aren’t comfortable—it’s not a nice feeling. So I wanted to create that idea of a safe arena with an anthem. It’s a violent, cutting anthem. It’s like, ‘I am full of love, but that doesn’t mean you can elbow me in the face or touch my breasts.’ We can play it in sets to give people the confidence that there is a platform here to be safe. I said to Bowen, ‘I really wish there was a woman singing the chorus, because it’s not just about my voice, it’s more often women that get groped.’ A couple of days later, we were in Paris recording Jehnny Beth’s TV show and I told her about this song. It was a nice relief to have someone French backing up my shit French.” **Carcinogenic** “Jungle was a movement based around unity—very different kinds of people getting together under the love of music. It was one of the most forward-thinking, beautiful things to happen to our country, \[and it\] was shut down by police and people who couldn’t make money from it. I wanted to write a song that was part garage rock, part jungle, because both movements have their part to play in building IDLES and also building amazing communities of people and great musicians. Then I thought about jungle and grime and garage and how something positive gets turned into something negative with the media. Basically, any Black music that creates a positive network of people and communities, building something out of love, is dangerous because it’s people thinking outside the box and not relying on the government for reassurance and entertainment and distraction. So then it got me thinking about ‘carcinogenic’ and how everything gives you cancer, when really the most cancerous thing about our society isn’t anything like that, it’s the class war that we’re going through and depriving people of a decent education, decent welfare, decent housing. That’s fucking cancer.” **Reigns** “This was written around the bass, obviously. Again, another movement—techno—and that idea of togetherness and the love in the room is always apparent. Techno is motorik, it’s mesmeric, it is just a singularity—minimal techno, especially. It’s just the beat or the bassline and that carries you through, that’s all you need. Obviously, we’re a chorus band, so we thought we’d throw in something huge to cut through it. But we didn’t want to overcomplicate it. That sinister pound just reminds me of my continual disdain for the Royal Family and everything they represent in our country, from the fascism that it comes from to the smiley-face racism that it perpetuates nowadays.” **The Lover** “I wanted to write a soul song with that wall-of-noise, Phil Spector vibe—but also an IDLES song. What could be more IDLES than writing a song about being a lover but making it really sweary? When I love someone, I swear a lot around them because I trust them, and I want them to feel comfortable and trust me. So I just wrote the most honest love song. It’s like a defiant smile in the face of assholes who can’t just accept that your love is real. It’s like, ‘I’m not lying. I am full of love and you’re a prick.’ That’s it. That song was the answer to the call of ‘Grounds.’ That huge, stabby, all-together orchestra.” **A Hymn** “Bowen and I were trying to write a song together. I had a part and he had a part. Then my part just got kicked out and we wrote the song around the guitar line. We wanted to write a song that was like a hymn, because a hymn is a Christian, or gospel, vision of togetherness and rejoicing at once for something they love. I wanted to write the lyrics around the idea that a hymn nowadays is just about suburban want, material fear. So it’s like a really subdued, sad hymn about materialism, suburban pedestrianism. And it came out really well.” **Danke** “It was going to be an instrumental, a song that made you feel elated and ready for war—and not muddy it with words. A song that embodies the whole album, that just builds and pounds but all the parts change. Each bit changes, but it feels like one part of one thing. And I always finish on a thank you because it’s important to be grateful for what people have given us—so I wanted to call the song ‘Danke.’ Then, on the day of recording it, Daniel Johnston died. So I put in his lyrics \[from ‘True Love Will Find You in the End’\] because they’re some of the most beautiful ever written. It fits the song, fits the album. He could have only written that one lyric and it’d be enough to understand him. I added \[my\] lyrics \[‘I’ll be your hammer, I’ll be your nail/I’ll be the house that allows you to fail’\] at the end because I felt like it was an offering to leave with—like, ‘I’ve got you.’ It’s what I would have said to him, or any friend that needed love.”

The earliest releases of Yves Tumor—the producer born Sean Bowie in Florida, raised in Tennessee, and based in Turin—arrived from a land beyond genre. They intermingled ambient synths and disembodied Kylie samples with free jazz, soul, and the crunch of experimental club beats. By 2018’s *Safe in the Hands of Love*, Tumor had effectively become a genre of one, molding funk and indie into an uncanny strain of post-everything art music. *Heaven to a Tortured Mind*, Tumor’s fourth LP, is their most remarkable transformation yet. They have sharpened their focus, sanded down the rough edges, and stepped boldly forward with an avant-pop opus that puts equal weight on both halves of that equation. “Gospel for a New Century” opens the album like a shot across the bow, the kind of high-intensity funk geared more to filling stadiums than clubs. Its blazing horns and electric bass are a reminder of Tumor’s Southern roots, but just as we’ve gotten used to the idea of them as spiritual kin to Outkast, they follow up with “Medicine Burn,” a swirling fusion of shoegaze and grunge. The album just keeps shape-shifting like that, drawing from classic soul and diverse strains of alternative rock, and Tumor is an equally mercurial presence—sometimes bellowing, other times whispering in a falsetto croon. But despite the throwback inspirations, the record never sounds retro. Its powerful rhythm section anchors the music in a future we never saw coming. These are not the sullen rhythmic abstractions of Tumor\'s early years; they’re larger-than-life anthems that sound like the product of some strange alchemical process. Confirming the magnitude of Tumor’s creative vision, this is the new sound that a new decade deserves.

“I think most of it takes place in dreams,” Caleb Landry Jones says of his debut solo album, The Mother Stone. “I’m talking more about dreams than I am about what’s happened in the physical realm. Or I’m talking about both, and you’re not sure what’s what.” This is the kind of conversation you end up having about a record like this one, a sprawling psychedelic suite built from abrupt and disorienting detours and schizoid shifts of voice, its manic energy forever pulling the tablecloth out from under classic pop orchestration. One minute you’re squarely in the realm of biographical fact and a moment later you’re having a discussion about lucid dreaming and how Jones once punched up a dream set on a soccer field by willing himself to experience it from the POV of the ball. But maybe that’s just another story about grabbing the wheel of your own hallucination; maybe this pertains to the music after all. Some biographical facts: Caleb Landry Jones was born in Garland, Texas in 1989 and comes from a long line of fiddle players. Three, maybe four generations back, on his mother’s side. His grandfather wrote jingles for commercials, his mother was a singer-songwriter who taught piano lessons in the house, and his father was a contractor who did a lot of work for the Dallas music-equipment retailer Brook Mays and knew a guy if you needed a bass or a banjo. But Jones is not sure if you can hear any of this in his music and he does not play the fiddle. What you can hear on this record are the marks left by conversion experiences, two in particular. First there’s Jones’ formative encounter with the Beatles’ “White Album,” the Fabs record most obviously composed by four Beatles rowing in different directions, and the beginning of what Jones calls “this British Invasion of my soul,” which is still ongoing. Second, there’s Syd Barrett, cracked vessel of Pink Floyd’s most intergalactic ambitions, and the “falling-down-the-stairs” quality of his solo work in particular. “I was dating a girl who was obsessed with him,” Jones remembers, “and the fact that I’d never heard him really pissed her off. So we went and got The Madcap Laughs and we listened to it and I could see why it pissed her off.” “John keeps knocking at the door, and so does Syd,” Jones says of these songs. “And I’m in there somewhere. And so are a few other people, I think. It would be really boring if it was just one guy.” Jones has been writing and recording music since age 16, around the same time he started acting professionally. Played in a band called Robert Jones for a minute, lost his guitar player to higher education, moved into his own place, and broke up with somebody, at which point the songs really started coming hard and fast. “I started playing guitar and playing more keys,” he says, “and then started writing record after record after record after record, because I didn’t know what to do with myself. It was a good way of healing. And it felt like as soon as I started doing it, it felt like it needed to happen all the time.” In the ensuing years he’d spend a lot of time carrying unrecorded songs around in his head like goldfish in a bag, waiting for a chance to record them in marathon sessions in his parents’ barn. “You gotta play the songs every day, or every two or three days, to keep ‘em,” he says. “Otherwise I forget them.” Sometimes the ideas fuse together, one chapter to the next; this is how songs grow into seven-plus-minute epics like the ones on The Mother Stone. His back catalog is around seven hundred songs deep— a whole discography of full albums, most of them unheard outside the barn, at least for now. Before long Jones’ other job started to keep him away from the barn for longer stretches. You may have seen him playing the drums on television as a member of Landry Clarke’s death-metal band on Friday Night Lights. You may have seen him in other things, too. But enough about acting, except for this: A few years ago Jones had a pivotal meeting with Jim Jarmusch, the movie director and musician. “I was a big fan of his work,” Jones says, “and I know how I act with people that I’m big fans of their work. So instead of wanting to talk, I thought I’d write him a piece that would somehow let him know who I was.” So Jones spent a few nights composing a new instrumental work for solo piano, and showed up ready to play it for the director at their meeting— which turned out to be at a diner somewhere in Canada, where the amenities did not include a piano, so they had a conversation instead. Jones did slip Jarmusch Microastro and Macroastro, two collections of songs from the barn, most of them four or five or maybe eight years old at that point. Jarmusch liked what he heard, told Jones he should talk to Sacred Bones founder Caleb Braaten, and before long Jones was making the record you’re about to hear— whose opening track, “Flag Day/The Mother Stone” incorporates that piano piece Jones wrote to explain himself to Jim Jarmusch. A few more germane facts: The Mother Stone was recorded at Valentine Recording Studios, where everyone from Bing Crosby to Frank Zappa once logged time, refurbished to time-capsule retro standards in 2015 by studio manager and Mother Stone producer Nic Jodoin. Jones brought his collection of battered Yamahas and Casios up from the barn and played them alongside vintage equipment from Jodoin’s collection. Working in a real studio gave Jones a chance to slow his creative process down. They built the songs up from acoustic guitar, let them sit a while, circled back. Sometimes Jones and his girlfriend would decompress at the Shakey’s down the street, home to a range of acceptable video-arcade options. “They got that thing where you throw it in the clown’s mouth,” Jones says. “That’s fun. I like the look of those clowns.” Maybe the clowns are the key. This isn’t a concept album, it’s a parade led by multiple unreliable narrators who rail against the universe and profess their love and vacate the stage before we can ask them a question. The circus comes to town, the circus leaves town. A young man from suburban Texas winds up and a clown opens its mouth as wide as the sky. -Alex Pappademas

As a kid in the late ’60s, Wayne Coyne lived in fear of losing his oldest brother to drugs. “A lot of times, when he left the house on his motorcycle, I just thought, ‘He’s going to crack,’” the Flaming Lips frontman tells Apple Music. “If he didn\'t come home ’til 4:00, I would literally be up in my bed, scared that he was dead somewhere. That’s a real thing.” The Lips’ 16th studio LP is a haunting exploration of how we see the world as children and adults, high and sober, innocent and experienced—and its cover is a photo of Coyne’s brother in 1968. Featuring guest vocals from Kacey Musgraves, it’s also—by Flaming Lips standards—a song-oriented reimagining of American classic rock that’s inspired, in part, by a passage in the late Tom Petty’s biography about Petty and his band Mudcrutch stopping to record in Coyne’s native Oklahoma in 1974, as they traveled cross-country to make a go of it in LA. “There\'s never been anybody who’s ever uncovered it or ever noticed it or anything,” Coyne says of the Tulsa session. “But in that little gap, I wondered what that music would have been. So \[multi-instrumentalist\] Steven \[Drozd\] and I just took it further. Like, ‘What if Tom Petty and his band would have run into my older brother, if my brother went up there and they all got addicted to drugs and they got caught up in all this violence and they never became Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, but they made this very sad, fucked-up, beautiful record in Tulsa?’ And then we said, ‘Let\'s make that record.’ Here, Coyne tells the story of every song therein. **Will You Return / When You Come Down** “A lot of music is trying to tell you, ‘Dude, go blow your mind.’ And ‘Being insane is great.’ Steven and I\'ve always been like, ‘Dude, I think I\'m insane anyway.’ And I think we\'re glad to finally be embarrassed enough or old enough or whatever it is to say, ‘Yeah, we\'re singing about drugs.’ Part of it is our friends that have died from crashing their car. Part of it is our friends that have died from drug overdoses. And a part of the song is survivor’s guilt, while part of me was glad that I wasn\'t the one who died. But now as you look at yourself later, you’re like, ‘I wish was there with you.’ I think when you\'re a teenager and your friends die in a car accident, part of you has this fantasy you\'ll see them in heaven. Or if we live a thousand lives, you’ll be something else and I\'ll meet you again. And all of these are just fantasies, so you really have to face the horrible truth that you\'re never going to see that person again. The song’s you singing to these ghosts and hoping that they understand how you feel about it.” **Watching the Lightbugs Glow** “We like to always leave room for instrumentals. We like that it just floats along. You don\'t have to listen to it so intensely. Once we convinced Kacey Musgraves to sing on one track \[‘God and the Policeman’\], I thought, ‘Well, while we\'re there, why don\'t we try to do two songs?’ So we came up with another song, and then we end up coming up with a third song \[‘Flowers of Neptune 6’\], and she ended up liking all the things that we presented. I asked her about the song \[2018’s\] ‘Mother.’ She talked about this idea of light bugs, and they were floating around in her yard and she got one with a leaf and she put it in the house and she played some music for it and they danced together. All of this was on a very pleasant acid trip, but she did say that not all of her acid trips were pleasant—she understood sometimes they go horribly bad. While we were coming with this thing, I thought, well, let\'s just have her do kind of a wordless melodic thing, and we would let it be about that story. We could relate to it and she could relate to it and it would be real. And it would be true. I think that\'s why we put it second. Like, ‘Let\'s just not be in such a hurry to say more stuff, just let it just float along with the mood.’ But I wouldn\'t have done it without her. We would have never done it as one of us singing. It was made for her.” **Flowers of Neptune 6** “‘Flowers of Neptune’ came from an insanely great demo that Steven made, but it was long enough that we could envision it being a bigger, more epic song. As we started to make it, we were like, ‘I don\'t think it\'s as good if it keeps going too long, because it\'s got such a crescendo of emotion. Let’s just make it two songs.’ One, ‘Lightbugs,’ could be a little bit more fun and kind of floaty and melancholy—but optimistic. The other, ‘Flowers of Neptune,’ could be more powerful and personal. There is some connection to that idea that our older brothers and their friends, they were these characters that we didn\'t relate to. They were crazy and they were going to go to jail. They were going to go off to war, they were going to get in a fight, they were going to get in a motorcycle accident and we weren’t. And then at some point we realized their life and ours is the same. I am me because of them. You can\'t really express it, but in a song you can, because it\'s big and it\'s crescendos and it\'s emotional and you find somehow you\'re able to express this thing that we would never, ever consider saying to our real brothers, in real life. You\'d just be too embarrassed. But music wants you to go all the way.” **Dinosaurs on the Mountain** “I remember being in the back of the station wagon with my family as we were traveling down a highway, in the middle of the night, on our way to Pittsburgh. And seeing these giant trees, pretending that they were dinosaurs, falling over and killing each other. And also remembering that this is like the last time that I felt that I could just see fantasy and not worry that we\'re driving down a highway, my father might be falling asleep, and we could crash the car and die—all these things you start to think about when you\'re becoming an adult. The times we went back after, I didn\'t see the dinosaurs in the trees. They were just trees. You can\'t get that back. It’s trying to make that into a song that an adult can relate to instead of being like a children\'s storybook or a Disney movie.” **At the Movies on Quaaludes** “I only did quaaludes once, and I have to say, I didn\'t feel anything. There\'s a line at the very beginning of the novel *The Outsiders*—which when you live in Oklahoma, you read in junior high and high school because it\'s set in Tulsa—about coming out of a movie theater. You were so immersed in the movie that you forgot, ‘Oh yeah, this is real life out here.’ My brothers and their friends, they would go to movies all the time in the middle of the day and they would just be so completely fucked up. There was hardly any moments that they weren\'t on some drugs. And I just remembered for myself sometimes, the shock of being in a movie theater, so immersed in that, and you walk outside and you\'re back in real life, whereas I think sometimes they never came back to real life. It\'s just one big, long movie. So there\'s something wonderful about that. It\'s like a dream that you know is never going to come true, but the better to dream it and know it isn\'t going to come true. Or is it worse to not dream it at all?” **Mother I’ve Taken LSD** “This one is devastating for me. It has to be 1968, 1969—there’s a lot of talk about LSD. It’s in the news every day, and when we would be at school, dudes in suits would come with a briefcase full of drugs and say, ‘Don\'t take drugs. And especially don\'t take LSD, because it\'ll make you think that you can fly, and you\'ll go to the top of a bridge and jump off and you\'ll die.’ So all this is in our minds and I\'m only seven or eight years old. It’s like, ‘Fuck. The Beatles think it\'s cool, but the police think it\'s horrible. What do I do here?’ So my brother and my mother are sitting on the porch and they’re having a conversation. I remember my brother saying, ‘Well, mother, I\'ve taken LSD.’ I just couldn\'t believe it. My own brother is doing the things that the police are coming to school to tell me about and he’s going to go insane. I\'m singing about it like it\'s sad for her, but really, it was just sad for me. It’s stayed with me my whole life because it was such a blow.” **Brother Eye** “Steven was like, ‘Why don\'t you just write down some words and I\'ll make up a song around your words?’ Which we never do. Usually, he\'s got a melody and I\'ll put lyrics to it, or I\'ll have lyrics and stuff and he\'ll help me with melodies. I think I wrote out, \'Mother, I don\'t want you to die.’ And then he was like, ‘Well, you have too many songs about mothers. Let\'s do one about brothers.’ His older brothers and his younger brother, all of them, his whole family is dead. When his oldest brother died, I know it devastated him, and we really don\'t sing about it. But in this way of me presenting words to him, I know that he put it in a way of saying we\'re just doing a song. But both of us knew somewhere in there, we\'re singing about this heavy thing. When it came time to be like, ‘Well, are you going to sing it or am I going to sing it?’ I just told him, ‘I think you’ve got to sing that.’ And he was just like, ‘Oh shit.’” **You n Me Sellin’ Weed** “When I was 16 and 17, I started selling pot because everybody around me was selling pot and some were making better money than they were working in a restaurant like I was. But I didn\'t want to do it for very long, because I did fear that I\'d get put in jail or something worse. The second verse is about that. It sounds pretty gentle, but it\'s really about a friend of ours who was involved in a murder. He owed the drug dealer a lot of money and the drug dealer was threatening to kill his little girl. So he went over to his house and he stabbed \[the dealer\] to death. He was put in jail for murder and he was sentenced to spend the rest of his life there. And a year or two later, he committed suicide in jail. It\'s a blissful story about a state of mind for just a moment, before the violence and all these things rush in and kill you. I was very lucky that my experience stayed an adventure. That time could have been where everything went badly and our family destroyed itself. Because we saw it happen and because we knew them and they were just like us, I think it changed us to say, ‘Let\'s not let that happen.’” **Mother Please Don’t Be Sad** “When I was 17, there was a robbery happening in the restaurant that I was working in. The guys came in and I thought for sure that I was going to be killed. This song is what I was saying to myself while I laid on the floor, waiting to be shot in the head. I was going to stop at my mother\'s house after I got off work that night and leave my dirty work uniform there, and talk to her for a little bit. I\'m laying on the floor and I know that I\'m going to die. And I\'m thinking, ‘Mother is going to wonder where I\'m at because I\'m going to be late, and she\'s going to start to worry. Then the cops are going to show up like they do in all these horrible movies, and they\'re going to tell her that I died in the robbery.’ And that line, ‘Mother, please don\'t be sad’: I said that laying on the floor there because I just knew it was going to be horrible. It was me that was going to die, but I just thought I\'ll be dead in a second, and it\'s going to be horrible for her. I wanted her to know that I wasn\'t doing something dangerous, I wasn\'t doing something fucked up. I was just at work and this happened, so don\'t worry about it. This was just the chaos of the world. Sometimes there\'s nothing you can do. You\'re just in the wrong place at the wrong time.” **When We Die When We’re High** “That beat that Steve plays—in the hands of a lot of drummers, it would be flashy and it would be pompous, but he\'s doing these things that are just so effortless that you don\'t realize what an insane beat it is. And man, that one note with that beat, that\'s got a good menacing joy about it. And then to put that title to it. A friend of ours was killed in a car accident, and everybody in the car was completely zonked out. The car hits a telephone pole and part of his head is just completely taken off and he\'s just dead right there at the scene. This is real stuff. And part of you, what you do to get around just how brutal and how horrible this is, is you do music. Well, he was so high when he died that he wouldn\'t know he was dead. He\'s going to wake up later in the afterlife, everything will be cool. We\'re saying, ‘If you\'re high when you die, do you really die?’ It\'s ridiculous, but it\'s fun to sing.” **Assassins of Youth** “I think in the beginning, it was intended to be on that Deap Lips collaboration that we did with the girls from Deap Vally, and it just never really went anywhere. Something about it reminded us of ABBA. And what I liked about ABBA is that they\'re singing about something that sounds rebellious and revolutionary, but it\'s very sweet-sounding at the same time. And because English too wasn\'t their first language, I always felt like they didn\'t quite know what they were talking about, which was better. So we took this ridiculously overused line, ‘assassins of youth,’ and we pretended that we were like ABBA—we’re not quite sure what it means in English, but we know what it means in Swedish or whatever. It\'s just great, triumphant classic-rock stuff. It presents itself like it\'s an important message. And then when you dissect it, you’re like, ‘I\'m not sure what you\'re saying.’ That, to me, is wonderful.” **God and the Policeman (feat. Kacey Musgraves)** “When Kacey heard it, she came back to me and was like, ‘Now, this is the one. This is the one I want to be on, for sure.’ I kept looking at it like Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton. I thought it would be perfect for her, a song about a fugitive on the run. On the run from what, I don’t know, but it tied into another drug story, a friend of ours who got caught up in a bad drug deal. It sounds like I\'ve told this one before, but another guy I know, a drug dealer was telling him, ‘Well, if you don\'t pay me, I\'m going to kill you.’ So he went over to \[the dealer’s house\], and the drug dealer, he thought that he was bringing him what he owed him and he just went over there and killed the guy. And he said, ‘See you later. I\'ll never see my friends again. Better than being killed by this biker drug dealer.’ I can\'t talk too much about it, but I feel like enough time has gone by, I really don\'t even know if he\'s alive anymore.” **My Religion Is You** “It still feels like a folk song or religious song or something, but nothing in our life—my life, anyway—was ever so heavy that I had to turn to God. I always had my mother, my father, and plenty of people around to explain the mysteries of pain and all that to me. I remember, when we initially went to school, our first and second grade, we went to a Catholic school. And there\'d be a lot of talk about Jesus sacrificing himself for us. I didn\'t really understand. I would ask my mother, like, ‘Well, what do they mean? Why is Jesus dying? I don\'t want him to die. Why does he have to die for me?’ And she\'d say, ‘Well, these aren\'t things that most people have to deal with. It\'s for people who don\'t really have families and brothers. People don\'t love them, so Jesus loves them. They don\'t have anybody that will listen to them. So they need God to listen to them.’ And I said, ‘Well, my religion is you.’ She\'s like, ‘Yeah, I know.’”

for audio stream or download : awal.ffm.to/galore 1 - little one 2 - fall 3 - unearth me 4 - god's chariots 5 - galore 6 - nightime 7 - asturias (ft. Zero) 8 - rosebud 9 - girl on my throne (ft. Casey MQ) 10 - another night 11 - I didn't give up on you

Over the last decade, Khruangbin (pronounced “krung-bin”) has mastered the art of setting a mood, of creating atmosphere. But on *Mordechai*, follow-up to their 2018 breakthrough *Con Todo El Mundo*, the Houston trio makes space in their globe-spinning psych-funk for something that’s been largely missing until now: vocals. The result is their most direct work to date. From the playground disco of “Time (You and I)” to the Latin rhythms of “Pelota”—inspired by a Japanese film, but sung in Spanish—to the balmy reassurances of “If There Is No Question,” much of *Mordechai* has the immediacy of an especially adventurous pop record. Even moments of hallucinogenic expanse (“One to Remember”) or haze (“First Class”) benefit from the added presence of a human voice. “Never enough paper, never enough letters,” they sing from inside a shower of West African guitar notes on “So We Won’t Forget,” the album’s high point. “You don’t have to be silent.”

After 2015’s openly autobiographical *Carrie & Lowell*, Sufjan Stevens makes a dramatic musical left turn from intimate, acoustic-based songs to textural electronic music on his 8th solo LP. Stevens, who\'s no stranger to taking on large-scale projects, builds on the synth-heavy soundscapes of his instrumental album with stepfather Lowell Brams, *Aporia*, while channeling the eccentric energy of his more experimental works *The Age of Adz* and *Enjoy Your Rabbit*. But *The Ascension* is its own powerful statement—throughout this 15-track, 80-minute spiritual odyssey, he uses faith as a foundation to articulate his worries about blind idolatry and toxic ideology. From soaring new age (“Tell Me You Love Me”) and warped lullabies (“Landslide”) to twitchy sound collages (“Ativan”), *The Ascension* is mercurial in mood but also aesthetically consistent. Stevens surrenders to heavenly bliss on “Gilgamesh,” singing in a choir-like voice as he dreams about a serene Garden of Eden before jarring, high-pitched bleeps bring him back to reality. On the post-apocalyptic “Death Star,” he pieces together kinetic dance grooves and industrial beats inspired by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis’ production work with Janet Jackson—which is no coincidence given that Stevens shared a photograph of his cassette copy of Jackson’s *Rhythm Nation 1814* on his blog. Stevens ultimately wishes to drown out all the outside noise on \"Ursa Major,\" echoing a sentiment that resonates regardless of what you believe: “Lord, I ask for patience now/Call off all of your invasion.”

Jarvis Cocker’s band Pulp might have been one of the defining groups of the mid-’90s Britpop era, but there was something distinctly different about them. In a sea of bands fixated on the past, Pulp’s landmark 1995 album *Different Class* was, musically and lyrically, a step forward. They weren’t the only band taking a critical look at British society, but Cocker was constantly turning his gaze inward. In his songwriting, relationships were messy, memories weren’t always to be trusted, the drugs often had the opposite of their intended effect, and even the losers got lucky—more than just sometimes. On two albums to follow, the Sheffield group would cut further left—and Cocker would go on to explore many more avenues of expression. Two solo albums in 2006 and 2009 (as well as writing most of Charlotte Gainsbourg’s beautiful *5:55*) only further showcased his range—and that’s before he occupied himself as a book editor, a BBC radio host, and, during the COVID-19 shutdown, a housebound orator of great literary works. (Google “Jarvis Cocker’s Bedtime Stories” to hear his soothing baritone recite Brautigan and Salinger.) On the heels of his collaborative project with Chilly Gonzales, 2017’s *Room 29*, Cocker was invited by Sigur Rós to perform at a festival in Reykjavík. He quickly assembled an entirely new London-based group of musicians to work through song sketches he’d developed over the last few years, which became the band-in-progress JARV IS…—emphasis on those three trailing dots. “Usually you put that into a sentence when you are implying that something isn\'t quite finished,” Cocker tells Apple Music. “The whole point of this band was to finish off these ideas for songs that I\'d had for quite a long time but wasn\'t able to bring to fruition on my own.” At a trim seven songs, *Beyond the Pale* still manages to explore a range of themes, most of which revolve around the modern human condition—from aging to FOMO and self-doubt to living in the wake of a bygone era. Evolution plays a big part, too—not just in the subject matter, but in how the music took shape: “Because we were doing this experiment of trying to finish off a record by playing it to people, it seemed logical that we should record the shows so we could see how we were getting on,” he says of what would become “Must I Evolve?”, which was recorded live in an actual cave in Castleton, Derbyshire. “A light bulb went off in my head then, because that\'s every artist\'s dream, really—to make a record without even realizing it. To not go through that self-conscious phase where you go into a studio and start questioning things and the song gets away from you.” Here, Cocker tells us how the rest of the songs came together. **Save the Whale** \"You\'re not the first person to say there\'s a similarity to Leonard Cohen, which I take as a massive compliment, because he\'s really been an artistic touchstone for me, all through my career. There are some artists that show you different ideas of what a song can be, and open up your perceptions of what a song can be. Especially for someone like me, who was basically brought up on pop radio, which lyrically isn\'t very adventurous. So what Leonard Cohen did with words in songs was something that really had an effect on me. But what\'s exciting for me was all the time that I was in Pulp, I was the only person in the band who sang. And in this band, basically everybody sings, especially Serafina \[Steer, harpist\] and Emma \[Smith, violinist/guitarist\]. Rather than it being a monologue, I can tie in other viewpoints with what they say. And sometimes it will reinforce it, sometimes it will undercut it, sometimes it will just comment on it. And it\'s a lot of fun writing that way, because suddenly you\'re writing a dialogue or conversation rather than just me, me, me all the time.\" **Must I Evolve?** \"The starting point for it was me thinking about the development of a relationship, from meeting someone to moving in with them and stuff like that. You could draw a parallel with evolution itself, of two cells splitting and then those cells divide more and then you start to get organisms and eventually you\'ve got some fish and then the fish grows legs and somehow comes out... I guess I was just remembering biology textbooks from school. The idea of the ascendant man, stuff like that. The Big Bang. That was a bit of a joke I had with myself, with the meanings of \'bang.\' Banging, like \'Who\'ve been banging lately,\' and the Big Bang that started the whole of human creation off. Two of the longest songs on the record are questions: \'Must I Evolve?\' and \'Am I Missing Something?\' I guess I\'m at an age where I ask myself those kind of questions, and the songs were some type of attempt on my part to answer those questions. But this really was the key song because it was the first one that we finished and released, and also the call-and-response theme came from this song, because I\'d already written the \'Must I evolve? Must I change? Must I develop?\' But there was no answer to that. We were just rehearsing and I think it was Serafina started going, \'Yes, yes, yes,\' I think as a bit of a joke. And then I thought, \'That\'s such a great idea, let\'s just do that.\' That totally added a new dimension to the song.\" **Am I Missing Something?** \"It\'s in that tradition, I suppose, of those long songs where it very directly addresses the listener. This is the oldest song on the record; the lyrics were written pretty much eight years ago. I wanted to try a bit of a different approach, and so the lyrics aren\'t so much a through narrative; it\'s not just one story. It jumps around a bit. And that seemed appropriate because it\'s about this idea of \'Am I missing something?\' It could mean there\'s something really interesting going on but I don\'t know about it, which is like a modern disease: Too many entertainment and information options to choose from. It can also be like, \'Do I lack something? Is there something missing in me? Do I need to fill some gaping psychological hole within myself or whatever?\' Or actually, ‘Am I overlooking something, am I not getting something?’ That\'s a really important part of a song, that you have to leave some space in it for the person listening to do what they want with it.” **House Music All Night Long** \"People have said, ‘Yes, it\'s a COVID anthem,’ but it wasn\'t conceived in that way at all. For a start, it was written two years ago before anybody was really thinking about any pandemic. It was really just one weekend where I was stuck in London. It was a very hot weekend and everyone I knew had left town. I was in this house on my own and some friends had gone to a house music festival in Wales and I was jealous of that. I was having—people call it FOMO, don\'t they? I just thought to myself, \'Don\'t just sit here feeling sorry for yourself, do something to get yourself out of this trough you\'ve found yourself in.\' So I remembered that there was a secondhand keyboard that I\'d bought from a street market just a few weeks before and it was down in the basement of this house. So I went and found it, brought it up, plugged it in, put it through an amp, and just started trying to write bits of music. I came up with the chord pattern that the song starts off with, and because this keyboard—it\'s an old string machine, so it\'s got a quite naive sound to it, which reminded me of some of those early house records where they would use big, almost symphonic-sounding things but on really crap keyboards. The first chord change really reminded me of something like \'Promised Land\' by Joe Smooth or something like that. So maybe it was because I was thinking about my friends who were having a good time at a rave. Again, once I\'ve got that idea of the two meanings of \'house\'—like, house music and then \'house\' as in a building that you live in. I was stuck in a house feeling sorry for myself whilst my friends were out dancing to house, probably having a great time, as far as I was imagining. And so then the song had already half written itself once I got those basic ideas down.\" **Sometimes I Am Pharaoh** \"I developed a fascination with these street entertainers—human statues. You tend to get them outside famous buildings or in tourist hotspots. So you either get somebody dressed up as Charlie Chaplin—that\'s why it\'s \'Sometimes I\'m Pharaoh/Sometimes I\'m Chaplin.\' And they stand still and then a crowd gathers and eventually they move and everybody screams and hopefully gives them some money. It died out a little bit in more recent years. They’ve been superseded slightly by those levitating guys—have you seen those ones? Where it\'s like Yoda floating, and he\'s holding a stick but obviously the stick—there\'s some kind of platform under him. And I feel sorry for the statue guys, because the levitating Yoda, it\'s just like, anybody could do that. You just go and buy the weird frame—which has obviously got some kind of really heavy base so that it doesn\'t topple over—and you\'re in business. Whereas to actually stand still for hours on end must be really difficult. I was just showing some respect and love to the people that were doing that.\" **Swanky Modes** \"My son \[who lives in France\] goes to this once-a-week rock school. It\'s run by a guy from Brooklyn who moved over to Paris. I\'ve become friendly with him, and he asked me if I would come to the class and help the kids write a song in the space of an hour or something. So we met to talk about how that could work, and then we\'re jamming around and he was playing the piano and I was messing around on the bass and then we started playing what became \'Swanky Modes,\' which is really not a kids\' song at all. The piano that you hear on the record is him, Jason Domnarski. And the first half of the song has got my bass playing on it. So it\'s almost like a field recording. This is probably the most narrative-driven song on the record. Somehow all these events that happened to me at very specific periods of time, which was when I was living in Camden in London, just towards the end of my time at Saint Martins art college, so we\'re talking about 1991. I was only living there for maybe eight months, and all these images from my time of living there suddenly came into my mind really, really clearly. The title of the song, \'Swanky Modes,\' it\'s the name of the shop. It was a women\'s clothes shop that was near where I was living at the time. Again, that\'s one of the mysteries of songwriting—why suddenly, almost 30 years later, these words would come to me that summed up a fairly minor chapter in my life. But it came back in really minute detail and I\'m really glad it did, because now I\'ll never forget that period on my life, because I\'ve got a souvenir of it.\" **Children of the Echo** \"A few years ago I was asked to write a review of a book called *The John Lennon Letters*. I\'m a Beatles fan, and particularly of John Lennon, so I thought if John Lennon wrote lots of letters, I\'d really like to see them. So I was sent an advance copy of the book, and it was just weird. They weren\'t letters. Some of them were just \'Tell Dave to get lasagna from supermarket. Walk dog.\' They were just to-do notes, like a Post-it note that you would put on your refrigerator to remind you to do something. They weren\'t letters. So I was really, really disappointed with this book, so I tried to express this in the review. And this phrase \'children of the echo\' came into my mind, which in the context of the article was talking about how someone in my position—I can\'t really remember The Beatles, because I was a kid. I was born in 1963, when they first broke through, and then they broke up in 1970 when I was seven. They were there, but I couldn\'t really be actively a fan or anything like that. But they left such a mark and they made such an impact that the ripples obviously were coming out and affected everybody a lot. And this made me think of this idea of an echo, of a sound which would be like The Beatles, this amazing sound that changed everything. And then I consider myself to be a child of the echo because I was brought up in the aftermath of that. And I was thinking, \'Well, we\'ve got to get beyond that,\' because that was the problem with that thing that got called Britpop in the UK—that it was so in thrall to the \'60s and The Beatles in particular that it killed it. It stopped it from being what could\'ve been a really forward-thinking and exciting and innovative thing into a retro thing. And you can\'t make another period of history happen again, it\'s just impossible. It seemed like it was exciting, and \'here we come, here\'s the revolution, the world\'s going to change.\' And then it just went into this horrible nostalgic morass of nothing. That\'s when I jumped ship. I think now it\'s so long ago that there is a chance now to do something new, because we have to transcend the echo now, we have to make another thing happen. We can\'t keep living on this echo that gets fainter and fainter and fainter and fainter. Because there\'s nothing to live on anymore.\"

The theme of the fourth Tame Impala album is evident before hearing a note. It’s in the song names, the album title, even the art: Kevin Parker has time on his mind. Ruminating on memories, nostalgia, uncertainty about the future, and the nature of time itself lies at the heart of *The Slow Rush*. Likewise, the music itself is both a reflection on the sonic evolution of Parker’s project as it’s reached festival headliner status—from warbly psychedelia to hypnotic electronic thumps—and a forward thrust towards something new and deeply fascinating. On “Posthumous Forgiveness,” Parker addresses his relationship with his father over a woozy, bluesy bass and dramatic synths, which later give way to a far brighter, gentle sound. From the heavy horns on “Instant Destiny” and acoustic guitars on “Tomorrow’s Dust” to the choppy synths and deep funk of “One More Year” and “Breathe Deeper,” the album sounds as ambitious as its concept. There’s a lot to think about—and Kevin Parker has plenty to say about it. Here, written exclusively for Apple Music, the Australian artist has provided statements to accompany each track on *The Slow Rush*. **One More Year** “I just realized we were standing right here exactly one year ago, doing the exact same thing. We’re blissfully trapped. Our life is crazy but where is it going? We won’t be young forever but we sure do live like it. Our book needs more chapters. Our time here is short, let’s make it count. I have a plan.” **Instant Destiny** “In love and feeling fearless. Let’s be reckless with our futures. The only thing special about the past is that it got us to where we are now. Free from feeling sentimental…we don’t owe our possessions anything. Let’s do something that can’t be undone just ’cause we can. The future is our oyster.” **Borderline** “Standing at the edge of a strange new world. Any further and I won’t know the way back. The only way to see it is to be in it. I long to be immersed. Unaware and uncontrolled.” **Posthumous Forgiveness** “Wrestling with demons of the past. Something from a long time ago doesn’t add up. I was lied to! Maybe there’s a good explanation but I’ll never get to hear it, so it’s up to me to imagine what it might sound like…” **Breathe Deeper** “First time. I need to be guided. Everything feels new. Like a single-cell organism granted one day as a human. We’re all together. Why isn’t it always like this?” **Tomorrow’s Dust** “Our regrets tomorrow are our actions now. Future memories are present-day current events. Tomorrow’s dust is in today’s air, floating around us as we speak.” **On Track** “A song for the eternal optimist. The pain of holding on to your dreams. Anyone would say it’s impossible from this point. True it will take a miracle, but miracles happen all the time. I’m veering all over the road and occasionally spinning out of control, but strictly speaking I’m still on track.” **Lost in Yesterday** “Nostalgia is a drug, to which some are addicted.” **Is It True** “Young love is uncertain. Let’s not talk about the future. We don’t know what it holds. I hope it’s forever but how do I know? When all is said and done, all you can say is ‘we’ll see.’” **It Might Be Time** “A message from your negative thoughts: ‘Give up now… It’s over.’ The seeds of doubt are hard to un-sow. Randomly appearing throughout the day, trying to derail everything that usually feels natural…*used* to feel natural. You finally found your place, they can’t take this away from you now.” **Glimmer** “A glimmer of hope. A twinkle. Fleeting, but unmistakable. Promising.” **One More Hour** “The time has come. Nothing left to prepare. Nothing left to worry about. Nothing left to do but sit and observe the stillness of everything as time races faster than ever. Even shadows cast by the sun appear to move. My future comes to me in flashes, but it no longer scares me. As long as I remember what I value the most.”

Just after she’d released her second album, 2016’s *Oh No*, Jessy Lanza’s life was in a bit of an upheaval. She’d broken up with her partner and co-producer, Junior Boys’ Jeremy Greenspan, and moved from her hometown of Hamilton, Ontario, to New York City to start a new relationship. But things didn’t immediately gel. “I had a vision of what that move was going to mean and how I was going to feel,” the songwriter/producer tells Apple Music. “And then when I ended up feeling pretty much how I did before I left, I just started feeling lost and homesick. I think I just underestimated how moving away from my family and from familiarity and all that stuff would affect me.” But as the songs for her third LP, *All the Time*, began to take shape, “it just became this thing I could connect to and engage with that made sense,” she says. “I was a bit of an emotional mess writing this record. I was really depressed and I used the album as a way to claw myself out of this hole that I was in.” Listening to these tracks—by turns woozy and propulsive, ruminative and joyful, taking inspiration from ’80s funk and quiet storm, ’90s house and techno, and 2010s footwork and hip-hop—you wouldn’t necessarily suspect they’re the product of dark times. But it is, at its core, a dance record, meant more for catharsis than self-pity: “It was hard not to write these meaningful, really emotional lyrics,” she says. “It sounds like a cliché thing to say, but I do feel like overthinking the lyrics is my first step in ruining a song.” Despite having established a new working relationship with Greenspan, who helped produce the album, that feeling of upheaval hasn’t entirely gone away. When the pandemic hit, and her NYC lease was up, Lanza hit the road and landed—at least temporarily—in Palo Alto, California, where she told us more about the genesis of *All the Time*. **Anyone Around** \"That was the last song we wrote for the record. I wrote it while we had started mixing, so it was really late to be added to the tracklist, but it\'s one of my favorite songs. It’s about realizing that maybe you\'re the asshole in your life. I was just thinking about the plot, like in a film noir where it\'s at the end and the protagonist realizes they\'re the murderer or whatever. I was just thinking like, at the end of my life, I don\'t want to suddenly realize that actually I was the asshole the whole time. It\'s about pushing people away and not having self-awareness.\" **Lick in Heaven** \"I wrote that after I had a particularly bad fight with my partner. I was in the remorse phase of feeling like I really need to apologize for what I said, and then I started thinking about that moment in a fight when somebody really has the choice to either go back or let their pride or their ego get the better of them, and then they just go full nuclear. And then I thought of the idea of spinning out, and how that would be a fun lyric to write the chorus around.\" **Face** “This was an edit fest of a song; it was a lot of experimenting on new equipment that I just got. I had a bunch of semi-modular stuff that I didn\'t really know how to use, so I would do just really long takes at the BPM that I wanted ‘Face’ to be at, and then just edited stuff together after. I know Jeremy did the same thing; he was experimenting a lot with new modules he added to his Eurorack. It started with that bassline that\'s in the song. For me, the bassline is the hook. In house music, that bassline really is everything, so I was thinking about that a lot in ‘Face’—trying to get a good bassline—but it\'s a lot of editing. That song just became a clusterfuck of a song. The lyrics were the last thing I wrote. I was riding home on the subway in New York and just being a bit creepy and looking at everyone\'s expression and had this thought of \'I wonder what these people are actually thinking about. Are they pissed off?\' I thought it would be fun to write lyrics about that.” **Badly** \"I think ‘Badly’ is my favorite track from the album. I know I already said that maybe about \'Anyone Around,\' but I like ‘Badly’ a lot. The reason I have an affection for it is because it was a lot of happy accidents in that song. The sub line at the beginning of the song was kind of a mistake. I don\'t even know how the sampler in Logic made that...it just happened. I did a lot of modular experimenting in that song too, and then Jeremy added—in the breakdown there\'s this really cheesy Mariah Carey pop-ballad breakdown in the middle that when I first heard it, I was like, \'I don\'t know if I like this.\' But it really grew on me, and I think of that song really fondly.\" **Alexander** \"I was pretty sad when I wrote that one. I was trying to do a cover of the Alexander O\'Neal song \'A Broken Heart Can Mend.\' And then it just wasn\'t going anywhere and it just didn\'t sound very good, so I changed the key. I just started messing around with it over the course of a couple weeks, and it changed from that cover into \'Alexander,\' and I just kept the title.\" **Ice Creamy** \"I think the vocals ended up sounding that way because Jeremy and I passed that one back and forth quite a few times, and I would run it through some of my vocal effects and then Jeremy would have a go at processing it, and it just took on this weird shift. I kind of can\'t tell what key it\'s in. It\'s a weird song. I went on this tour in 2017, all by myself, which was a really bad idea. I was trying to be tough and thinking, \'Oh, I traveled around. I\'ll be fine.\' It just really fucked me up by the end of it. I was taking these pills that I bought over the counter in Mexico to sleep—tramadol. It just makes you not care about anything, and so by the end of that tour, I was taking tramadol to sleep, and it was just not good. It just was a big mistake to do that. It\'s not a problem for me anymore, but \'Ice Creamy\' was about basically taking tramadol and not giving a shit about anything, and how sad that is.\" **Like Fire** \"I kept hearing \'In My Feelings,\' the Drake song, because in 2018, when it came out, I would just hear it everywhere I went. I was just like, \'The drums are really good for this song. I\'m going to try and figure out what\'s going on,\' and so it was just an experiment trying to learn a Drake beat, and then also I was working on a HOMESHAKE remix at the same time, which wasn\'t going anywhere, so it became kind of like a failed HOMESHAKE remix and also me trying to figure out a Drake drum pattern, and then it turned into \'Like Fire.\'\" **Baby Love** \"I wrote it after coming home from the hospital after meeting my niece for the first time. It was just a different feeling than I\'ve ever felt before. I was really just so happy. So that song is dedicated to her.\" **Over and Over** \"I was really into this one S.O.S. Band song called \'Looking for You.\' In the first verse, Mary Davis does this little speaking thing where all of a sudden she breaks from singing. I just thought it sounded so good. At the time, I was feeling really angry, really sad, and just trying to write in opposition of that feeling, so I think \'Over and Over\' is a very good example of me trying to do that—and trying to copy Mary Davis. It comes back again to the theme of patterns in your life that, if you\'re lucky, you\'ll notice them before you die. Not to get too self-help, like we\'re in a therapy session, but it really is about just noticing things that just keep happening over and over, and I think it comes back to, \'Wow, these issues in my new relationship are the same issues I\'ve been having throughout my adult life with people.\'\" **All the Time** \"\'All the Time\' was like the catalyst for the whole record, because it was the oldest song on the record. Jeremy sent me a really simple chord progression and drums, and it was right when I was moving and we just weren\'t sure if we were going to make another record together. And then I wrote the vocal and the lyrics over top of what he sent me, and we were both so happy with it. I think it was a good omen or something. It was just a sweet, sad song that we both loved so much, and it was a really nice motivator. It was the spark to make a whole nother record together.\"

The most surprising thing about Tricky’s 14th album isn’t how dark it is (Tricky fans are used to the darkness by now), but how to the point. These are short songs, most under three minutes. And while his landmark albums had a dense, phantasmagoric quality, *Fall to Pieces* is clean and stripped down. The moods are still liminal: “Hate This Pain” sounds like someone murmuring through a nightmare, “Running Off” like someone trying to remember a strange old nursery rhyme. (His newest collaborator, vocalist Marta Złakowska, is perfect—eerie and innocent and seductive all at once.) But in the clarity of the sound lies a challenge: He might make the pain pretty (“I’m in the Doorway”) or even danceable (“Fall Please”), but he doesn’t let you settle into it. He’s always been a blues musician at heart, just visionary enough to avoid the blues per se. *Fall to Pieces* is his lonesome motel confession.

Throughout the late ’90s and 2000s, Destroyer was essentially a guitar band. Whether principal singer-songwriter (and erstwhile New Pornographer) Dan Bejar was exploring glam rock’s velvety contours (2001’s *Streethawk: A Seduction*), experimenting with drum- and bass-less baroque pop (2004’s *Your Blues*), or orchestrating a grand rock opus (2006’s *Destroyer’s Rubies*), six strings generally provided his songs their backbone. That changed with 2011’s *Kaputt*. “I cast down the guitar in disgust,” the Vancouver-based Bejar tells Apple Music, partly kidding, but mostly serious. *Kaputt*’s focus on atmosphere and mood (its soft-rock synths, fretless bass, ’80s jazz-pop saxophones) signaled a major shift in not only how Bejar would write songs (“I like to avoid writing on an instrument at all,” he says), but also how each of his subsequent albums would sound. The experiments with chamber strings and horns on 2015’s *Poison Season* and the apocalyptic New Wave of 2017’s *ken* were essentially a lead-up to the band’s 12th album, *Have We Met*, Bejar’s most self-aware, confident, and abstract work to date. It’s also his darkest, filled with scenes of violence, isolation, and existential dread, most of which Bejar wrote and sang into his laptop at his kitchen table at night. (He then sent those files to bandmates John Collins and Nicolas Bragg, who added everything from bass, drums, keys, and guitar to the glitchy bee-swarm textures that close out the LP.) But for all its excursions into the unknown, *Have We Met* is still very much a Destroyer album—those hyper-literate, self-referential lyrical flourishes and melodic arrangements that have become Bejar’s signature still fully intact. No matter how different things might feel this time around, \"You can see a Destroyer song coming a mile away,” Bejar says. Here, he deciphers his 10 latest. **Crimson Tide** \"It\'s composed of the style of writing which I usually call like \'old Destroyer.’ I don\'t see that kind of lyrical attack too much in any song I\'ve written since \[the 2009 EP\] *Bay of Pigs*. I had it in my special ‘this is for something else\' book, and finally wrote the song from disparate chunks of writing that struck me as kind of musical. But it was really all over the place, and I needed to tie it in together somehow. And for some reason I thought a good way to do that would be to constantly say \'crimson tide\' at the end of every stanza. It has specific connotations in America—like a college football team or a submarine movie, which are really dumb. And so I think that\'s important to point out, when there\'s dumb American things that take over language. It has an end-of-the-world ring to it, as like blood on the horizon, or some kind of apocalypse incoming. It was a loaded two words, and it felt good to sing it at the end of each verse and just see what the song ended up meaning.\" **Kinda Dark** \"As opposed to \'Crimson Tide,’ \'Kinda Dark\' I felt was some other kind of writing that I didn\'t really know—a kind of music, especially in the last half of the song, that I felt was a bit more violent-sounding than the band usually is. It\'s supposed to be the three stanzas, with the last one being particularly gnarly. The first one is kind of a cruising imagery, leading up to sitting on a park bench next to the Boston Strangler. The second one is more slightly eerie sci-fi. And the last one is just a dystopic kind of dogfight or something like that. Like a torture chamber with an audience.\" **It Just Doesn\'t Happen** \"That song was kind of different from the rest. I wrote it on the guitar, for one. And I sat down, and I just wrote it. When I do that, the songs always have kind of a ditty quality—a happy-go-lucky quality—as opposed to the song that comes before it, which has none of those qualities. I thought that the song titles themselves \[the lyrics name-check Primal Scream’s “You\'re Just Too Dark to Care,” Charlie Patton’s “High Water Everywhere,” and The Platters’ “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”\] somehow reflect the vibe of being alone at night in a strange place. Which is something that happens to me a lot. And then wondering if that feeling of isolation is really so special or so specific to you, or is it maybe something that every single person is feeling on and off.\" **The Television Music Supervisor** \"For such specific subject matter, it came to me as if in a dream. It just came to me with the melody in this kind of lilting way. And it was just supposed to be this sad moment in someone\'s life, looking back on their life. It\'s either with perhaps some sense of regret or some sense of amazement. It really depends on what you get out of the words \'I can\'t believe what I\'ve done.\' I also thought the title was maybe such a specific phrase to the early 21st century, just because it\'s possible that in 20 years, no one will actually know what that means—the job that most specifically sums up our day and age. It really rolled off the tongue, too—for such a weird thing, it really feels so musical and melodious to sing it. I think that\'s why I wanted the music to be dreamlike and collapsing, like a fog that I sing through. John \[Collins, producer\] really nailed that one.\" **The Raven** \"I like art that talks about what it\'s going to do when it makes art—and then at the end, that\'s the piece of art. The art that\'s just like, ‘Here\'s my plan, it\'s going to be great,\' and then in the description of the plan, you get the plan, you don\'t get the thing. And that\'s kind of what \'The Raven\' is. The last line that repeats itself kind of alludes to that: \'That\'s what I\'ll write about when I write about The Raven.\' I think it\'s me—or it\'s the singer, because that\'s not me necessarily—talking about... In some ways it\'s kind of like \'When I Paint My Masterpiece,’ the Bob Dylan song. You know, when I get around to writing about the serious topics, this is what it\'s going to be.\" **Cue Synthesizer** \"I like that song a lot, for very different reasons. Part of it is that the production is just way more maniacal than I\'m used to, and extreme in its rhythm. It\'s kind of obliterated by guitar playing that\'s used as samples. I find it very groovy and also ominous at the same time, which is a combo that I like. I also really love stage direction as literature. It\'s maybe my favorite form of literature—the stuff in parentheses before there\'s any action in the play. Like, ‘Cue this, exit that.’ It\'s all a lead-up to the last verse, which is just unbridled dread. I don\'t normally let it loose like that. And when it\'s a song that\'s leading up to a portrait of a doomed world, it\'s interesting to me to see how musical words can be painted or darkened or made evil-sounding when you know what the last verse is. Or I guess before you even know, maybe the point *is* to make them sound terrible—to make the word ‘synthesizer\' or ‘guitar\' or ‘drum\' or \'fake drum\' sound like weapons.\" **University Hill** \"That\'s maybe my favorite song on the record. University Hill is a school in Vancouver in what is now a really nice part of town. When I was a kid, it was kind of a small school where fuck-ups would go. But the main thing that University Hill is is a description of some kind of force that comes and kills and puts people in camps. I mean, that\'s literally what the words describe. So there\'s very little room for interpretation, aside from the very end of the song that has this \'Come on, University Hill!’—like a school rallying cry. What I really needed, though—this will give you deep insights into how I work—the last verse goes, ‘Used to be so nice, used to be such a thrill.’ I needed something that rhymed with \'thrill.’ And I knew deep down it was going to be some kind of hill. And I was like, what hills have I known in my life? And out of nowhere, I was like, oh, there\'s University Hill, and that\'s kind of a big part of my childhood. It comes loaded with real imagery for me.\" **Have We Met** \"The original idea was for the record to be an attack on melody, to completely clamp down on that. But in the end, that\'s not what me and John like. I knew that Nick had been making these guitar pieces over the last couple of years, and I just wanted that one. There was a claustrophobic kind of Max Headroom vibe to the album, which was purposeful. But a moment of sighing, a moment of respite, would be really nice. I also just think it\'s kind of a really beautiful track. I wanted there to be a title track—and it made the most sense for that to be it. I knew the record would be called *Have We Met*. And I wanted that expression to be as open-ended or endless as it could possibly be. As far as the title, I realize I\'ve never heard that said in my entire life, even though I\'ve always heard it said in movies. So it automatically seemed strange to me, and it seemed really deceptively simple. I purposefully left the question mark out, so there could just be words. And there\'s something vaguely noir-ish to it, which I love in all things.\" **The Man in Black\'s Blues** \"I think that song was initially called ‘Death\' or \'Death Blues.’ It\'s just a song about death. One thing that I always seem to write about these days is the world disappearing or erasing itself. And I think that song is supposed to be on the more personal side of that, and it\'s just about what it looks like to be faced with utter loss. But also, it\'s supposed to be kind of like a balm. It\'s not like a dirge. And it\'s not wailing. I feel like it’s kind of a stroll through grief. The original demo was a lot like what you hear at an Italian ice cream parlor maybe, in the late \'80s. It had this kind of weird fairground midtempo disco. More than any other song on the record, I feel like there\'s a real disconnect between what I\'m singing and how I\'m singing it and the music around it, but I didn\'t want it to be a depressing song. I wanted it to be kind of danceable—a moment of levity—especially at the end, where it\'s pretty goofy, and it\'s like, \'Knock knock/Did you say who you come for?\' It\'s literally supposed to be the Grim Reaper at the door, but I kind of sing it in this British funk kind of way.\" **Foolssong** \"I wrote it around the same time that I wrote the *Kaputt* songs, but it didn\'t fit on that record, because there were no 6/8 or waltz-time songs allowed; if you didn\'t have a steady beat to it, then you got kicked off that album. But it was definitely written as a kind of lullaby. A lullaby\'s a vulnerable song, just purely because you sing it to a baby or a small child, which is a vulnerable headspace to be in. I feel like it\'s not a song I could write now. Maybe it\'s the only instance where I\'ve ever thought, like, I\'m serenading myself. And, you know, the lines are not comforting at all. The end refrain, \'Its figures all lit up/Nagasaki at night/At war with the devil\'—I guess maybe lullabies have a history of containing terrifying imagery. But maybe it\'s not so strange. I think there\'s a tradition of gothic horror in lullabies. This makes total sense.\"

As a newcomer to the electronic scene, Nicolas Jaar, then still a college student, made his mark by slowing minimal techno into a form both woozy and sensuous. Since then, his music has become steadily hazier and less rhythmic, exploring a rich mixture of ambient atmospheres and electro-acoustic textures. *Telas* is the Chilean American musician’s second album of 2020, following *Cenizas*, and it might be his gauziest record yet. The title translates as “Veils,” and the music, created to accompany visual works by the artist Somnath Bhatt, is meant to encapsulate a world where, according to Jaar, “no matter—whether existing in thought, physical form, or other—has a solid or unmovable origin.” The results are fittingly fluid: Incorporating sounds from cellist Milena Punzi, vocalist Susanna Gonzo, and instrument makers Anna Ippolito and Marzio Zorio, *Telas* flutters like bedsheets in the breeze. Divided into four long tracks, the hour-long album drifts across brushed percussion, free-jazz reeds, and an ever-shifting expanse of luminous, synthetic sounds. There are echoes of Japanese ambient, German cosmic music, and turn-of-the-millennium microsound, but mostly *Telas* is a world of its own—a multidimensional space so amorphous that it never sounds the same way twice.

“We’d made two very sample-heavy records in a row,” Avalanches founding member Robbie Chater tells Apple Music. “We just felt very liberated to make a left turn and to go anywhere and do anything.” The Melbourne group’s third album is still rich with endless samples—the trademark that made them crate-digging heroes with their 2000 debut *Since I Left You* and 2016’s *Wildflower*—but this time their focus is more on live collaboration. Guest artists abound, including Jamie xx, Karen O, Rivers Cuomo, Perry Farrell, Denzel Curry, Sampa the Great, Leon Bridges, and Johnny Marr. Each was tasked with putting their slant on the big ideas characterizing the album: life, God, spirituality, the human voice, mortality. The Avalanches also took inspiration from the Golden Record, a 1977 collection of music and terrestrial sounds compiled by astronomer-scientist Carl Sagan and writer-producer-director Ann Druyan (whose image is on the cover of this album) to be carried into space as part of the Voyager Interstellar Message Project. “It all came from a personal inward journey that expanded throughout the whole universe,” says keyboardist Tony Di Blasi on the chosen themes. “There’s a saying: ‘So within, so without.’ What is here is also out there. So it all expanded just from our own personal journeys.” For all its grand subject matter, however, *We Will Always Love You* is a warm, gentle listen, and The Avalanches’ most reflective work to date. “It’s a bit of a shining light in dark times,” says Di Blasi. “And that’s the mood we were trying to set, for it to be light.” Below, Di Blasi and Chater talk through 10 of the album’s 25 tracks. **We Will Always Love You (feat. Blood Orange)** Robbie Chater: “That vocal sample by The Roches \[‘Hammond Song’\] is absolutely incredible. With *Since I Left You*, those samples were from junk-store records and were forgotten pieces of flotsam and jetsam that we would turn into something new. But The Roches’ song was already so beautiful. We were exploring different kinds of devotional music, gospel music and Christian music, and although that’s not what The Roches do, it has those massed voices of the sisters singing together. And we were reading about Ann Druyan’s story in compiling the Golden Record, and the way the sound of her heartbeat and brainwaves are the sound of a young woman in love and are captured on that record and are forever floating out there. And then you have these sisters singing ‘we will always love you’ and it’s like, you can build an album around that.” **The Divine Chord (feat. MGMT & Johnny Marr)** RC: “I have a sneaking suspicion it’s about heartbreak from \[MGMT vocalist\] Andrew VanWyngarden’s point of view, although we’ve never spoken about it directly. I think I was just drawn to the very first line when he sings, ‘I still remember you.’ To me that said so much. Because sampling plays with time and remembering voices from the past, and when he sung that line I thought, ‘This is going to work.’ We were lucky enough Johnny Marr wanted to contribute. The Smiths are a huge part of my childhood and my youth. The day Johnny Marr’s guitar part came through with a note saying, ‘Guys, this is a brilliant track,’ it was just like, okay, I can die happy.” **Interstellar Love (feat. Leon Bridges)** RC: “It came about through spending a lot of time in LA. Leon was there, I was there, and then we got to work at Sunset Sound studios in the same room Prince had recorded, so of course Leon and me were both freaking out about that. It was an incredible experience, and I’m just so grateful that people came to this record so open. They’re big themes, and I don’t think just anyone could have walked in and embraced that and tapped into something very personal and sincere in their own lives. It’s pretty incredible that people are prepared to be so intimate. The vocals definitely aren’t just dialed in and plonked on top of the track.” **Oh The Sunn! (feat. Perry Farrell)** Tony Di Blasi: “That was one of those really surreal events where we’re in the taxi on the way to Perry Farrell’s house in Santa Monica and we get a text saying, ‘Do you guys like Indian food and is there anything you don’t eat?’ And we arrive and there’s Perry Farrell and just his look and his voice are so unique. It’s just one of those things where you’re like, ‘Wow, this is actually happening.’ Before we even started, we just sat there for an hour and got to know each other and ate this wonderful food and this amazing ice cream. And then we ended up going down to record the vocals, and he’s just so open and creative. He was making up lines as he was walking around the house and singing them out really loud and I was just sitting there and I looked at Robbie like, ‘That’s Perry Farrell up there making up these melodies to one of our songs, and we’re in his home.’ Moments like that hit you.” **We Go On (feat. Cola Boyy & Mick Jones)** TDB: “It’s a bit of an oddball one. And the cast of characters in it is Karen Carpenter, Cola Boyy, and Mick Jones’ voices all together. It’s wild, but it’s also so beautiful, the way it’s sung. It’s hitting that spot between the happiness and the sadness, which is a beautiful feeling.” RC: “Even though it’s one of the least Avalanchesy-sounding ones, I just love it. It works on different levels. Karen’s voice is so beautiful and her story’s so sad and there’s all that history and meaning, and then there’s Mick Jones and Cola Boyy, who’s one of the most inspiring people I’ve ever met, and a great friend, a true anarchist, but it’s great the way it ties in around Karen’s voice. ‘We go on hurting each other’ says so much, especially the way the world is today. That line makes me quite sad.” **Take Care in Your Dreaming (Denzel Curry, Tricky & Sampa the Great)** RC: “It’s kind of a melancholy song. Sometimes it sounds upbeat to me and sometimes it doesn’t. It was an incredible moment in the studio from Denzel Curry. We spoke quite deeply about my personal journey and what the song meant to me and unfulfilled dreams and a journey from darkness to light. And to see someone around strangers be open and vulnerable and really tell a story from the heart was really moving to watch him do that.” TDB: “And he just wrote that on the spot too. There are these moments where you go, ‘Wow, this guy from nothing has created that.’ And it wasn’t until quite later, when we really listened to the lyrics, that we realized how much he’d opened himself up in that song and talked about all these really personal, horrible things that had happened to him.” **Gold Sky (feat. Kurt Vile)** RC: “Kurt is one in a million. I remember listening to some of his records back in dark times and they sort of got me through. I had a few paragraphs written down in an email about what this record is about, and some people would say, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Maybe we should work together in the future.’ But he was just one of those people who said, ‘I’ve got it,’ and then gave his own slant on it. It’s got this rambling preacher spoken-word vibe. I didn’t expect to get that back from him.” TDB: “I remember going over to Robbie’s place and he said, ‘I’ve got this vocal from Kurt Vile, let me know what you think of it,’ and he played it and I just remember going, ‘This is one of the best things I’ve ever heard.’ It sounded perfect from the get-go. I was so blown away and just said, ‘Play it again.’” **Dial D for Devotion (feat. Karen O)** RC: “That was lovely. That was done remotely. They’re some of \[late Silver Jews frontman\] David Berman’s words. She was kind enough to go out on a limb with words that weren’t her own. It was lovely getting the recording back because it’s almost like I could hear someone doing the dishes in the background and then I could hear a dog barking outside. And not anyone could have done that.” **Running Red Lights (feat. Rivers Cuomo & Pink Siifu)** TDB: “We got a spreadsheet, I think Rivers’ assistant had sent it, with three different lyrical ideas. And we were like, ‘We’d love to hear the melodies that go along with them,’ so he ended up singing all three melodies and was like, ‘Let us know which ones you want.’ And we said, ‘Can we have them all?’ We got to meet Rivers when he was in Australia; Weezer were playing with Foo Fighters. We were googling all these amazing bars to take him to, cool places Melbourne has to offer, and we had a list of things we were going to do with him. It ended up raining, so we just took some umbrellas out of the hotel he was staying in and all he wanted to do was walk around in the rain. And then we went to a Starbucks and drank coffee for an hour and walked back and that was it. And that ended up being heaps cooler than anything we could have planned.” **Wherever You Go (feat. Jamie xx, Neneh Cherry & CLYPSO)** RC: “Our friend Jamie xx worked on that track with us, which was such a wonderful experience. We have a common love of working with samples, so it was a dream come true. I would send him lots and lots of demos for fun, and he used to call that track the banger; he was always like, ‘I love the banger. Send me the banger, I want to work on the banger.’ And he must have heard something in it, because it was quite slow before he got his hands on it. You can hear it speeding up as he’s trying to put some more energy into it. And of course working with CLYPSO from Sydney, it feels like we’ve made a great new friend.” TDB: “And of course there’s Neneh Cherry, who we met maybe six months before she recorded with us. It was backstage after her show, and there’s always lots of people there. We know what it’s like: Everyone’s trying to talk to you, and you can be like, ‘I just want to relax, I just played a show.’ But to everyone she was so welcoming and kind. They’re the type of people we want to work with.”

Since her days fronting Moloko beginning in the mid-’90s, Róisín Murphy has been dancing around the edges of the club, and occasionally—for instance, on the 2012 single “Simulation” or 2015’s “Jealousy”—she has waded into the thick of the dance floor. But on *Róisín Machine*, the Irish singer-songwriter declares her unconditional love for the discotheque. Working with her longtime collaborator DJ Parrot—a Sheffield producer who once recorded primitive house music alongside Cabaret Voltaire’s Richard H. Kirk in the duo Sweet Exorcist—she summons a sound that is both classic and expansive, swirling together diverse styles and eras into an enveloping embrace of a groove. “We Got Together” invokes 1988’s Second Summer of Love in its bluesy, raving-in-a-muddy-field stomp; “Shellfish Mademoiselle” sneaks a squirrelly acid bassline under cover of Hammond-kissed R&B; “Kingdom of Ends” is part Pink Floyd, part “French Kiss.” The crisply stepping funk of “Incapable”—a dead ringer for classic Matthew Herbert, another of her onetime collaborators—is as timeless as house music gets. So are the pumping “Simulation” and “Jealousy,” which bookend the album, and which haven’t aged a day since they first burned up nightclubs as white-label 12-inches.

“I needed to change things in my personal life, but also in the way that I was working,” Jehnny Beth tells Apple Music of her debut solo LP. “It was exhilarating for me to begin from a clean slate, starting something new and feeling that fear of the unknown again.” Best known as the lead singer and co-writer for UK post-punk band Savages, Beth was repeatedly told that it was too much of a risk to branch out on her own and that she should build on what she had done before. She followed her instinct instead, relying on her own resources and several collaborators to bring her project to life, including British producers/audio engineers Flood and Atticus Ross and longtime creative partner Johnny Hostile. *TO LOVE IS TO LIVE* is a natural display of Beth’s experimental curiosity—unleashing unsettling synths and industrial percussive elements as she gets in touch with feelings of self-doubt and her sexuality. “It was an inner voice, something that was calling me to do this—otherwise, there’s the danger of losing myself completely,” Beth says. “I didn\'t want to be enslaved to one genre of music, and I didn\'t want to be one of those singers who are slaves to their dance.” Here, Beth walks us through the album, one song at a time. **I Am** “When I heard Atticus Ross’ production, I knew it was going to be the opener. With Savages, my voice was connected to the intensity of the guitars and the drums with that classic punk-rock band scenario. And he was creating the same intensity but with strings, and instruments that were different. I love that it creates a sense of suspense and wonder. When you finish the track, you\'re left with questions like \'What is coming next?\' The song was written by me and Johnny Hostile, and it was during the very early stages of exploration. During one of our lab experiments, we tried to pitch my voice in different styles and tonologies, and we found one that was really pitched down. There\'s a multiplicity of voices on the record. And I think the purpose is to unlock the forbidden thoughts and intimate thoughts that we believe are shameful. I think that we push them down. But as humans, we have contradictory thoughts—and we battle with the idea of identity and the idea of good and bad all the time. There is danger in trying to repress those hidden voices and not giving the space for them. So that\'s why it was important to open with that voice and not my voice.” **Innocence** “It was produced by Flood in his studio in London. He has this capacity of getting obsessed with details and muting all the important parts. You don\'t understand what he\'s listening to or why he\'s even listening to that. So I got frustrated, and he kicked me out of the studio and asked me to come back an hour later. And then I was very frustrated and angry. I came back and heard the mix, and then came this moment where I was hearing myself in a way that I had never heard myself before. It brought me to tears. I wrote the lyrics early on in the process of making the record; I placed it as the starting point of the journey—the same way a novelist would start with the shameful thoughts for his novel, and start from there to grow. Not trying to avoid it, but put it at the center—and I asked myself what is the thought that keeps you up at night that you never reveal to anyone. And it was the idea of lost innocence, in the sense of feeling isolated and not being able to connect with the rest of humanity. It\'s about the reality of living in busy cities as well. The more you close your eyes to people, the more walled up you become. You see the reality of a city which doesn\'t treat everybody equally or the same way, and the anger that it creates.” **Flower** “It\'s a classic scenario of distance being sexier than the touch, and celebrating female nudity in a hypnotic way. I was inspired by all the girls in Jumbo\'s, which is an LA pole-dancing club I go to when I\'m in LA. I really love the atmosphere of the club and how freeing it is, and how exciting and frightening it is at the same time. I love that tension. Hostile composed it for me, and when it was finished, I felt it wasn\'t for me. I wasn\'t sure, so I sent it to my friend Romy Madley Croft \[The xx vocalist/guitarist\], and she replied in capital letters that I have to have this song on the record and that it was great to hear me in a different context. I decided that I was going to check with myself if I was feeling uncomfortable. And if I was feeling uncomfortable, it was a good sign that I was going in the right direction.” **We Will Sin Together** “It’s an invitation to do bad things together and the realization that love is part of that. That there\'s no right or wrong; there\'s only in and out. If you decide to break a sweat and participate in life, you are going to make mistakes. So for me, it\'s what I call a post-romantic love song. It tries to reach beyond the ancestral codes of romanticism, because they too often generate frustration. Romy sang backing vocals on it. We were working on the song in LA and I asked her to sit behind the mic. I love her voice. I think it naturally carries a lot of emotion and never sounds fabricated, and it also suits the song perfectly. It\'s one of my favorite tracks of the record.” **A Place Above (feat. Cillian Murphy)** “I had written the texts and I wondered if \[Irish actor\] Cillian could read it. Because, again, I wanted this multiplicity of voices on the record. I knew he was a fan of Savages, and I was a fan of his; I think he has one of the best voices in modern cinema. He did it without hearing any music, which I think was great and perfect. I remember what Cillian wrote to me when he wrote the text. He said, ‘It\'s big stuff.’ And then he said, \'It should be done in a slow way, a quiet way.\' He made it personal, as if you were hearing someone\'s personal thoughts that you suddenly had access to. It’s a little bit like in *Wings of Desire* \[German film director Wim Wenders’ 1987 film\]. The angels have access to people\'s thoughts and minds, and they can hear their secret thoughts.” **I’m the Man** “What I wanted to say with this song is that the root of evil isn\'t just on the other side—it lives inside of each of us. It\'s implanted in our core by generations of parents or grandparents in society, and we must stay strong and aware to overcome the aggressive power to control us. It\'s about facing my own responsibility for the evil of this world. It\'s important for arts, in general, to show our own complexities to our faces. I wanted to portray the evil of this world and put it on me, wear the mask of people. Because it\'s impossible for me, as an artist, to draw a line between good and bad and just pretend that I\'m always standing on the right side of the fence. Sometimes it\'s about looking on the other side, trying to understand your own thoughts and your own darkness and your own violence.” **The Rooms** “It’s a resolution moment, kind of a resting in contrast to ‘I’m the Man.’ I wrote and recorded hours of piano and vocals on my own in the studio. It\'s a calm description of an orgy where women have all the power. It comes from a line by Francis Bacon, who said something like, ‘When I went into the rooms of pleasure, I didn\'t stay in the rooms where they celebrate acceptable modes of loving, I went into the rooms which are kept secret.’ It\'s a beautiful way to describe desire and exploration.” **Heroine** “I think ‘Heroine’ is a cry to be free. I have had quite a journey with this song, because it was originally called ‘Heroism.’ Because I wanted to talk about the idea of freedom and role models and the fact that freedom is, in fact, frightening. I was told I should play the heroine in ‘Heroine.’ I couldn\'t really step into the shoes of that big character that way, that was positive in a way. You need to be able to embody positive characters as much as you embody frightening and contradictory characters. So that was the realization for me. Sometimes you look for role models around, but you have to also be able to see what\'s within you. And for me to hold the people around me to get there, to take me there.” **How Could You (feat. Joe Talbot)** “One of my favorite songs about jealousy is ‘Why’d Ya Do It?’ by Marianne Faithfull from *Broken English*, and I always wanted to write something about jealousy. I\'ve had to work very hard to conquer jealousy in order to live, and it wasn\'t easy. I had to fight against all my conditioning and invent new rules for myself. I\'ve learned so much from the process, but it\'s something you constantly need to check yourself with. Because jealous people always think they\'re right. Which I think is my main problem with it; when I was jealous, I was tempted to think I was right, because jealousy makes you think that there isn\'t a greater pain than yours. I couldn\'t imagine a better person as Joe \[Talbot, IDLES vocalist\] to be a jealous man on this song. Because he knows, and he understands, what it means to take control of this human instinct. And he\'s been jealous. He\'s been a bad guy; he knows what it\'s like. When I discovered IDLES, I thought they were shining a light into what it means to be a man in a band. I knew Joe was going to write something brilliant about anger and jealousy, and he did.” **French Countryside** “I wrote it as if I was writing a soundtrack for *Call Me by Your Name*. That\'s what I had in mind: the summer, the countryside, and the promise of love. I wrote the lyrics much before that. I wrote them in a plane when I thought we were going to crash, and I was making a list of promises of what I would do better if I survived. And obviously when the plane landed safely, I forgot about my list of promises. When I revisited the idea I realized, oh god, we forget about the urgency of life. I was suddenly facing those ideas again, and I really wanted to make something before I go too. It contrasts so much with the rest of the record, but that\'s really on purpose.” **Human** “I knew I wanted to make a record that would give a sense of the journey, holding a narrative from start to finish. It was part of my early discussions with Atticus. I didn\'t want to make a collection of songs. I wanted the record to be a world you can live in. He had this idea of reintroducing the dark voice at that point with the same lyrics. And again, bringing in those orchestral strings, and that sort of drama and intensity and suspense. So we\'re going back to the beginning, but we\'ve evolved. The idea of the lyrics came to me when I was reading about people who go to digital rehab, because they\'ve lost the sense of self and connection to their life. It felt that it was interesting to finish the album by saying I used to be a human being and now I live in the web. Because I think we can relate to that more and more.”

🇬🇧🇺🇸 "Domesticated" is Sébastien Tellier's 6th studio album, his groundbreaking come back since "L'Aventura" in 2014. In his mind, he had only one ambition: gathering a fresh new guard of producers with the aim of crafting a new lush, futuristic pop sound, although still infused by his eternal and oh so special melodies. Mixed by the sound wizard Nk.F (celebrated for French rap duo PNL’s stunning sound), "Domesticated" will surprise you by its breadth and silkiness. Its topic, domestication, will speak to anybody delightfully familiar with the everyday domestic ballet of a household. Mostly written at home, Sébastien allowed himself to be inspired by what he had in front of him: piles of plates stacked in the sink, dirty socks spread out on the scratched floor, two beautiful children he has yet to domesticate…or is it him now who is being domesticated? 🇫🇷 "Domesticated" est le 6e album studio de Sébastien Tellier, son retour en grandes pompes depuis "L'Aventura" en 2014. Dans sa tête, une ambition : rassembler toute une jeune garde de producteurs dans le but de produire un nouveau son pop léché, futuriste, mais toujours emprunt de ces mélodies éternelles dont lui seul a le secret. Mixé par le sorcier du son Nk.F (repéré notamment aux côtés de PNL), "Domesticated" vous surprendra par son ampleur et sa douceur. Et aussi par son thème, la domestication, et le destin d'un homme qui assiste au ballet domestique avec délectation. Écrit en majeure partie à la maison, il s'est laissé inspirer par ce qu'il y a trouvé : des piles d'assiettes dans l'évier, des chaussettes sales sur le parquet rayé, deux beaux jeunes enfants à domestiquer... Ou peut-être est-ce lui qui est désormais domestiqué ?...

From thrilling affairs that dissolve into sweaty desperation (Night Chancers) to the absurd bloggers, fruitlessly clinging to the fag ends of the fashion set (Sleep People), via soiled real life (Slum Lord) social media – enabled stalkers (I’m not Your Dog) and new day, sleep – deprived optimism (Daylight), the record’s finely drawn vignettes, are all based on the corners of world Dury has visited. Baxter says “Night Chancers is about being caught out in your attempt at being free”, it’s about someone leaving a hotel room at three in the morning. You’re in a posh room with big Roman taps and all that, but after they go suddenly all you can hear is the taps dripping, and all you can see the debris of the night is around you. Then suddenly a massive party erupts, in the room next door. This happened to me and all I Could hear was the night chancer, the hotel ravers”.

The idea for Daniel Lopatin’s ninth Oneohtrix Point Never LP came as he began revisiting old radio mixtapes he’d made as a teenager just outside of Boston. “Unlike a mixtape that you make for somebody else, they\'re non-sequential,” he tells Apple Music. “You’re reacting to something that you may have not even heard before, that you\'re just titillated by for the first few seconds. It’s like a map of your unconscious in a way.” Meant to simulate the experience of listening to FM radio for an entire day, *Magic Oneohtrix Point Never*—a nod to Boston soft rock station Magic 106, and the name to which Lopatin’s 2007 debut *Betrayed in the Octagon* was originally attributed—had to have “an eclecticism” that made you feel like you were spinning the dial. So in addition to collages of hallucinogenic DJ chatter, there are also mutant pop ballads (“No Nightmares,” which features friend and co-executive producer The Weeknd), warped alt-rock anthems (“I Don’t Love Me Anymore”), New Age satires (“The Whether Channel”), and sculptures wrought from sound that most people would dismiss as garbage or background noise. All of it speaks to a career defined by liquid sensibilities and an open mind. “I wanted to make a cohesive, punchy, 50-minute record that was very personal, but pulled from FM palettes that I was personally interested in,” Lopatin says. “I think it works really well as a metaphor for how I\'ve changed. The things that I try to understand about my own life and being an avid musical listener and how much that\'s influenced me as a musician is kind of apparent on this record. That metaphor of transformation is something that I came to by thinking about the radio.” Here, Lopatin walks us through the day, from sunup to midnight. **Cross Talk I** “You’re in alarm clock territory. You’re waking up kind of inside the fucking radio, not listening to it. I really want the setting of the album to be almost within a kind of psychic environment—Magic Oneohtrix Point Never as a radio station. So you’re waking up. Time to get on with the day.” **Auto & Allo** “It\'s really a track of two parts. The first half is really abstract, and in the second half it comes together. I called it \'Auto & Allo,\' which means self and other. So it’s like you\'re orienting and you\'re moving towards something. The album is becoming, earning its subjectivity out of this haze.” **Long Road Home** “I imagined it as the beginning of the album’s journey. It\'s setting the thesis of the whole record up, which is sort of embracing transformation, even if it\'s kind of disturbing and the future is vast and unfortunately filled with question marks. But that\'s it. That\'s the game. That\'s where we are. That\'s who we are. And so, how to live alongside your incompleteness, instead of fight against it or to think that you can overcome it. There\'s no home you come to. There\'s just this kind of road, and the road is the thing. That\'s what that song is for me.” **Cross Talk II** “You\'re in the Midday Suite. The collaged-together narrative there is the DJ saying, ‘Somehow our childhood fantasies don\'t relate to our adult realities.’ And from there, the record gets a little bit more dense. I like to think of midday as active and energetic. There\'s a lot of optimism, weirdly.” **I Don’t Love Me Anymore** “Basically it’s Frankensteined together—partially a bratty pop-punk song, partially motorik, like psych rock that\'s drum-machine-driven. There\'s a lot of weird over-sampled guitars on it, like the kinds that you might hear in a Sega Genesis video game.” **Bow Ecco** “A lot of the more ambient moments on the record are references to weather. The liminal space of a weather report is always, I\'ve found, really calming, but it’s scary because you\'re essentially just somebody sitting there talking about unpredictable dynamic systems and trying to figure them out and conquer them. A bow echo is a weather pattern that\'s shaped like an archer\'s bow, this thing that could be like a tornado. This song is calm and there’s a lot of repetition. Then I\'m trying to characterize a moment of weather where it flares up like a cyclone, a music-as-sculpture moment where I try to characterize this thing that was like something you\'d see on a Weather Channel broadcast.” **The Whether Channel** “It\'s like ‘Bow Ecco’ is the actual weather outside, happening somewhere in the lower atmosphere. And ‘Whether Channel’ is like a station, a place where something\'s commenting on it, dealing with it, or trying to track it. And so it flows out of that. \[Rapper\] Nolan \[berollin\] did that part off the cuff, and it\'s really interesting because he\'s talking almost in this pseudo-motivational-speaker way, which I thought was really funny. That fit so perfectly and wonderfully into this whole New Age thing that I\'m interested in anyway. I was like, ‘Oh. Let\'s do this kind of Law of Attraction satire where, by the end of his verse, his voice is totally transformed into this super-saturated bit-crushed thing and it sounds like weird baby voices are being pulled apart from each other.” **No Nightmares** “It kind of has this 10cc/Godley & Creme/‘Take My Breath Away’ kind of vibe to it that could be like a late-night thing because it\'s slow. But I felt that it was so sweet and kind of pretty. It also has a kind of blue-sky quality to it even if it\'s kind of slow and romantic. It’s as poppy as the record gets. I mean, this is not a pop record. It references popular music a lot, but it\'s not sequenced or created to be a series of singles in that way. It\'s very much a record that is meant to be listened to almost like how you watch a film, so this really needed to be there in a way for me. It just made sense as the moment on the record—if there is one—that’s going to have this big, brash FM radio moment, right there in the middle.” **Cross Talk III** “It’s sundown now, the sun is setting. This one is pretty lighthearted. I think it was a commercial for a candy bar and I just did a kind of Negativland-style collage where I made the woman in the advertisement talk about styles of music—about background music and elevator music—as if it was something she was tasting.” **Tales From the Trash Stratum** “The trash stratum is a reference to \[author\] Philip K. Dick. Here’s the quote: ‘Elements of the divine trash stratum,’ he says. ‘The clue lies there. Symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum.’ It’s a very spiritual way of thinking about trash: If everything, if all material, is kind of equally alive in a sense, because we\'re here to witness it and observe it, then everything is kind of special. Trash is a discarded thing, but for a lot of artists—me included—there\'s always been an interest in the abject or in the trash and the discarded stuff. That’s been such a big part of my music and my philosophy in thinking about musical tastes—like trashy tastes or dustbin stuff or throwaway New Age records that really meant a lot to me.” **Answering Machine** “Really, the record to me is about listening—and all these sort of overlapping modes of listening. We have voicemails now, but I remember the eeriness of an answering machine, and having to come home and press a button. There\'s this weird beep and you could hear the sort of mechanism itself, the thing—there’s a tape in it and it looks all weird. I wanted to make an interlude that had an homage to this other thing that I would imagine I\'d be listening to while I was listening to the radio. It\'s as simple as that.” **Imago** “In nature, an imago is the fully realized final stage of an insect when it becomes its final form—so a butterfly when it\'s fully winged. I wrote the piece first and then named it that because it seemed to have that kind of narrative to it—it sounds like pieces in between that are almost barely there, like something\'s happening. Beautiful music was a style of music on the radio that was essentially background music, and to me this sounded like a really doomed piece of beautiful music that you\'d never hear. As the song progresses, it both decays and becomes more itself at the same time. By the time the strings come in and there\'s this really crazy kind of symphonic string arrangement that hugs the decaying loop, it occurred to me that that was kind of like an imago, a butterfly abandoning its exoskeleton and becoming this new thing.” **Cross Talk IV / Radio Lonelys** “The beginning of the overnight, and that’s when things get a little darker, seedier, and, in a way, more fun and cynical. Things open up. To me, the overnight programming on freeform radio was either generically stuck in there and wasn\'t actually what the station was doing all the rest of the time, or it was this inverse—a more freeform chunk where it was more libidinous and weird. I mean, it\'s overnight, so who the fuck is up listening?” **Lost But Never Alone** “It\'s like ‘Lost But Never Alone’ and ‘No Nightmares’ are two sides of the same coin. I just love a triumphant power ballad, and I love Def Leppard. To me, this is like a Def Leppard song but it\'s hybridized with other things that are a little bit more like 1980s synth-pop but on the gothier side of it, so like Depeche Mode’s *Violator* and stuff like that. That was always alchemically interesting to me, because you were either hair metal or you were goth—but if you were both, you were schizophrenic, basically.” **Shifting** “Arca and I really connect on this idea that we\'re both interested in transformation as a powerful formal device in music. Because you can do stuff with sound design and production in a way that can really encapsulate all these other ways of thinking about transformation, whether it\'s bodily transformation or evolving your ideas or devolving your ideas. The whole thing is sort of reinforcing that theme of liquid ideas as liquid sounds, and I really wanted Arca to be on the record somewhere because I think she\'s doing it and has been doing that so well for so long. I always felt such a kinship with her that way.” **Wave Idea** “Much like ‘Shifting’—which I think of as a weird spooky theremin, kind of an Ed Wood vibe but turned into something really futuristic—‘Wave Idea’ is like, what if you could animate this sort of stuff between the dials and sculpt it into something that had a body, that had its own sort of psychic importance and its own physical kind of manifestation? So it\'s like a creature, my hallucination, how I sculpt something that becomes much more interesting than just noise or trash.” **Nothing’s Special** “There\'s a kind of thesis in it. It was a really rough fucking year and it\'s been hard for everybody. Something that\'s always given me a lot of solace when I\'m in a funk is that I notice that I\'ve become disenchanted. The thing that can kind of re-enchant me very quickly when I get there is to remember that—like the Philip K. Dick quote said—everything is kind of divine, and everything is interesting, including the stuff between the dials. The noise. I wanted to end the album on a high note, so it crescendos towards the lyric that says no matter how bleak things get, I\'m still fundamentally fascinated that I can find such enchantment in such random, small things.”

Melbourne’s RVG return with their highly anticipated second album, Feral. Following their beloved 2017 debut ‘A Quality of Mercy’, RVG perform the tricky alchemy of combining rock’s urgency, punk’s anarchy, and pop’s empathy to create a record that feels vital: Feral is a catharsis, a call to arms, and a forthright indictment of contemporary complacency. ‘Feral’ was recorded at Head Gap studios with producer Victor Van Vugt (PJ Harvey, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Beth Orton). Internationally renowned, Van Vugt currently resides in Berlin, Germany and travelled to Melbourne to work with RVG. One of the producer’s key tenets is a sense of spontaneity, of capturing the essence of a song’s live performance, a concern that RVG prize above all else when recording The band recorded the album’s instrumentals live to track, allowing their playing to be infused with the kind of electricity that has seen the band’s live show lauded across Australia and internationally. ‘Feral’ is RVG’s first full-length release in three years and marks the beginning of an exhilarating new era for the band. Both a cry for help and a call to action, this is an album that demands your attention. RVG is Romy Vager, Reuben Bloxham and Marc Nolte. ‘Feral’ is out 24th April on Fire Records.

After spending much of 2019 on the road touring their debut EP, *No. 1*, Montreal quintet Pottery returned home a profoundly changed band. For one, the garage-rock adrenaline of that first record had given way to a cowbell-clanging funk that owed as much to the call-and-response theatrics of James Brown and block-party atmosphere of War as it did to the polyrhythmic complexity of *Remain in Light*-era Talking Heads. But more importantly, the band had fully embraced the (sur)realities of life on the road: the mind-numbing drives, the dinners of raw supermarket hot dogs, the nights spent crammed into zero-star hotel rooms. Those bonding experiences form the basis for Pottery’s full-length debut, *Welcome to Bobby’s Motel*—a concept album that doesn’t so much immerse you in a storyline as a state of mind, with the titular character serving less as a traditional protagonist than a personification of the band’s driving philosophy. “We actually conceptualized the record after we\'d already made it,” guitarist Jacob Shepansky tells Apple Music. “It just ended up culminating into a pretty good portrait of our lives at that time. We were staying in all these shitty motels with five guys in a room with two queen-size beds and one guy sleeping on the floor. The whole idea came out of just trying to make the best out of these dismal situations and just enjoy the time with your friends.” But more than just successfully bottle up Pottery’s relentless onstage energy—with interlocking tracks that suggest the whole album was recorded in a single continuous live take—*Welcome to Bobby’s Motel* also charts the band’s spiritual maturation, as frontman Austin Boylan balances his absurdist proclamations with more sobering ruminations on family, labor, and addiction. Here, Shepansky checks us into *Bobby’s Motel* with this track-by-track guide to the album. **Welcome to Bobby’s Motel** “Back in April 2019, we were touring with Viagra Boys throughout the States, and we actually opened the show with this every night. That was exactly what we wanted to use this song for: a fast show opener that just grabs people\'s attention right away.” **Hot Heater** “We wrote this song a couple of years ago, and it kind of spearheaded a lot of the funkier, dancier stuff on this record. Something clicked, and it was very easy to understand where we wanted to take it from there. This song was sort of like a precursor to \'Bobby\'s Forecast\' and \'Under the Wires\'—it was the start of that trying-to-play-funky type of deal.” **Under the Wires** “This was actually inspired by the same Viagra Boys tour, and the same sort of circumstance that the whole Bobby character is surrounded by. We were staying in Weed, California, and we had a day off, so we had this great idea to rent out a cabin in the woods. We find this cabin on Airbnb, we get there…and it turns out the guy hasn\'t been there in, like, three months and the road isn\'t even plowed. So it\'s like 8 pm, we don\'t know what we\'re gonna do. All we\'ve got is a bunch of uncooked hot dogs and hot dog buns, because our plan was to have a fire and cook hot dogs. We ended up going to a Motel 6 and cramming into there, and we had no way to cook these hot dogs. So we just ended up hanging out by the highway behind this barbed-wire fence all night, and it was very special. It was kind of like that tipping point where you no longer care.” **Bobby’s Forecast** “Austin was ad-libbing for most of this. He was very inspired by James Brown at the time, so I think that definitely had an effect on his delivery. We wanted that line \[‘Power/It doesn’t take much work’\] to sound as ambiguous as possible, and for the listener to create whatever narrative they imagine. At the time we were writing the lyrics \[in June 2019\], we were thinking about our day jobs, and how there\'s always that boss that\'s going to look down on you just because he has the power to, and there\'s always going to be somebody that\'s abusing their power in some form, whether it\'s completely pedestrian or an actual human rights violation. So we wanted to keep it as open as possible for people to create their own narratives and understand it in their own way.” **Down in the Dumps** “We almost ad-libbed the lyrics for \'Down in the Dumps\' as well. We were just riffing off of a similar idea \[as \'Bobby\'s Forecast\'\] and talking about the powers that be. And we were also doing taxes at the time, and everybody was all stressed out about whether they did their returns correctly. There\'s that line ‘Taxman, come get me,’ which started from a joke. One of us was saying to Austin, \'Oh, you might want to double-check your return and make sure everything\'s okay,\' and his response was all confident and cocky, like, ‘Come get me!’” **Reflection** “Austin wrote this about his relationship with his mom, and it\'s very personal. His vocals and lyrics all came after we had actually done the whole song. We had been practicing it for a while and we just never really came up with any melodies. We were kind of getting close to finishing the record, and Austin was like, ‘You know, I just got to do this, I got to finish this.’ So he went home for a night, we came back to our drummer Paul \[Jacobs\]’s house the next day to work, and Austin had a full page of lyrics and a melody. We asked what it was about; he said, ‘My mom,’ and we were like, ‘Perfect!’ I\'m really happy with the way that one turned out. I think it\'s going to definitely affect future records. I think we\'re more conscious about writing personal stories now.” **Texas Drums Pt I & II** “We were in Texas last year for South by Southwest, and we were playing, like, four shows in one day, and there\'s drum kits for everybody to play at each venue. So Paul was kind of like rolling the dice all day. But at one of the gigs, there was this beautiful drum kit that he just fell in love with, and it turns out it was handmade by this guy in Texas. Paul just wouldn\'t stop thinking about it and became kind of obsessed with it. He had become so engulfed in this kit that when we got home, we were working on music and we had this song, and then, in the spur of the moment, he started shouting out, \'Texas drums!\' We all really liked it, and then we just went with it. It\'s a love letter to this drum kit in Austin that Paul played for 45 minutes.” **NY Inn** “\'NY Inn\' was actually written shortly after we finished recording our first record, *No. 1*, so it preceded the whole *Bobby\'s Motel* theme by at least three years. But it\'s kind of funny that it ended up being in such a similar realm. I had an old demo of the guitar line on an old four-track of mine, and then Austin came over and we just hashed it out. And then very quickly we played it with the band and adjusted the lyrics, and we were really happy with it. We\'ve been playing it live for like three years now.” **What’s in Fashion?** “This is definitely the most on-the-nose track on the record. It\'s a culmination of living in a very gentrified neighborhood in Montreal. It was mostly just a commentary on the people that we see on the street, where you\'re like, ‘Do you have a job?’ You see the same person walking around the street most days—they\'re just cruising around and they\'re always looking good, but you\'re like, ‘What the fuck do you do?’” **Take Your Time** “When I was living in Vancouver, my mom ran a mission—it was basically a free store for the homeless in the Downtown Eastside. I would go volunteer there on weekends in high school every once in a while, so it\'s always been something that I\'ve understood, and I\'ve been just really close to it. But then you come to Montreal, and you just see people gorging themselves and it\'s like this free-for-all. \'Take Your Time\' was about going from that point \[of witnessing rampant addiction in Vancouver\] to being a twentysomething in the bar having a great time, but what does it take to get to that other position? And how far do you have to be disillusioned with reality in order to get there? It\'s trying to understand what it takes for that sort of an addiction to spiral out of control.” **Hot Like Jungle** “Our first version of this was much more profane. It was me and Austin basically making this Austin Powers-esque cheesy love song. We sent it to Tim \[Putnam\], the head of Partisan Records, and he laughed…and then he was like, ‘Okay, you\'re going to change this, right?’ But we got somewhat attached to the song—not for the content, but just for the phrasing. And then when we were recording, \'Hot Like Jungle\' was on the back burner the whole time, because I was the only one really pushing to get it going, because I had this idea in my head of where we could take it. But we tried so many different iterations of that song when we were doing demos that everybody was just ready to check out. And then we really slowed it down, and then everybody was really happy about it. And Paul ended up just penning a couple of lines about him coming home from work—when me and him were working construction—and throwing down his keys and giving his girlfriend a hug. I don\'t know how he got in that headspace when we were recording, but c\'est la vie!”

The debut album from Pottery, Welcome to Bobby's Motel, arrives June 26. Produced by Jonathan Schenke. Who is “Bobby,” you ask? Enter Pottery. Enter Paul Jacobs, Jacob Shepansky, Austin Boylan, Tom Gould, and Peter Baylis. Enter the smells, the cigarettes, the noise, their van Mary, their friend Luke, toilet drawings, Northern California, Beatles accents, Taco Bell, the Great Plains, and hot dogs. Enter love and hate, angst and happiness, and everything in between. Beginning as an inside joke between the band members, Bobby and his “motel” have grown into so much more. They’ve become the all-encompassing alt-reality that the band built themselves, for everyone else. So, in essence, Bobby is Pottery and his motel is wherever they are.  But really, Bobby is a pilot, a lumberjack, a stay at home dad, and a disco dancer that never rips his pants. He's a punching bag filled with comic relief. He laughs in the face of day-to-day ambiguity, as worrying isn’t worth it to Bobby. There’s a piece of him in everyone, there to remind us that things are probably going to work out, maybe. He’s you. He’s him. He’s her. He’s them. Bobby is always there, painted in the corner, urging you to relax and forget about your useless worries. And his motel? Well, the motel is life. It might not be clean, and the curtains might not shut all the way. The air conditioner might be broken, and the floors might be stained. But that’s okay, because you don’t go to Bobby’s Motel for the glamour and a good night’s sleep, the minibar, or the full-service sauna. You go to Bobby’s Motel to feel, to escape, to remember, to distract. You go for the late nights and early mornings, good times and the bad. You might spend your entire life looking for Bobby’s Motel and just when you think you will never find it, you realize you’ve been there all along. It’s filthy and amazing and you dance, and you love it. The 11 songs on ‘Welcome to Bobby’s Motel’ don’t just invite you to move your body; they command you to. Fusing reckless, manic energy with painstaking precision, the record is part post-punk, part art-pop, and part dance floor acid trip, hinting at everything from Devo to Gang of Four as it boldly careens through genres and decades. The music is driven by explosive drums and off-kilter guitar riffs that drill themselves into your brain, accented with deep, funky grooves and rousing gang vocals. The production is similarly raw and wild, suggesting an air of anarchy that belies the music’s careful architecture and meticulous construction. The result is an album full of ambitious, complex performances that exude joy and mayhem in equal measure, a collection that’s alternately virtuosic, chaotic, and pure fun.

A CERTAIN RATIO are back with a new album, ACR Loco. Revitalized by their most successful tour in over two decades, the band returned to the studio to record their first album in 12 years – due for release September 25 on Mute. The new 10-track album will be released on CD, cassette, limited edition colored vinyl and digital platforms. The vinyl will be available in one of four colors: white, blue, red and turquoise, randomly packed, with each color of varying rarity. ACR Loco was recorded by the core line up of Jez Kerr, Martin Moscrop and Donald Johnson with contributions from the ACR live line up – Tony Quigley on sax, Denise Johnson adds vocals and Matt Steele provides keyboards. Additional guests include Sink Ya Teeth’s Maria Uzor and Gemma Cullingford, Gabe Gurnsey (Factory Floor) and Manchester luminaries Mike Joyce and Eric Random. “This album is a culmination of everything we've ever done,” explains Kerr. The album distills the different directions and styles that have run throughout the band’s career, one that began in the late ‘70s with Factory Records’ first ever 7” release. “Digging into the past for the boxset [ACR:BOX was released in 2019 on Mute] must have rubbed off on us and influenced the current album,” says Moscrop. “I think it helped spark up our imagination. It allowed us to work in some of the past as we move forward into the future.” Keen on the joys of collaboration and sharing, it makes sense that adding the ACR touch to other artists via a series of reworks led to their latest album taking shape. Recent reworks of tracks for the likes of Barry Adamson, The Charlatans and Maps saw the band return to the studio to unpick those original tracks. “The reworks were crucial,” says Donald Johnson. “They got us back in the studio and forced a union and a bond. They allowed us to start getting a groove again.” Kerr mirrors this. “We love doing the reworks because it's just us doing our thing,” he says. “The three of us jamming is really the basis of it all. Once you get that groove there’s no stopping us.”