Les Inrocks' Top 100 Albums of 2020

It took Kelly Lee Owens 35 days to write the music for her second album. “I had a flood of creation,” she tells Apple Music. “But this was after three years that included loss, learning how to deal with loss and how to transmute that loss into something of creation again. They were the hardest three years of my life.” The Welsh electronic musician’s self-titled 2017 debut album figured prominently on best-of-the-year lists and won her illustrious fans across music and fashion. It’s the sort of album you recommend to people you’d like to impress. Its release, however, was clouded by issues in Owens’ personal life. “There was a lot going on, and it took away my energy,” she says. “It made me question the integrity of who I was and whether it was ego driving certain situations. It was so tough to keep moving forward.” Fortunately, Owens rallied. “It sounds hippie-dippie, but this is my purpose in life,” she says. “To convey messages via sounds and to connect to other people.” Informed by grief, lust, anxiety, and environmental concerns, *Inner Song* is an electronic album that impacts viscerally. “I allowed myself to be more of a vessel that people talk about,” she says. “It’s real. Ideas can flow through you. In that 35-day period, I allowed myself to tap into any idea I had, rather than having to come in with lyrics, melodies, and full production. It’s like how the best ideas come when you’re in the shower: You’re usually just letting things be and come through you a bit more. And then I could hunker down and go in hard on all those minute nudges on vocal lines or kicks or rhythmical stuff or EQs. Both elements are important, I learned. And I love them both.” Here, Owens treats you to a track-by-track guide to *Inner Song*. **Arpeggi** “*In Rainbows* is one of my favorite albums of all time. The production on it is insane—it’s the best headphone *and* speaker listening experience ever. This cover came a year before the rest of the album, actually. I had a few months between shows and felt like I should probably go into the studio. I mean, it’s sacrilege enough to do a Radiohead cover, but to attempt Thom’s vocals: no. There is a recording somewhere, but as soon as I heard it, I said, ‘That will never been heard or seen. Delete, delete, delete.’ I think the song was somehow written for analog synths. Perhaps if Thom Yorke did the song solo, it might sound like this—especially where the production on the drums is very minimal. So it’s an homage to Thom, really. It was the starting point for me, and this record, so it couldn’t go anywhere else.” **On** “I definitely wanted to explore my own vocals more on this album. That ‘journey,’ if you like, started when Kieran Hebden \[Four Tet\] requested I play before him at a festival and afterwards said to me, ‘Why the fuck have you been hiding your vocals all this time under waves of reverb, space echo, and delay? Don’t do that on the next album.’ That was the nod I needed from someone I respect so highly. It’s also just been personal stuff—I have more confidence in my voice and the lyrics now. With what I’m singing about, I wanted to be really clear, heard, and understood. It felt pointless to hide that and drown it in reverb. The song was going to be called ‘Spirit of Keith’ as I recorded it on the day \[Prodigy vocalist\] Keith Flint died. That’s why there are so many tinges of ’90s production in the drums, and there’s that rave element. And almost three minutes on the dot, you get the catapult to move on. We leap from this point.” **Melt!** “Everyone kept taking the exclamation mark out. I refused, though—it’s part of the song somehow. It was pretty much the last song I made for the album, and I felt I needed a techno banger. There’s a lot of heaviness in the lyrics on this album, so I just wanted that moment to allow a letting loose. I wanted the high fidelity, too. A lot of the music I like at the moment is really clear, whereas I’m always asking to take the top end off on the snare—even if I’m told that’s what makes something a snare. I just don’t really like snares. The ‘While you sleep, melt, ice’ lyrics kept coming into my head, so I just searched for ‘glacial ice melting’ and ‘skating on ice’ or ‘icicles cracking’ and found all these amazing samples. The environmental message is important—as we live and breathe and talk, the environment continues to suffer, but we have to switch off from it to a certain degree because otherwise you become overwhelmed and then you’re paralyzed. It’s a fine balance—and that’s why the exclamation mark made so much sense to me.” **Re-Wild** “This is my sexy stoner song. I was inspired by Rihanna’s ‘Needed Me,’ actually. People don’t necessarily expect a little white girl from Wales to create something like this, but I’ve always been obsessed with bass so was just wanting a big, fat bassline with loads of space around it. I’d been reading this book *Women Who Run With the Wolves* \[by Clarissa Pinkola\], which talks very poetically about the journey of a woman through her lifetime—and then in general about the kind of life, death, and rebirth cycle within yourself and relationships. We’re always focused on the death—the ending of something—but that happens again and again, and something can be reborn and rebirthed from that, which is what I wanted to focus on. She \[Pinkola\] talks about the rewilding of the spirit. So often when people have depression—unless we suffer chronically, which is something else—it’s usually when the creative soul life dies. I felt that mine was on the edge of fading. Rewilding your spirit is rewilding that connection to nature. I was just reestablishing the power and freedoms I felt within myself and wanting to express that and connect people to that inner wisdom and power that is always there.” **Jeanette** “This is dedicated to my nana, who passed away in October 2019, and she will forever be one of the most important people in my life. She was there three minutes after I was born, and I was with her, holding her when she passed. That bond is unbreakable. At my lowest points she would say, ‘Don’t you dare give this up. Don’t you dare. You’ve worked hard for this.’ Anyway, this song is me letting it go. Letting it all go, floating up, up, and up. It feels kind of sunshine-y. What’s fun for me—and hopefully the listener—is that on this album you’re hearing me live tweaking the whole way through tracks. This one, especially.” **L.I.N.E.** “Love Is Not Enough. This is a deceivingly pretty song, because it’s very dark. Listen, I’m from Wales—melancholy is what we do. I tried to write a song in a minor key for this album. I was like, ‘I want to be like The 1975’—but it didn’t happen. Actually, this is James’ song \[collaborator James Greenwood, who releases music as Ghost Culture\]. It’s a Ghost Culture song that never came out. It’s the only time I’ve ever done this. It was quite scary, because it’s the poppiest thing I’ve probably done, and I was also scared because I basically ended up rewriting all the lyrics, and re-recorded new kick drums, new percussion, and came up with a new arrangement. But James encouraged all of it. The new lyrics came from doing a trauma body release session, which is quite something. It’s someone coming in, holding you and your gaze, breathing with you, and helping you release energy in the body that’s been trapped. Humans go through trauma all the time and we don’t literally shake and release it, like animals do. So it’s stored in the body, in the muscles, and it’s vital that we figure out how to release it. We’re so fearful of feeling our pain—and that fear of pain itself is what causes the most damage. This pain and trauma just wants to be seen and acknowledged and released.” **Corner of My Sky (feat. John Cale)** “This song used to be called ‘Mushroom.’ I’m going to say no more on that. I just wanted to go into a psychedelic bubble and be held by the sound and connection to earth, and all the, let’s just say, medicine that the earth has to offer. Once the music was finished, Joakim \[Haugland, founder of Owens’ label, Smalltown Supersound\] said, ‘This is nice, but I can hear John Cale’s voice on this.’ Joakim is a believer that anything can happen, so we sent it to him knowing that if he didn’t like it, he wouldn’t fucking touch it. We had to nudge a bit—he’s a busy man, he’s in his seventies, he’s touring, he’s traveling. But then he agreed and it became this psychedelic lullaby. For both of us, it was about the land and wanting to go to the connection to Wales. I asked if he could speak about Wales in Welsh, as it would feel like a small contribution from us to our country, as for a long time our language was suppressed. He then delivered back some of the lyrics you hear, but it was all backwards. So I had to go in and chop it up and arrange it, which was this incredibly fun challenge. The last bit says, ‘I’ve lost the bet that words will come and wake me in the morning.’ It was perfect. Honestly, I feel like the Welsh tourist board need to pay up for the most dramatic video imaginable.” **Night** “It’s important that I say this before someone else does: I think touring with Jon Hopkins influenced this one in terms of how the synth sounded. It wasn’t conscious. I’ve learned a lot of things from him in terms of how to produce kicks and layer things up. It’s related to a feeling of how, in the nighttime, your real feelings come out. You feel the truth of things and are able to access more of yourself and your actual soul desires. We’re distracted by so many things in the daytime. It’s a techno love song.” **Flow** “This is an anomaly as it’s a strange instrumental thing, but I think it’s needed on the album. This has a sample of me playing hand drum. I actually live with a sound healer, so we have a ceremony room and there’s all sorts of weird instruments in there. When no one was in the house, I snuck in there and played all sorts of random shit and sampled it simply on my iPhone. And I pitched the whole track around that. It fits at this place on the record, because we needed to come back down. It’s a breathe-out moment and a restful space. Because this album can truly feel like a journey. It also features probably my favorite moment on the album—when the kick drums come back in, with that ‘bam, bam, bam, bam.’ Listen and you’ll know exactly where I mean.” **Wake-Up** “There was a moment sonically with me and this song after I mixed it, where the strings kick in and there’s no vocals. It’s just strings and the arpeggio synth. I found myself in tears. I didn’t know that was going to happen to me with my own song, as it certainly didn’t happen when I was writing it. What I realized was that the strings in that moment were, for me, the earth and nature crying out. Saying, ‘Please, listen. Please, see what’s happening.’ And the arpeggio, which is really chaotic, is the digital world encroaching and trying to distract you from the suffering and pain and grief that the planet is enduring right now. I think we’re all feeling this collective grief that we can’t articulate half the time. We don’t even understand that we are connected to everyone else. It’s about tapping into the pain of this interconnected web. It’s also a commentary on digital culture, which I am of course a part of. I had some of the lyrics written down from ages ago, and they inspired the song. ‘Wake up, repeat, again.’ Just questioning, in a sense, how we’ve reached this place.”

Atlanta underground rock provocateurs Black Lips have announced that their new LP The Black Lips Sing In A World That’s Falling Apart is set for release January 24th on Fire Records/Vice. Boasting an unapologetic southern-fried twang, the twelve-track collection marks the quintet’s most pronounced dalliance with country music yet, with a clang and harmony that is unmistakably the inimitable sound and feel of the Black Lips. While the songcraft and playing is more sophisticated, Black Lips were determined to return to the raw sound roots that marked their early efforts. Recorded and co-produced with Nic Jodoin at Laurel Canyon’s legendary, newly reopened Valentine Recording Studios (which played host to Beach Boys and Bing Crosby before shuttering in 1979) without Pro-Tools and other contemporary technology, the band banged the album out directly to tape quickly and cheaply, resulting in their grimiest, most dangerous, and best collection of songs since the aughts. Like The Byrds, who flirted with pastoral aesthetics before going all-out with the radical departure that was Sweetheart of The Rodeo, the Black Lips have been skirting the edges of country since “Sweet Kin” and “Make It” from their eponymous debut. But eschewing Graham Parson’s earnestness, Black Lips are careful not to hint at authenticity, wisely treading into their unfeigned rustic romance with the winking self-awareness of Bob Dylan’s “You Ain’t Goin Nowhere,” Rolling Stones “Dear Doctor,” or The Velvet Underground’s “Lonesome Cowboy Bill.” The band’s stylistic evolution and matured approach to musicianship and writing is, in part, due to the seismic lineup shifts they have undergone over the last half-decade. Worn down after a decade of prolific touring and recording, longtime guitarist Ian St Pé left the group in 2014, followed shortly thereafter by original drummer Joe Bradley. Jeweler/actress (and now Gucci muse) Zumi Rosow, whose sax skronk, flamboyant style, and wild stage presence had augmented the team before the duo’s departure, assumed a bigger writing and performance role in their absence. Soon drummer Oakley Munson from The Witnesses brought a new backbeat and unique backing vocal harmony into the fold. Last year the quintet was rounded out by guitarist Jeff Clarke of Demon’s Claws. The newly forged partnership, all of whom collaborate as songwriters, vocalists, and instrumentalists, has breathed new life into their sound. The result is akin to the radiance of the impulsive, wild nights where you find yourself two-stepping into the unknown.

You don’t need to know that Fiona Apple recorded her fifth album herself in her Los Angeles home in order to recognize its handmade clatter, right down to the dogs barking in the background at the end of the title track. Nor do you need to have spent weeks cooped up in your own home in the middle of a global pandemic in order to more acutely appreciate its distinct banging-on-the-walls energy. But it certainly doesn’t hurt. Made over the course of eight years, *Fetch the Bolt Cutters* could not possibly have anticipated the disjointed, anxious, agoraphobic moment in history in which it was released, but it provides an apt and welcome soundtrack nonetheless. Still present, particularly on opener “I Want You to Love Me,” are Apple’s piano playing and stark (and, in at least one instance, literal) diary-entry lyrics. But where previous albums had lush flourishes, the frenetic, woozy rhythm section is the dominant force and mood-setter here, courtesy of drummer Amy Wood and former Soul Coughing bassist Sebastian Steinberg. The sparse “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” is backed by drumsticks seemingly smacking whatever surface might be in sight. “Relay” (featuring a refrain, “Evil is a relay sport/When the one who’s burned turns to pass the torch,” that Apple claims was excavated from an old journal from written she was 15) is driven almost entirely by drums that are at turns childlike and martial. None of this percussive racket blunts or distracts from Apple’s wit and rage. There are instantly indelible lines (“Kick me under the table all you want/I won’t shut up” and the show-stopping “Good morning, good morning/You raped me in the same bed your daughter was born in”), all in the service of channeling an entire society’s worth of frustration and fluster into a unique, urgent work of art that refuses to sacrifice playfulness for preaching.

Aveu, fiction et constat. Ainsi semble évoluer la trajectoire dessinée par Julien Gasc au fil de ses disques. Si Cerf, Biche et Faon prenait la forme d'un journal intime et Kiss Me, You Fool ! celle d'un recueil de fictions, L'Appel de la Forêt clôt cette trilogie en un dialogue tendre et spontané, abordant le présent avec clairvoyance par des mélodies aux reflets lumineux. Plus aventureux que ses prédécesseurs, ancrés respectivement dans le sud de la France et à Londres, ce troisième chapitre offre une vision kaléidoscopique, multipliant les géographies et les temporalités pour mieux s'inscrire dans l'instant. Par une collection de danses aux diverses origines, Julien se place au centre du quotidien - l'embrasse, le sublime et l'appelle à une transfiguration pour échapper à son imminent désastre. Sa voix circule à travers cet horizon morcelé, elle est nue et immédiate, parfois si blanche qu'elle disparaît, laissant la place à son interlocuteur, comme une invitation à occuper l'espace façonné par ses ritournelles. Émancipé de son costume de dandy, les rares fois où il s'en pare sont pour mieux s'en jouer. L'adresse se veut franche, et avant tout bienveillante. Plus qu'un chant d'amour, c'est une ode à la liberté et à la pleine conscience de notre condition humaine qui se déploie devant nous. Une invitation sans cynisme à quitter notre masque d'animal social et décoloniser le monde qui nous entoure - cesser de vouloir posséder coûte que coûte et laisser libres ceux que l'on aime. Ce disque est un compagnon de route, sans dogmes ni préceptes, à la devise simple : Garde la joie. Confession, fiction, and observation. This is how the trajectory drawn by Julien Gasc seems to evolve from one album to the next. While Cerf, Biche et Faon took the form of a diary and Kiss Me, You Fool! that of a collection of stories, L'Appel de la Forêt concludes this trilogy in a tender and spontaneous dialogue, broaching the present with clairvoyance through melodies with bright glimmers. More adventurous than its predecessors, which respectively took root in the south of France and in London, this third chapter offers a kaleidoscopic vision, multiplying geographies and temporalities to ingrain itself in the moment all the better. Through a collection of dances of diverse origins, Julien places himself at the heart of the everyday – embracing it, sublimating it, and calling for a transfiguration to escape its imminent disaster. His voice circulate through this fragmented horizon; it is raw and immediate, sometimes so stark that it disappears, making way for its interlocutor, like an invitation to occupy the space shaped by his ritornello. Emancipated from his dandy’s costume, the rare moments where he puts it on again are to more effectively elude it. The address is deliberately frank and above all benevolent. Beyond an amorous chant d’amour, it is an ode to freedom and to the full awareness of our human condition that unfolds before us. An invitation, devoid of cynicism, to take off of our ‘social animal’ mask and decolonise the world around us – to stop wanting to possess at all costs and let those we love be free. This album is a roadside companion, with no dogma or precepts, and a simple motto: Stay joyful.

“My language for producing music is way more diverse now and allows me to create different-sounding music,” Yaeji tells Apple Music. With her mesmerizing voice and chill vibe, the New York (by way of South Korea) DJ, producer, and multimedia artist Kathy Yaeji Lee is a unique presence in dance music. Her songs are celebratory yet meditative—influenced by house, R&B, and hip-hop. They’re reflective of her dual heritage and intercontinental mindset, ranging from stunt anthems (“raingurl,” “drink i’m sippin on”) to her lowercased cover of Drake’s “Passionfruit.” Recorded before inking a deal with XL (the home to Tyler, The Creator and other sonic misfits), *WHAT WE DREW 우리가 그려왔던* is a personal and intimate mixtape she likens to a musical diary. Sung-spoken in whispery tones in English and Korean, Yaeji’s observations are sharp, whether yearning for stillness (“IN PLACE 그 자리 그대로”), indulging in simple pleasures (“WAKING UP DOWN,” “MONEY CAN’T BUY”), or getting in her feelings (“WHAT WE DREW 우리가 그려왔던,” “IN THE MIRROR 거울”). It also represents a time when she soaked up new production techniques and was inspired by 2000s bossanova-influenced electronica, ’80s-’90s Korean music (curated by her parents, who live outside of Seoul), R&B, and soul. Below Yaeji walks through each song on her mixtape. “Every track is a bit different,” she says “I really hope it brings a little bit of positivity.” **MY IMAGINATION 상상** “I wrote it with the intention of warming people up to what I do. I repeat a lot in this song in Korean: ‘If you follow me in this moment I chose, right in this moment.’ And I repeat ‘my imagination’ over and over in Korean. I wanted it to feel really smooth and continuous, almost cyclical, but in a way that felt relaxing. It’s a way to ease you into the next song, which is quite emotional for me.” **WHAT WE DREW 우리가 그려왔던** “It’s one of the older songs on the mixtape. It was written at a very emotional time, when I was going through a lot of transitions and growing pains. In the midst of all that darkness, I was able to stay positive because of family around me. I think that notion of family and unconditional love is so Korean to me. Thinking of Korea gets me very emotional. My dad messaged \[himself scatting\] to me on KakaoTalk \[a Korean messaging app\] a year and a half ago. He said, ‘I have a song idea for you. Use it if it helps you in any way.’ When I finished up the mixtape, I realized it would be so perfect and meaningful for the track, so I added it in.” **IN PLACE 그 자리 그대로** “It was written around the time me and my friends were watching a video of Stevie Wonder performing live with a talk box \[a cover of The Carpenters’ ‘Close to You’ on *The David Frost Show* in 1972\]. We were listening to that a lot and it was stuck in my head. I loved how the talk box sounded; it’s so warm and fuzzy, his performance is so playful. It also has such a robotic quality. I wanted to create this feeling but using a completely different technique. I layered nine different vocal tracks to create that harmony you hear in the intro. It affected each layer differently and holds a similar feeling that I received when I heard Stevie Wonder. Emotionally, it was written when I didn’t want things to change. Just for a moment, I wanted things to stay still. It’s about yearning for stillness.” **WHEN I GROW UP** “It’s an idea I’ve been settling and meditating on for a long time. It’s the concept of a younger me, or a younger person, imagining what it’s like to become an adult. There’s another perspective in the song where it’s me, the adult version of myself, telling my younger self: ‘Unfortunately, when you grow older, you’re fearful for a lot of things. You don’t want to get hurt. You suppress your emotions and pretend like everything is OK.’ All these things I had no idea would happen when I was younger; it’s my reality, our reality, as adults. It’s a kind of back and forth about that.” **MONEY CAN’T BUY (feat. Nappy Nina)** “It’s the really playful one. It’s purely about friendship and being goofy and positive. The thing I repeat in Korean: ‘What I want to do is eat rice and soup.’ It’s pretty common for me. I’ll put the rice in the soup and mix it up, so it becomes like a porridge. I’m repeating that and it’s followed by ‘What I want, money can’t buy.’ Friendship isn’t something that’s quantifiable or measurable with materialism. It’s completely magical and far more special than what can be described. It’s like an appreciation song for friendship. It’s kind of perfect that Nappy Nina was featured on it. I had met her last minute. She’s a friend of my mixing engineer. She came in and recorded immediately; we realized we had mutual friends, so now we keep in touch. That lends itself well to the message of the song.” **FREE INTERLUDE (feat. Lil Fayo, Trenchcoat & Sweet Pea)** “It felt really liberating to include this in the mixtape. It was a completely natural, goofy hang with my friends. We were having fun making music together, kind of first takes of freestyles. The spirit of our hang and our friendship is really in that track. It’s a very meaningful one for me.” **SPELL 주문 (feat. YonYon & G.L.A.M.)** “It was a joy to put together. It started as a bare-bones demo that I had lyrics to. When I was writing it, I was thinking of the experience of performing onstage to a sea of people that you’ve never met before and sharing your most intimate thoughts and experiences. It’s casting a spell; you’re sharing something that only you know, and then they’re applying it in whatever way it means for themselves. I thought of YonYon because we went to the same middle school in Japan when I was living there for one year. We’ve stayed in touch since, and she’s doing great with music in Japan, so she’s always on my mind to collaborate, and this felt perfect. G.L.A.M. is a close friend of a friend. I had also played shows with her a long time ago when I moved to New York, so I thought she was also another perfect collaborator.” **WAKING UP DOWN** “Purely a feel-good song. There’s a moment of questioning and hesitation. The Korean verses embody that side of it. The parts in English are about the feeling I had when I had all of these basic life routines down and felt healthy, mentally and physically. It’s a song to groove to and hopefully feel inspired by. And also, not to get too wrapped up in the literal things: cooking, waking up, hydrating. Yes, it’s important, but the Korean lyrics remind you: Don’t forget, there are these bigger themes in life you have to think about.” **IN THE MIRROR 거울** “It’s the dramatic one. I really wanted to try singing in a way that feels like I’m unleashing pent-up energy. It was written after a difficult tour that mentally and physically stretched me quite thin. It came from a thought I had while I was looking in the mirror in the airplane bathroom. I think being up in the air makes you more emotional. I don’t know how true that is, but I definitely feel that way. I was really in my feelings and really upset.” **THE TH1NG (feat. Victoria Sin & Shy One)** “I want to credit Vic and Shy because I knew I wanted to work with them. I sent them a pretty bare-bones demo, just synth and samples. They’re partners and based in London. Vic is an incredible performing artist and Shy is an incredible DJ. Vic came up with all of the lyrics and vocals. They wrote it on their birthday, stayed at home alone in their bedroom, surrounded themselves with plants, meditated, and had an introspective stream of consciousness of what is this ‘TH1NG.’ It sounds really abstract, but they explore the concept. Shy did a lot of the production on it and built on the little things I sent them.” **THESE DAYS 요즘** “Do you know the \[anime\] genre Slice of Life? It feels like a Slice of Life song, which is, the way I understand it, it’s mundane day-to-day lifestyle about meditating on time. I would visually describe it as feeling like sitting on a stoop with your friends on a nice fall afternoon sharing stories with each other about how you’re doing. That kind of feeling. It’s not overly dramatic or purposeful; it’s a mood.” **NEVER SETTLING DOWN** “It’s a song about making a determined promise to myself to never settle. I should always stay open-minded, to continue unlearning and learning things, to shed things that felt toxic to me in the past. I say things like ‘I’m never shooting the shit,’ which is a balance of not taking myself too seriously but also that I’m not playing, I’m working every day. It’s a confident track, and I hope it brings confidence to other people that hear it. At the end, the breaks come in, and it feels like a big release, like a moment where you’re taking flight or dancing like crazy, alone in your room. That’s how I wanted to end the mixtape.”

Caribou’s Dan Snaith is one of those guys you might be tempted to call a “producer” but at this point is basically a singer-songwriter who happens to work in an electronic medium. Like 2014’s *Our Love* and 2010’s *Swim*, the core DNA of *Suddenly* is dance music, from which Snaith borrows without constraint or historical agenda: deep house on “Lime,” UK garage on “Ravi,” soul breakbeats on “Home,” rave uplift on “Never Come Back.” But where dance tends to aspire to the communal (the packed floor, the oceanic release of dissolving into the crowd), *Suddenly* is intimate, almost folksy, balancing Snaith’s intricate productions with a boyish, unaffected singing style and lyrics written in nakedly direct address: “If you love me, come hold me now/Come tell me what to do” (“Cloud Song”), “Sister, I promise you I’m changing/You’ve had broken promises I know” (“Sister”), and other confidences generally shared in bedrooms. (That Snaith is singing a lot more makes a difference too—the beat moves, but he anchors.) And for as gentle and politely good-natured as the spirit of the music is (Snaith named the album after his daughter’s favorite word), Caribou still seems capable of backsliding into pure wonder, a suggestion that one can reckon the humdrum beauty of domestic relationships and still make time to leave the ground now and then.

In the months leading up to his first tour date supporting 2019’s *Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest*, Bill Callahan was struck by what he describes to Apple Music as “the perfect inspiration for the perfect goal”: Before he left home, he’d try to write and record another album. “I\'m the type of person that can only do one thing at a time,” he says. “I just knew that if I didn\'t finish it before the tour, then it would be a year before I could even think about working on these songs. And I knew that if I did finish it, I would feel like a million bucks.” So Callahan drew up some deadlines for himself and began finishing and fleshing out songs he had lying around, work he hadn’t been able to find a home for previously. *Gold Record* is the short story collection to his other LPs\' novels—a set of self-contained worlds and character studies every bit as detailed and disarming as anything the 54-year-old singer-songwriter has released to date. It also includes an update to 1999’s “Let’s Move to the Country,” a song (originally under his Smog pseudonym) that was calling out for some added perspective. “I have a natural inclination to try to make a narrative out of a whole record,” he says. “But this time, it’s really just a bunch of songs that stand on their own, not really connected to the others. That\'s why I called it *Gold Record*—it’s kind of like a greatest hits record, though singles record is maybe more accurate.” Here, he takes us inside every song on the album. **Pigeons** “I noticed when I got married that I finally understood this word ‘community.’ I was always hearing it, but it never really meant anything to me. But then when I got married—and especially when I had a kid—that word became my favorite word. It meant so much. This song is just about the feeling of marriage, how it connects you to life processes, to birth and death and your neighbors. I think if you have a partner, you can\'t be the selfish person you used to be, because there\'s actually someone listening to you when you\'re being that way, so it kind of steers you into being more considerate and a more generous person. Because when someone is hearing what you\'re saying, then you are hearing what you\'re saying for the first time. That leads to being married to the world, I think.” **Another Song** “I actually wrote that song for a producer who contacted me. They were making a covers record with Emmylou Harris, and so I wrote that for her. The record never happened, so I just used it for myself. I think that one has a different feel because I got \[guitarist\] Matt Kinsey to play bass on that one song, and he has a pretty distinct and melodic kind of up-front way of playing bass.” **35** “It\'s definitely an experience that I had, where I felt like I’d read all the great books and would just be disappointed or feel alienated from any new authors that I would try to read. In your late teens and early twenties is when you read great books and you kind of take them on as if they are books about you, or books that reflect your inner world perfectly. But whenever I try to go back to those, I\'m just not interested. I look at it as a good thing: You are kind of unformed in your twenties, and then hopefully, by the time you hit 30, you are somewhat formed. I think that it\'s like you\'re getting your wings to fly. When you\'re unformed, when you\'re a fledgling person, you can\'t really express a lot. I think it\'s a good thing to have that feeling of not connecting necessarily with art, because it prompts you to work on your own.” **Protest Song** “That song is probably the oldest new song on the record. I started it ten years ago, got the idea and just never finished it. But I considered putting it on *Shepherd*, just as I considered putting it on \[2013’s\] *Dream River*. It didn\'t seem to fit either of those. It was kind of a revenge song. At the time I used to watch a lot of late-night shows, just because I was curious about what kind of music gets on there. At least at the time, it was almost invariably the worst people out there, in my opinion. So it was just kind of like a revenge fantasy, on the musicians that are performing. That accent I use is just a film noir that lives inside me.” **The Mackenzies** “When I bought my first car 30 years ago, the couple who was selling it invited me into their house and made me a cocktail. I just kind of hung out with them for a while, which was just a very pleasant and unusual thing. It was a used Dodge minivan, and he was a Dodge mechanic. I figured it was probably the safest person to buy a car from, a mechanic. They were maternal and paternal, to a complete stranger, me just coming out to their house. They also had one of those very homey houses that some people have. Some people master the art of comfort—they have the best couches and chairs and shag carpet and stuff. That\'s what stuck with me—their warmth, their instant warmth. But maybe that\'s because I was giving them a check for five grand. The song is fairly new, but those people had been in my head for a long time. I guess I always believe that if it\'s something you always think about, then that means it\'s very important—it\'s a good way to find out about what you should be writing about, if you have recurring thoughts.” **Let’s Move to the Country** “I always like playing it live, but I kind of stopped and then resurrected it a couple of years ago on tour. It seemed like there was something missing, and because of developments in my personal life, it just seemed like I should write a new chapter to the song. The original is from the perspective of someone who can\'t even say the words ‘baby’ or ‘family.’ The updated version is someone that can. It\'s sort of a mystery, and deciding if you\'re going to have a second one or not is kind of almost as big a decision as having one kid, because it could be looked at as whether or not you\'re happy having kids. I\'m totally not saying that people that only have one kid aren\'t happy having kids, but by having this second kid, you\'re definitely making some kind of deeper commitment, I think. You\'re saying, ‘Okay, I\'m willing to get deeper into this.’” **Breakfast** “I think it just started from an image I had of a woman making breakfast for her man—doing that kind of affectionate thing, but not having affection for the person. What are the dynamics of that? What\'s going on in that type of relationship? Why is she still feeding him and feeding the relationship when she\'s not happy? I was trying to explore that kind of dynamic that relationships can get into sometimes. I also find it interesting with couples: who gets up first and the way that changes sometimes, depending on what\'s going on. Who\'s getting out of bed first, and who\'s laying in bed longer?” **Cowboy** “It’s kind of nostalgic for the way TV used to be. There would be a later movie, and then later there was a late, late movie. If you were staying up to watch that, it would usually be after *The Tonight Show*. That meant something. It meant you\'re up pretty late, for whatever reason. You might be being irresponsible, or you might just be indulging yourself. Now that TV is on demand, I don\'t think anyone really watches late-night shows at night anymore—they just watch the highlights the next day. So on one level, it\'s about that loss of sense of place that TV used to give you, because it was a much more fixed thing. And that kind of correlates to watching a Western, because that\'s about a time that is also gone. I was just thinking about that, the time of your life when you can just watch a movie at two in the morning.” **Ry Cooder** “He\'s someone that I\'ve been familiar with maybe since his \[1984\] *Paris, Texas* soundtrack, but I hadn\'t really explored his records very much. Maybe three or four years ago I started digging into all of them and was really being blown away by how great so many of his records are and how different each one is and how he really uplifts and kind of puts a spotlight on international musicians. Unlike \[1986’s\] *Graceland*—where people think that Paul Simon kind of was just using those people—Ry Cooder really seems to want people to know about all this other kind of music. If you watch or read an interview with him from now, he\'s totally stoked about music and not at all jaded or bored or anything. I just thought that he deserved a ballad, a tribute. Because I think he\'s great.” **As I Wander** “I tried to make it a song about everything that I possibly could. I was trying to sum up human existence and sum up the record, even though it wasn\'t written with that intent necessarily. All the perspectives on the record are very distinct, and limited to just that narrative. But with ‘As I Wander,’ I tried to hold all narratives at the same time. Just like a great big spaghetti junction where all the highways meet up and swirl around.”

(ENGLISH TEXT BELOW) "Oh femme, femme africaine Oh femme, femme béninoise Femme noir, lève toi, ne dort pas Oh femme noir, lève toi ne dort pas Tu peu devenir, président de la république Tu peu devenir, premier ministre du pays Lève-toi, il faut faire, quelque chose Femme africaine, soit indépendante Le pays a besoin de nous, allons à l’école L’Afrique a besoin de toi, il faut travailler Le monde a besoin de nous, levons nous allons défendre Femme africaine, soit indépendante » Star Feminine Band Sans crier gare, une formation de jeunes filles originaires d’une région reculée du Bénin, bouscule l’idiome rock garage avec une fraîcheur, une inventivité et une énergie stupéfiantes, jouant juste, haut et fort. Au cours de la première partie du vingtième siècle, le découpage de la majorité de l’Afrique par les puissances européennes introduit une modernité forcée un peu partout sur le continent. Dans les villes et les ports, le continent bruisse d’une agitation nouvelle alors que l’électricité commence sa timide apparition. A la faveur de transports maritimes en plein essor, les 78 tours ramenés par les marins latino-américains, en particulier cubains, mais aussi par les soldats ou les colons européens, influencent durablement de nouvelles orientations musicales le long des côtes africaines. On assiste ainsi progressivement à une réinterprétation de ces musiques cubaines, mais aussi caribéennes, jazz ou rhythm’n’blues. Originaires en grande partie d’Afrique, ces musiques revenues des Amériques font office de vérité naturelle sur le continent. Certains orchestres décident ainsi de « réafricaniser » ces musiques afro-cubaines et noires américaines écoutées sur dans les ports, sur la place publique ou diffusées sur les ondes. Les bars et dancings, ainsi que les associations de jeunesse jouent également un rôle important dans la diffusion et le développement de ces musiques. A l’image de ce qui se passe dans la plupart des villes d’Afrique, de nombreux orchestres voient le jour au cours des années 1950 et 1960. Ils incarnent des symboles de modernité, au même titre que l’électricité, les automobiles et le cinéma. L’euphorie des années qui suivent l’indépendance est donc mise en musique par ces orchestres. Ceux-ci sont en partie influencés par les formations de danse ghanéennes qui sillonnent alors toutes les grandes villes du Golfe du Bénin, du Nigeria jusqu’au Liberia. Les échanges culturels sont fertiles. Au début des années 1960, les riches traditions locales du Bénin, à commencer par les musiques de transe et de cérémonie vaudou commencent à fusionner avec l’afro-cubain, la rumba congolaise et le high-life. Des dizaines d’orchestres, d’artistes et de labels participent à ce mouvement sans précédent. Par rapport à sa population, le Bénin est le pays d’Afrique le plus prolifique en terme de production discographique, notamment au cours d’une effervescence extraordinaire durant les années 1970. A la manière de ce qu’il se passe alors en Guinée, en Côte d’Ivoire ou au Mali, chaque grande ville ou préfecture possède au moins un orchestre moderne, que ce soit à Cotonou, Porto-Novo, Parakou, Ouidah, Natitingou, Abomey ou Bohicon. Des formations comme les Black Santiagos, le National Jazz du Dahomey, le Super Star de Ouidah, le Picoby Band et le Renova Band d’Abomey ou encore les Black Dragons de Porto Novo se font une réputation au niveau national. Au milieu des années 1960, la chanteuse Sophie Edia devient la première voix féminine à diffuser la musique béninoise en dehors des frontières du pays, à commencer par le Nigeria. En 1975, l’Unesco promeut l’Année Internationale de la Femme, un événement destiné à faire prendre conscience du rôle des femmes dans de nombreux pays, là où leur rôle est trop souvent minimisé ou bafoué. Cette initiative a un impact considérable sur le continent africain. Que ce soit au Mali avec Fanta Damba, en Côte d’Ivoire avec Mamadou Doumbia, au Cameroun avec Anne-Marie Nzie, au Congo Brazzaville avec Les Bantous de la Capitale ou au Burkina Faso avec Echo del Africa, tous rendent hommage à cette initiative. Partout en Afrique francophone, les consciences s’éveillent quand aux droits des femmes. En 1976, le poète camerounais Francis Bebey publie l’éloquent La Condition Masculine. Sous ses airs humoristiques, cette merveille interpelle elle aussi les consciences, sans pour autant sombrer dans une moralisation outrancière. "Tu ne connais pas Sizana Sizana, c'est ma femme C'est ma femme puisque nous sommes mariés depuis plus de dix-sept ans maintenant Elle était très gentille auparavant Je lui disais "Sizana, donne-moi de l'eau" Et elle m'apportait de l'eau à boire De l'eau claire, hein, très bonne! Je luis disais, "Sizana, fais-ceci" "Fais-cela" et elle obéissait Et moi j'étais content, je regardais tout ça avec bonheur Ah, je te dis que Sizana, Sizana, elle était une très bonne épouse auparavant Seulement, depuis quelques jours, les gens, là Ils ont apporté ici la condition féminine Il paraît que là-bas, chez eux, ils ont installé une femme dans un bureau Pour qu'elle donne des ordres aux hommes Aïe, tu m'entends des choses pareilles?" Francis Bebey "La condition masculine" Son compatriote Ali Baba creuse le même sillon avec La Condition Féminine, on ne tape pas la femme. En Côte d’Ivoire, Sidiki Bakaba déclame un poème de Léopold Sédar Senghor sur l’éloquent 45 tours Femme noire, mis en musique en mode spiritual jazz. Au Bénin, en 1977, le batteur Danialou Sagbohan enregistre l’éloquent Viva, femme africaine, un single fondateur pour la prise de conscience féminine dans ce pays. L’enthousiasme de ces années d’émancipation retombe toutefois au cours des années 1980, avec son lot d’unions imposées, de grossesses précoces, de violences diverses et d’excisions, notamment en Afrique sahélienne. En 1989, Oumou Sangaré, une jeune chanteuse malienne originaire du Wassoulou, enregistre l’historique Moussoulou (« Femmes »), aux sonorités claires et acoustiques. Puissant et percutant, son chant influence de nombreuses chanteuses du continent au cours des décennies suivantes. Ce premier opus offre un instantané saisissant de la condition des femmes d’Afrique de l’Ouest à la fin des années 1980. A ses débuts, elle chante dans les rues de Bamako, pour gagner de quoi manger. Oumou Sangaré modernise radicalement la tradition des cantatrices locales. Elle séduit immédiatement grâce à sa voix féline, mais aussi en raison de ses textes qui dénoncent la polygamie, les mariages forcés ou l’excision, prônant une sensualité, une fierté et une féminité sans ambages. Son succès est immédiat, avec des millions de cassettes vendues dans tous les marchés d’Afrique de l’Ouest. Oumou Sangaré accède au statut de superstar de la pop africaine. Femme malienne inscrite dans son époque, elle incarne le triomphe de l’amour et des émotions féminines en toutes circonstances. Si la musique sur laquelle elle chante est séduisante, audacieuse et pleine de vie, ses paroles imposent une nouvelle manière de voir. Celles-ci sont plus importantes que la musique. Elle est inspirée par les évènements sociaux et par son environnement immédiat. Femme libre, elle dit ce qu’elle veut et ce qu’elle pense. Sa musique, apolitique mais féministe, a un large impact. Son message à propos de la femme africaine rencontre un très large écho, sur le continent comme dans le reste du monde. Au cours des années 1990, la béninoise Angélique Kidjo s’impose également comme l’une des grandes voix féminines africaines. Elle porte haut l’héritage musical béninois. Née en 1960 à Ouidah, le berceau du vaudouisme, elle est bercée enfant par le théâtre et les sonorités afro-américaines. Encore adolescente, elle se fait un nom dans tout le pays grâce à ses apparitions radiophoniques. A ses débuts, elle est accompagnée par le Poly Rythmo de Cotonou, formé en 1969. Cet orchestre est le plus légendaire du pays, au gré d’une discographie pléthorique, de centaines de singles, d’albums et d’innombrables tournées partout dans le monde. En 1980, Angélique Kidjo enregistre son premier album Pretty à Paris sous la houlette du Camerounais Ekambi Brillant. Son succès en Afrique de l’Ouest est immédiat. Elle s’installe en France en 1983, en pleine explosion des musiques venues d’Afrique. Elle participe à divers groupes, avant de se lancer en solo et de s’imposer comme la grande voix féminine du Bénin. Quarante ans plus tard, ses héritières et compatriotes sont en passe de rayonner au grand jour. Dernière grande ville étape sur la route nationale qui sillonne le Nord Ouest du Bénin, la paisible Natitingou s’étale en longueur de part et d’autre d’un ruban d’asphalte. Après une quinzaine d’heures de route depuis la capitale économique Cotonou, cette ville offre une étape appréciable avant de poursuivre vers le Burkina Faso, le Togo ou l’immense réserve de la Pendjari, via Tanguiéta, là où commencent les vastes plaines sahéliennes et se réfugient les derniers grands animaux sauvages ayant échappé à la folie des hommes. Ville de croisement dans cette région située au carrefour de quatre pays, Natitingou contrôle l’accès de la région des collines de l’Atakora, qui ceignent la ville. Enclavée, la commune de Natitingou est largement isolée du reste du Bénin, tributaire du ravitaillement routier, des coupures d’électricité et des éléments naturels, parfois hostiles. Longtemps rétive à toute forme de domination, cette région a pour héros Kaba. Au début de la première guerre mondiale, il refusa la conscription militaire obligatoire et mena une guérilla farouche contre l’oppression coloniale. Cette guerre perdue se termina dans un bain de sang en 1917. A la sortie de la ville, le musée Kaba raconte cette résistance du peuple somba, notamment par son évocation de sa culture, de ses cérémonies, du travail du fer ou encore des cases circulaires, au toit conique, souvent surélevées et fortifiées, appelées tatas que l’on retrouve dans une bonne partie du Sahel. Kaba donna son nom à l’un des premiers orchestres de Natitingou, Kaba Diya, actif entre 1979 et 1983. Celui-ci publia un unique album de musiques modernes en 1980, représentatif de la culture de cette région, à commencer par sa pochette. Si Kaba Diya a eu l’occasion de publier un 33 tours, d’autres formations locales ont également marqué les esprits. Formation historique créée dès 1960, l’orchestre Bopeci a publié deux 45 tours. En revanche, Nati Fiesta, le Tchankpa Jazz ou L’Echo de l’Atakora n’ont a priori jamais publié leurs morceaux au format vinyle. Plus récemment, depuis le milieu des années 1990, Gay Stone, Cool Star, Ata Echo, les 3 Couleurs, le groupe Tchingas, Zénith Temple, Excelsior mais aussi depuis 2017 la formation FMG animent les nuits de Natitingou et de l’Atakora. Culturellement et musicalement, cette région du Nord-Ouest du Bénin est plus proche de l’aire d’influence sahélienne que de celle du Sud du pays, du sato, du vaudou et du folklore modernisé développé par des formations comme l’orchestre Black Santiagos qui donna ainsi naissance à l’afrobeat dès le milieu des années 1960, avant d’être repris et développé par Fela Kuti. C’est dans cette région de contraste, de paysages à la fois verts et rocailleux qu’ont grandies les sept vedettes juvéniles du Star Feminine Band. Souvent déscolarisées et promises à vendre des arachides, des bananes, du gari ou du tchoucoutou, une boisson locale à base de mil au bord du goudron, la plupart des jeunes filles de la région n’ont guère d’avenir. Les mariages forcés et les grossesses précoces sont légion. Conscient de cette précarité, le musicien André Baleguemon décide de former un groupe exclusivement féminin ancré dans les préoccupations de son époque. Il laisse la part belle à la guitare, à la batterie et au clavier, instruments admirés depuis son enfance, symboles de modernité dans cette région reculée. Son constat est simple : « Dans le Nord, les filles n’évoluent pas beaucoup et les femmes sont mises de côté. J’ai simplement voulu montrer la valeur de la femme dans les sociétés du Nord Bénin en formant un orchestre féminin ». Originaire de Tchaourou, une vaste commune située au centre Est du Bénin, André Balaguemon se passionne très jeune pour la musique. Il intègre l’orchestre Sam 11 de Parakou, au Nord Est du pays, au cours des années 1990, où il est successivement trompettiste puis guitariste. En 1999, il descend à Cotonou avant de se fixer dans le Nord-Ouest du pays, afin de renouer avec ses racines et ses passions musicales. Le 25 juillet 2016, avec le soutien de la municipalité de Natitingou, André lance un communiqué sur les ondes de Nanto FM afin de former des filles bénévolement à la musique. Quelques jours plus tard, des dizaines d’aspirantes musiciennes se présentent à la Maison des Jeunes. « Les filles qui sont venues ne connaissaient rien à la musique. Les sept sélectionnées sont de jeunes filles d’ethnie waama et nabo. Venues des villages alentour, certaines n’avaient même jamais vu ce genre d’instruments ». Depuis l’époque des indépendances, posséder ses propres instruments a toujours été l’une des conditions premières pour tout orchestre africain qui se respecte. Avec les instruments achetés par ses soins, batterie, deux guitares et des claviers, ajoutés à quelques percussions, André effectue ses premiers essais musicaux avec ses nouvelles recrues, une poignée de jeunes filles parmi les plus motivées. Rapidement, les filles se passionnent pour leurs nouvelles activités musicales, apprenant la batterie, la guitare, les harmonies vocales, le piano. Leurs progrès sont stupéfiants. Un intense travail de formation musicale se met en place, à commencer par des ateliers de batterie, l’instrument fétiche de la formation. Angélique et Urrice sont à la batterie et au chant, secondées par Marguerite, la troisième batteuse. Sandrine est aux claviers, tout comme Grace, qui œuvre également au chant. Julienne est à la basse et Anne à la guitare. Comme influence fondatrice de leur démarche, André cite volontiers Angélique Kidjo, « notre inspiration principale. C’est une femme que l’on ne peut pas ignorer. Miriam Makeba est aussi une source de fierté, comme Sagbohan Danialou, Stanislas Tohon. Kaba Diya, le grand orchestre régional nous a aussi beaucoup inspiré ». La pugnacité d’André est l’un des éléments clé de cette réussite humaine et artistique. Les filles ont déjà donné des dizaines de concerts dans la région, forgeant et étoffant un répertoire déjà solide, tout en séduisant un public local toujours plus nombreux. Outre les progrès musicaux, il s’implique personnellement auprès de chaque famille pour leur faire comprendre l’importance de son projet, à la fois sur le plan musical et humain, notamment sur le fait que chaque fille reste scolarisée et ne soit pas entrainée dans un mariage forcé. Dans l’histoire des musiques populaires africaines, peu nombreuses sont les formations féminines. Si les Amazones de Guinée, la Famille Bassavé et les Colombes de la Révolution au Burkina, les Sœurs Comoë en Côte d’Ivoire ou les Lijadu Sisters au Nigeria viennent notamment à l’esprit, Star Feminine Band n’a certainement pas d’équivalent au Bénin. La fraicheur, l’insouciance et la liberté, mais surtout le talent de ces jeunes filles est sans appel. A la fin de l’année 2018, la rencontre avec le jeune ingénieur français Jérémie Verdier accélère le cours des choses. En mission dans la région, il fait appel à ses amis espagnols Juan Toran et Juan Serra. Ceux-ci débarquent avec leur matériel d’enregistrement afin de graver les premiers morceaux de la jeune formation dans l’annexe du Musée local. Au hasard des rencontres et mû par un instinct sûr, Jean-Baptiste Guillot entend ces bandes. Il décide alors de partir à leur rencontre à la fin de l’année 2019. Ce voyage mémorable de quelques jours scelle le destin de l’album que vous tenez entre vos mains. Aujourd’hui âgées de neuf à quinze ans, les sept jeunes filles du Star Feminine Band continuent d’aller à l’école. Dans une annexe du Musée Départemental de Natitingou, André a installé le local de répétition de la formation. Plusieurs fois par semaine, les sept jeunes filles se retrouvent dans cet endroit, habitées par les plus nobles aspirations, celles de chanter leur culture, leur condition féminine et leur possible émancipation. Leurs répétitions ont lieu trois fois par semaine, de 16h à 19h. En période de vacances scolaires, elles répètent tous les jours du lundi au vendredi de 9h à 17h. En 2020, dans nombre de zones rurales du continent africain, mais aussi parfois dans les grandes métropoles, la situation des femmes n’a guère évolué depuis les années 1960, l’époque des indépendances où l’on pensait que tout aller changer à travers un continent en quête de modernité, de culture et d’émancipation. S’il a fait des émules en Afrique, le mouvement Me Too n’a guère touché les parties les plus reculées du continent. Prenant son essor, le Star Feminine Band donne plusieurs concerts à Natitingou mais aussi dans les villages alentour. A chaque fois qu’elles jouent en public, elles rassemblent un public local toujours plus nombreux et curieux quand à la démarche de cette formation iconoclaste. Les femmes viennent en masse, mais plus généralement les parents avec leurs enfants, mais aussi beaucoup de personnes âgées, dans une région où les activités culturelles se limitent souvent aux cérémonies agraires ou funéraires. André Baleguemon et ses talentueuses protégées adaptent des chansons d’inspiration traditionnelle, dans une veine de folklore modernisé. « Nous jouons les danses de rythme waama, nous voulons les mettre à l’honneur. Nous avons composé des chansons en français, en waama et ditamari, deux ethnies méconnues du Nord. Nous chantons aussi des morceaux en langue bariba, ainsi qu’en langue fon, langue majoritaire au Bénin, dans le nouveau répertoire, afin de se faire comprendre du plus grand nombre ». Peba est chanté en waama. Il y est dit que les filles vont à l’école pour être elles mêmes. Chantées en français les paroles de La musique et de Femme africaine sont éloquentes quant aux messages énoncés. Timtilu est chantée en ditamari. Les filles conseillent ici de ne pas délaisser leur culture, mais plutôt de la mettre à l’honneur. Chant d’émancipation en langue peule, Rew Be Me Light, est une ode à la femme, un encouragement pour réussir sa propre carrière et réussir en tant que femme. Fédérateur, Iseo est chanté en bariba. « Hommes et femmes, levons nous, du sud, du centre, du nord, unissons-nous et soyons un pour que le pays évolue ». Il s’agit ici de rassembler les régions et la diversité des cultures du Bénin. Louange à Dieu en peul, Montealla est d’inspiration mandingue dans son interprétation. Chanté en bariba, Idesouse indique que les filles doivent être scolarisées et aller au bout de leurs études pour défendre les valeurs de la femme. Elles doivent se battre d’autant plus afin de gagner cette reconnaissance. Au gré de chacun ces morceaux, chacune des filles de Star Feminine Band apporte sa propre inspiration. André compose tous leurs morceaux. Comme il le concède : « Elles amènent leurs idées. Le rêve de ces filles c’est de devenir des stars au niveau international. Elles doivent montrer la valeur de la femme dans le monde entier. Parler de l’Afrique, accomplir de grandes missions autour des valeurs de la femme. Elles parlent de l’excision, de la maltraitance et des violences faites aux filles. Nous voulons inscrire ces sujets dans le débat politique au Bénin, puis ailleurs en Afrique si cela nous est un jour possible ». Avec beaucoup d’aplomb, un œcuménisme et un charisme indéniables, Star Feminine Band s’impose aujourd’hui comme l’une des fiertés de la région de l’Atakora. Le groupe commence même à susciter des vocations, tout en semant les graines pour la prochaine génération de jeunes filles provinciales, mues par une volonté de fer, forgée du même minerai que les armes de Kaba, héros oublié de l’Atakora. Véritables héroïnes du quotidien, les sept filles du Star Feminine Band incarne le futur et la relève d’une génération en quête de reconnaissance. « Dans les années 1960, Dieu était une jeune fille noire qui chantait » avait coutume de dire le duo de compositeur new-yorkais Carole King et Gerry Coffin. Soixante années plus tard, dans une des provinces oubliées du continent africain, cet adage revêt toute sa valeur. Florent Mazzoleni ////////////////////ENGLISH/////////////////////////////// "Oh woman, African woman Oh woman, Beninese woman Black woman, get up, don't sleep Oh black woman, get up don't sleep You can become president of the republic Lead You can become the country’s Prime Minister Get up, something has to be done African woman, be independent The country needs us, let's go to school Africa needs you, you have to work The world needs us, stand up, let's stand up African woman, be independent" Star Feminine Band "Femme Africaine" Without warning, a group of young girls from a remote region of Benin is shaking up the world of garage rock with breathtaking freshness, ingenuity and energy, playing spot-on, loud and clear. During the first half of the twentieth century, the division of the majority of Africa by European powers introduced a forced modernity throughout most of the continent. In cities and ports, the continent buzzed with new energy as electricity began its timid appearance. Thanks to booming maritime transport, the 78 rpm records brought in by Latin American sailors, in particular Cubans, but also by European soldiers or settlers, had a durable influence on the new musical interests along the African coasts. Gradually, the reinterpretation of Cuban, but also Caribbean, jazz or rhythm’n’ blues music began. For the most part originally from Africa, this music from the Americas acted as a natural truth on the continent. Some orchestras thus decided to "re-Africanize" this Afro-Cuban and black American music heard in ports, public places or broadcasted on the radio. Bars and dance halls, as well as youth associations also played an important role in the dissemination and development of this music. In most African cities, many orchestras were born during the 1950s and 1960s. They became symbols of modernity, like electricity, cars and cinema. The euphoria of the years following independence was therefore set to music by these orchestras. These were partly influenced by Ghanaian dance formations that toured through all the major cities of the Gulf of Benin, from Nigeria to Liberia. The cultural exchanges were fertile. In the early 1960s, the rich local traditions of Benin, starting with trance and voodoo ceremonial music, began to merge with Afro-Cuban, Congolese rumba and high-life. Dozens of orchestras, artists and labels participated in this unprecedented movement. Unlike its population count, Benin is the most prolific African country in terms of record production, especially during the extraordinary exhilaration of the 1970s. In Guinea, Ivory Coast or Mali, each major city or prefecture had at least one modern orchestra, whether in Cotonou, Porto-Novo, Parakou, Ouidah, Natitingou, Abomey or Bohicon. Bands such as the Black Santiagos, the National Jazz of Dahomey, the Super Star of Ouidah, the Picoby Band, the Renova Band of Abomey and the Black Dragons of Porto Novo gained in popularity at the national level. In the mid-1960s, singer Sophie Edia became the first female singer to distribute Beninese music outside of the country's borders, starting with Nigeria. In 1975, Unesco promoted the International Women’s Year, an event designed to raise awareness of the role of women in many countries, where their role is too often downplayed or flouted. This initiative had a considerable impact on the African continent. Whether in Mali with Fanta Damba, in Côte d'Ivoire with Mamadou Doumbia, in Cameroon with Anne-Marie Nzie, in Congo Brazzaville with Les Bantous de la Capitale or in Burkina Faso with Echo del Africa, they all paid tribute to this initiative. All over French-speaking Africa, people were awakening to women's rights. In 1976, the Cameroonian poet Francis Bebey published the eloquent La Condition Masculine. Under its humorous airs, this gem challenged morals with lightness and tact. "You don't know Sizana Sizana is my wife She's my wife since we've been married for over seventeen years now She used to be very nice I would say to her "Sizana, give me water" And she would bring me water to drink Clear water, huh, very good! I would say, "Sizana, do this" "Do that" and she would obey And I was happy Ah, I tell you that Sizana, Sizana, she used to be a very good wife But, these past few days, these people They brought the female condition here Apparently over there, where they live, they put a woman in an office So that she can give orders to men Ouch, have you ever heard such a thing? " His fellow countryman Ali Baba ploughed the same furrow with La Condition Féminine, on ne tape pas la femme (The Feminine Condition, you don't hit a woman). In Ivory Coast, Sidiki Bakaba recited a poem by Léopold Sédar Senghor on the eloquent Femme noir (Black Woman) 45 rpm, set to spiritual jazz. In Benin, in 1977, drummer Danialou Sagbohan recorded the eloquent Viva, femme africaine (Viva, African woman), a founding song for women’s rights in his country. However, the enthusiasm of these years of emancipation dropped during the 1980s, with its share of forced unions, early pregnancies, various forms of violence and female genital mutilation, particularly in Sahelian Africa. In 1989, Oumou Sangaré, a young Malian singer from Wassoulou, recorded the historic Moussoulou ("Women"), with clear and acoustic tones. Powerful and impactful, her song influenced many female singers on the continent during the following decades. This first opus offered a striking snapshot of the condition of West African women in the late 1980s. When she started out, she sang in the streets of Bamako in order to earn enough to eat. Oumou Sangaré radically modernized the tradition of local singers. She immediately seduces the listener with her feline voice, but also with her lyrics which denounce polygamy, forced marriages or female genital mutilation, advocating sensuality, pride and unambiguous femininity. Her success was immediate, with millions of cassettes sold throughout all West African markets. Oumou Sangaré reached the status of African popstar. A Malian woman of her time, she embodied the triumph of love and female emotions in all circumstances. If the music on which she sings is attractive, daring and full of life, her words impose a new way of seeing things. These words weighed more than the music. Inspired by social events and her immediate environment, a free woman, she spoke her truth. Her music, apolitical but feminist, had a wide impact. Her message about African women was widely heard, both on the continent and throughout the rest of the world. During the 1990s, the Beninese Angélique Kidjo also established herself as one of the great African female singers. She proudly promoted Beninese musical heritage. Born in 1960 in Ouidah, the cradle of voodooism, she was raised in the world of theater and African-American sounds. As a teenager, she made a name for herself throughout the country thanks to her radio appearances. At the start of her career, she was accompanied by the Poly Rythmo of Cotonou, formed in 1969. The most legendary orchestra of the country, according to an enormous discography that includes hundreds of singles, albums as well as countless tours around the world. In 1980, Angélique Kidjo recorded her first album Pretty in Paris under the leadership of the Cameroonian Ekambi Brillant. Its success in West Africa was immediate. She moved to France in 1983 when music from Africa was all the hype. She joined different bands, before going solo and establishing herself as the greatest female voice of Benin. Forty years later, her successors and compatriots are about to shine bright. The last big city on the main road that criss-crosses northwestern Benin, peaceful Natitingou stretches out on either side of a strip of asphalt. After a fifteen hour drive from the business capital of Cotonou, this city offers a valuable stopover before heading to Burkina Faso, Togo or the huge Pendjari reserve, via Tanguiéta, where the vast Sahelian plains begin and where the last great wild animals to have escaped the madness of mankind take refuge. One of the region’s main crossover cities located at the crossroads of four countries, Natitingou controls the access to the Atakora hills region, which surrounds the city. Landlocked, the city of Natitingou is largely isolated from the rest of Benin, dependent on road deliveries and subject to power cuts and sometimes hostile natural elements. Steadily reluctant to any form of domination, this region’s hero is named Kaba. At the start of the First World War, he refused compulsory military service and led a fierce guerrilla war against colonial oppression. This lost war ended in a bloodbath in 1917. Upon leaving the city, the Kaba museum tells the story of the resistance of the Somba people, in particular through its evocation of its culture, its ceremonies, its iron work and even its circular huts with conical roofs, often raised and fortified, called tatas that are found in a good part of the Sahel. Kaba gave his name to one of Natitingou's first orchestras, Kaba Diya. Active between 1979 and 1983, it released a unique record of modern music in 1980, representative of the culture of its region, starting with the artwork. If Kaba Diya had the opportunity of releasing an LP, so did other local bands. A historical group formed in 1960, the Bopeci orchestra, released two 45 rpm records. On the other hand, Nati Fiesta, Tchankpa Jazz or L’Echo de l'Atakora never had a chance to release their songs on vinyl. More recently, since the mid 90s, Gay Stone, Cool Star, Ata Echo, Les 3 Couleurs, the Tchingas band, Zénith Temple, Excelsior and also since 2017 the FMG formation have been livening up the nights of Natitingou and Atakora. Culturally and musically, this region of North-West Benin is more ​​influenced by the Sahel than by the South of the country, by sato, voodoo and modernized folklore developed by groups like the Black Santiagos orchestra which gave birth to Afrobeat in the mid-1960s, before being adopted and developed by Fela Kuti. It is in this region full of contrast, of both green and rocky landscapes, that the seven young stars of the Star Feminine Band grew up. Often taken out of school and sent to sell peanuts, bananas, gari or tchoucoutou, a local millet drink on the side of the road, most young girls in the region have little future to look forward to. Forced marriages and early pregnancies in the majority of cases. Aware of this insecurity, a musician named André Baleguemon decided to form an exclusively female band rooted in the concerns of its time. He puts the spotlight on the guitar, drums and keyboard, instruments he has admired since his childhood, symbols of modernity in this remote region. His observation is simple: "In the North, girls have no room to advance and women are put aside. I simply wanted to show the importance of women in the societies of North Benin by forming a female orchestra ". Originally from Tchaourou, a vast commune located in central eastern Benin, André Balaguemon developed a passion for music at a very young age. During the 1990s, he joined the Sam 11 orchestra in Parakou, in the northeastern part of the country, where he successively played trumpet and guitar. In 1999, he spent some time in Cotonou before settling in the northwest, in order to reconnect with his roots and musical passions. On July 25th, 2016, with the support of the city of Natitingou, André launched a press release on Nanto FM offering to help train girls in music for free. A few days later, dozens of aspiring musicians showed up at the Youth Center. “The girls who came didn't know anything about music. We selected seven girls of the Waama and Nabo ethnic groups from the surrounding villages, some had never even seen these types of instruments before. " Since the independence era, having your own instruments has always been the prerequisite of any self-respected African orchestra. With drums, two guitars, keyboards and some added percussion purchased by André, the first musical tests began with his new recruits, a handful of young girls among the most motivated. The girls quickly became passionate about their new musical activities, learning how to play drums, guitar, piano and sing vocal harmonies. Their progress was astounding. An intense work of musical training took place, starting with drum workshops, their favorite instrument. Angelique and Urrice on drums and vocals, assisted by Marguerite, the third drummer. Sandrine is on keyboards, as is Grace, who also sings vocals. Julienne is on bass and Anne on guitar. As the founding influence of their approach, André readily quotes Angélique Kidjo, “our main inspiration. She is a woman you cannot ignore. Miriam Makeba is also a source of pride, as is Sagbohan Danialou, Stanislas Tohon. Kaba Diya, the great regional orchestra, also inspired us a lot. ” André's determination is one of the key elements of this human and artistic success. The girls have already performed dozens of concerts in the region, forging and expanding an already solid repertoire, while attracting an ever-increasing local audience. In addition to musical progress, he has been personally involved with each family, showing them the importance of his project, both musically and humanly and in particular the fact that each girl must remain in school and not be forced into marriage. There are very few female bands in the history of popular African music. If the Amazones de Guinée, la Famille Bassavé and les Colombes de la Révolution in Burkina, the Sœurs Comoë in Ivory Coast or the Lijadu Sisters in Nigeria notably come to mind, Star Feminine Band has no equivalent in Benin. The originality, carefree attitude, freedom, and above all the talent of these young girls is undeniable. At the end of 2018, their encounter with the young French sound engineer Jérémie Verdier accelerated the course of things. On a mission in the region, he called on his Spanish friends Juan Toran and Juan Serra who showed up with their recording equipment in order to record the band’s first songs in the annex of the local museum. Random encounters and fate led Jean-Baptiste Guillot to hear the tapes. He decided to go meet them at the end of 2019. This short but memorable journey sealed the fate of the record you are now holding in your hands. Now aged nine to fifteen, the seven girls of the Star Feminine Band continue to go to school. André installed a rehearsal room in an annex of the Departmental Museum of Natitingou. Several times a week, the seven young girls get together, inhabited by the noblest aspirations, those of singing their culture, their feminine condition and their possible emancipation. They rehearse three times a week, from 4 to 7 p.m. During school holidays, they rehearse daily from Monday to Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. It’s 2020 but the situation of women in many rural areas of the African continent and also sometimes in large metropolises, has hardly changed since the 1960s, the era of independence when it was believed that everything would change in this continent that was searching for modernity, culture and emancipation. Although there were some followers of the Me Too movement in Africa, it hardly touched the most remote parts of the continent. The Star Feminine Band is taking off. Performing several concerts in Natitingou but also in the surrounding villages. Each time they play in public, they bring together an ever-increasing and curious local audience when it comes to this one of a kind training. Women come en masse, as well as parents with their children, but also many elderly people, in a region where cultural activities are often limited to agricultural or funeral ceremonies. André Baleguemon and his talented protégés adapt songs of traditional inspiration, in a vein of modernized folklore. “We play waama rhythm dances, we want to honor them. We compose songs in French, waama and ditamari, two unknown ethnic groups from the North. We also sing songs in the Bariba language, as well as the Fon language, the main language in Benin, in the new repertoire, in order to be understood by as many people as possible.” Peba is sung in waama. It’s about girls going to school in order to be themselves. Sung in French, the lyrics of La Musique and Femme africaine speak for themselves. Timtilu is sung in ditamari. In this song, the girls give the advice to not abandon your culture, but rather to honor it. A song of emancipation in the peul language, Rew Be Me Light, is an ode to women, an encouragement to succeed in your own career and succeed as a woman. A unifying song, Iseo is sung in bariba. “Men and women, let us rise, from the south, from the center, from the north, let us unite and be one so that the country can evolve”. This song is about bringing together the regions and the diversity of cultures in Benin. Praise be to God in peul, Montealla’s interpretation was inspired by mandingo. Sung in bariba, Idesouse indicates that girls must go to school until the end of their studies in order to defend the values ​​of women. They have to fight all the more in order to gain this recognition. Through all of these songs, each of the Star Feminine Band members brings their own inspiration. André composes all their songs. He admits: “They bring their ideas. The dream of these girls is to become international stars. They must show the importance of women throughout the world. Speak of Africa, accomplish great missions around the values ​​of women. They talk about female genital mutilation, abuse and violence against girls. We want to include these subjects in the political debate in Benin, then elsewhere in Africa if this is ever possible ”. With much confidence, an undeniable ecumenism and charisma, Star Feminine Band is one of the prides of the Atakora region. The band is even starting to instigate vocations, while sowing the seeds for the next generation of provincial girls, driven by an iron will, forged of the same mineral as the weapons of Kaba, forgotten hero of the Atakora. True heroines of everyday life, the seven girls of the Star Feminine Band embody the future and the next generation in search of recognition. “In the 1960s, God was a black girl who sang” used to say New York composer duo Carole King and Gerry Goffin. Sixty years later, in one of the forgotten provinces of the African continent, this adage takes on its full value. Florent Mazzoleni

The music of Darren Cunningham, the British electronic musician known as Actress, is notoriously difficult to categorize. Over the past 15 years, he has evaded the confines of more familiar dance music with avant-garde, abstract compositions that gaze inward. Although he references house, techno, dubstep, and R&B, he deconstructs, twists, and stretches them into practically unrecognizable forms. But make no mistake, his records are still intensely emotional—vivid soundscapes so full of depth and light that they can feel overwhelming. And *Karma & Desire*, his seventh LP, feels, in many ways, like mourning. Guided by meandering piano arpeggios and hushed vocals about heaven and prayer, it evokes funereal images of death and rebirth (“I’m thinking/Sinking/Down/In Heaven,” Zsela sings on “Angels Pharmacy”). A glitchy, fuzzy texture permeates the album, as if the tracks had been passed through an old-fashioned Instagram filter, and it builds a general sense of uneasiness. Actual beats are scarce, but those that do appear feel almost meditative (“Leaves Against the Sky,” “XRAY”), as if to provide relief from the amorphous expanse. It’s easy to see the metaphor for getting lost in dark corners of your own mind, and the solace that you feel when reality returns.

After recent mixtape “88”, Actress reveals new album "Karma & Desire". ‘Walking Flames’ featuring Sampha is out now. “Karma & Desire” includes guest collaborations from Sampha, Zsela and Aura T-09 and more. It’s “a romantic tragedy set between the heavens and the underworld” says Actress (Darren J. Cunningham) “the same sort of things that I like to talk about – love, death, technology, the questioning of one's being”. The presence of human voices take the questing artist into new territory. ‘Walking Flames’: “These are like graphics that I’ve never seen / My face on another human being / The highest resolution / Don't breathe the birth of a new day.” Flute-like melodies contributed by Canadian organist and instrument builder Kara-Lis Coverdale.

Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever wanted to get back in touch with the things that bring meaning to their lives after touring extensively in support of 2018’s full-length debut *Hope Downs*. The Melbourne five-piece has always approached their music with a keen sense of geography. On *Hope Downs*, singer/songwriter/guitarist Joe White and singer/songwriter/guitarists Fran Keaney and Tom Russo, who split songwriting duties, told stories about characters in distress in settings both familiar and remote—from the beautiful stretches of the Aeolian Islands in Sicily to the vast iron ore mines in Western Australia. On their second studio LP, *Sideways to New Italy*, they\'re also looking within themselves to connect with their feelings and emotions. “We went into the interior geography rather than writing about the outside,” says Russo. “It took us back to our formative places, and the places that we grew up and the places that we never guessed that we had idealized from a distance.” It also helped them recapture the excitement of being in a band together. “We wanted to carry through the positivity we always had when we started this band before we started touring,” says Keaney. “All together in the same room, not writing the songs until we\'ve actually had a chance to rip them apart and take them in different directions.” Here, Keaney, Russo, and White walk us through the album track by track. **The Second of the First** Fran Keaney: “That was one of the earlier ones that we wrote or started writing. And it informed the path that we would take for the rest of the album, which is that we found something that we were really excited about. I had a few chords for it and a rough idea for a song, and I brought it to the band, but then we ended up just taking it down a different path and left that song for dead. We had this jam that we were really excited about, but that\'s all it was. It was just two chords, and we just stuck on it, you know, like 10 minutes, 15 minutes, and then just recorded it on an iPhone and then sat with it for a while and tried to work out what that new song might be.” Tom Russo: “We were going back to our roots of bringing in whoever is at hand to help do little bits and pieces on the album. And Joe\'s girlfriend, and one of our best friends, we got him to come in and do a spoken-word part. And that\'s not to our original spirit where we used to do that without first recording through it, just throwing the kitchen sink at it.” **Falling Thunder** Russo: “It’s about the constants of change, when you find yourself the next year in the same season. It’s written in that point where fall turns into winter. And I find that to be a really reflective time. Everyone else was on holiday in Europe, taking some time off. And I was just riding around in the tour van for a few days throughout Europe with our tour manager and our tech, which was a great experience, getting ferried around like that. I was in the van on my own, and I remember chewing the bones of this song, on my computer, in the back of a tour van watching Germany and the Midlands going by. When we eventually took it back to the band, we really pulled it apart and ended up surgically connecting two different songs.” Keaney: “Normally when we would do an operation like that, the body ends up rejecting the prosthetic, but this one was a complete success. We try to relate to our handsome monsters, our beautiful monsters. There’s a lot of—I know the metaphor is getting a bit weird—limbs on the cutting room floor. We can be brutal now. We\'re all very much open to collaborating, and while we do have a personal connection to ideas that we put in, everybody accepts that everything\'s up for grabs and everything\'s up to be moved around. So I think we\'ve got better at that over time. So yeah, there\'s a lot of carnage.” **She’s There** Joe White: “‘She\'s There\' was definitely one of those songs that just fell out of my hands really quickly on the guitar. I just knocked up a really quick demo on my computer at home. We went into pre-production with our producer Burke \[Reid\], who quickly informed us that whatever I created that day was a bit too confusing and a bit too odd. I think we were trying to push some boundaries of what\'s cool and what\'s normal and what\'s adventurous, so I guess an attitude we tried to take into this record was to not try to use the same verse-chorus-verse song structures that we\'ve used before. We hadn\'t really considered that idea of the listener, just going in it as this cool, weird pop song that can just jump around all different parts and do whatever it wants. Turns out maybe that isn\'t the case, but in the end, it informed what we have now. I feel like I used my brain more than I ever used it before, and I\'d go to sleep thinking about songs and then wake up in the morning with those songs in my head.” **Beautiful Steven** Russo: “I was thinking about the places that shaped me and shaped us. It\'s loosely set at the small, pretty tough Catholic boys\' school that Fran, Joe \[Russo, RBCF bassist\], and I went to. It would have been better to be in a co-ed school with boys and girls; there\'s something strange about getting a whole bunch of teenage boys together in like a concrete box. It\'s a bit of an unrequited love song from a teenage boy to their best friend.” **The Only One** White: “It started on my phone trying to make a synth-pop banger. I pulled the chords out of that and started playing it on the guitar. And then it turned into this kind of sad country song. So it was living in these two worlds. I think I went to bed one night while we were recording, watching *Stop Making Sense*, that live Talking Heads video-like concert. I liked the way that they introduced the elements, just one by one, and how they still managed to get so much groove, so much working for the song with so few elements. I had a little minor epiphany and thought, ‘Oh, all right. Maybe that is how we approach this song.’” Keaney: “I remember the very start and the very end of recording it. It was late at night and Marcel \[Tussie, RBCF drummer\] was probably pretty exhausted and he had his top off. So he was just walking around in his shorts, like he’s a man on a mission. He was losing his mind a bit. He was in his room, almost like he was boxed in a zoo, and Burke was playing around with all these drum sounds. I think he ended up using a plastic paint tub for one of the toms.” **Cars in Space** Keaney: “It\'s set at the time of the breakup between two people, and all that time before the breakup, when there are all the swirling thoughts and meandering words that happened at that time. When we were recording it, Burke said that he can see the rising and falling of the song, which is what happens in the verses. When it shifts between the chords and the hi-hats come up and the electric guitars move in and out, it\'s sort of the waves of \'Am I going to say it now? Is she going to say it now?\' For a long time, we tried to preserve the idea that it would be in two parts, that it would be \'Cars in Space\' and \'Cars in Space II.\' The first had another chorus on it, but then once you got to II—which is now the outro of the song—it just didn\'t make sense. You\'re on this journey, and it feels like watching a Hollywood movie and then having another 45 minutes stuck on the end. That was sort of the idea why we couldn\'t really keep it as a song in two parts, so we ended up abandoning that idea.” **Cameo** Keaney: “The setting of the song was inspired by a place in the city of Darwin. We played at the Darwin Festival, and then there was this after-party at the park just next to it. It was a really cool scene. It sort of felt like we were in *Priscilla, Queen of the Desert*. There were all these different types of people, all congregated in Darwin. There\'s someone that I liked there, and then nothing happened. As I walked back home, I let my mind go down the alternative path of just being with that person, reaching through to eternity with that person. This is an absurd sort of an idea, a bit like letting your mind wander.” **Not Tonight** Keaney: “My auntie, a few years ago, was talking about how she hated the song ‘Miss You’ by The Rolling Stones. Because it reminded her of when she was a kid. Her older brother, my uncle, would start to get ready to go out to parties or going out on a Saturday night rather than staying at home and watching TV and being in a warm house. He would be in the next room listening to ‘Miss You’ while he was putting on some cheap fragrance and putting on his cowboy shirt, getting ready to go out and drink booze and maybe get into a fight, that sort of thing. It always made her nervous and worried. And I could see that so vividly in my head. I thought that that would be a nice place to set a song.” Russo: “It started out as a country punk song. We tried to do surgery because it didn\'t quite sit right. There was a mix between both, and some parts which were almost like \'90s radio rock. And that didn\'t sound like us—it was too powerful. It had a bit of an identity crisis for a long time. Joe knocked the cowbell against it to give it that weird country disco swing. And that was the last thing, so we were all dancing around like, \'This is the end of the album,\' like a celebratory cowbell. It\'s my first cowbell recording experience, and possibly my last. I\'ve heard about this rule that you\'re only allowed to record a cowbell once in your life. So we\'ve used up that ticket already. I think it\'s the right song to use it on.” **Sunglasses at the Wedding** Keaney: “I did this thing that Mick Jones from The Clash does. Apparently, he writes the lyrics first, and then he just looks at the words and tries to find melody, tries to find the song in the words. There\'s all those really good soul songs about weddings and marriage. And I really like the tug of those, like \[*singing*\] \'Today I meet the boy I\'m going to marry\' and \'Going to the chapel, I\'m going to get married.\' I like those songs that are set at a wedding or near a wedding; it\'s such a momentous day. So I wanted to somehow try and carry that across. It\'s a bit dreamlike.” White: “The last thing we added to the song was that really sort of bubbly, nasally electric guitar that washes over the whole thing that, again, puts it back into that dream world. So it does make it feel like it\'s got a breath, a change of pace on the album, that also takes you into a different headspace.” **The Cool Change** Russo: “It\'s another one that\'s a bit of a mix of fact and fiction. It\'s someone remembering someone who comes in and out of their lives. In places like Australia, there\'s always someone whose ego kind of outgrows their town, and they go to other places to be bigger than they can be there. So they might go to LA or New York or London to be a star in one of the fields. It\'s about a person like that, but then they keep coming back to their old relationship and they\'re never going to love anyone else more than they love themselves. It\'s based on an amalgamation of a few people; I feel everyone knows someone like that. Musically, it was like a weird, folky little number. We didn\'t really know what to do with it; it was a bit countryish and it didn\'t really fit in our world. We looked at amping it up a bit, making it a bit faster, and then it suddenly turned into this sleazy LA country-rock number. But a good kind of sleazy, like riding a motorbike down the freeway.” White: “The backwards guitar helps fight that element. I just took my lead guitar track and chopped it up and reversed some of it and stuck it back in certain spots. That immediately just takes it to that *Sweetheart of the Rodeo* \[The Byrds’ 1968 album\] psych-folk kind of thing. But I\'ll also say that drumbeat is not bad at all. It lives between those worlds.”

On their second record, Sideways to New Italy, Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever have turned their gaze inward, to their individual pasts and the places that inform them. From a town in regional Australia that serves as a living relic to how immigrants brought a sense of home to an alien place, to the familiar Mediterranean statues that dot the front lawns of the Melbourne suburbs where the band members live, the inspiration for the record came from the attempts people make at crafting utopia in their backyard (while knowing there is no such thing as a clean slate). In searching for something to hold onto in the turbulence, the guitar-pop five-piece has channelled their own sense of dislocation into an album that serves as a totem of home to take with them to stages all over the world.

In 2017, Kevin Morby moved home to Kansas. “I ended up sort of liking it, if for nothing more than having space and time to work on things,” he tells Apple Music. “But with that definitely came a bunch of uneasy feelings, having to interact with a bunch of ghosts from my past and just being back where I grew up. I really had to push through some initial emotions, but once I got past those, I was able to see the Midwest for the first time in a way that I never had before. That’s the seed of this record.” Having found inspiration in New York (2013’s *Harlem River*) and LA (2016’s *Singing Saw*), *Sundowner* finds Morby paying tribute to Midwestern twilight and Midwestern expanse with a set of panoramic folk that’s flush with fresh perspective. “When I was living on the coasts, so much of my life happened at night,” he says. “I wasn\'t really measuring the days in the way that I do now. In coming home, I just found that I\'m like looking at the sun going down and it\'s making me face myself.” Here, Morby walks us through the entire album track by track. **Valley** “Not only is it the first song on the record, but it\'s also the first song that I wrote for the record. Kansas doesn\'t really have any valleys, it\'s famous for being flat. But when I was living in Los Angeles, I was living in Mount Washington; my album *Singing Saw*, the cover was taken there. I would do this walk every day to the top of Mount Washington and this valley would be in my wake. That neighborhood just meant a lot to me, and it was really hard for me to have to leave it—I really didn\'t want to in a lot of ways, but I knew that I sort of had to. So that is kind of like my exit song to LA, the song that I feel like I was singing to myself as I left one part of my life and went into the next.” **Brother, Sister** “Coming back here and sort of looking at other people that I admire and what they were kind of doing around 30, it wasn\'t lost on me that a lot of my heroes and songwriting influences were doing similar things—like growing beards and moving to the country. One of those artists is Bruce Springsteen. I love his album *Nebraska*, and I\'ve always loved the story behind it. When I moved back to Kansas City, there was this killer on the loose—he had killed a few people, and then he got caught. And he explained to the press that he was doing it sort of as revenge for his brother who had been killed. I never learned too much about his brother, but my imagination just sort of ran with that, the idea of someone killing for someone sort of speaking to them beyond the grave.” **Sundowner** “It was a fear of the night coming on, just in the sense that I was living two lifestyles. One is my life of being a musician, out on the road and living in these exotic places and having this very social, active nightlife. And then my other life was coming back here and really being faced with myself once the sun went down, sort of left to my own devices and not really being able to run away from any sort of collection of thoughts that I may be thinking at the time. I just really have to sit with those, and I do a lot of processing and just getting to know myself really. The night represented that.” **Campfire** “I was watching a lot of Westerns, and I think of songs very cinematically. This is the first song that I recorded into my four-track where it felt like I had something really real. And I wanted it to feel like someone was walking, singing this song, and in the middle of this, they encountered someone, a stranger, who was sort of singing their own song, and they have some overlap at a fire. I was reading a book called *Lonesome Dove*, and there\'s this Latin phrase in that book that translates to ‘A grape ripens when it sees another grape.’ I\'m singing this song and I\'m going to come across another person, and they\'re singing a song, and then it changes the song that I\'m singing. That\'s what I\'m doing sonically, and the subject matter is paying homage to friends that have passed away and heroes that have passed away.” **Wander** “When I sent the demos to \[producer\] Brad Cook, I kind of put that one on there by mistake, or I didn\'t think there was too much to that song; I didn\'t know where to take it. And Brad seemed really excited about it in this way that got me excited about it. So it\'s a song meant to speed up and sort of get your blood pumping and then just abruptly stop. That central lyric—‘I wonder as I wander, why was I born in a wild wonder?’—is just something that\'s been in my brain for a long time. It\'s a sentiment that I’ve said to myself, kind of a fun tongue twister that sums up some outlook I have of the world.” **Don’t Underestimate Midwest American Sun** “The Midwest is largely looked over as flyover states, and most people who haven\'t been here think that it would be boring or just don\'t have much of an opinion on it. It was wanting to put the name front and center and have a song revolve around that and then have the sonic space to really represent or display what the openness of the Plains and the openness of the Midwest feels like. The lyrics are speaking to that, but also with this sort of depiction of a relationship in its earliest form when you kind of aren\'t clear what exactly is happening yet. You know you like it, but you\'re afraid that at any moment it could dissolve.” **A Night at the Little Los Angeles** “A friend of mine had commented, when I moved out to my house, that I was decorating it to look like Los Angeles and not like a typical house in Kansas. And I just liked the imagery of that a lot, of the idea of someone who is sort of longing for an exotic place like Los Angeles, but has to live in rural Kansas, and how they sort of decorate their place to mimic the other. My imagination just sort of ran with that idea and came up with this idea of a rural hotel that you could sort of step inside of, and there would be this sort of magical but kind of left-of-center idea of what Los Angeles is. I spent a lot of time in hotels around the world, and it\'s different things that I\'ve sort of encountered or heard coming through the walls. It’s really my take on fiction, for the record.” **Jamie** “Jamie was my best friend who passed away when I was 20. And at the time that I wrote the song, I had just turned 30. Jamie was a huge influence. He was kind of like an older brother to me, and we would spend every day together up until his passing. And he\'s been sort of my muse, but also this person that I felt that I worked really hard to sort of carry some sort of torch for. He’s made his way into a lot of my work over the years. But something about it being 10 years, I just felt I wanted to write a song to honor him that just sort of explicitly named him and put him front and center.” **Velvet Highway** “My girlfriend and I, when we first started dating, we went to Marfa, Texas, which is very close actually to where I ended up recording the album, outside of El Paso. To get to Marfa, we had to fly to El Paso and then drive three hours down this long, desolate highway. You really feel like you could just sort of disappear out there—it’s the open West Texas desert, and there\'s no one around. It was really late when we were driving, and there were jackrabbits all over the road, and they kept running in front of the car, and we kept hitting some, but we also just noticed there\'s a ton of these dead rabbits all over the road. When we got to Marfa, we asked someone about it and they said, ‘Oh, yeah, you came in on Delta Highway.’ And I just liked the idea of the imagery of this highway with a bunch of dead rabbit fur all over it. But I also like the idea of this magical kind of Yellow Brick Road, the imagery of a highway with a sort of velvet carpet. So I wrote that piece, and it just seemed like something that I would like to soundtrack that sort of drive.” **Provisions** “I was going through a lot of different things at the time. I left Los Angeles because of a breakup, and I was beginning something new romantically, and I was living back in my hometown. It just felt like my life was very much in flux. And ‘Provisions’ to me was a reminder of all these things changing. Sometimes it gets worse before it gets better, and sometimes it stays bad for a long time, and sometimes it stays good for a long time, but no matter what, you need to take care of yourself. You need to grab provisions, because you don\'t know when the next stop is going to be. You don\'t know when the next sign of relief or joy or respite is going to be, so you just need to be thinking ahead. It’s a song that really felt appropriate given where everyone\'s at right now, in quarantine and with the pandemic.”

A highly qualified jazz drummer who has worked with the late Geri Allen and others, Brooklyn-via-Seattle artist Kassa Overall also describes himself as a “backpack jazz producer”—an MC, singer, songwriter, and filler of many roles, beyond any one category. His 2019 debut, *Go Get Ice Cream and Listen to Jazz*, was a vivid representation of what this could mean in practice. The follow-up, *I Think I’m Good*, on Gilles Peterson’s Brownswood label, continues in a similarly collaborative spirit, with glitchy beats and fat basslines framing rap verses, vocal hooks, synth textures, and contributions from an array of top-tier singers and instrumentalists. Sparkling sonic details—Brandee Younger’s harp, Jay Gandhi’s bansuri flute, Morgan Guerin’s bass clarinet—emerge from the very start. Guitarist Rafiq Bhatia, trumpeter Theo Croker, and vocalist and kindred spirit J. Hoard, among others, bring in other elements to make the music simmer. And in the acoustic piano cameos from jazz heavyweights Aaron Parks, Craig Taborn, and Sullivan Fortner, we get a satisfying sense of how Overall works, putting piano through effects, or sampling and chopping it, injecting ghostly tones and patterns into the mix. Two tracks seem endearingly personal: “Landline” is a fragmented drum-and-saxophone duet between Overall and his brother Carlos, setting up Overall’s reflective spoken-word account of struggle and growth, while “Was She Happy” reminisces about Geri Allen in the wake of her untimely death, framed by Vijay Iyer’s calmly pulsating Fender Rhodes.

Seattle-raised, Brooklyn-residing Kassa Overall is a jazz musician, emcee, singer, producer, and drummer. His second, full-length album, I THINK I’M GOOD, is the work of an artist whose voice has ripened to its own hard-earned, provocative conclusions, erasing the need to talk about dissolving barriers between hip hop and jazz because he has begun a new conversation. I THINK I’M GOOD is a window into the real life of Overall, a Bushwick-based artist wrestling with the abhorrent American prison system, the ebbs and flows of romantic relationships, and perils of trust, all seen through the kaleidoscopic lens of a brilliant 21st century composer. The backdrop to these varied themes is Overall confronting his experience with mental illness, which included a manic episode and subsequent hospitalisation when he was a student. Themes of incarceration and claustrophobia weave through the record, but never drown out the feeling of a fragile but vital hope. “Mental instability or hyper-sensitivity was something that felt too taboo to talk about," said Overall. "I want to show the world that mentally sensitive people are the innovators of our society, and hopefully set a new standard that includes a healthy way of life and embracing our unique perspective on reality.” Recent years have seen something of a worldwide movement making jazz and improvised music relevant to fresh audiences, providing a critical cultural counterpoint to feelings of political disenfranchisement and globalised anxiety. Exciting scenes are springing out of grassroots musical communities from London to Melbourne, Chicago to Johannesburg. But perhaps the most vital of these scenes remains in New York, a city that is still ground zero for the most competitive jazz musicians in the world, a community that continues unbroken from Charlie Parker to the present. This is Overall’s home turf, and it shows on I THINK I’M GOOD, which is a tour de force of New York’s brightest young up-and-comers (Joel Ross, Morgan Guerin, Julius Rodriguez, Melanie Charles, J Hoard) as well as some of its more established fixtures, including Sullivan Fortner, Brandee Younger, Theo Croker, Craig Taborn, Aaron Parks, and Vijay Iyer. Iyer’s contribution is a gorgeous, melancholic tribute to their shared musical mentor, Geri Allen, with whom Overall played for seven years. Dr. Angela Davis, a longtime jazz supporter and fan of Overall’s work, makes a recorded cameo, punctuating the album’s dive into the human condition and exploration of social justice. Like Karriem Riggins before him, Overall belongs to a rare class of musicians naturally fluent in both jazz performance and hip-hop production. He’s also a clear contemporary of brazen, potent genre-shifters like Madlib, Flying Lotus, Solange, and Kendrick Lamar. Yet one of the most striking aspects of I THINK I’M GOOD is its singular intimacy, a byproduct of Overall’s indie hustle and uncanny at-home and on-the-fly production methods. In fact, most of the album happened out of Overall’s Bushwick bedroom and a backpack. "I’ve recently begun to think of myself as a backpack jazz producer, which is something like a cross between a jazz musician, a backpack rapper and a bedroom producer," said Overall, who mostly used a skeletal mobile studio (laptop, a simple audio interface, and microphone), giving the album a distinctively inward, almost confidential flavour. But Overall describes his method as being a far more social endeavour than bedroom production. "The bedroom producer is mostly solitary and stationary, but the backpack producer is collaborative, mobile, and totally improvisatory in the truest sense of our tradition. My studio is with me almost all the time. I need to be able to work whenever and wherever, at my own pace.” As Time Out New York frames his talent, Overall is “a Renaissance man: part chopsy, super-funky jazz drummer, and part rising producer-MC.” Since the January 2019 release of Ice Cream, NYC and global audiences have had the opportunity to experience Overall’s singular brilliance, which has been embraced with rave reviews from The New York Times, AFROPUNK, Downbeat, NPR, BBC Radio 6 Music, and other influential media outlets.

After a banner year that witnessed Lafawndah release her first album Ancestor Boy, the debut of her soundsystem Fara Fara, and further incursions into film, contemporary art and fashion, the ceaseless artist returns with another plot twist: The Fifth Season. Inspired by her encounter with author NK Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, Lafawndah both pays homage to and extends further the elemental, emotionally charged myths of Jemisin’s books. These are stories where a broken heart can tear apart a continent. In contrast to the precision- tuned industrial productions of Ancestor Boy, The Fifth Season breathes a different kind of volatility. Inviting a new degree of spontaneity and freedom into her process, Lafawndah’s collaborators - Theon Cross (tuba), Nathaniel Cross (trombone), Valentina Magaletti (percussion), and Nick Weiss (keyboards) - encircle her confrontational character studies with iridescent, cinematic chamber-bass moves. These are torch songs for when it rains ash, creation ballads for when the earth turns inside out. Ghosts of Art Ensemble of Chicago and Rahsaan Roland Kirk color the air, yet Lafawndah’s mastery of pop songcraft, vocal production and razor-honed clarity of purpose cut through. In addition to the Lafawndah originals, The Fifth Season features interpretations of hybrid-folk godfather Beverly Glenn Copeland’s “Don’t Despair” and acid-impressionist prodigy Lili Boulanger’s “Old Buddhist Prayer.” Album highlight “You, at the End” deploys a poem by poet-performer Kate Tempest to aching, rift-tearing ends, and french dream-trap wraith Lala &ce features on “Le Malentendu”. The Fifth Season anchors Lafawndah as a descendent of forebearers Brigitte Fontaine and Scott Walker - a born theatric whose acid humor warps the sub-continental undertow of her emotive storytelling. Lafawndah’s elementalism on The Fifth Season finds her imagination more agile than ever, and recent live shows have evinced a drive to push these compositions further out, deeper, and more aflame.

“Life seems to provide no end of things to explore without too much investigation,” Laura Marling tells Apple Music. The London singer-songwriter is discussing how, after six albums (three of which were Mercury Prize-nominated), she found the inspiration needed for her seventh, *Song For Our Daughter*. One thing which proved fruitful was turning 30. In an evolution of 2017’s exquisite rumination on womanhood *Semper Femina*, growing, as she says, “a bit older” prompted Marling to consider how she might equip her her own figurative daughter to navigate life’s complexities. “In light of the cultural shift, you go back and think, ‘That wasn’t how it should have happened. I should have had the confidence and the know-how to deal with that situation in a way that I didn’t have to come out the victim,’” says Marling of the album’s central message. “You can’t do anything about it, obviously, so you can only prepare the next generation with the tools and the confidence \[to ensure\] they \[too\] won’t be victims.” This feeling reaches a crescendo on the title track, which sees Marling consider “our daughter growing old/All of the bullshit that she might be told” amid strings that permeate the entire record. While *Song for Our Daughter* is undoubtedly a love letter to women, it is also a deeply personal album where whimsical melodies (“Strange Girl”) collide with Marling at her melancholic best (the gorgeously sparse “Blow by Blow”—a surprisingly honest chronicle of heartbreak—or the exceptional, haunting “Hope We Meet Again”). And its roaming nature is exactly how Marling wanted to soundtrack the years since *Semper Femina*. “There is no cohesive narrative,” she admits. “I wrote this album over three years, and so much had changed. Of course, no one knows the details of my personal life—nor should they. But this album is like putting together a very fragmented story that makes sense to me.” Let Marling guide you through that story, track by track. **Alexandra** “Women are so at the forefront of my mind. With ‘Alexandra,’ I was thinking a lot about the women who survive the projected passion of so-called ‘great men.’ ‘Alexandra’ is a response to Leonard Cohen’s ‘Alexandra Leaving,’ but it’s also the idea that for so long women have had to suffer the very powerful projections that people have put on them. It’s actually quite a traumatizing experience, I think, to only be seen through the eyes of a man’s passion; just as a facade. And I think it happens to women quite often, so in a couple of instances on this album I wanted to give voice to the women underneath all of that. The song has something of Crosby, Stills & Nash about it—it’s a chugging, guitar-riffy job.” **Held Down** “Somebody said to me a couple of years ago that the reason why people find it hard to attach to me \[musically\] is that it\'s not always that fun to hear sad songs. And I was like, ‘Oh, well, I\'m in trouble, because that\'s all I\'ve got!’ So this song has a lightness to it and is very light on sentiment. It’s just about two people trying to figure out how to not let themselves get in the way of each other, and about that constant vulnerability at the beginning of a relationship. The song is almost quite shoegazey and is very simple to play on the guitar.” **Strange Girl** “The girl in this song is an amalgamation of all my friends and I, and of all the things we\'ve done. There’s something sweet about watching someone you know very well make the same mistakes over and over again. You can\'t tell them what they need to know; they have to know it themselves. That\'s true of everyone, including myself. As for the lyrics about the angry, brave girl? Well, aren’t we all like that? The fullness and roundness of my experience of women—the nuance and all the best and worst things about being a complicated little girl—is not always portrayed in the way that I would portray it, and I think women will recognize something in this song. My least favorite style of music is Americana, so I was conscious to avoid that sound here. But it’s a lovely song; again, it has chords which are very Crosby, Stills & Nash-esque.” **Only the Strong** “I wanted the central bit of the album to be a little vulnerable tremble, having started it out quite boldly. This song has a four-beat click in it, which was completely by accident—it was coming through my headphones in the studio, so it was just a happy accident. The strings on this were all done by my bass player Nick \[Pini\] and they are all bow double-bass strings. They\'re close to the human voice, so I think they have a specific, resonant effect on people. I also went all out on the backing vocals. I wanted it to be my own chorus, like my own subconscious backing me up. The lyric ‘Love is a sickness cured by time\' is actually from a play by \[London theater director\] Robert Icke, though I did ask his permission to use it. I just thought that was the most incredible ointment to the madness of infatuation.” **Blow by Blow** “I wrote this song on the piano, but it’s not me playing here—I can\'t play the piano anywhere near as well as my friend Anna here. This song is really straightforward, and I kind of surprised myself by that. I don\'t like to be explicit. I like to be a little bit opaque, I guess, in the songwriting business. So this is an experiment, and I still haven’t quite made my mind up on how I feel about it. Both can exist, but I think what I want from my music or art or film is an uncanny familiarity. This song is a different thing for me, for sure—it speaks for itself. I’d be rendering it completely naked if I said any more.” **Song for Our Daughter** “This song is kind of the main event, in my mind. I actually wrote it around the time of the Trayvon Martin \[shooting in 2012\]. All these young kids being unarmed and shot in America. And obviously that\'s nothing to do with my daughter, or the figurative daughter here, but I \[was thinking about the\] institutional injustice. And what their mothers must be feeling. How helpless, how devastated and completely unable to have changed the course of history, because nothing could have helped them. I was also thinking about a story in Roman mythology about the Rape of Lucretia. She was the daughter of a nobleman and was raped—no one believed her and, in that time, they believed that if you had been ‘spoilt’ by something like that, then your blood would turn black. And so she rode into court one day and stabbed herself in the heart, and bled and died. It’s not the cheeriest of analogies, but I found that this story that existed thousands of years ago was still so contemporary. The strings were arranged by \[US instrumentalist, arranger, and producer\] Rob Moose, and when he sent them to me he said, ‘I don\'t know if this is what you wanted, but I wanted to personify the character of the daughter in the strings, and help her kind of rise up above everything.’ And I was like, ‘That\'s amazing! What an incredible, incredible leap to make.’ And that\'s how they ended up on the record.” **Fortune** “Whenever I get stuck in a rut or feel uninspired on the guitar, I go and play with my dad, who taught me. He was playing with this little \[melody\]—it\'s just an E chord going up the neck—so I stole it and then turned it into this song. I’m very close with my sisters, and at the time we were talking and reminiscing about the fact that my mother had a ‘running-away fund.’ She kept two-pence pieces in a pot above the laundry machine when we were growing up. She had recently cashed it in to see how much money she had, and she had built up something like £75 over the course of a lifetime. That was her running-away fund, and I just thought that was so wonderfully tragic. She said she did it because her mother did it. It was hereditary. We are living in a completely different time, and are much closer to equality, so I found the idea of that fund quite funny.” **The End of the Affair** “This song is loosely based on *The End of the Affair* by Graham Greene. The female character, \[Sarah\], is elusive; she has a very secret role that no one can be part of, and the protagonist of the book, the detective \[Maurice Bendrix\], finds it so unbearably erotic. He finds her secretness—the fact that he can\'t have her completely—very alluring. And in a similar way to ‘Alexandra Leaving,’ it’s about how this facade in culture has appeared over women. I was also drawing on my own experience of great passions that have to die very quietly. What a tragedy that is, in some ways, to have to bear that alone. No one else is obviously ever part of your passions.” **Hope We Meet Again** “This was actually the first song we recorded on the album, so it was like a tester session. There’s a lot of fingerpicking on this, so I really had to concentrate, and it has pedal steel, which I’m not usually a fan of because it’s very evocative of Americana. I originally wrote this for a play, *Mary Stuart* by Robert Icke, who I’ve worked with a lot over the last couple of years, and adapted the song to turn it back into a song that\'s more mine, rather than for the play. But originally it was supposed to highlight the loneliness of responsibility of making your own decisions in life, and of choosing your own direction. And what the repercussions of that can sometimes be. It\'s all of those kind of crossroads where deciding to go one way might be a step away from someone else.” **For You** “In all honesty, I think I’m getting a bit soft as I get older. And I’ve listened to a lot of Paul McCartney and it’s starting to affect me in a lot of ways. I did this song at home in my little bunker—this is the demo, and we just kept it exactly as it was. It was never supposed to be a proper song, but it was so sweet, and everyone I played it to liked it so much that we just stuck it on the end. The male vocals are my boyfriend George, who is also a musician. There’s also my terrible guitar solo, but I left it in there because it was so funny—I thought it sounded like a five-year-old picking up a guitar for the first time.”

Laura Marling’s exquisite seventh album Song For Our Daughter arrives almost without pre-amble or warning in the midst of uncharted global chaos, and yet instantly and tenderly offers a sense of purpose, clarity and calm. As a balm for the soul, this full-blooded new collection could be posited as Laura’s richest to date, but in truth it’s another incredibly fine record by a British artist who rarely strays from delivering incredibly fine records. Taking much of the production reins herself, alongside long-time collaborators Ethan Johns and Dom Monks, Laura has layered up lush string arrangements and a broad sense of scale to these songs without losing any of the intimacy or reverence we’ve come to anticipate and almost take for granted from her throughout the past decade.

Mike Hadreas’ fifth LP under the Perfume Genius guise is “about connection,” he tells Apple Music. “And weird connections that I’ve had—ones that didn\'t make sense but were really satisfying or ones that I wanted to have but missed or ones that I don\'t feel like I\'m capable of. I wanted to sing about that, and in a way that felt contained or familiar or fun.” Having just reimagined Bobby Darin’s “Not for Me” in 2018, Hadreas wanted to bring the same warmth and simplicity of classic 1950s and \'60s balladry to his own work. “I was thinking about songs I’ve listened to my whole life, not ones that I\'ve become obsessed over for a little while or that are just kind of like soundtrack moments for a summer or something,” he says. “I was making a way to include myself, because sometimes those songs that I love, those stories, don\'t really include me at all. Back then, you couldn\'t really talk about anything deep. Everything was in between the lines.” At once heavy and light, earthbound and ethereal, *Set My Heart on Fire Immediately* features some of Hadreas’ most immediate music to date. “There\'s a confidence about a lot of those old dudes, those old singers, that I\'ve loved trying to inhabit in a way,” he says. “Well, I did inhabit it. I don\'t know why I keep saying ‘try.’ I was just going to do it, like, ‘Listen to me, I\'m singing like this.’ It\'s not trying.” Here, he walks us through the album track by track. **Whole Life** “When I was writing that song, I just had that line \[‘Half of my whole life is done’\]—and then I had a decision afterwards of where I could go. Like, I could either be really resigned or I could be open and hopeful. And I love the idea. That song to me is about fully forgiving everything or fully letting everything go. I’ve realized recently that I can be different, suddenly. That’s been a kind of wild thing to acknowledge, and not always good, but I can be and feel completely different than I\'ve ever felt and my life can change and move closer to goodness, or further away. It doesn\'t have to be always so informed by everything I\'ve already done.” **Describe** “Originally, it was very plain—sad and slow and minimal. And then it kind of morphed, kind of went to the other side when it got more ambient. When I took it into the studio, it turned into this way dark and light at the same time. I love that that song just starts so hard and goes so full-out and doesn\'t let up, but that the sentiment and the lyric and my singing is still soft. I was thinking about someone that was sort of near the end of their life and only had like 50% of their memories, or just could almost remember. And asking someone close to them to fill the rest in and just sort of remind them what happened to them and where they\'ve been and who they\'d been with. At the end, all of that is swimming together.” **Without You** “The song is about a good moment—or even just like a few seconds—where you feel really present and everything feels like it\'s in the right place. How that can sustain you for a long time. Especially if you\'re not used to that. Just that reminder that that can happen. Even if it\'s brief, that that’s available to you is enough to kind of carry you through sometimes. But it\'s still brief, it\'s still a few seconds, and when you tally everything up, it\'s not a lot. It\'s not an ultra uplifting thing, but you\'re not fully dragged down. And I wanted the song to kind of sound that same way or at least push it more towards the uplift, even if that\'s not fully the sentiment.” **Jason** “That song is very much a document of something that happened. It\'s not an idea, it’s a story. Sometimes you connect with someone in a way that neither of you were expecting or even want to connect on that level. And then it doesn\'t really make sense, but you’re able to give each other something that the other person needs. And so there was this story at a time in my life where I was very selfish. I was very wild and reckless, but I found someone that needed me to be tender and almost motherly to them. Even if it\'s just for a night. And it was really kind of bizarre and strange and surreal, too. And also very fueled by fantasy and drinking. It\'s just, it\'s a weird therapeutic event. And then in the morning all of that is just completely gone and everybody\'s back to how they were and their whole bundle of shit that they\'re dealing with all the time and it\'s like it never happened.” **Leave** “That song\'s about a permanent fantasy. There\'s a place I get to when I\'m writing that feels very dramatic, very magical. I feel like it can even almost feel dark-sided or supernatural, but it\'s fleeting, and sometimes I wish I could just stay there even though it\'s nonsense. I can\'t stay in my dark, weird piano room forever, but I can write a song about that happening to me, or a reminder. I love that this song then just goes into probably the poppiest, most upbeat song that I\'ve ever made directly after it. But those things are both equally me. I guess I\'m just trying to allow myself to go all the places that I instinctually want to go. Even if they feel like they don\'t complement each other or that they don\'t make sense. Because ultimately I feel like they do, and it\'s just something I told myself doesn\'t make sense or other people told me it doesn\'t make sense for a long time.” **On the Floor** “It started as just a very real song about a crush—which I\'ve never really written a song about—and it morphed into something a little darker. A crush can be capable of just taking you over and can turn into just full projection and just fully one-sided in your brain—you think it\'s about someone else, but it\'s really just something for your brain to wild out on. But if that\'s in tandem with being closeted or the person that you like that\'s somehow being wrong or not allowed, how that can also feel very like poisonous and confusing. Because it\'s very joyous and full of love, but also dark and wrong, and how those just constantly slam against each other. I also wanted to write a song that sounded like Cyndi Lauper or these pop songs, like, really angsty teenager pop songs that I grew up listening to that were really helpful to me. Just a vibe that\'s so clear from the start and sustained and that every time you hear it you instantly go back there for your whole life, you know?” **Your Body Changes Everything** “I wrote ‘Your Body Changes Everything’ about the idea of not bringing prescribed rules into connection—physical, emotional, long-term, short-term—having each of those be guided by instinct and feel, and allowed to shift and change whenever it needed to. I think of it as a circle: how you can be dominant and passive within a couple of seconds or at the exact same time, and you’re given room to do that and you’re giving room to someone else to do that. I like that dynamic, and that can translate into a lot of different things—into dance or sex or just intimacy in general. A lot of times, I feel like I’m supposed to pick one thing—one emotion, one way of being. But sometimes, I’m two contradicting things at once. Sometimes, it seems easier to pick one, even if it’s the worse one, just because it’s easier to understand. But it’s not for me.” **Moonbend** “That\'s a very physical song to me. It\'s very much about bodies, but in a sort of witchy way. This will sound really pretentious, but I wasn\'t trying to write a chorus or like make it like a sing-along song, I was just following a wave. So that whole song feels like a spell to me—like a body spell. I\'m not super sacred about the way things sound, but I can be really sacred about the vibe of it. And I feel like somehow we all clicked in to that energy, even though it felt really personal and almost impossible to explain, but without having to, everybody sort of fell into it. The whole thing was really satisfying in a way that nobody really had to talk about. It just happened.” **Just a Touch** “That song is like something I could give to somebody to take with them, to remember being with me when we couldn\'t be with each other. Part of it\'s personal and part of it I wasn\'t even imagining myself in that scenario. It kind of starts with me and then turns into something, like a fiction in a way. I wanted it to be heavy and almost narcotic, but still like honey on the body or something. I don\'t want that situation to be hot—the story itself and the idea that you can only be with somebody for a brief amount of time and then they have to leave. You don\'t want anybody that you want to be with to go. But sometimes it\'s hot when they\'re gone. It’s hard to be fully with somebody when they\'re there. I take people for granted when they\'re there, and I’m much less likely to when they\'re gone. I think everybody is like that, but I might take it to another level sometimes.” **Nothing at All** “There\'s just some energetic thing where you just feel like the circle is there: You are giving and receiving or taking, and without having to say anything. But that song, ultimately, is about just being so ready for someone that whatever they give you is okay. They could tell you something really fucked up and you\'re just so ready for them that it just rolls off you. It\'s like we can make this huge dramatic, passionate thing, but if it\'s really all bullshit, that\'s totally fine with me too. I guess because I just needed a big feeling. I don\'t care in the end if it\'s empty.” **One More Try** “When I wrote my last record, I felt very wild and the music felt wild and the way that I was writing felt very unhinged. But I didn\'t feel that way. And with this record I actually do feel it a little, but the music that I\'m writing is a lot more mature and considered. And there\'s something just really, really helpful about that. And that song is about a feeling that could feel really overwhelming, but it\'s written in a way that feels very patient and kind.” **Some Dream** “I think I feel very detached a lot of the time—very internal and thinking about whatever bullshit feels really important to me, and there\'s not a lot of room for other people sometimes. And then I can go into just really embarrassing shame. So it\'s about that idea, that feeling like there\'s no room for anybody. Sometimes I always think that I\'m going to get around to loving everybody the way that they deserve. I\'m going to get around to being present and grateful. I\'m going to get around to all of that eventually, but sometimes I get worried that when I actually pick my head up, all those things will be gone. Or people won\'t be willing to wait around for me. But at the same time that I feel like that\'s how I make all my music is by being like that. So it can be really confusing. Some of that is sad, some of that\'s embarrassing, some of that\'s dramatic, some of it\'s stupid. There’s an arc.” **Borrowed Light** “Probably my favorite song on the record. I think just because I can\'t hear it without having a really big emotional reaction to it, and that\'s not the case with a lot of my own songs. I hate being so heavy all the time. I’m very serious about writing music and I think of it as this spiritual thing, almost like I\'m channeling something. I’m very proud of it and very sacred about it. But the flip side of that is that I feel like I could\'ve just made that all up. Like it\'s all bullshit and maybe things are just happening and I wasn\'t anywhere before, or I mean I\'m not going to go anywhere after this. This song\'s about what if all this magic I think that I\'m doing is bullshit. Even if I feel like that, I want to be around people or have someone there or just be real about it. The song is a safe way—or a beautiful way—for me to talk about that flip side.”

AN IMPRESSION OF PERFUME GENIUS’ SET MY HEART ON FIRE IMMEDIATELY By Ocean Vuong Can disruption be beautiful? Can it, through new ways of embodying joy and power, become a way of thinking and living in a world burning at the edges? Hearing Perfume Genius, one realizes that the answer is not only yes—but that it arrived years ago, when Mike Hadreas, at age 26, decided to take his life and art in to his own hands, his own mouth. In doing so, he recast what we understand as music into a weather of feeling and thinking, one where the body (queer, healing, troubled, wounded, possible and gorgeous) sings itself into its future. When listening to Perfume Genius, a powerful joy courses through me because I know the context of its arrival—the costs are right there in the lyrics, in the velvet and smoky bass and synth that verge on synesthesia, the scores at times a violet and tender heat in the ear. That the songs are made resonant through the body’s triumph is a truth this album makes palpable. As a queer artist, this truth nourishes me, inspires me anew. This is music to both fight and make love to. To be shattered and whole with. If sound is, after all, a negotiation/disruption of time, then in the soft storm of Set My Heart On Fire Immediately, the future is here. Because it was always here. Welcome home.

Where do you go after making an album that the Guardian hailed as “a rich, ambitious triumph”, American Songwriter called “a strikingly original, complex and inspired work”, MOJO described as “a record you could lose yourself in for months”, and Billboard as a “most magnificent recording, one that is mandatory listening if you are in search of an immersive album rock experience in the 21st century”? It's a question Jonathan Wilson asked himself after his “maximalist” album Rare Birds was released in 2018 to glowing reviews. Not only did it earn him Album of the Year awards in Rolling Stone, France and Blitz in Portugal, it brought him his first national television appearances in the US, on Conan and CBS Saturday Morning. Rare Birds had been the culmination of three solo albums in seven years that the singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer released to widespread acclaim. His first, 2011's Gentle Spirit, a beautiful California dream of an album, is a classic by now and won him the admiration and friendship of Graham Nash, David Crosby, Elvis Costello and Jackson Browne. His follow-up, Fanfare, was also well-received with Uncut calling it “a lavish musical epic, the work of a dedicated and stone cold studioholic.” But now Wilson was looking for something completely new. In 2019 he appeared on the celebrated nationally-syndicated live music radio show eTown. “It was sort of bluegrass-based”, Wilson says, “and on this particular show I was playing with Steve Earle. Next thing you know, I'm talking with Steve about recording.” Earle advised Wilson that, if he had a bunch of songs written, he ought to take them to Nashville and make the record blind, since Nashville's crawling with studios and top-notch session players. “And that's how I got into the idea of going to Nashville and tapping into that sound,” says Wilson. “The sound of my home.” Wilson was born in a small town in North Carolina. As a child he was raised on a mix of Beatles, 60’s and 70’s rock, country, and bluegrass. His uncle played in bluegrass legend Bill Monroe's band. His father had a rock band, but he would often jam with local friends who could “moonlight on banjo and mandolin and do gospel harmonies that would knock you out. I would sit there and strum along,” says Wilson, “There’s this astute southern rhythm and musicality in western NC… Then there’s this crazy three finger banjo style that you have to be really good at it because you’re from the place where Earl Scruggs is from. One of my father’s best pals was the music director at the Caroleean gospel church where my grandfather was a preacher and on the side he could pick the shit out of a mandolin. So, I was exposed to something super-authentic that I was soaking up. In hindsight, it doesn’t get more authentic than that.” A musical prodigy himself, Wilson wrote his first song at three. He was also a musical polymath, playing drums, horns, woodwind, piano and guitar. He joined an R&B band at 14; left high school to study jazz with some old masters, and joined a rock band, Muscadine. He also became a noted luthier and a record producer. Among the artists he has produced albums for are Father John Misty, American band Dawes, British folk legend Roy Harper and Conor Oberst. In 2017-18 Rogers Waters asked Wilson to join him on his US+THEM tour on guitar and as musical director. Wilson also sang all the David Gilmour vocal parts. On that two-year tour, Wilson would sometimes find himself thinking about his Southern home. “Stuck out there in a hotel in Latvia, it's a long way from anything that feels like home or family. I felt I was subconsciously being led back to my roots.” In the new song '69 Corvette' he sings, I still think of Carolina sometimes. I miss the family. I miss that feeling. I miss home. Those feelings were still fresh in his mind during that conversation with Steve Earle. Making his next album live in the studio with a Nashville band, instead of building them alone, piece by piece in his L.A studio, seemed like a good way to go back while simultaneously moving forward. An example of that is Wilson's new take on “Korean Tea”, an old song he had done with his ‘90’s band Muscadine. “That is a song about having a shining musical gift to share with the world. My brother says that’s one of the prettiest melodies I’ve written, so I decided to bring it back into the world”. “Heaven Making Love” is a song Wilson wrote for Rare Birds but abandoned; “I tried but I could never really get it, it had that locomotive polka thing sorta so I guess it was waiting for an album like this to join!” With Wilson's longtime friend Pat Sansone of Wilco producing, Wilson and the band recorded in Studio A at the Sound Emporium, the late country maverick Cowboy Jack Clement's studio. The musicians included Nashville’s premier session players including bass player Dennis Crouch, Russ Pahl on pedal steel, multi-instrumentalist Jim Hoke, and world renowned Fiddle master Mark O’Connor. “I was thinking about fiddle as being an integral part of the record, and I needed to find the best. In my mind the best of the best was Mark O'Connor. So I decided to reach out to him. I said, ‘Hey man, I'm doing a session, would you like to come down and play fiddle?’ and he's like, ‘Thank you, but I haven't done a session since 1990.’ So, he didn't say no and he didn't say yes! Over time, he eventually said, ‘Maybe, but my only stipulation is it's got to be with the band, no overdubs. That's what drove me out of the session business.’ That was a big deal to all of us. Mark truly elevates the record and he shines as the most brilliant fiddler on Earth, I thank him for his beautiful melodies on this album.” Working with this Nashville band gave Wilson the same kind of feeling he had as a kid, strumming along with those bluegrass bands. “There's something about this level of musicianship, they've been in so many sessions. It was fun to play some of the more stoner Canyon-ey tunes for this crack session band and watch them write up their special Nashville charts with their numbers, symbols and diamonds… they call it ‘hillbilly arithmetic’ over there…. The album was cut in only six days. “It was so fast it was a blur.” Hence the title, Dixie Blur. “And there really is a magic that occurs when musicians play together in a room and create that one consistent thing in time, something is created by the collective energy that is impossible to recreate otherwise,” says Wilson. “It feels like another side, you know? Sort of like a personal, unplugged, just got off the road feeling. I think it's the most down to earth and emotional both musically and lyrically that I've ever been.”

By the time Declan McKenna finished touring his first album *What Do You Think About the Car?*, there was nothing left in the tank. “We did this really long tour in America,” the North London singer-songwriter tells Apple Music. “And it pretty much put me and my whole band in therapy. We’d been working so hard for so long.” McKenna’s 2017 debut revealed a songwriter who, on tracks such as “Brazil” and “Paracetamol,” could fuse complex, topical issues with easygoing indie-pop. But as he began to write the follow-up, he found himself reflecting on matters closer to home. “I feel like I was talking about the stuff I’d learned about myself,” he says. “The stuff that I struggle with, the stuff that I do that can negatively impact me, the patterns of behavior you get into where you let yourself down.” The resultant record, *Zeros*, is a reflection of the scope and imagination of its creator. It is bombastic (the careening classic rock of opener “You Better Believe!!!” and Bowie-style balladeering of “Be an Astronaut”) while feeling confessional; expansive (the ’70s-style stomp of “Twice Your Size”) but still tethered to the ground. Recorded in Nashville with producer Jay Joyce (Carrie Underwood, Little Big Town), these songs take in themes of space, the future, the environment, and the dread of modern life and document how McKenna found his way out of the abyss. “The story of the record is this young character becoming lost in the world, seeing people falling into dark corners,” he says. “In a way, it’s a dramatized version of what I was going through at the time. I did start beginning to feel lost, but also this sense of discovery helped me to understand it all.” All aboard Starship McKenna for a journey through *Zeros*, his cosmic odyssey. **You Better Believe!!!** “I wrote this and I was like, ‘I want it to be the start of the album.’ It felt like it was describing a world. I had a vague idea of a few different concepts and ideas I was thinking about. I was reading *Homo Deus*, the book by Yuval Noah Harari, and there was a lot of ideas of the future and stuff that I\'d been thinking about. I just thought it kind of thrust you into this world. It’s this damaging world; it\'s foreboding in a sense, where it\'s like you\'re going to get yourself killed. It is the start of someone being pushed away, and I think that is the story of the album. I wrote it with my friend Jake Passmore. He came up with the line ‘Fastest gun in the solar system,’ which is one of my favorite lines on the record.” **Be an Astronaut** “This was when I was really deep into making things as big and extended as they could be. I was obsessed with *The Age of Adz* by Sufjan Stevens, where it\'s just these huge songs. I also knew this would be the second song on the album. After that thrust in, it\'s this throwback and it\'s recalling something, recalling thoughts of a childhood, thoughts of growing up and experiencing hardships and experiencing grief. It became quite central to giving the album its spaciness, or at least an aspiration to go to space. I think the album maybe exists in a world not far from our own, but definitely dreams of something bigger. And I think that the whole thing in ‘Be an Astronaut’ is that dreams can be damaging and can often be unattainable, and I think that\'s the thing.” **The Key to Life on Earth** “I came up with this when I was on the train. I was on the way back from Hertfordshire, where I\'m from and where my family is, and getting the train into Finsbury Park, London, where I lived at the time. When I was growing up, the juxtapositions between those places weren’t apparent, it was just life and normal, but now the conflict of ideas between working-class people or people living in suburban areas is amplified. Everyone thinks they know what is right, but really they just don\'t understand each other. I wrote two of the key melodies on a xylophone. I think that’s the first time that a xylophone has been used as a writing tool. It\'s weird playing an instrument that you\'re so not comfortable or used to playing—the first thing you play is often the best thing you\'ll even play on that instrument.” **Beautiful Faces** “I had to build this song around the chorus. I was living in West London—I lived there for two months while I was writing the album. I was writing with \[UK producer\] Max Marlow, and I got the melodies and the chorus together and then the verses took so, so long. I was writing about spending an awful lot of time on my phone and thinking about the futuristic stuff I\'d been reading about—where social media, technology is going and the future of inequality, how technology is going to impact that. It\'s kind of this weird Big Brother thing, the feeling of being watched. I didn\'t really finish writing the verses until I was in the studio, and I had a verse that was actually loads better than the one that\'s in the actual song, but it didn\'t serve the chorus. I\'ll probably use that for a different song.” **Daniel, You’re Still a Child** “I think of it in a similar vein to ‘The Key to Life on Earth.’ I think it\'s fairly simple in that it tells the story of the album—someone being pushed away and someone becoming lost or being thought to be something they\'re not. It ties into the stuff that I felt like I was observing all around the world. People being misunderstood, people becoming flat-earthers, or anti-vaxxers, or anti-maskers. Just people finding a dark corner for themselves, but oftentimes being pushed into it. I guess this is understanding what\'s behind the human being and what is behind their actions.” **Emily** “‘Emily’ is like a letter or a conversation. It was one of those strange moments where I literally sat down and knew what I wanted to do. I listened to a lot of Fleetwood Mac and wanted to do a Lindsey Buckingham-style guitar part, something really muted and acoustic and but very simple. I think the character of Emily represents the toxicity on a personal level—where it\'s not the big world anymore, it\'s actually quite direct.” **Twice Your Size** “This is an environmentalist jam. I talk directly about this quite grim end-of-days thing, where it\'s this stuff melting and turning to dust, and all of that imagery was based around setting the tone for the end of the world. At one point, I thought I was writing an album for each way the world could end, like each song would be a way the world could end. And the last few songs are that, so ‘Twice Your Size’ seems to be some kind of environmental collapse, or like the sun has gotten too big and everyone\'s trying to get off Earth. It also represents the way that discourse happens now. Like, it only means half as much when you say it twice, and that relates to so many things right now, where whoever\'s talking the loudest gets heard, but it doesn\'t mean as much if you keep repeating yourself.” **Rapture** “This was one I sat down and wrote very quickly. It leads in from that end-of-days thing, and it\'s a bit more direct than ‘Twice Your Size.’ It\'s a similar vein, but a bit more scary, but also more danceable. It’s talking about fear of the future, because it\'s this torment and being told that stuff isn\'t real by some and that\'s it\'s an ever-present threat by others, and it\'s like the rapture\'s in your head. It\'s both this dread for the future but also this personal torment and personal struggle. It all ties in, all the stresses of going through all of this stuff and worrying so much about it.” **Sagittarius A\*** “I\'d just read that Sagittarius A\* was the name of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, so it\'s like this big massive thing that\'s just pulling everything in and downward. And unless some other crazy shit in the universe happens, it\'s inevitable that one day we\'re going to be sucked into it. I guess the simplest way of describing it is like, ‘I\'m Sagittarius, I\'m a star, I am this thing that is going to pull you all down with me.’ I was seeing a lot of people in very powerful positions ignore the concerns of people who were in much less powerful positions, worried about the environment and worried about injustices and worried about things, and it\'s just almost like, ‘I am bigger than the world, even though we are limited to our resources and we know we\'re limited to our world. I don\'t care, and I\'m going to pull you down with me.’” **Eventually, Darling** “I guess, in a way, this is the song that sparked the album. I wrote it not long after I released the first album. Even though I didn\'t really have a concept at that point, there were certain things that were once normal becoming lost, and certain things changing so much. The song itself is this big transition, and it made sense once I\'d recorded the album to fit on the end, because the story ends up at loss. That was the simplest thing I was talking about, that change can be brutal, and it fits into the narrative of the album. It\'s just a very simple idea that life is always changing and the modern world is changing at a faster rate than we can keep up with. All of that change was really, really affecting me. My life was changing, and in some ways it was better, some ways it was worse. It\'s complicated, I guess. That\'s why you write songs about things, because they are complicated and you\'re trying to kind of make sense of them.”

“I have such a personal connection to dance music,” Georgia Barnes tells Apple Music. “I grew up around the UK rave scene, being taken to the raves with my mum and dad \[Leftfield’s Neil Barnes\] because they couldn’t afford childcare. I\'d witness thousands of people dancing to a pulsating beat and I always found it fascinating, so I\'m returning to my roots. The story of dance music and house music is a familiar one—it helped my family, it gave us a roof over our heads.” Five years on from her self-titled debut, the Londoner channels the grooves and good times of the Detroit, Chicago, and Berlin club scenes on the single “About Work the Dancefloor,” “The Thrill,” and “24 Hours.” Tender, twinkling tracks like “Ultimate Sailor” recall Kate Bush and Björk, while her love of punk, dub, and Depeche Mode come through on “Ray Guns,” “Feel It,” and “Never Let You Go.” “My first record was a bit of an experiment,” she explains. “Then I knew exactly what needed to be done—I just locked myself away in the studio and researched all the songs that I love. I also got fit, I stopped drinking, I became a vegan, so these songs are a real reflection of a personal journey I went on—a lot happened in those five years.” Join Georgia on a track-by-track tour of *Seeking Thrills*. **Started Out** “Without ‘Started Out’ this album would be a completely different story. It really did help me break into the radio world, and it was really an important song to kickstart the campaign. Everything you\'re hearing I\'ve played: It\'s all analog synthesizers and programmed drum machines. We set the studio up like Frankie Knuckles or Marshall Jefferson did, so it’s got a real authenticity to it, which was important to me. I didn\'t just want to take the sounds and modernize them, I wanted to use the gear that they were using.” **About Work the Dancefloor** “During the making of this track I was very heavily listening to early techno music, so I wanted to create a song that just had that driving bassline and beat to it. And then I came up with that chorus, and I wanted it to be on a vocoder to have that real techno sound. Not many pop songs have a vocoder as the chorus—I think the only one is probably Beastie Boys’ ‘Intergalactic.’” **Never Let You Go** “I thought it\'d be really cool to have a punky electronic song on the record. So, ‘Never Let You Go’ started as this punk, garage-rock song, but it just sounded like it was for a different album. So then I wrote the chorus, which gave it this bit more pop direction. During the making of this record I was really disciplined, I wasn\'t drinking, I was on this very strict routine of working during the day and then finishing and having a good night’s sleep, so I think some of the songs have these elements of longing for something. I also liked the way Kate Bush wrote: Her lyrics were inspired by the elements, and I wanted to write about the sky like she did. It just all kind of came into one on that song.” **24 Hours** “This was written after I spent 24 hours in the Berghain club in Berlin. It was a life-changing experience. I was sober and observing all these amazing characters and having this kind of epiphany. I saw this guy and this girl notice each other on the floor, just find each other—they clearly didn\'t know each other before. They were dancing together and it was so beautiful. People do that even in an age where most people find each other on dating apps. That\'s where I got the line ‘If two hearts ever beat the same/We can beat it.’” **Mellow (feat. Shygirl)** “I wasn\'t drinking, but I\'ve had my fair share of doing crazy stuff. I wrote this song because I really wanted to go out and seek my hedonistic side. I wanted another female voice on it, and I heard Shygirl’s \[London singer and DJ Blane Muise\] music and really liked it. She understood the type of vibe I was going for because she likes to drink and she likes to go out with her girls. I didn\'t want many collaborations on the record, I just wanted that one moment in this song.” **Till I Own It** “I\'ve got a real emotional connection to this song. I was listening a lot to The Blue Nile, the Glaswegian band, who were quite ethereal and slow. I was interested in adding a song that was a bit more serious and emotive—so I wrote this because I just had this feeling of alienation in London at the time. Also, during the making of this record Brexit happened, so I wrote this song to reflect the changing landscape.” **I Can’t Wait** “‘I Can’t Wait’ is about the thrill of falling in love and that feeling that you get from starting something new. I was listening to a lot of reggae and dub and I\'d wanted to kind of create a rhythm with synthesizers that was almost like ragga. But this is definitely a pop record—and quite a sweet three-minute pop song.” **Feel It** “This was one of the first songs that I recorded for the second record. It’s got that kind of angry idea of punk singers. There are a couple of moments on this record where I was definitely listening to John Lydon and Public Image Ltd., and it\'s also an important song because I felt like it empowers the listener. I wanted people to listen to these songs and do something in their lives that is different, or to go and experience the dance floor. I think \'Feel It\' does that.” **Ultimate Sailor** “‘Ultimate Sailor’ was something that just came along unexpectedly. I really wanted to create a song that just put the listener somewhere. All the elemental things really inspired this record: skies, seas, mountains, pyramids. I think that is one of the things that\'s rubbed off on me from Kate Bush. She’s the artist that I play most in the studio.” **Ray Guns** “I had a concept before I wrote this song about an army of women shooting these rays of light out of these guns, creating love in the sky to influence the whole world. It\'s about collective energy again. I was influenced by all the Chicago house and Detroit techno, and how bravery came from this new explosive scene. And \'Ray Guns\' was meant to try and instill a sense of that power to the listener.” **The Thrill (feat. Maurice)** “At this point I was so influenced by Chicago house and just feeling like I wanted to create a song in homage to it. I wanted a song that took you on a journey to this Chicago house party, and then you have these vocals that induce this kind of trip. Maurice is actually me—it’s an alter ego! That\'s just my voice pitched down! I thought, ‘I’m going to fuck with people and put \'featuring Maurice.’” **Honey Dripping Sky** “I love the way Frank Ocean has the balls to just put two songs together and then take the listener on a journey. This song has a quite dub section at the end, and it\'s about the kind of journey that you go through on a breakup, so it’s really personal. It’s also quite an unusual track, and I wanted to end the album on a thrilling feeling. It\'s a statement to end on a song like that.”

Owen Pallett’s first album in six years opens with a series of deep, desolate piano chords in slow succession—a foghorn-like effect that signals arrival ashore at some mysterious new destination. But in this case, it’s a new destination in a familiar setting: *Island* finds the Montreal-based avant indie pop composer returning to Spectrum, the fictional 14th-century universe in which they set their 2010 concept album *Heartland*. That record centered around the character of Lewis, a farmer in conflict with his god—who just happened to be named Owen Pallett and who met a violent end by Lewis’ hand at the record’s conclusion…or did they? *Island* doesn’t just survey the aftermath of that fateful duel; its narrative actually begins at the same moment the previous one ends. However, as was the case with *Heartland*, all of this fantastical world-building is really just an elaborate way for Pallett to analyze their own real-life experiences. “Lewis is meant to both represent people that I see outside of myself, as well as a part of myself that I don\'t always see,” Pallett tells Apple Music. “With *Island*, however, Lewis is more representative of an instinctive, subconscious side of myself that I only really become acquainted with when I\'m blind drunk.” True to that duality, *Island* represents a hybrid of two dramatically different approaches. Though known primarily as a violinist, Pallett wrote much of the record on acoustic guitar in anticipation of translating it into an orchestral work. But the end result hovers somewhere in between those two poles: Conceived as a single continuous piece, *Island* gradually mutates from peaceful, pastoral folk to percussive, symphonic clamor to reflect the increasingly fraught circumstances of Lewis’ new journey, and his inability to escape the specter of his maker. Or as Pallett puts it, “We have this record that begins like it could just be a sequel to \[Nick Drake’s\] *Pink Moon*, and instead it kind of descends into something much more in line with Scott Walker\'s *The Drift*.” Here’s Pallett’s song-by-song guide to help you navigate his brave new world. **- - -> (i)/Transformer** “Initially, my concept for *Island* was that it was going to be 80 minutes of orchestral music. Those opening chords that you hear on the piano were literally recorded on my iPhone. I had originally wanted the album to begin with gongs and faraway horn fanfares that were playing essentially what the piano is playing. But when I was circulating the album, people were really gravitating much more towards the original demo version of the record. So what I ended up doing is hybridizing the two: The record begins very much like contemplative solo exploration, and then the orchestra becomes more and more intrusive as the record goes on. But it starts in more of a demo mode. The piano chords are meant to have a funereal quality. *Heartland* ended somewhat abruptly with Owen\'s death, so this is almost like a funeral moment. And \'Transformer\' is about starting with a clean slate. I\'ve left it ambiguous as to whether the song is Owen viewing Lewis floating away or whether it\'s sung from Lewis\' perspective as he floats away. But it\'s about Lewis departing from this bloody scene of violence at the end of *Heartland* and arriving in a new place so he can start afresh…” **Paragon of Order** “...and Lewis\' version starting afresh is actually going to be just getting drunk and screwing around and getting depressed and hanging out by the ocean.” **- - -> (ii)/The Sound of Engines** “‘The Sound of Engines\' is meant to be reflective of Lewis feeling this perhaps misplaced sense of power—he feels like he\'s going to live longer than any of the children of his enemies, and that his \'body is stronger than collapsing buildings.\' That\'s a throwaway nod to Einstürzende Neubauten, by the way. So Lewis is getting drunk, getting in fights, and ending up in an ambulance and in the hospital. The origin of that song really came from a moment in 2009, before I had moved to Montreal. Me and a few friends had a yearly ritual of going to Montreal in the dead of winter and celebrating New Year\'s there. And I just remember a moment when we had all done some MDMA—me for the first time, actually—and I remember it being like minus-25 outside and feeling like the cold was energizing as opposed to oppressive. My coat was open, and I just felt like a million bucks and had that kind of hubristic feeling of \'I\'m on top of the world.\'” **Perseverance of the Saints** “This song is reflective of an experience that I have a great deal, probably two to three times a week, which is this feeling of waking up a little too early and being in this state of confusion. And my experience being in this situation is that, oftentimes, this is the time that the presence of a lover or a partner is most advantageous. The times I need the most comfort is after an anxious night of sleep.” **Polar Vortex** “Historically in literature, the concepts of insanity and madness are given certain associations—like the moon, for example, and the whole concept of lunatic and lunacy. But it\'s also seen as a very feminine kind of thing that\'s typically associated with hysterical women. This song is positing that the madness is actually in patriarchal structures—that the sources of stability are, in fact, actually the sources of madness. I\'m just throwing this theory out there—this is not a thesis that I live by. I\'m skeptical of all aspects of gender, not just masculinity! But this song is meant to be an investigation and an inversion of that concept.” **- - -> (iii)/A Bloody Morning** “This was by far the last song to be completed—I had finished every other song a good nine months before I finished this one, just from a lyrical perspective. I had been sitting on this track, I had orchestrated it, and I knew what the song was supposed to be about, but it was really hard for me to find a melody that fit. So it took a long time and a lot of experimentation and a lot of thrown-out verses. Greg Fox from Liturgy is on the drums, and there\'s just something magical about the way he plays straight eighth notes—I\'ve never heard something so in-time.” **Fire - Mare** “The whole concept of the fire mare came from the movie *Krull*. I actually never saw *Krull* as a kid, but we had the board game, and fire mares were a part of that board game. The song is portraying a situation where Lewis, having caused the nautical disaster that occurs in \'A Bloody Morning,\' is now in jail and trying to contemplate having so quickly gone from being the hero of *Heartland* to being now somebody who is imprisoned and trying to adjust to that. And the interesting thing about this song is the way the voices diverge shortly after Lewis calls out Owen\'s name, as if there\'s two people singing the album instead of just the one. I\'m a big fan of having songs where suddenly there\'s just two vocals going on that are unrelated to each other. \'Father Lucifer\' from Tori Amos’ *Boys for Pele* was a real formative influence in this regard.” **Lewis Gets Fucked Into Space** “Some of these songs were written before I knew this was going to be a Lewis narrative and then got revised, and this was one of them. I had this idea of wanting to commemorate a particularly memorable sexual experience, and I think the title came after the song was written—I was like, \'Ha ha, \"Lewis Gets Fucked Into Space,\" what a fun title.’ But then it became the crux of the narrative of this entire album. Lewis is first hated by the community, and then imprisoned by the community, and now he’s removed from his jail cell and thrown up into space—like, the most ultimate exile you can ever imagine.” **- - -> (iv)/In Darkness** “Here, Lewis is trying to make sense of the events of this record and where it\'s left him, and trying to parse out some lessons from all this. And the two lessons are: Self-destruction is not an adequate way of finding forgiveness from your peers, and secondly, you don\'t always need to be acting in ways that are just strictly meant to be achieving your base desires. It\'s kind of a dreary song—it works really nicely when you\'re laying in bed with headphones on contemplating the meaninglessness of your existence.”

In the FBI file on the American rock ‘n’ roll band Algiers—which given their prior penchant for repping the Black Panthers, Malcolm X, Angela Davis, and Afeni Shakur, among others, surely exists—under the subheading for their third album, There is No Year, the intelligence should soon read: all prior analytics appear outdated… this undoes everything we thought we knew about their intentions…what hides inside them… as if they are mutating live on camera, between frames… Indeed, even those aware of the ideals of this outspoken four-piece will find their latest direction traversing unprecedented ground. Coming off two years of nonstop world-touring for their critically acclaimed second album, The Underside of Power—including Central and Eastern Europe, the Baltic States and the Balkans, where they have established a rabid following; an extended stint opening for Depeche Mode in huge stadiums such as the 75,000-capacity Olympiastadion in Berlin; as well as Glastonbury 2019—There is No Year solidifies and expands upon the doom-laden soul of their foundation, toward an even more epic, genre-reformatting sound, one somehow suspended in the amber of “a different era,” as described by guitarist Lee Tesche. From the instant synth-pulse of the opening seconds of There is No Year, it’s clear that Algiers have set out to stake new ground, internally as much as sonically. At the forefront of this evolution is the centrality of power housed in Algiers’ multi-instrumentalist lead vocalist, Franklin James Fisher, whose voice and words provide the backbone of the album, his lyrics sourced entirely from an epic poem, “Misophonia,” composed during his search for meaning amidst a protracted personal period of anxiety and lack. “What I wanted to do is create a negative space wherein I can exist and engage but at the same time not be so exposed,” Fisher explains. He speaks of the record’s perspective as not only a political apparatus, but an intimate, responsive evocation of his understanding that “nothing is ever what you expect”, that what might seem for now to be well known or assured is not always so, that there is no safety net. The effect, as felt on the record, is undeniable: Fisher sounds like he is singing for his life—for all our lives, really—baring his soul while the walls disintegrate around us. The pool that he draws on is at once penetrating and exhilarating, wielding its anguish like a mirror at Medusa, full of hell. Whether he is lilting over post-Lynchian synth-whorl like a spot-lit bandleader, as on “Unoccupied,” or reincarnating the spirit of thrumming 80s R&B into a proto-no wave dancefloor classic straight from 2046, as on “Chaka,” there is a tangible emotional electricity to Fisher’s delivery, a personal valence that makes you want, more than anything, to believe, even while not quite knowing where we’re headed. No less next-level in Algiers’ conception is the ambition of the aural architecture they manage to summon. Under the direction of producers Randall Dunn [Sunn O))), Earth] and Ben Greenberg [Zs, Uniform (as featured on Twin Peaks season 3)], the same exciting duo who first teamed up on Jóhann Jóhannsson’s Mandy soundtrack in 2018, the clearly studied composition of this new horizon finds an outlet for turmoil via a fascinating synthesis of styles— There Is No Year encompasses future-minded post-punk R&B from the trapped heart of ATL, where they began; to industrial soundscapes à la 4AD-era Scott Walker or Iggy & Bowie’s Berlin period; to something like the synthetic son of Marvin Gaye and Fever Ray. The whip-tight rhythm section of Ryan Mahan and Matt Tong (ex-Bloc Party) moves back and forth from infectious menace to sci-fi soundtrack to big band fever dream, seamlessly syncing fresh continuity. Mahan’s beat programming and synth constructions fill out the fibrous threshold, while Tesche’s sound-sleeves and aural-layering shapeshift into a richly polished means of exploration, revealing more and more the deeper you delve. “This is the sowing / Of the whirlwind,” Fisher sings on “Repeating Night.” “Don’t forget it’s us against them.” There’s something more behind the curtain of our daily-headlined pain, the album’s title seems to suggest—something even larger at stake than rage, or even revolution; which is exactly what Algiers’ music appears to have resolved itself to channel, and to wield. Their essence on There is No Year is a statement of their defiance, their desire to feel and be human even beyond the necessary fight back, sprawling head-on into the burning wind of doubt and fear and all it’s claimed, arriving on the far side of calamity more alive than ever. - Blake Butler

"Farewell To All We Know" to be released on Ici d'ailleurs on March 27th There are records with empathy, records which are your friends and then there’s the others... There might be little difference between them, a certain «je ne sais quoi», an «almost nothing but still something» which makes the difference between almost pointless and vital records. Despite, or rather thanks to his cynical despair, Matt Elliott’s music never holds up a moralizing mirror to us - on the contrary, it creates a compassionate dialogue with listeners like the rhythm of two steps that synchronize to become as one. In 2016, Matt Elliott brought out his seventh solo album The Calm Before whose obscure title is neither exactly threatening nor comforting... the calm before what? Before the storm for sure but maybe also before the great record, the immediate classic we felt might be coming for a long time in the dual discography of the Bristol-born artist working under his own name and his electronic alias Third Eye Foundation. The elegant details and perspectives of Little Lost Soul (2000) already hinted at the upcoming masterpiece from the English singer-songwriter. The Mess We Made (2003) was Matt Elliott’s first solo album and portrayed a universe in a kind of flight towards Balkan horizons made up of visceral despair. With the Songs trilogy, he put aside the electronic side of his work to continue working with a minimalist, stark and lucid style of writing. The Broken Man (2012) was full of tears and long laments sometimes carried by Katia Labèque’s piano on a record which painted new shades of grey. On this record Matt began working with the producer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist David Chalmin (La Terre Invisible) who has kept on collaborating with the Bristol-born singer since then. Their partnership continued on Only Myocardial Infection Can Break Your Heart (2013) and The Calm Before (2016). Stéphane Grégoire is the head of the Ici D’Ailleurs label which has accompanied Matt Elliott since 2005 and perhaps he describes this album the best: «This new record by Matt is without a doubt his best album to date, a record that takes him into another dimension where he fully asserts himself as a songwriter and singer of the calibre of artists like Bill Callahan, Leonard Cohen or Johnny Cash.» Matt Elliott’s other records all seemed like empathic links between each other. Farewell To All We Know is an instant classic based on the sensitive piano and superb arrangements of David Chalmin, the sensitive cello of Gaspar Claus, the subtle bass of Jeff Hallam (who has also played with Dominique A and John Parish). There is a clear form of alchemy in all of this and still we find Matt Elliott’s usual atmospheres and scenery, the same Eastern European folk music, long songs that take time to settle over time. Everything is the same but also is transfigured. By making his music stark and purifying and redefining the subject matter, Matt Elliott’s work became so much more delicate. However this work is never frail nor really turned in on himself and thus becomes like a vital tune that vibrates and unfolds. The opening song Farewell To All We Know seems torn between the fear of what tomorrow may bring, inevitability and hope for the future in a permanent and progressive dramatic tension expressed by his Spanish guitar, the impressionist style piano and Matt’s voice teetering on the edge of whispers. A funereal tribute to endless twilights and the dawns we all dream of seeing. The haunted instrumental Guidance Is Internal harks back to the atmospheres of Howling Songs (2008) with its guitar parts full of scansions and muted threats. The music is transcendental but never seems afraid of the risk of falling. This is also what Bye Now tells us with its quasi-obsolete simplicity and sunburst melancholy reminiscent of the work of Luiz Bonfá, Bill Evans on Peace Piece or laidback crooners of the 50s. In Farewell To All We Know, Matt Elliott incessantly alternates between the dual desires to face up to the world or to protect himself from it. Hating The Player, Hating The Game is a lucid statement about the dullness of our daily lives sometimes, our right to get out of the game and no longer want to be part of it. Matt Elliott is tender but spares no one, particularly himself. Aboulia speaks of the tiredness of living and of looming death while Crisis Apparition says that there is always a time for reconstruction after chaos. This is like initially wearying wandering in the ruins of Aleppo with the slow dilution of the melody into a hallucinated drone. However the smell of great fires always fades and the earth always regenerates. Matt Elliott seems to suggest that the survival instinct is stronger than any cold winds could ever be. Matt Elliott never sings of certainties and prefers possibilities. Possibly the worst is over? Maybe... Maybe the storm has passed and devastated everything, now we just have to rebuild and live again. Farewell To All We Know shows us the distance that still needs to be walked and he walks next to you - right next to you, he is the friend who doesn’t spare you the truth like all true friends really do.

Stephen Bruner’s fourth album as Thundercat is shrouded in loss—of love, of control, of his friend Mac Miller, who Bruner exchanged I-love-yous with over the phone hours before Miller’s overdose in late 2018. Not that he’s wallowing. Like 2017’s *Drunk*—an album that helped transform the bassist/singer-songwriter from jazz-fusion weirdo into one of the vanguard voices in 21st-century black music—*It Is What It Is* is governed by an almost cosmic sense of humor, juxtaposing sophisticated Afro-jazz (“Innerstellar Love”) with deadpan R&B (“I may be covered in cat hair/But I still smell good/Baby, let me know, how do I look in my durag?”), abstractions about mortality (“Existential Dread”) with chiptune-style punk about how much he loves his friend Louis Cole. “Yeah, it’s been an interesting last couple of years,” he tells Apple Music with a sigh. “But there’s always room to be stupid.” What emerges from the whiplash is a sense that—as the title suggests—no matter how much we tend to label things as good or bad, happy or sad, the only thing they are is what they are. (That Bruner keeps good company probably helps: Like on *Drunk*, the guest list here is formidable, ranging from LA polymaths like Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Louis Cole, and coproducer Flying Lotus to Childish Gambino, Ty Dolla $ign, and former Slave singer Steve Arrington.) As for lessons learned, Bruner is Zen as he runs through each of the album’s tracks. “It’s just part of it,” he says. “It’s part of the story. That’s why the name of the album is what it is—\[Mac’s death\] made me put my life in perspective. I’m happy I’m still here.” **Lost in Space / Great Scott / 22-26** \"Me and \[keyboardist\] Scott Kinsey were just playing around a bit. I like the idea of something subtle for the intro—you know, introducing somebody to something. Giving people the sense that there’s a ride about to happen.\" **Innerstellar Love** \"So you go from being lost in space and then suddenly thrust into purpose. The feel is a bit of an homage to where I’ve come from with Kamasi \[Washington, who plays the saxophone\] and my brother \[drummer Ronald Bruner, Jr.\]: very jazz, very black—very interstellar.\" **I Love Louis Cole (feat. Louis Cole)** \"It’s quite simply stated: Louis Cole is, hands down, one of my favorite musicians. Not just as a performer, but as a songwriter and arranger. \[*Cole is a polymathic solo artist and multi-instrumentalist, as well as a member of the group KNOWER.*\] The last time we got to work together was on \[*Drunk*’s\] \'Bus in These Streets.\' He inspires me. He reminds me to keep doing better. I’m very grateful I get to hang out with a guy like Louis Cole. You know, just me punching a friend of his and falling asleep in his laundry basket.\" **Black Qualls (feat. Steve Lacy, Steve Arrington & Childish Gambino)** \"Steve Lacy titled this song. \'Qualls\' was just a different way of saying ‘walls.\' And black walls in the sense of what it means to be a young black male in America right now. A long time ago, black people weren’t even allowed to read. If you were caught reading, you’d get killed in front of your family. So growing up being black—we’re talking about a couple hundred years later—you learn to hide your wealth and knowledge. You put up these barriers, you protect yourself. It’s a reason you don’t necessarily feel okay—this baggage. It’s something to unlearn, at least in my opinion. But it also goes beyond just being black. It’s a people thing. There’s a lot of fearmongering out there. And it’s worse because of the internet. You gotta know who you are. It’s about this idea that it’s okay to be okay.\" **Miguel’s Happy Dance** \"Miguel Atwood-Ferguson plays keys on this record, and also worked on the string arrangement. Again, y’know, without getting too heavily into stuff, I had a rough couple of years. So you get Miguel’s happy dance.\" **How Sway** \"I like making music that’s a bit fast and challenging to play. So really, this is just that part of it—it’s like a little exercise.\" **Funny Thing** \"The love songs here are pretty self-explanatory. But I figure you’ve gotta be able to find the humor in stuff. You’ve gotta be able to laugh.\" **Overseas (feat. Zack Fox)** \"Brazil is the one place in the world I would move. São Paulo. I would just drink orange juice all day and play bass until I had nubs for fingers. So that’s number one. But man, you’ve also got Japan in there. Japan. And Russia! I mean, everything we know about the politics—it is what it is. But Russian people are awesome. They’re pretty crazy. But they’re awesome.\" **Dragonball Durag** \"The durag is the ultimate power move. Not like a superpower, but just—you know, it translates into the world. You’ve got people with durags, and you’ve got people without them. Personally, I always carry one. Man, you ever see that picture of David Beckham wearing a durag and shaking Prince Charles’ hand? Victoria’s looking like she wants to rip his pants off.\" **How I Feel** \"A song like \'How I Feel’—there’s not a lot of hidden meaning there \[*laughs*\]. It’s not like something really bad happened to me when I was watching *Care Bears* when I was six and I’m trying to cover it up in a song. But I did watch *Care Bears*.\" **King of the Hill** \"This is something I made with BADBADNOTGOOD. It came out a little while ago, on the Brainfeeder 10-year compilation. We kind of wrestled with whether or not it should go on the album, but in the end it felt right. You’re always trying to find space and time to collaborate with people, but you’re in one city, they’re in another, you’re moving around. Here, we finally got the opportunity to be in the same room together and we jumped at it. I try and be open to all kinds of collaboration, though. Magic is magic.\" **Unrequited Love** \"You know how relationships go: Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose \[*laughs*\]. But really, it’s not funny \[*more laughs*\]. Sometimes you—\[*laughing*\]—you get your heart broken.\" **Fair Chance (feat. Ty Dolla $ign & Lil B)** \"Me and Ty spend a lot of time together. Lil B was more of a reach, but we wanted to find a way to make it work, because some people, you know, you just resonate with. This is definitely the beginning of more between him and I. A starting point. But you know, to be honest it’s an unfortunate set of circumstances under which it comes. We were all very close to Mac \[Miller\]. It was a moment for all of us. We all became very aware of that closeness in that moment.\" **Existential Dread** \"You know, getting older \[*laughs*\].\" **It Is What It Is** \"That’s me in the middle, saying, ‘Hey, Mac.’ That’s me, getting a chance to say goodbye to my friend.\"

GRAMMYs 2021 Winner - Best Progressive R&B Album Thundercat has released his new album “It Is What It Is” on Brainfeeder Records. The album, produced by Flying Lotus and Thundercat, features musical contributions from Ty Dolla $ign, Childish Gambino, Lil B, Kamasi Washington, Steve Lacy, Steve Arrington, BADBADNOTGOOD, Louis Cole and Zack Fox. “It Is What It Is” has been nominated for a GRAMMY in the Best Progressive R&B Category and with Flying Lotus also receiving a nomination in the Producer of the Year (Non-Classical). “It Is What It Is” follows his game-changing third album “Drunk” (2017). That record completed his transition from virtuoso bassist to bonafide star and cemented his reputation as a unique voice that transcends genre. “This album is about love, loss, life and the ups and downs that come with that,” Bruner says about “It Is What It Is”. “It’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, but at different points in life you come across places that you don’t necessarily understand… some things just aren’t meant to be understood.” The tragic passing of his friend Mac Miller in September 2018 had a profound effect on Thundercat and the making of “It Is What It Is”. “Losing Mac was extremely difficult,” he explains. “I had to take that pain in and learn from it and grow from it. It sobered me up… it shook the ground for all of us in the artist community.” The unruly bounce of new single ‘Black Qualls’ is classic Thundercat, teaming up with Steve Lacy (The Internet) and Funk icon Steve Arrington (Slave). It’s another example of Stephen Lee Bruner’s desire to highlight the lineage of his music and pay his respects to the musicians who inspired him. Discovering Arrington’s output in his late teens, Bruner says he fell in love with his music immediately: “The tone of the bass, the way his stuff feels and moves, it resonated through my whole body.” ‘Black Qualls’ emerged from writing sessions with Lacy, whom Thundercat describes as “the physical incarnate of the Ohio Players in one person - he genuinely is a funky ass dude”. It references what it means to be a black American with a young mindset: “What it feels like to be in this position right now… the weird ins and outs, we’re talking about those feelings…” Thundercat revisits established partnerships with Kamasi Washington, Louis Cole, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Ronald Bruner Jr and Dennis Hamm on “It Is What Is Is” but there are new faces too: Childish Gambino, Steve Lacy, Steve Arrington, plus Ty Dolla $ign and Lil B on ‘Fair Chance’ - a song explicitly about his friend Mac Miller’s passing. The aptly titled ‘I Love Louis Cole’ is another standout - “Louis Cole is a brush of genius. He creates so purely,” says Thundercat. “He makes challenging music: harmony-wise, melody-wise and tempo-wise but still finds a way for it to be beautiful and palatable.” Elsewhere on the album, ‘Dragonball Durag’ exemplifies both Thundercat’s love of humour in music and indeed his passion for the cult Japanese animé. “I have a Dragon Ball tattoo… it runs everything. There is a saying that Dragon Ball runs life,” he explains. “The durag is a superpower, to turn your swag on. It does something… it changes you,” he says smiling. Thundercat’s music starts on his couch at home: “It’s just me, the bass and the computer”. Nevertheless, referring to the spiritual connection that he shares with his longtime writing and production partner Flying Lotus, Bruner describes his friend as “the other half of my brain”. “I wouldn’t be the artist I am if Lotus wasn’t there,” he says. “He taught me… he saw me as an artist and he encouraged it. No matter the life changes, that’s my partner. We are always thinking of pushing in different ways.” Comedy is an integral part of Thundercat’s personality. “If you can’t laugh at this stuff you might as well not be here,” he muses. He seems to be magnetically drawn to comedians from Zack Fox (with whom he collaborates regularly) to Dave Chappelle, Eric Andre and Hannibal Buress whom he counts as friends. “Every comedian wants to be a musician and every musician wants to be a comedian,” he says. “And every good musician is really funny, for the most part.” It’s the juxtaposition, or the meeting point, between the laughter and the pain that is striking listening to “It Is What It Is”: it really is all-encompassing. “The thing that really becomes a bit transcendent in the laugh is when it goes in between how you really feel,” Bruner says. “You’re hoping people understand it, but you don’t even understand how it’s so funny ‘cos it hurts sometimes.” Thundercat forms a cornerstone of the Brainfeeder label; he released “The Golden Age of Apocalypse” (2011), “Apocalypse” (2013), followed by EP “The Beyond / Where The Giants Roam” featuring the modern classic ‘Them Changes’. He was later “at the creative epicenter” (per Rolling Stone) of the 21st century’s most influential hip-hop album Kendrick Lamar’s “To Pimp A Butterfly”, where he won a Grammy for his collaboration on the track ‘These Walls’ before releasing his third album “Drunk” in 2017. In 2018 Thundercat and Flying Lotus composed an original score for an episode of Golden Globe and Emmy award winning TV series “Atlanta” (created and written by Donald Glover).

Is that a goddamn bouzouki? you may ask. A pedal steel guitar? What kind of Stephen Malkmus album is this, anyway? It’s called folk music, and it’s taking the country by storm. Stephen Malkmus is only the latest popular artist to apply this old new approach to their rock and roll sounds. Take the name Traditional Techniques with as much salt as you’d like or dig the Adorno reference, Malkmus’s third solo LP without the Jicks (or Pavement) is as organic as they come. It’s packed with handmade arrangements, modern folklore, and 10 songs written and performed in Malkmus’s singular voice. An adventurous new album in an instantly familiar mode, Traditional Techniques creates a serendipitous trilogy with the loose fuzz of the Jicks’ Sparkle Hard (Matador, 2018) and the solo bedroom experiments of Groove Denied (Matador, 2019). Taken together, these three very different full-lengths in three years highlight an ever-curious songwriter committed to finding untouched territory. Perhaps some of these “folk” musicians could take a lesson or two. Created in the spontaneous west coast style adopted so infectiously by young American musicians in this time of global turmoil, Malkmus took on Traditional Techniques as a kind of self-dare. Conceived while recording Sparkle Hard with the Jicks at Portland’s Halfling Studio, Malkmus had observed the variety of acoustic instruments available for use. The idea escalated within a matter of weeks into a full set of songs and shortly thereafter into a realized and fully committed album. When he returned to Halfling, Malkmus drew from a whole new musical palette–including a variety of Afghani instruments–to support an ache both quizzical and contemporary. Stephen Malkmus isn’t one of those “hung up” musicians one reads about so frequently these days, sequestered in a jungle room of the heart. The jukebox in Malkmus’s private grotto remains fully updated. Not only is the artist present, but he’s on Twitter. Traditional Techniques is new phase folk music for new phase folks, with Malkmus as attuned as ever to the rhythms of the ever-evolving lingual slipstream. Instead of roses, briars, and long black veils, prepare for owns, cracked emojis, and shadowbans. Centered around the songwriter’s 12-string acoustic guitar, and informed by a half-century of folk-rock reference points, Traditional Techniques is the product of Malkmus and Halfling engineer/arranger-in-residence Chris Funk (The Decemberists). Playing guitar is friend-to-all-heads Matt Sweeney (Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Chavez, and too many other to count), who’d previously crossed paths with Malkmus on the opposite end of the longhairs’ map of the world, most lately gnarling out together back east in the jam conglomerate Endless Boogie. But, buyer beware, no matter how these recordings might be tagged by your nearest algorithm, the expansive and thrilling folk-rock sounds of Traditional Techniques aren’t SM Unplugged. One might even question his commitment to acoustic instruments, but we’ll leave that for somebody else’s hot take. All we’re saying is watch your head. Because alongside all that gorgeous folk music (“The Greatest Own in Legal History,” “Cash Up”), there are also occasional bursts of flute-laced swagger (“Shadowbanned”), straight-up commune rock (“Xian Man”), and mind-bending fuzz in places you least expect it (“Brainwashed”). It’s hard to call Traditional Techniques “long awaited,” because Stephen Malkmus just put out an album last year, but it’s also exactly that. While he may have taken his sweet time in jumping on the folk music boom, surely there are those among us who have fantasized about how lovely it might sound if SM would just get with the times. And it sounds like all that and beyond. Set a day or two aside to transcribe the lyrics like the Dylanlogists of yore (though please keep your garbology to yourself) and vibe on the shape of folk to come with Stephen Malkmus. – Jesse Jarnow

One night in the mid-1970s, Neil Young invited some musician friends to join him at the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood for a small listening party. He had not one but two finished LPs to share: *Homegrown* and *Tonight’s the Night*, which, since it happened to be on the same reel, was simply an added bonus. But in hearing them back to back that evening, Young had a change of heart. Written in the wake of his relationship with actor Carrie Snodgress, *Homegrown* was so personal and intense that it frightened him. He chose to release *Tonight’s the Night* in June 1975 instead, leaving most of *Homegrown* to sit in his vault for nearly five decades, unheard—a lost classic he described to his father as “great songs I can live without.” Released now as part of his ongoing Archives project, *Homegrown* sounds like a troubled extension to the folk and country rock of 1972’s *Harvest*, the best-selling album that year. For a listener, it’s a thrilling juxtaposition: one of the decade’s brightest (and most enigmatic) stars at the height of his powers creatively, while also at his most vulnerable personally. Much of what’s here is previously unreleased—the crunchy title track and “Star of Bethlehem” appeared on side two of 1977’s *American Stars ’N Bars*, “Little Wing” on 1980’s *Hawks & Doves*—but all of it still feels cathartic, alive with regret. The album opens with a goodbye, “Separate Ways” speaking directly to Snodgress and making devastating reference to their son Zeke (“Sharin’ our little boy/Who grew from joy back then”) above a mournful tangle of acoustic guitar, pedal steel, and harmonica. “Vacancy” offers anger and “Try” glimmers of optimism as well as vocal contributions from Emmylou Harris. Recorded as an acoustic duet with The Band’s Robbie Robertson before a CSNY show at Wembley, “White Line” is a highlight that Young would electrify later on with Crazy Horse for 1990’s *Ragged Glory*. “You were my raft and I let you slide,” Young sings, his voice weary. “It seemed like a long, easy ride/I was adrift on a river of pride.”

It’s about self love, acceptance, living my most authentic life. It’s about the entire rainbow of emotions. And not wanting to be just one thing but finding beauty in all complexities of life. I wanted the record to feel intimate and sexy and deep under the skin. My favorite songs are songs i can listen to in bed.. waking up or falling asleep.. drowsy, in between 2 worlds. In between dreams and consciousness.. In between purpose and letting go. It’s about wanting to break the cycle of dysfunctional relationships and hope for a better future. But maybe it’s about much more !

« 𝗦𝗮𝘁𝗮𝗻 & 𝗘𝘃𝗲 » 𝗦𝗧𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗠𝗜𝗡𝗚 ♪ smarturl.it/satan.eve 𝐅𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐨𝐰 𝗗𝗔𝗠𝗜𝗘𝗡 ♡ linktr.ee/damien.officiel

Daniel Avery returns with his third full-length album, Love + Light, a surprise release out now via Phantasy worldwide and Phantasy/Mute in the United States and Canada on all digital platforms, with ethereal artwork taken from an image by Avery’s tour photographer Keffer. Love + Light arrives unexpectedly, following Avery’s recent collaborations with Alessandro Cortini on the critically acclaimed Illusion of Time LP (“a record that suggests Godspeed You! Black Emperor in drone mode, reimagining Music For Airports as if the runways were covered in gravel and air traffic control was on strike,” said Loud & Quiet, while Q hailed it “lush mood music to get lost in”) and alongside Roman Flügel under the alias of Noun. Avery’s previous solo album Song For Alpha was released in 2018 to similar acclaim. Avery shares, “This record has been a real positive force of energy in my life, to the point where it almost formed itself in front of me. In that same spirit, I wanted to share it with you now, as soon as it was finished. As I started to collect the pieces together, it was apparent that the album would be split into two distinct halves but halves that were inexorably tied together. One could not have existed without the other. Music has always been a source of personal strength for me yet I remain fascinated by the power it can possess of its own volition. Releasing the record in this way, just a couple of weeks after the final note had fallen, felt like a decision made by an outside force yet one I agreed with entirely. Stay safe, friends and I’ll see you on the other side soon. DA xxx”

After coming to prominence as the frontman of the Mercury Prize-winning Klaxons, recording with Arctic Monkeys, and crafting his Shock Machine project, James Righton is now set to release his debut solo album ‘The Performer’ on March 20th, 2020 via DEEWEE. ‘The Performer’ stands in stark contrast to the electro-hedonism of Righton’s work with Klaxons. Instead, it spins through various points from 1970 onwards. It touches on the suave art-lounge of Roxy Music, the jangly grooves of R.E.M., the sumptuous psychedelia of latter day Beach Boys, and the songwriting gift of Nick Lowe. In short, it uses classic elements as the groundwork for something which feels a natural fit for 2019. Visually, the project finds Righton playing up the role of ‘The Performer’ as depicted in the title track’s video. Filmed by Hugo Campan at DEEWEE, it’s a stylized take on perennial glamour – Righton’s charismatic performance matched by his classic white Gucci suit and an array of vintage equipment. It will also form the basis for the stage set for his upcoming shows in support of the album. It was recorded at a handful of locations, notably Righton’s home studio, Bryan Ferry’s Studio One. It was subsequently mixed by David and Stephen Dewaele at DEEWEE in Ghent, Belgium. Mixed at DEEWEE Art Direction : Ill-Studio Photography : Raffaele Cariou

Dreaming doesn’t come easy these shadowed days, which is why Strange To Explain by Woods is such a welcome turning of new colors.  It presents an extended moment of sweet reflection for the 15-year-old band, bouncing back to earth as something hopeful and weird and resolute. After quickly recording and releasing 2017’s Love Is Love in response to the tumultuous events of their (and our) 2016, Jeremy Earl and company took their time with the follow-up. Parenthood arrived, as did a short songwriting pause. The band went bicoastal when Jarvis Taveniere headed west. The result is an album that not only catches and holds and shares the light in yet another new way, but recognizes that there’s still light to be caught. A bend beyond the last bend beyond, Woods keep on changing, thoughtfully and beautifully. The colors were always there, like trees blossoming just slightly differently each season, a synesthetic message coded in slow-motion. Recorded in Stinson Beach, the California enclave where the government once tracked one of the largest LSD rings in the world only to be questioned by the neighbors as agents prowled the woods, on Strange To Explain, the familiar jangling guitars recede to the background. John Andrews’s warm keyboards and twining Mellotron rise around Earl’s songs and dance across the chord changes like warm sunlight off the Pacific. The music feels a karmic landmass away from the creepiness of the uncanny valley.  Just dig into “Can’t Get Out” or “Fell So Hard” and it’s easy to spot the affable hooks and fuzzed-out bass and third-eye winks and fun harmonies that Woods have produced reliably since way back ‘round 2004 (which, in the buzz-buzz world of psych-pop really is a grand achievement). But listen carefully, too, to the sound of our (and their) world in transition, the ambient humming of spring peepers behind “Where Do You Go When You Dream.” Especially sink into the intention-setting opening trio of songs, emerging from (and shimmering inside) an atmosphere that could only be made by musicians who’ve been working together for nearly 20 years, as Earl and Taveniere have. It’s hardly a secret language, but you try verbalizing it. Depending on where in the time-track one stands, it’s their 11th full length (not counting collaborations, split LPs, EPs, and singles), and the 99th release on Earl’s Woodsist label. By any standards, Strange To Explain is the work of a mature band, capable of both heavy atmospheric declarations like “Just To Fall Asleep” alongside extended-form pieces like the album-closing “Weekend Wind,” unfolding in layers of trumpet and vibraphone and ambient guitars and stereoscopic percussion. For contemporary heads, it can be nearly a full-time job to filter out all the bad energy being blasted through nearly all media channels from every conceivable direction. But not all media channels. The benevolent, Mellotron-dabbed dream-sounds of Strange To Explain constitute some of the more welcome transmissions on these shores in a Venusian minute. They’re sure to brighten any desert solarium, LED-lit pod, portable Bucky-dome, eco-fit Airstream, or whatever other cozy dwelling your time-mind is currently occupying. Jesse Jarnow

If it weren’t any more clear that The Lemon Twigs are loyal to classic-rock touchstones, then look no further than “Hell on Wheels,” the opening track to their third LP, where the Long Island, New York, duo of brothers Brian and Michael D’Addario manage to cram in Sparks’ rock-heavy pop, Jim Steinman-esque piano strut, and Bob Dylan vocal impersonations over a surging orchestral backdrop. Since they formed in 2015, the duo hasn’t been shy about tackling grand ideas and concepts; after all, they did write a rock opera about a chimpanzee raised by human parents (starring rock elder statesman Todd Rundgren as the father, no less) in 2018’s *Go to School*. But on *Songs for the General Public*, the brothers continue to revere ’70s power-pop songcraft with a theatrical bent—turning more inward as they come to realize that love and heartbreak go hand in hand. For every note-perfect guitar solo (“The One”), there are quirky, proggy touches of electric organ (“Only a Fool,” in which they keep things fun and upbeat as they shrug off romantic pursuits). On “Hog,” Brian cheekily laments the love he’s come to hate over a Badfinger-like power ballad: “Who is this hog? You once were an angel full of glitter/Now of shit.”

The legendary experimental pop outfit returns with a brand-new record entitled Figures, written, conceived and produced over the last couple of years by Marc Hollander (founder of Aksak Maboul and of the Crammed label) and Véronique Vincent (former singer with The Honeymoon Killers). Figures is a double album containing 22 tracks and interludes, resulting from the flow of creative ideas which arose after a gap of over thirty years (see the Aksak story overleaf). Drawing again from the multiple sources which have always inspired the band (from electronic music and pop to experimentation, jazz, minimalism, contemporary classical etc), Aksak Maboul transcends and reconfigures them with its inimitable style, to create an impressive, rich and unclassifiable piece of work. Seamlessly weaving electronic and acoustic instrumentation, improvisation and programming, songs, beats, found objects and sound collages, the album works as a labyrinth, full of secret passages and interconnections. Figures clocks in at 75 minutes, thus deliberately shunning the laws of instant gratification and the myth of today’s reduced attention span: the Aksak Maboul aficionados will surely be happy to engage in an immersive session of deep listening (in two halves), in order to enjoy the album’s many layers and details. Véronique Vincent & Marc Hollander wrote the album together, by following parallel courses with their own respective internal logic, while remaining closely connected. Enigmatic and finely chiseled, feeding on her love for painting and literature, Véronique’s texts form a dense fabric which mirrors the sonic kaleidoscope assembled by Marc, who wrote and arranged all the music (aside from a track co-written and sung by Véronique and Julien Gasc). Véronique also made the drawings and paintings which illustrate the cover and inserts. The two protagonists recorded most of the album in their own studio, with contributions by the young members of Aksak Maboul’s current live line-up: Faustine Hollander (bass, vocals, co-production), guitarist Lucien Fraipont and drummer Erik Heestermans. Also featured are performances by several friends and guests, including revered improvisor Fred Frith, Tuxedomoon’s Steven Brown, members of Aquaserge (Julien Gasc, Audrey Ginestet & Benjamin Glibert), former band members (including Michel Berckmans and Sebastiaan Van den Branden), and several others

Whether he\'s writing rock music, soul, country, classical, or any of his other myriad stylistic departures, Elvis Costello’s albums have always felt rigorous and focused. On *Hey Clockface*, his 31st album, he focuses on the loss of focus; these knotty songs express the unexpurgated thoughts of a man living through a pandemic of faith. Unsteadiness suffuses the lyrics and the music, which veers from rattling guitar rock to spoken-word pieces to a giddy offshoot of ragtime jazz. “At least the Emperor Nero had an ear for music,” Costello sings witheringly on “We Are All Cowards Now,” which compares our political leaders unfavorably to the man who fiddled while Rome burned. No songwriter has ever had a more enduring gift for jaundiced critiques of how power and lust twist our lives, and *Hey Clockface* lingers over virtuosic internal rhymes and disturbing images of modern vanity (“Freedom to be reckless/Freedom to plunder,” he sings on “Newspaper Pane”) without offering the satisfaction of catharsis. Like all clear-eyed realists, Costello isn’t here to offer false hope or restorative tonics.