Les Inrocks' Top 100 Albums of 2022

“You can’t come get this work until it’s dry. I made this album while the streets were closed during the pandemic. Made entirely with the greatest producers of all time—Pharrell and Ye. ONLY I can get the best out of these guys. ENJOY!!” —Pusha T, in an exclusive message provided to Apple Music

“I want to love unconditionally now.” Read on as Steve Lacy opens up about how he made his sophomore album in this exclusive artist statement. “Someone asked me if I felt pressure to make something that people might like. I felt a disconnect, my eyes squinted as I looked up. As I thought about the question, I realized that we always force a separation between the artist (me) and audience (people). But I am not separate. I am people, I just happen to be an artist. Once I understood this, the album felt very easy and fun to make. *Gemini Rights* is me getting closer to what makes me a part of all things, and that is: feelings. Feelings seem like the only real things sometimes. “I write about my anger, sadness, longing, confusion, happiness, horniness, anger, happiness, confusion, fear, etc., all out of love and all laughable, too. The biggest lesson I learned at the end of this album process was how small we make love. I want to love unconditionally now. I will make love bigger, not smaller. To me, *Gemini Rights* is a step in the right direction. I’m excited for you to have this album as your own as it is no longer mine. Peace.” —Steve Lacy

In the context of Nilüfer Yanya’s second album, the word “painless” has a few different meanings. “I was enjoying the process of making the record, and thinking, ‘Why do you have to beat yourself up in order to make something?’” the London singer/guitarist tells Apple Music. “Obviously, you have to work hard, but often the idea of really struggling is something that people inflict on others, just because it\'s the idea they sell to them, like, ‘Oh, you need to go through this.’” Yanya felt that she hadn\'t given herself enough time and space to make her 2019 debut, *Miss Universe*—a record based loosely, and playfully, around the concept of self-help and wellness, and what happens when you get too in your head about things. So, in the thick of the pandemic, she eased into making *PAINLESS*, writing the songs more collaboratively—mostly with producer Will Archer—than she had been used to. “I kind of felt a bit like, ‘Am I cheating?’ Because you\'re sharing the work, it feels lighter,” she says. \"But then because of that, I kind of delved in deeper and it got a bit darker.” (The album title actually comes from the “shameless” lyric “Until you fall, it\'s painless.”) Those depths can be felt both in Yanya\'s vocal dynamics and the sense of urgency that underpins much of the album, particularly on opener “the dealer” and “stabilise,” the first single. “I think the rhythm plays a big part in these songs,” Yanya says. “You feel like there needs to be an escape somewhere.” Here Yanya talks through *PAINLESS*, track by track. **“the dealer”** “It\'s like when someone\'s hiding behind their layers, or not being honest, but then also you\'re not being honest with yourself. My favorite lyric is \'I hope it\'s just the summertime you grew attached to,\' because it\'s like you\'re lying to yourself. You’re not saying, \'Oh, it was this person that made the difference, or it was this person that I miss.\' You\'re just saying, \'I had a great time,\' and you\'re not being honest about why.” **“L/R”** “\[Producer\] Bullion played me this beat, and it had this pitched drum in it. It just made me feel really happy and warm. It had this kind of marching feeling to it, which I really liked. It took us like a year to finish it, but the initial idea came really quickly. I like the almost spoken element to it, because it sounds like you\'re speaking rather than singing, but then the chorus is very much singing—and it took a while to get that right. It\'s kind of about so many things. In my notebook at the time, I\'d written, \'Do less things\'—like, less is more. That was my thinking behind the song: trying to enjoy simple things and not overcomplicate things.” **“shameless”** “It\'s a really intimate song. I felt like it was about someone that\'s trying to run away from stuff in their life, but they kind of don\'t have much hope. The vocals are very celestial—not something I really experimented with in the past. At first, I was going to kind of speak the words, but it needed a lighter touch, like something even more delicate.” **“stabilise”** “That was the first one me and Will did together. All the others kind of grew off that song. It\'s about environments and the way they impact you, and not being able to escape your environment, taking it with you wherever you go. And it kind of becomes your cage or the way you view things. You know when you\'ve been somewhere too long and then it\'s hard to imagine the world another way? Definitely a very lockdown song.” **“chase me”** “I really liked the line \'Through corridors your love will chase me,\' because it was like the safe feeling you can get when you know you are loved, but you don\'t necessarily want it. It\'s almost like an ego song for me. It\'s very confident.” **“midnight sun”** “I was digging into more of an overall feeling and a mood. I feel like it\'s a song about confidence and finding your own voice in order to speak up, whether that\'s about your own feelings or bigger issues: ‘I can\'t keep my mouth shut this time. I can\'t keep my head down. I\'m not going along with this anymore.’” **“trouble”** “That song is so sad—in a beautiful way, if I may say so. It also felt like quite a brave one for me because it\'s very different. When I was writing, I was like, \'Am I doing a straight-up pop song?\' It\'s not. I think it definitely has that take on it. The vocals needed to be more intimate. Like one voice, and it just all keeps spilling out. It\'s quite challenging to sing. ‘Trouble’ is one of those words—I think I heard it in a Cat Stevens song—\'Trouble, set me free\'—and I really loved the way it was being referred to almost like a person. In the lyrics here, it\'s something that\'s quite persistent and it\'s not going away. Something\'s definitely broken that you can\'t fix.” **“try”** “This one is about getting better, and feeling the need to connect on a deeper level, finding new depths and making new connections, but becoming confused, tired, and dejected with the effort it takes.” **“company”** “It\'s about giving up and you\'re not in a happy place. Originally it started out as, like, you\'re in a relationship that you are just really not sure about and you\'re trying to give signs across that you\'re trying to get rid of someone. But I think the song now is definitely about your inner demons, and they\'re not really going away.” **“belong with you”** “I did this with Jazzi Bobbi, who\'s in my band. She does more electronic stuff, so that definitely comes into play. I feel like builds are always my favorite things in songs, and at the beginning we actually tried to overcomplicate the song and there was like a whole other section and it changed tempo and it just wasn\'t working. And I was like, \'We just need to keep building and that\'s it.\' What it\'s about is like you\'re tied into something, but you know you\'re too good for it or you want to leave. I feel like these are all the songs, in a way. It’s like, escape—but you can\'t escape.” **“the mystic”** “It\'s about watching other people get on with their lives and feeling like you\'re being left behind. I spend a lot of time doing music, so that\'s where I put all my energy, and I was like, \'Oh, I thought we were all still doing that.\' Other people have got other plans and you\'re like, \'Oh, you\'re a grown-up. You\'re going to move in with your boyfriend,\' or, \'Oh, you can drive now.\' The verse is really sad, because it\'s about watching that happen, and feeling very insecure and unconfident.” **“anotherlife”** “For me, this has a completely different energy. It\'s kind of like you\'re admitting you\'re lost now, but in a parallel universe or in the future, you won\'t always be lost. It\'s not always bad to be in that kind of lost, super-emotional, flung-out state. I find sometimes when something bad happens and you get really upset, it\'s kind of— I don\'t want to say cleansing, but you see things with this new kind of brilliance and clarity. And that\'s kind of a beautiful moment.”

Nilüfer Yanya runs head first into the depths of emotional vulnerability on her anticipated sophomore record PAINLESS. Recorded between a basement studio in Stoke Newington and Riverfish Music in Penzance, the record is a more sonically direct effort, narrowing her previously broad palette to a handful of robust ideas. Yanya's debut album Miss Universe (2019) earned a Best New Music tag from Pitchfork and saw support tours with Sharon Van Etten, Mitski and The XX.

“I like that rock ’n’ roll is simple, that it’s 12 bars—the ineptitude of it,” Jason Pierce tells Apple Music. It’s a funny statement to hear from an artist notorious for spending years meticulously fine-tuning his records and hiring enough guest instrumentalists to fill a 747. But as the Spiritualized leader has proven time and time again in his three decades of space-rock exploration, minimalism provides the clearest path to maximalism. “I like the American bands that wanted desperately to sound like The Rolling Stones, but by pure accident, it all came out wrong, and it became their own thing. They were just seeing where it goes. And I still follow that. With records, they say the devil’s in the details, and there’s thousands of details on the record. I’m trying to find a way of crushing all these things together to make something that doesn’t sound like anything else.” On Spiritualized’s ninth album, two of those details jump out at you: a woman’s voice announcing the title of the record, followed by a lunar-shuttle transmission beep—the very same effects that introduced their 1997 psychedelic-gospel masterwork, *Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space*. And much like that album’s opening track, *Everything Was Beautiful*’s first song, “Always Together With You,” builds a simple repeated melody and romantic lyric into an orchestral surge that’s a little overwhelming. It’s the first of many audio Easter eggs on an album that takes a number of sonic and lyrical cues from Spiritualized’s trailblazing ’90s-era explorations in interstellar rock, to the point that *Everything Was Beautiful* often feels like a greatest-hits retrospective made of new songs. But as much as he’s cultivated a reputation as an all-seeing auteur, Pierce insists such callbacks aren’t part of some grand design. For instance, the seeds for “Always Together With You” were actually first planted back in 2014, when an embryonic version of the song appeared on a Record Store Day compilation called *Space Project*, which featured songs incorporating recordings captured by NASA. Pierce knew he always wanted to take another pass on that hastily recorded demo, but even after embellishing it into the rapturous curtain-raiser we hear on *Everything Was Beautiful*, he still felt it was missing something—until work on the 2021 reissue of *Ladies and Gentlemen* inspired a late-game revision. “I felt like it was a big ask to have people listen to six minutes of three-note chords at the top of an album, and I couldn’t resolve that,” Pierce says. “I couldn’t find a way that I wanted to listen to it and present it. So, I did two very simple steals—the transmission beep from the Apollo landing, which is at the top of *Ladies and Gentlemen*, and the announcement of the album. Suddenly, the whole thing felt like a strange transmission—like somebody outside of the planet looking down. It adds some kind of drama to it that wasn’t there.” Such spur-of-the-moment decisions defined the creation of *Everything Was Beautiful*, which is effectively the second half of a double album that began with 2018’s *And Nothing Hurt*. (The titles form a quote from Kurt Vonnegut’s *Slaughterhouse-Five*.) Pierce is grateful his record company talked him out of approaching the two albums as a single piece. “My focus was too wide,” he says. “If I had tried to do the whole thing together, I think I’d still be working on it now.” By splitting the project into two separate releases, Pierce gave himself the time and space to exhale and let the songs evolve according to his gut instincts rather than some master plan. To wit, the epic centerpiece track “The Mainline Song” began life as a tremolo-heavy instrumental in the vein of longtime live favorite “Electric Mainline” (“It was almost like giving the audience an intermission,” Pierce says) only to suddenly receive lyrics late in the process and get reborn as the album’s most exultant anthem. Even the seemingly simple country ballad “Crazy” had, in Pierce’s words, “its own perverse end.” Due to budgetary constraints, Pierce’s original vision of an orchestral serenade modeled after Lee Hazlewood and Jimmy Holliday gave way to a Mellotron-backed recording, and when he couldn’t decide between two different mixes of the song, he opted to use both in separate channels. But as a result, “Crazy” transcends the realm of pure country pastiche and takes on the undefinable, otherworldly quality that’s allowed Spiritualized to maintain their own lofty orbit for more than 30 years. “Most people edit down—they have 15, 16 tracks that they edit down to eight or nine for an album,” Pierce says. “I feel like I edit up: I haven’t got enough songs to ever edit something out of the equation, so I drag everything up to be the best it could be. And as some songs get better, the bar gets raised for the others.”

Daniel Avery's most ambitious and accomplished studio album to date, 'Ultra Truth', is out now on limited edition double white vinyl, CD and blue cassette. 'Ultra Truth' offers a very different listening experience to any of Daniel Avery’s previous records. It inhabits its own world of sound, a construct built in his Thames side studio with collaborative help from a host of friends: the production touch of Ghost Culture and Manni Dee, the vocals of HAAi, Jonnine Standish (HTRK), AK Paul and the voices of Marie Davidson, Kelly Lee Owens, Sherelle and James Massiah. “Ultra Truth finds me in a different place to where I’ve been before. My previous albums have all focused on the idea of music being an escape or a distraction from the world but that’s not the case this time. For me this album is about looking directly into the darkness, not running away from it. There’s a way through these times but it involves keeping the important people in your life close to you and navigating the noise together. This is an intentionally heavy and dense album, the hooks often hidden in dusty corners. I’m no longer dealing in a misty-eyed euphoria. Ultra Truth is a distorted fever dream of a record: riled, determined and alive.” In creating 'Ultra Truth', Daniel Avery went back to many of the things that had inspired him to first make music as a teenager - pensive, emotive records by Deftones, Portishead, Nick Cave or Mogwai, the exquisite darkness of David Lynch’s movies and - on tracks like Devotion and Higher - the thunderous energy of leftfield rave music. “I’m working with an entirely new world of sound on this record. Every single influence from the last decade spent on the road plays a part. Things that have been in the back of my mind forever, warped, distorted and pushed to a new place.”

On “Tick Tock,” the second track on *Warm Chris*, Aldous Harding asks, “Now that you see me, what you gonna do? Wanted to see me.” The New Zealand singer-songwriter’s lyrics have always been veiled and poetically cryptic—and she’s made a point of not explaining the meaning behind any of it. But her fourth album feels assured and open in a way that makes you wonder whether the question is directed at an audience that\'s been wanting to learn more about this singular artist. There’s a lot to see here, and like a well-directed film, it benefits from multiple replays, with more nuances and hidden meanings uncovered on each listen. Across her four albums, you’ll notice a linear emotional evolution. Speaking to Apple Music in 2019 about her then-new album *Designer*, she said, “I felt freed up… I could feel a loosening of tension, a different way of expressing my thought processes.” The journey clearly continued. *Warm Chris* is as intimate and curious as ever, but it’s more grounded, more confident. If the tension was loosening on *Designer*, here, Harding has grown accustomed to the relaxed space and made herself at home. The album seems to deal primarily with connections and relationships. She reflects on a lost love during opener “Ennui” (“You’ve become my joy, you understand… Come back, come back and leave it in the right place”), hunts for faded excitement on “Fever” (“I still stare at you in the dark/Looking for that thrill in the nothing/You know my favorite place is the start”), comically complains on “Passion Babe” (“Well, you know I’m married, and I was bored out of my mind/Of all the ways to eat a cake, this one surely takes the knife… Passion must play, or passion won’t stay”), and accepts an ending on “Lawn” (“Then if you\'re not for me, guess I am not for you/I will enjoy the blue, I’m only confused with you”). On the whole, *Warm Chris* feels light and folksy, and the music is relatively simple—though not without its surprises. There are brass embellishments here, a psychedelic guitar solo there, even a brief foray into forlorn vintage blues on “Bubbles.” It leaves space for Harding’s voice to remain in the spotlight. Her vocal acrobatics are as strange and versatile as ever—she can shift from breathy, dramatically deep bass to ultra-fine, ultra-high falsetto in moments, sometimes for only a word at a time. She sounds innocent and paper-thin on the gentle “Lawn,” lively—and inflected with an unusual accent—on “Passion Babe.” Her delivery is so pronounced and hyperbolic on the heart-wrenching “She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain” that it sounds like something out of a musical. And album closer “Leathery Whip” feels inspired by The Velvet Underground, complete with a deep Nico drawl (occasionally flipping to a Kate Bush-style nasal tone), backing harmonies, a jangling tambourine, and a cheeky refrain: “Here comes life with his leathery whip.”

An artist of rare calibre, Aldous Harding does more than sing; she conjures a singular intensity. The artist has announced details of Warm Chris new studio album, the follow-up to 2019’s acclaimed Designer. For Warm Chris, the Aotearoa New Zealand musician reunited with producer John Parish, continuing a professional partnership that began in 2017 and has forged pivotal bodies of work (2017’s Party and the aforementioned Designer). All ten tracks were recorded at Rockfield Studios in Wales, the album includes contributions from H. Hawkline, Seb Rochford, Gavin Fitzjohn, John and Hopey Parish and Jason Williamson (Sleaford Mods).

“I always get deep into a record, but now I’m 100% fully operational,” Kurt Vile tells Apple Music. “I got a fully armed battle station.” The Philly singer-songwriter is referring to Overnight KV, or OKV, the new home studio he finished building just before the pandemic hit in 2020. It’s afforded Vile a level of creative independence he’s not felt since he started recording in his bedroom years ago. “Why do I always have to go to some producer\'s studio?” he asks. “It\'s on their terms. I\'m grateful for it, we got a lot of stuff done. But you could say nothing\'s been 100% my personality since my early, more lo-fi records. I was 100% guard down, just doing my thing, man.” His ninth LP (and first for Verve, the legendary jazz imprint) combines the experimental purity of those early recordings with the sort of “completely high-fidelity” feel that he says his studio can provide, though he did, to be clear, collaborate again with producer Rob Schnapf (Elliott Smith, Beck) both at home and in LA. The result, Vile says, is “kind of like some American folk version of shoegaze music”—a set of sidewinding pop (see: “Flyin \[like a fast train\],” originally written for Kesha) and classic rock (“Fo Sho”) that includes contributions from Cate Le Bon and Chastity Belt, as well as drumming from Stella Mozgawa (Warpaint) and Sarah Jones (Hot Chip, Harry Styles). “It’s just lived in, really, the whole record,” he says. “There\'s multiple records that were left behind. But that\'s the way it should be. That\'s like somebody who\'s a carpenter or something, always working in their shop. I feel like you\'re not meant to put everything out. Just the way I live my life.” Here, Vile tells the story behind a number of songs on the album. **“Goin on a Plane Today”** “I got a piano at my house—it\'s very meditative and I can go to it every day. I remember I\'d be touring \[2018’s\] *Bottle It In*, and I\'d be thinking up these records that I was going to make from home, and then when I was home I\'d go over to the piano and be like, ‘Oh, I\'m so stoked, I\'m going to get a lot of music done while I\'m here.’ And then be rudely awakened to the fact that, no, I’ve got to leave in two weeks. I talk about opening for Neil Young in the song, because I wrote it around the time that we opened for Neil Young with Promise of the Real in Quebec, in 2018. That really happened.” **“Palace of OKV in Reverse”** “I love that there\'s more two-minute jams on this record—you could say that’s not been the case since my first album, \[2008\'s\] *Constant Hitmaker*, with ‘Freeway.’ But there\'s a lot of secrets about ‘OKV in Reverse.’ There\'s just a certain groove to it that triggered my mind, and then those lyrics came pretty quick. I didn\'t sing it until later when I was at Rob Schnapf\'s studio in LA, on the fly. He\'s good at capturing that thing.” **“Like Exploding Stones”** “‘Pain ricocheting in my brain like exploding stones.’ Some people attribute that line to migraines, and I do get migraines, so that\'s fine. But in the moment when I wrote it, it\'s more just stress, something weighing down hard on my head. I was pretty bummed out about something when I wrote that song, and then I recorded it right on my Zoom recorder—pretty much just live acoustics, drumming, and singing live. I imagined guitars feeding back, and the Moog synthesizer making noise, feedback massaging my cranium. I had all those things in the demo. Yeah, that\'s the beauty: You can just exorcise demons.” **“Hey Like a Child”** “It’s a love song. I’ve known my wife since we were pretty young, but you don\'t have to take it all so literally, because in the moment when I was writing it, obviously I\'ve got children of my own. It’s got the shoegaze-y bend, but a jangle to it as well. And I knew that song had super poppy potential. We did an early version of it in my basement studio, but then I took it over to Rob Schnapf\'s and I replayed all the parts, and again, Sarah Jones, she just killed it on drums on that song. That song was made really quick.” **“Chazzy Don’t Mind”** “Courtney Barnett turned me on to Chastity Belt—they toured together on \[2017’s\] *I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone*. I liked their music immediately, but it creeps up on you because they sing about everyday things. Julia \[Shapiro’s\] lyrics are really emotional, sometimes funny but pretty real, and they have this cyclical playing that really resonates with me. I knew I wanted them on this song. Lydia \[Lund\] and Julia play guitar on it, and Annie \[Truscott\] plays violin on it, and they all sing. Annie, she\'s such an amazing musician, she’s got perfect pitch on the vocal. They all have an equally important role in the band, but it\'s her bass underneath it all that really gets that melancholy thing.” **“Wages of Sin”** “That\'s been one of my favorite songs of Springsteen’s for a long time—it’s got that melancholy, dark hypnotic thing. I knew I could sing the hell out of it and make it mine, but also stay true to his. Nobody\'s done that lately, but in the country music world that\'s what I like: There\'s a song that speaks to you, and often it\'s a deep cut or somebody hears a song written fresh off the presses, like a demo, and they\'re like, ‘That\'s my song.’ Well, this is that except it\'s been my song since my mid-twenties, and now here I am at 42. We got it. We nailed it. And Springsteen, I don\'t know—it\'d be hard for him to ignore it. He\'d have to make a conscious decision to ignore it. Something tells me him and Obama are going to be enjoying it soon.” **“Stuffed Leopard”** “It’s funny because I felt like ‘Wages of Sin’ was a centerpiece, and I wanted it to fade out. But then ‘Stuffed Leopard’ just crept up on me, and I realized I didn\'t fingerpick throughout the whole record. Lyrically, you\'re just looking at stuff around the house, and you\'re just clarifying it’s a toy, not a taxidermy leopard. Yeah, it\'s just a fingerpicker, man. What can I tell you? Can\'t help it.”

Josh Tillman, aka Father John Misty, has released five albums in the last decade—and each one is an expansion of and challenge to his indie-folk instrumental palette. From the stark rock/folk contrasts of *Fear Fun*’s ballads and anthems to the mariachi strains of *I Love You, Honeybear*’s love notes to the wry commentary and grand orchestrations of *Pure Comedy* and *God’s Favorite Customer*, Tillman has a penchant for pairing his articulate inner monologue with arrangements that have only grown more eclectic and elaborate. *Chloë and the Next 20th Century* builds on all of the above—the micro-symphonies, the inventive percussion, the swift shift from dusty country-western nostalgia to timeless dirges plunked out on a dive-bar piano. A swooning sax solo in a somber jazz number (“Buddy’s Rendezvous”) is immediately followed by the trill of a psychedelic harpsichord (“Q4”); “Goodbye Mr. Blue” recalls the acoustic inclinations of his early work, and warm strings wash over the record, from its first single, the romantic “Funny Girl,” through “The Next 20th Century,” the album’s sardonic closer, which resurfaces the ever-simmering existential dread of *Pure Comedy*. “If this century’s here to stay,” he sings on the track, “I don’t know about you, but I’ll take the love songs/And the great distance that they came.”

Father John Misty returns with Chloë and The Next 20th Century, his fifth album and first new material since the release of God’s Favorite Customer in 2018. Chloë and the Next 20th Century was written and recorded August through December 2020 and features arrangements by Drew Erickson. The album sees Tillman and producer/multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Wilson resume their longtime collaboration, as well as Dave Cerminara, returning as engineer and mixer. Basic tracks were recorded at Wilson’s Five Star Studios with strings, brass, and woodwinds recorded at United Recordings in a session featuring Dan Higgins and Wayne Bergeron, among others. Chloë and The Next 20th Century features the singles “Funny Girl,” “Q4,” “Goodbye Mr. Blue,” and “Kiss Me (I Loved You),” and will be available April 8th, 2022 worldwide from Sub Pop and in Europe from Bella Union.

Riderless Horse is my first solo record, and it’s the first record my former partner, Kennan Gudjonsson, didn’t produce. I haven’t made an album since 2010. I decided to stop pursuing music several years after my sixth record, Outlaster, because of unhappiness, overwhelming chaos, mental illness, and my tragically dysfunctional relationship with Kennan. Creating music had always been a positive outlet during difficult times, but eventually it became a source of absolute misery. Kennan, a cat and I lived in a studio apartment in NYC for 25 years, finding ways to survive while making records and going on tours. Our apartment was the place where people would come stay, eat, drink, play music, and use our tub. It was quite a home we had created, but it was decaying steadily from the moment we moved in, and in the end, it was as if black mold was growing beneath the surface, undetected, and the two of us were dying and getting too weak to ever leave. We loved each other. We were each other’s family, but there was ongoing abuse, control and manipulation. We hid. We didn’t want anyone to see how ugly things could get, so we increasingly isolated from our friends and family. We were lost. On January 26, 2020, I made the decision to separate and live apart, and on January 27, Kennan died by suicide. What a thing, suicide. I can only feel sadness and guilt about it. Maybe I’ll have other reactions to it later on. Riderless Horse documents the grief, but it also marks moments of empowerment and a real happiness in discovering my own capability. Steve Albini produced this record with me, and Greg Norman assisted. The three of us are old friends, and we did a field recording in a guesthouse built like a lighthouse that two very dear friends of mine have in Esopus, NY. It was exactly the right environment to work on this record. We all had meals together, cried, laughed, and told stories. It was perfect. It made me realize how much I love writing, playing and recording music. Terrible things happen. These were some terrible things. So, what to do – learn something valuable, connect with people, move the fuck out of that apartment, remember the humor, find the humor, tell the truth, and make a record. I made a record.

Kurt Wagner’s Lambchop project was once the standard-bearer for fusions of country and indie rock, but over the years, it has become more unpredictable: By 2016’s *Flotus*, the Nashville musician was submerging his voice in watery vocoder, and on 2019’s *This (Is What I Wanted to Tell You)* he spread on a thick layer of synths and drum machines. After the quasi-ambient diversions of 2021’s *Showtunes*, *The Bible* ventures even further afield. In its opening song, you’ll find ruminative piano, horns, strings, a sudden detour into classical music, digital glitches, and Wagner’s voice freshly stripped of artifice, all in the service of a pensive portrait of his aging father—some of the most moving songwriting in Lambchop’s catalog. Produced by Minneapolis’ Andrew Broder and Ryan Olson, frequent Bon Iver collaborators, *The Bible* offers new surprises at every turn, like the disco-house groove and trance synths of “Little Black Boxes,” or the jazzy drum ’n’ bass of “Whatever, Mortal,” or the Lil Jon-styled “hey!” that goes tearing through the placid waters of “Daisy,” a sound so out of place you wonder if you’ve imagined it. Along the way, he considers the George Floyd riots on “Police Dog Blues” and mourns the late rapper The Gift of Gab on “A Major Minor Drag.” The closing “That’s Music” even features quotes from Tommie Smith, an Olympic runner who raised the Black Power fist from the winners’ podium in 1968. Much like Wagner’s patchwork of styles, the cumulative effect of all these images is cryptic yet powerful: a picture of life in America through the eyes of one of the nation’s most idiosyncratic songwriters.

“Every time I go in, I\'m trying to do something I haven\'t done before,” Jack White tells Apple Music. “And it\'s not like something that *other* people have never done before. It’s whatever it is to get me to a different zone so I\'m not repeating myself.” On *Fear of the Dawn*—the first of two solo LPs White is releasing in 2022, and the first in over four years—that zone is the world of digital studio effects, new territory for an artist who’s long been an avatar and champion for all matters analog. Here, working in lockdown and playing most of the instruments himself as a result, White’s challenged himself to make a rock record that’s every bit as immediate and textured as what he’s made before. The guitars are scrambled and fried, blown out and buffed to an often blinding shine (see: the crispy title track; “The White Raven”). Keys squiggle and giggle (“Morning, Noon and Night”), drums stutter and skitter and hiccup (“That Was Then, This is Now,” “What’s the Trick?”). It’s a real studio record, saturated and collage-like—White flexing his muscles as a producer. “I don\'t know how many, but there\'s dozens and dozens of tracks,” he says of the recording process. “I never used to do that. I made mistakes—I would play drums last, which you\'re not supposed to do. But then I started to feed off of that. I liked that it was wrong. It\'s nice that time goes on and you get better at certain things in the studio.” And having been so dogmatic from the start—famously dedicated to tape, vinyl, and primary colors—White sounds free to experiment on *Fear of the Dawn*, whether he’s dusting off a Cab Calloway sample and joining forces with Q-Tip for “Hi-De-Ho” or pasting together shards of radioactive guitar and mutating vocals on “Into the Twilight.” But that doesn’t mean he’s any less disciplined. “It\'s delicate—when you have eight tracks only, there\'s not much you can do,” he says. “If someone says you can have as many tracks as you want, now you got to be your own boss. You got to be hard on yourself. All the years of the razor blade editing gets you to a point where I don\'t want to waste my energy on that when I could put that energy to this now.”

For two decades, multi-instrumentalist Daniel Rossen has been known for his inventive, genre-meddling psychedelic folk and chamber pop as a key member in the era-defining Brooklyn indie-rock band Grizzly Bear as well as the duo Department of Eagles. Recorded at his new home in Santa Fe, his debut full-length album under his own name—following 2018’s Record Store Day-exclusive single “Deerslayer” and the EP *Silent Hour / Golden Mile* in 2012—is a majestic and masterful collection of songs that no doubt highlight his specific strengths: mournful fingerpicking, textural production, stacked horns and harmonies that play out like memories and an uncertain future, simultaneously. His specificity is clearest in an orchestral track like “Unpeopled Space,” where technical instrumentation distracts from Rossen’s vibrating tenor, his soft lyrics about nothingness.

On *Small World*, Joseph Mount shrinks his scope. Whereas its predecessor, 2019’s *Metronomy Forever*, was a sprawling 17 tracks, *Small World* consists of just nine. “Often, I want to do the opposite of what I’ve just done,” Mount tells Apple Music. “I wanted to be really musically focused and concise.” This album’s title is, too, a reflection of the shrunken world in which it was made. Written in summer 2020—and recorded between November of that year and early 2021—these songs were crafted in the thick of the pandemic and explore loneliness (the Elliott Smith-meets-Red Hot Chili Peppers “Loneliness on the run”), the optimism we clung to (“Things will be fine”), and the incomprehensible weight of it all (“Life and Death”). This isn’t, however, a record to transport us back to the worst moments of lockdown. “The way I made music during the pandemic was to escape from feeling like I was in a pandemic,” says Mount. “This album is designed to be listened to when you’re free.” The soothing and organic sound of *Small World* might surprise listeners who’ve been with Metronomy since day one—not least because of Mount’s voice, which has dropped a few octaves, sounding at times like Benjamin Biolay’s or Serge Gainsbourg’s. “When I first started writing songs, I imagined I was a producer and that, one day, I would get a female singer to sing them,” says Mount who has, of course, since produced for artists including Robyn and Jessie Ware. “I would always sing in a falsetto voice and really high up. Even though it was never necessarily comfortable, it’s just what I did. This was me trying to be a bit more mature. I want to grow up with Metronomy. You’ve got to develop it and turn it into what you want it to be.” Read on as Mount guides us through his seventh album, one song at a time. **“Life and Death”** “This was the last thing I wrote for the record. I felt like I’d mined the experiences of being locked down for nice songs. And I hadn’t really done anything that acknowledged the actual gravity of the situation, and just how horrible it is and how many people died. This is my song, which is supposed to be a bit despairing about everything. But like all the songs on the record, the music isn’t supposed to make you feel bad or upset. It’s meant to be supportive.” **“Things will be fine”** “The first thing I wrote for the record. It encapsulated everything I wanted it to be, in terms of the sound and the lyrics. I’ve got two children and I was having to say to them, ‘Everything is going to be OK.’ But I had no knowledge that backed that up. It’s also about when you’re young, and for the first time you realize that the world is quite a horrible place. And then you realize you’ve been protected by your parents, which is what they’re there to do.” **“It’s good to be back”** “I was imagining this character, a musician who’s in their late thirties, trying to write a record that connects with young people. I was imagining a fictitious conversation with a record label: ‘Oh, you want to reach the kids? You need to use drum machines and synthesizers.’ And then doing that but putting in an acoustic guitar. Which, to me, is this really fun juxtaposition of ideas. The song was about being back at home, and about when our tours were canceled or postponed. When you come back from being away, it always takes a week or two to lock back into the same routines with one another.” **“Loneliness on the run”** “‘Loneliness on the run’ is a song about being far away from people that you love. And wanting them to try and manage their bad feelings. I wrote something about visualizing your loneliness, or your anger, and then throwing it out the window or chasing it away. So, that was the idea. At the end of this song, I guess the album does shift a gear and it becomes a little less introspective and starts forgetting the bad stuff.” **“Love Factory”** “I liked the idea of industrializing love, making it this thing which is churned out. This factory is operating at astonishing capacity. We are doing incredibly well at creating love here. It’s supposed to be a relentless song to reflect that.” **“I lost my mind”** “It’s about feeling like you are doubting your own sanity. It’s not something that I’ve felt, but during the pandemic, it was something that I was very aware of—how friends of ours in quite different situations were just in apartments, on their own, feeling very isolated and out of touch. I wanted it to feel like it was following that in the music as well. It does wig out, and I decided to put a whistling sound in, which helped push it over the edge.” **“Right on time”** “The other thing about imagining where I want to be in a few years is also this awareness that you can’t keep writing songs about falling for people because it’s happened. It happened a long time ago. Having said that, the next two songs on the album are exactly that. But I think they’re going to be the last songs I write like it. It’s just another mindlessly optimistic song about enjoying the sunshine. I remember the summer of 2020. It was super hot. Everyone suddenly had this realization that, yes, you can be unable to see your family and be suffering with all kinds of stuff, but it’s unbelievably sunny and nice outside. Just finding somewhere where you can have the sun hitting your face makes you feel better.” **“Hold me tonight” (feat. Porridge Radio)** “The first demo I have of the song is just my voice and a guitar. It was a Velvet Underground-style thing I was thinking of: very sparse. Relatively near the end of recording the album, I was listening to this song, and I was like, ‘We should just restart and have someone else singing it.’ I thought it should be a girl’s voice and they should be singing about their side of this story, which is, of course, going to be that you love each other and everything’s great. I sent Dana \[Margolin, of Porridge Radio\] the track and what she sent back was this totally ruined situation where she turned the whole thing on its head. She turned it into something absolutely genuine for her, and it rescued the song for me in a way.” **“I have seen enough”** “I thought I’d try and write a song in French, and the idea for it was about the horror of life—but how you can’t look away. It’s too beautiful at the same time. And in the end, the French wasn’t really good enough, so it’s English! To nutshell it, it’s about just enjoying and appreciating what you have around you. And I guess the way that it would relate to the pandemic is just all of the horrors that were going on and still being able to find pleasurable things. Finding happiness within it all.”

There’s an expansive, uplifting quality to caroline’s 2022 debut, the sense of a large group of people—eight, in this case—together in a room, breathing as one. Cozy as the music can feel, it’s an unusual blend: the woodsy, rustic quality of ’70s British folk, the grandeur of classic Midwestern emo, the abstractions of post-rock and free improvisation. By either grace or design, the closest metaphors are found in nature: a blossoming dawn (“Dark Blue”), crashing waves (the chaotic finale of “Natural death”), ice thawing in sun (“Skydiving onto the library roof”), and wind rippling through grass (“zilch”). Together, they ebb, flow, fray, and coalesce—emphasis on *together*.

UK eight-piece caroline’s eponymous debut album often cascades with force like an avalanche, squalling and rumbling on the edge of all-out collapse. At other points they slip back into impossibly fragile moments of quiet – a simple bassline or a rattle of snare the only sound amid a dark sea of silence. caroline know exactly the right balance between restraint and release. These songs are expansive and emotive pieces, their rich palette drawing on a mixture of choral singing, Midwestern emo and O’Malley and Llewellyn’s roots in Appalachian folk. “Sometimes things sound much better when there’s empty space,” says Llewellyn. “Sometimes you might populate [a song] with too many things and forget that an element on its own is enough.” Elsewhere on the record the band have employed a collage-like technique, combining snippets of lo-fi recordings from a myriad of different locations – a barn in France, the members’ bedrooms and living rooms, the atmospheric swimming pool in which they also filmed sublime live sessions for ‘Dark blue’ and ‘Skydiving onto the library roof’ – with more traditional group sessions at the Total Refreshment Centre and their studio in Peckham. The growth that began as a scrappy guitar band above a pub many years ago is still continuing. caroline’s astounding debut album is merely the first step.

The two factions that became the German electronic group Moderat—the duo Modeselektor, aka Gernot Bronsert and Sebastian Szary, and producer Apparat, aka Sascha Ring—first met in the early 2000s while sharing a bill together. It was, perhaps, an odd coupling: Back then, Modeselektor were making dub- and dancehall-influenced breakcore, and Apparat was honing his strain of melodic electronic composition. But over a common desire to move away from the traditional techno that was soundtracking post-reunification Berlin at the time—and a love for Boards of Canada, Gescom, and other Warp and Rephlex artists—the two parties coalesced into one, while continuing to attend to their own primary projects. Their first three albums together took up a sort of abstract, dance-floor-informed electronic pop that paid as much attention to texture and programming as it did melody and vocal timbre. *MORE D4TA*, their fourth LP, comes after a six-year break following 2016’s *III*—and after a period of getting musically reacquainted during the pandemic. That last part is key: These 10 songs are a deep reflection of the tension and anxiety of the two years that preceded their release. *MORE D4TA* immediately throws you off-kilter with a woozy, plunging synth line that builds into a beehive of buzzing distortion. “EASY PREY” might clarify that murky atmosphere a little, but its lyrics—\"Raised among carnivorans/A bitter taste/I am just a low hanging fruit/Easy prey”—underscore the vulnerable feeling that any sentient being in 2022 can relate to. Those bleak themes don’t let up much. The instrumentals such as “DRUM GLOW” and \"NUMB BELL” are unsettlingly moody. But there are moments of light that occasionally fleck the darkness. On “MORE LOVE”—inspired by Botticelli’s *Venus*, which hangs in Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie, where Ring made regular visits during the pandemic—Apparat sings, \"Breathing life into dead trees/The first to stand alone/The night is worn, the night is gone/She keeps on dancing, mother of all” through a crunchy digital haze.

Back in 2017, Moderat announced that they'd be taking an extended break following a final concert in front of 17.000 people in their hometown of Berlin. And now they return. MORE D4TA, the group’s fourth album, arrives more than six years after its predecessor (2016’s III). Created largely during a time when touring (and most traveling) was off the table, MORE D4TA is an album that wrestles with feelings of isolation and information overload—issues that have become particularly pronounced over the past two years. The ten songs on MORE D4TA are rooted in collaboration, but long before any of its tracks were laid down, Moderat spent months hanging out and getting musically reacquainted, indulging in extended bouts of experimentation and slowly fleshing out ideas as they dove into modular composition, field recordings and other sonic oddities. But no matter how far the band ventures into music’s outer realms, they always wind up back in their own unique soundworld, a place where emotive pop and fluttering electronic soundscapes walk hand in hand. Many of its lyrics are rooted in Ring’s frequent trips to Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie museum (often with his infant daughter in tow), where he’d seek refuge in the great paintings of the past while worrying about the future. What they make isn’t necessarily dance music, but it is something that shines brightest in the dark of night, the group’s rich melodies and Ring’s ethereal vocals emitting a warm, almost bioluminescent glow. After spending the better part of two decades making music together, they’ve carved out a sound and aesthetic that are all their own, and MORE D4TA showcases a group that’s creatively recharged and fully dedicated to its craft.

Like its title suggests, *Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You* continues Big Thief’s shift away from their tense, early music toward something folkier and more cosmically inviting. They’ve always had an interest in Americana, but their touchpoints are warmer now: A sweetly sawing fiddle (“Spud Infinity”), a front-porch lullaby (“Dried Roses”), the wonder of a walk in the woods (“Promise Is a Pendulum”) or comfort of a kitchen where the radio’s on and food sizzles in the pan (“Red Moon”). Adrianne Lenker’s voice still conveys a natural reticence—she doesn’t want to believe it’s all as beautiful as it is—but she’s also too earnest to deny beauty when she sees it.

Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You is a sprawling double-LP exploring the deepest elements and possibilities of Big Thief. To truly dig into all that the music of Adrianne Lenker, Max Oleartchik, Buck Meek, and James Krivchenia desired in 2020, the band decided to write and record a rambling account of growth as individuals, musicians, and chosen family over 4 distinct recording sessions. In Upstate New York, Topanga Canyon, The Rocky Mountains, and Tucson, Arizona, Big Thief spent 5 months in creation and came out with 45 completed songs. The most resonant of this material was edited down into the 20 tracks that make up DNWMIBIY, a fluid and adventurous listen. The album was produced by drummer James Krivchenia who initially pitched the recording concept for DNWMIBIY back in late 2019 with the goal of encapsulating the many different aspects of Adrianne’s songwriting and the band onto a single record. In an attempt to ease back into life as Big Thief after a long stretch of Covid-19 related isolation, the band met up for their first session in the woods of upstate New York. They started the process at Sam Evian’s Flying Cloud Recordings, recording on an 8-track tape machine with Evian at the knobs. It took a while for the band to realign and for the first week of working in the studio, nothing felt right. After a few un-inspired takes the band decided to take an ice-cold dip in the creek behind the house before running back to record in wet swimsuits. That cool water blessing stayed with Big Thief through the rest of the summer and many more intuitive, recording rituals followed. It was here that the band procured ‘Certainty’ and ‘Sparrow’. For the next session in Topanga Canyon, California, the band intended to explore their bombastic desires and lay down some sonic revelry in the experimental soundscape-friendly hands of engineer Shawn Everett. Several of the songs from this session lyrically explore the areas of Lenker’s thought process that she describes as “unabashedly as psychedelic as I naturally think,” including ‘Little Things’, which came out of this session. The prepared acoustic guitars and huge stomp beat of today’s ‘Time Escaping’ create a matching, otherworldly backdrop for the subconscious dream of timeless, infinite mystery. When her puppy Oso ran into the vocal booth during the final take of the song, Adrianne looked down and spoke “It’s Music!” to explain in the best terms possible the reality of what was going on to the confused dog. “It’s Music Oso!” The third session, high in the Colorado Rockies, was set up to be a more traditional Big Thief recording experience, working with UFOF and Two Hands engineer Dom Monks. Monks' attentiveness to song energies and reverence for the first take has become a huge part of the magic of Thief’s recent output. One afternoon in the castle-like studio, the band was running through a brand new song ‘Change’ for the first time. Right when they thought it might be time to do a take, Monks came out of the booth to let them know that he’d captured the practice and it was perfect as it was.   The final session, in hot-as-heaven Tucson, Arizona, took place in the home studio of Scott McMicken. The several months of recording had caught up to Big Thief at this point so, in order to bring in some new energy, they invited long-time friend Mat Davidson of Twain to join. This was the first time that Big Thief had ever brought in a 5th instrumentalist for such a significant contribution. His fiddle, and vocals weave a heavy presence throughout the Tucson tracks. If the album's main through-line is its free-play, anything-is-possible energy, then this environment was the perfect spot to conclude its creation — filling the messy living room with laughter, letting the fire blaze in the backyard, and ripping spontaneous, extended jams as trains whistled outside.  All 4 of these sessions, in their varied states of fidelity, style, and mood, when viewed together as one album seem to stand for a more honest, zoomed-out picture of lived experience than would be possible on a traditional, 12 song record. This was exactly what the band hoped would be the outcome of this kind of massive experiment. When Max’s mom asked on a phone call what it feels like to be back together with the band playing music for the first time in a year, he described to the best of abilities: “Well it’s like, we’re a band, we talk, we have different dynamics, we do the breaths, and then we go on stage and suddenly it feels like we are now on a dragon. And we can’t really talk because we have to steer this dragon.”  The attempt to capture something deeper, wider, and full of mystery, points to the inherent spirit of Big Thief. Traces of this open-hearted, non-dogmatic faith can be felt through previous albums, but here on Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You lives the strongest testament to its existence. 

Cameron has always been a great storyteller, finding his ways into the depths of the places where not many others are looking, and Oxy Music continues on that trajectory. It’s filled with stories of people who fall outside the system and exist in the grey areas of life. In its design - its music, lyrics and tracklist - lies the journey a person can take, if the circumstances present themselves - down the road of heavy drug and alcohol abuse. Initially inspired by Nico Walker’s Cherry, Cameron was spurred into yet another commentary on American Life, this time about the opioid crisis that has taken over the country. He says about Oxy Music: “The album is a story, a work of fiction, mostly from the perspective of a man. Starved of meaningful purpose, confused about the state of the world, and in dire need of a reason to live - a person can, and according to the latest statistics, increasingly will, turn to opioids. This is one of those people.” While Oxy Music could be dark, it’s instead brighter and more buoyant than much of Cameron’s previous work, a shift in mood first seen across 2019’s Miami Memory. It’s told from a place of optimism and through the lens of Cameron, in the way that only he can tell it. As with the previously released, “Sara Jo,” “Best Life” gives a context of drug use to distort the confronting nature of contemporary reality as Cameron sings of the feelings of insecurity brought about by life online: “I guess I’m just winning / But I get no reaction / My comments just don’t rank / Or my post tanks.” Directed by Jemima Kirke, produced by Jim Larson and starring Kirke and Cameron, the song’s video explores the idea of what it means to find one’s “best life” by accepting others’ insecurities – in this instance, a skin condition such as eczema – as loveable qualities.

When Animal Collective emerged from the fringes of New York’s underground in the early 2000s, it was hard to imagine they’d become what they did—a big-tent psychedelic band that could handle festival stages while still pushing the avant-garde; an art project that skirts the mainstream while still making music more visionary and unusual than most of their indie peers. Whereas 2016’s *Painting With* explored the manic side of their sound, *Time Skiffs* is, by and large, chill—a lazy river of sound that mixes the primitive and the New Age-y (“Cherokee”), the funky and the ethereal (“Prester John”). And while there’s always a tinge of uncertainty—the Cheshire Cats to their sweet-natured Alice—the music always resolves gently toward the light. If they’re not our Grateful Dead, nobody is.

Time Skiffs’ nine songs are love letters, distress signals, en plein air observations, and relaxation hymns, the collected transmissions of four people who have grown into relationships and parenthood and adult worry. But they are rendered with Animal Collective’s singular sense of exploratory wonder. Harmonies so rich you want to skydive through their shared air, textures so fascinating you want to decode their sorcery, rhythms so intricate you want to untangle their sources. Here is Animal Collective's past two decades, still in search of what’s next.

Long before he made his name at jazz’s vanguard, editing together off-the-cuff live sessions like a hip-hop beatmaker, drummer, and producer, Makaya McCraven set out to create a comprehensive record of his collaborative process—a testament to the intuition of improvisation. Its sessions recorded over the course of seven years, between multiple projects and releases, *In These Times* is McCraven’s sixth album as a bandleader, and it showcases the virtuosic instrumentalists he has spent his career building an almost telepathic bond with—bassist Junius Paul and guitarist Jeff Parker among them. It’s also the warmest and most enveloping album he’s produced to date. Frenetic beat-splicing might underpin the polyrhythms of tracks such as “Seventh String” and “This Place That Place,” but the soft melodies played by Parker and harpist Brandee Younger always permeate—a reminder of the clarity of the moment of creation, rather than its post-production manipulation. Indeed, *In These Times* is a reflection of the past decade of McCraven’s instrumental expertise, but it’s also a powerful reminder of the freedom inherent in this time, in the here and now of making music together, when the artist lets go and surrounds us with the ineffable beauty of collective creation.

In These Times is the new album by Chicago-based percussionist, composer, producer, and pillar of our label family, Makaya McCraven. Although this album is “new," the truth it’s something that's been in process for a very long time, since shortly after he released his International Anthem debut In The Moment in 2015. Dedicated followers may note he’s had 6 other releases in the meantime (including 2018’s widely-popular Universal Beings and 2020’s We’re New Again, his rework of Gil Scott-Heron’s final album for XL Recordings); but none of which have been as definitive an expression of his artistic ethos as In These Times. This is the album McCraven’s been trying to make since he started making records. And his patience, ambition, and persistence have yielded an appropriately career-defining body of work. As epic and expansive as it is impressively potent and concise, the 11 song suite was created over 7+ years, as McCraven strived to design a highly personal but broadly communicable fusion of odd-meter original compositions from his working songbook with orchestral, large ensemble arrangements and the edit-heavy “organic beat music” that he’s honed over a growing body of production-craft. With contributions from over a dozen musicians and creative partners from his tight-knit circle of collaborators – including Jeff Parker, Junius Paul, Brandee Younger, Joel Ross, and Marquis Hill – the music was recorded in 5 different studios and 4 live performance spaces while McCraven engaged in extensive post-production work from home. The pure fact that he was able to so eloquently condense and articulate the immense human scale of the work into 41 fleeting minutes of emotive and engaging sound is a monumental achievement. It’s an evolution and a milestone for McCraven, the producer; but moreover it’s the strongest and clearest statement we’ve yet to hear from McCraven, the composer. In These Times is an almost unfathomable new peak for an already-soaring innovator who has been called "one of the best arguments for jazz's vitality" by The New York Times, as well as recently, and perhaps more aptly, a "cultural synthesizer." While challenging and pushing himself into uncharted territories, McCraven quintessentially expresses his unique gifts for collapsing space and transcending borders – blending past, present, and future into elegant, poly-textural arrangements of jazz-rooted, post-genre 21st century folk music.

“Through the writing of these songs and the making of this music, I found my way back to the world around me – a way to reach nature and the people I love and care about. This record is a sensory exploration that allowed for a connection to a consciousness that I was searching for. Through the resonance of sound and a beaten up old piano I bought in Camden Market while living in a city I had no intention of staying in, I found acceptance and a way of healing.” - Beth Orton Many musicians turn inward when the world around them seems chaotic and unreliable. Reframing one’s perception of self can often reveal new personal truths both uncomfortable and profound, and for Beth Orton, music re-emerged in the past several years as a tethering force even when her own life felt more tumultuous than ever. Indeed, the foundations of the songs on Orton’s stunning new album, Weather Alive, are nothing more than her voice and a “cheap, crappy” upright piano installed in a shed in her garden, conjuring a deeply meditative atmosphere that remains long after the final note has evaporated. “I am known as a collaborator and I’m very good at it. I’m very open to it. Sometimes, I’ve been obscured by it,” says Orton, who rose to prominence through ‘90s-era collaborations with William Orbit, Red Snapper and The Chemical Brothers before striking out on her own with a series of acclaimed, award-winning solo releases. “I think what’s happened with this record is that through being cornered by life, I got to reveal myself to myself and to collaborate with myself, actually.” Weather Alive - Beth Orton's first album in six years - is out 23rd September on Partisan Records"

After Chris of Christine and the Queens’ mother died, the French alt-pop star began to notice red cars everywhere—and almost always in moments of internal shift. Those sightings give context to the title of his third album, *Redcar les adorables étoiles (prologue)*, and inspired the name and artistic persona he would embrace thereafter. “For me, the red car was a way to encourage my spirit to lift a bit higher when I was a bit desperate,” he tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “Every record is a deep, deep wave of transformation both inwards and outwards. I feel actually braver than before, a bit terrified, but in a true gutsy way.” *Redcar*—the follow-up to 2018’s *Chris*—presents the artist’s most thrilling transformation to date. It’s also the most daring Christine and the Queens album so far: a high-concept collection of roof-raising ’80s synth-pop and funk inspired by artists such as The Cure and Fad Gadget. Sung almost entirely in French, it’s theatrical (the propulsive, operatic “Tu sais ce qu’il me faut”), spooky (“La chanson du chevalier”), shimmering, sensual, and frequently otherworldly, with electrifying guitar solos and R&B along the way. And yet, for all its ’80s hallmarks—drum machines, dazzling synths, songs cloaked in reverb (a throwback, too, to 2014 debut *Chaleur Humaine*)—the album was crafted with a rock ’n’ roll spirit in mind. Moved by the spontaneous artistic process of Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones, Chris wrote, recorded, and produced this album alone at home within just two weeks, spending no more than an hour on each song. The result is an album that feels epic and alive, and often like an outpouring, as an artist who has always committed to evolving in front of us moves through change. After the farewell—to a lover or a past self—of album opener “Ma bien aimée bye bye,” these songs explore intimacy, the search for meaning and connection (including the Sylvester-referencing “Looking for love”), and stepping into your true self. Loss, too, colors the album, but on “rien dire”—one of the album’s most powerful songs, and as much of a gut-punch as 2020’s “People, I’ve been sad”—Redcar reaches a hopeful conclusion: Love, and the people we love, are never truly gone. “I think true love is a conversation that never is interrupted, and by ‘never’ I mean not even by death,” he says. “That’s my current faith I have right now. That song is a conversation I have with someone who is not there anymore.”

EARTH IS ONE TOUGH BABY OUT SEPTEMBER 16 2022 WORLDWIDE

When Angel Olsen came to craft her sixth album, *Big Time*, the US singer-songwriter had been through, well, a big time. In 2021—just three days after she came out to her parents—her father died; soon after, she lost her mother. Amid it all (and, of course, with the global pandemic as a backdrop), Olsen was falling deep for someone new. *Big Time*, then, is an album that explores the light of new love alongside the dark devastation of loss and grief. Understandably, Olsen—who started work on *Big Time* just three weeks after her mother’s funeral—questioned whether she could make it at all. “It was a heavy time in my life,” she tells Apple Music. “It was the first time I walked into a studio and I had the option of canceling, because of some of the stuff that was going on. But I told my manager, ‘I just wanna try it.’” Working with producer Jonathan Wilson (Father John Misty, Conor Oberst) in a studio in Topanga Canyon, Olsen kept her expectations low and the brief loose. “Essentially, what I told everyone was, ‘I don’t need to turn a pedal steel on its head here, I just want to hear a classic,’” she says. “What would the Neil Young backing band do if they reined it in a little and put the vocals as the main instrument? If you overthink things, you’re really going down into a hole.” The starting point was “All the Good Times,” a song Olsen wrote on tour in 2017/18, and which she envisaged giving to a country singer like Sturgill Simpson. But it had planted a seed. On *Big Time*, she goes all in on country and Americana, inspired by her cherished hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, as well as by artists including Lucinda Williams, Big Star, and Dolly Parton. That sound reaches its peak on the title track, a woozy, waltzing love song that nods to the brighter side of this album’s title: “I’m loving you big time, I’m loving you more,” Olsen sings to her partner Beau Thibodeaux, with whom she wrote the song. In its embrace of simplicity, *Big Time* feels like a deep exhale—and a stark contrast to 2019’s glossy, high-drama *All Mirrors* (though you will find shades of that here, such as on the string- and piano-laden “Through the Fires” or closer “Chasing the Sun”). That undone palette also lays Olsen’s lyrics bare. And if you’ve ever been shattered by the singer-songwriter’s piercing lyricism, you may want to steel yourself. Here, Olsen’s words are more affecting, honest, and raw than ever before, as she navigates not just love and loss but also self-acceptance (“I need to be myself/I won\'t live another lie,” she sings on “Right Now”), our changed world post-pandemic (“Go Home”), and moving forward after the worst has happened. And on the album’s exquisite final track, “Chasing the Sun,” Olsen allows herself to do just that, however tentatively. “Everyone’s wondered where I’ve gone,” she sings. “Having too much fun… Spending the day/Driving away the blues.”

Fresh grief, like fresh love, has a way of sharpening our vision and bringing on painful clarifications. No matter how temporary we know these states to be, the vulnerability and transformation they demand can overpower the strongest among us. Then there are the rare, fertile moments when both occur, when mourning and limerence heighten, complicate and explain each other; the songs that comprise Angel Olsen’s Big Time were forged in such a whiplash. Big Time is an album about the expansive power of new love, but this brightness and optimism is tempered by a profound and layered sense of loss. During Olsen’s process of coming to terms with her queerness and confronting the traumas that had been keeping her from fully accepting herself, she felt it was time to come out to her parents, a hurdle she’d been avoiding for some time. “Finally, at the ripe age of 34, I was free to be me,” she said. Three days later, her father died and shortly after her mother passed away. The shards of this grief—the shortening of her chance to finally be seen more fully by her parents—are scattered throughout the album. Three weeks after her mother’s funeral she was on a plane to Los Angeles to spend a month in Topanga Canyon, recording this incredibly wise and tender new album. Loss has long been a subject of Olsen’s elegiac songs, but few can write elegies with quite the reckless energy as she. If that bursting-at-the-seams, running downhill energy has come to seem intractable to her work, this album proves Olsen is now writing from a more rooted place of clarity. She’s working with an elastic, expansive mastery of her voice—both sonically and artistically. These are songs not just about transformational mourning, but of finding freedom and joy in the privations as they come.

Dance daydreams fuel the pop maverick’s long-gestating second LP.

Jonathan Personne présente son troisième album, une suite de contes glauques aux dynamiques musicales vives et éclatées. À la fois candide et sinistre, léger et brutal, ce nouvel album homonyme mise sur une saisissante dualité, annoncée d’emblée par la pochette - une illustration signée Personne sur laquelle deux enfants découvrent les résidus d’un cadavre. La table est mise pour l’ébruitement d’un monde mystérieux où s’entrecroisent esprits fantomatiques, présences étranges et personnages au destin brisé. Composé seul avec sa guitare acoustique au chalet, Jonathan Personne a pris une tournure inattendue lorsque l’auteur-compositeur-interprète montréalais a repris contact en studio avec ses amis Samuel Gougoux (batterie), Julian Perreault (guitare), Mathieu Cloutier (basse) et Emmanuel Éthier (réalisation, violon, synthétiseur, mellotron, choeurs). Entre références pop 60s aux arrangements synthétiques, inspirations folk country à l’imagerie western-spaghetti, échantillonnages de séries ou de films obscurs et grooves rock décapants aux nappes de guitares surabondantes, l’album prévu pour le 26 août 2022 est une œuvre plus peaufinée et moins lo-fi que le reste du répertoire de Personne, mais dans un esprit tout aussi inventif et imprévisible.

Après l'album "L'appel de la forêt" salué par la critique, et l’EP de reprises de musique brésilienne "Serpentes", sortis en 2020, Julien Gasc poursuit sa carrière solo avec ce quatrième opus, écrit au calme, pendant le confinement dans le sud-ouest de la France. À l'écoute de la radio américaine indépendante WFMU en fond sonore, du jazz de Thelonious Monk et des productions de Sylvia Robinson, l'auteur tente d'échapper à la monotonie des jours qui passent. Il trouve une issue créatrice en se consacrant à la pratique du cut-up, chère à William S. Burroughs, en découpant des textes issus de sa collection de livres et de ses propres écrits. Associant la réitération (RE) et l’effacement (EFF), ces mots personnifient les multiples destinataires imaginaires ou réels, parfois sans réponse, dans la correspondance par mail et téléphonique du musicien. Ce procédé à la fois littéraire et ludique, donne le ton de l 'album, ainsi que son titre « RE EFF ». «  plaisanterie sérieuse » en somme. L'écriture des contre-fictions constitue l'autre expérimentation littéraire utilisée pour raconter ces récits en dix chansons. Pour citer quelques extraits, "La scie de la vision moderne" trouve sa source dans l'exploration fantastique d'un rêve, "La voyance" est une dénonciation politique tout en ironie, "Amours velours" se déploie tout en douceur et sensualité, et "Délivrance" aborde une mélancolie de la mort. Ces morceaux, résolument tournés vers la chanson avec le piano comme instrument majeur, ont été enregistrés en décembre 2021, et mixés en février 2022 à Londres au studio Haha Sounds de Syd Kemp. Julien Gasc y est accompagné par un groupe : Livvy O' Hagan (la fille de Sean des High Llamas), Victoria Hamblett et Marie Merlet au chant, Cédric Monzali à la batterie, Harry Stevenson au pedal steel, Eno Imwang aux percussions et Rick Walker à la guitare. Syd Kemp, bassiste de longue date du band, assure la production artistique de cet enregistrement. Il crée un écrin élégant et chaleureux pour ces chansons pop douces-amères, cinématographiques, bercées parfois par des rythmes tropicaux. La grande exigence de l'artiste, partagé entre désir de perfection d'une tradition musicale anglo-saxonne, singularité de la forme expérimentale et légère, et écriture des jeux de l'amour et du hasard, font de cet album une oeuvre hors du temps, apaisante et réjouissante. « RE EFF », loin de se résumer à son titre, est un acte poétique de résistance au conformisme, une ode à la fantaisie du quotidien et à la complexité des sentiments. Tout en gardant sa part de mystère, Julien Gasc confirme ici son talent de poète, à l'écoute du monde et de ses émotions, tel Narcisse se reflétant dans le miroir, pour mieux appréhender l'âme humaine. Laure Delsaux /// Originally Re Eff (pronounced Ri Èf) was a bunch of texts. One hundred and fifty pages that Julien Gasc wrote by trying his hand at the art of cut-up: a literary and political act of counter-fiction based on William Burroughs’s method. It was also Julien Gasc’s response to the isolation of 2020, while he was seeking refuge in the Southwest of France, with time as far as the eye could see, and a piano. For a long while, it hadn’t been about songs, but about expressing the indescribable by cutting randomly from books and his own notes, attempting to fleetingly strike a balance, find a beauty, a happy accident. Incidentally, it was almost by accident, while recycling a piece that he’d composed for pedal steel guitar, that Julien Gasc sketched the first draft of “Ce soir les bouteilles dansent” (“Tonight the Bottles Are Dancing”). This was combined with a version of “Rosario Bléfari”, recorded on an inexpensive Casio synthesizer. These were Re Eff’s baby steps. While everything was at a standstill, in stasis, Julien Gasc wanted to send a group message to some friends, to his family, a message from a confinee to those who weren’t answering, friend or foe, imaginary or otherwise. It was this collective recipient that he nicknamed Re Eff. The name comes from “re” (re-) and “effacer” (erase), words found during a cut-up and transformed into ri èf for added euphony, like a facetious grief (grievance, reproach in French) without the “g”. Like its title, a kind of serious joke, the album is one long interplay between humour and gravitas, sense and nonsense, shadow and light, aiming to fully describe feelings in terms of their ambiguous and contradictory elements. Through a return to regular piano practice, calm recovered at a holiday resort town, and literary experimentations, to which he added transcribed dreams, as in “La scie de la vision modern” (“The Saw of Modern Vision”), Julien Gasc composed ten demos on his computer. These demos were then rerecorded at Syd Kemp’s Haha Sound studio in London, in December 2021. The mix was completed there again, in February 2022, by Syd and Julian. Play to play and write to write, those are the keywords of Re Eff, in which memories are freely combined (“À travers le regard de l’indienne” / “Through the Amazon’s Eyes”), the theme of enclosure and passion (“Amour velours” / “Velvet Love”), melodrama ("Délivrance"), and romantic novella (“Tout ne peut pas nécessairement donner quelque chose” / “Not Everything Leads to Something”). Music resolutely oriented towards the piano, towards bold and filmic harmonic movements that make a successful form of lyrical poetry possible. Because all in all, by singing about current events – his own and those of the world – in an elegiac tone, like bards, Julien Gasc was gradually transformed from pop singer into poet. Joseph Sainderichin

While working on the songs that became 2022’s *EYEYE*, indie-pop singer Lykke Li found herself following a pattern she’d followed before: taking personal heartbreak and turning it into an album. She didn’t want to repeat herself, but she also found it interesting, in a way, that she was. So instead of scrapping the project, she turned her fixation into a kind of organizing principle: heartbreak music about the tropes of heartbreak music made by someone obsessed with heartbreak music. It’s an arty conceit, but you sense it was liberating: Where 2018’s *so sad so sexy* seemed occupied with covering the range and diversity of modern pop, *EYEYE* surrenders almost completely to its mood—a quality that gives the album an almost dreamlike consistency, filled with familiar images of dark roads (“HIGHWAY TO YOUR HEART”) and empty rooms (“NO HOTEL”), New Agey choral music (“CAROUSEL”) and ’80s ballads smoking with dry ice (“YOU DON’T GO AWAY”), beautiful and weightless throughout. “Is it only in the movies you love me?” she wonders on “5D.” And there’s the album’s realest heartbreak: Sometimes art feels more vivid than life.

Porridge Radio are one of the most vital new voices in alternative music, having gone from being darlings of the DIY underground to one of the UK’s most thrilling bands in the space of less than a year. Their barbed wit, lacerating intensity and potent blend of art-rock, indie-pop and post-punk sounds like little else around, and led their 2020 album Every Bad to make the nominees list for the coveted Mercury Music Prize. For frontperson Dana Margolin, drummer Sam Yardley, keyboardist Georgie Stott and bassist Maddie Ryall – who met in the seaside town of Brighton and formed Porridge Radio in 2014 – global recognition has been a long time coming, after years of self-releasing and music booking their own tours. In those eight years, Dana has gained a reputation as one of the most magnetic band leaders around with an ability to “devastate you with an emotional hurricane, then blindside you with a moment of bittersweet humour” (NME). But if Every Bad established Dana’s lemon-sharp, heart-on-sleeve honesty, Porridge Radio’s third album takes that to anthemic new heights. Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder To The Sky is the sound of someone in their late twenties facing down the disappointment of love, and life, and figuring out how to exist in the world, without claiming any answers. It’s also catchy as hell. The title – which was partly inspired by a collage by the British surrealist Eileen Agar – speaks to the “joy, fear and endlessness” of the past few years. Dana’s songwriting and delivery is more confident, with the emotional incisiveness of artists like Mitski, Sharon Van Etten and Big Thief. Though it’s softer and more playful in places than Every Bad’s blowtorch ferocity, there are moments of powerful catharsis, ones that occur when you allow the full intensity of an experience to take hold. In places, that no-holds-barred rawness is on a par with bands like Deftones (their panoramic metal is a key touchstone of Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder To The Sky) or American emo, elevated by Yardley’s ambitious instrumentals. “I kept saying that I wanted everything to be 'stadium-epic' - like Coldplay,” says Dana. With Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder To The Sky, Porridge Radio have distilled their myriad influences down like they’re flipping through their own singular dial: dreamy yet intense, gentle but razor-edged, widescreen and yet totally intimate. People tell Dana that Every Bad got them through their cancer diagnosis, their break-up, their isolated lockdown. But with their new album, the band are taking a step up and spring-boarding into a bright, exciting unknown.

Koudlam returns to civilization with “Precipice Fantasy”, an abnormal album once again. The Album is made up of 2 very different parts which will be released separately, with a first part which shells 12 songs like so many flamboyant mutations and a second contemplative instrumental part halfway between uneasy yoga music and trance from the lowlands of Kathmandu. Inspired by the hallucinated stories of mountain pioneers and conquistadores, the artist delivers here the soundtrack of peaks and precipices. Or rather that of the path between the two, winding, vertiginous, always on the edge of the blade. PAN075

LA trio Automatic conceived of *Excess* as a map of the moment when the ’70s underground met the ’80s mainstream: of post-punk being rebranded as New Wave, of the counterculture being absorbed into another capitalist exercise. From a political standpoint, it’s a reach, but from a stylistic one, it gets to what makes *Excess* appealing: a clash of slickness and grit (“Skyscraper”), punk appeal and pop instincts (“Venus Hour,” “NRG”), human error and machine perfection (“New Beginning”). The appeal to listeners interested in early-’80s music is obvious, but anyone into Le Tigre or 2000s K Records or the sparse post-disco of the Italians Do It Better label will appreciate it, too. As for the title, you assume it’s a joke.

The alt-rock trailblazers explore haunting uncharted territory.

Built to Spill’s mix of punk immediacy and classic-rock sprawl is one of indie’s defining sounds. Released 30 years into their career, *When the Wind Forgets Your Name* changes nothing. If anything, part of the Idaho band’s enduring appeal is leader and chief songwriter Doug Martsch’s ability to turn his rainy-day melancholy into something that feels not only sustainable but uplifting too. His inspirational songs are only gently so (“Alright”), and his epics unfold with a steadiness that makes them seem low-key no matter how loud they get (“Fool’s Gold,” “Comes a Day”). “I don’t wanna be constantly taking these long hard looks at myself,” Martsch sings on “Rocksteady.” “This psychology’s been inside of me/I don’t know how to be anybody else.”

Since its inception in 1992, Built to Spill founder Doug Martsch intended his beloved band to be a collaborative project, an ever-evolving group of incredible musicians making music and playing live together. “I wanted to switch the lineup for many reasons. Each time we finish a record I want the next one to sound totally different. It’s fun to play with people who bring in new styles and ideas,” says Martsch. “And it’s nice to be in a band with people who aren’t sick of me yet.” Following several albums and EPs on Pacific Northwest independent labels, including the unmistakably canonical indie rock classic, There’s Nothing Wrong With Love, released on Sub Pop offshoot Up Records in 1994, Martsch signed with Warner Brothers from 1995 to 2016. He and his rotating cast of cohorts recorded six more, inarguably great albums during that time – Perfect From Now On, Keep It Like a Secret, Ancient Melodies of the Future, You In Reverse, Untethered Moon, There Is No Enemy. There was also a live album, and a solo record, Now You Know. While the band’s impeccable recorded catalog is the entry point, Built to Spill live is an essential FORCE of its own: heavy, psychedelic, melodic and visceral tunes blaring from amps that sound as if they’re powered by Mack trucks. Now in 2022, Built to Spill returns with When the Wind Forgets Your Name, Martsch’s unbelievably great new album (and also his eighth full-length)... with a fresh new label. “I’m psyched: I’ve wanted to be on Sub Pop since I was a teenager. And I think I’m the first fifty year-old they’ve ever signed.” (The rumors are true, we love quinquagenarians…) When the Wind Forgets Your Name continues expanding the Built to Spill universe in new and exciting ways. In 2018 Martsch’s good fortune and keen intuition brought him together with Brazilian lo-fi punk artist and producer Le Almeida, and his long-time collaborator, João Casaes, both of the psychedelic jazz rock band, Oruã. On discovering their music Martsch fell in love with it right away. So when he needed a new backing band for shows in Brazil, he asked them to join. “We rehearsed at their studio in downtown Rio de Janeiro and I loved everything about it. They had old crappy gear. The walls were covered with xeroxed fliers. They smoked tons of weed,” Martsch says. The Brazil dates went so well Martsch, Almeida, and Casaes made the decision to continue playing together throughout 2019, touring the US and Europe. During soundchecks they learned new songs Martsch had written, and when the touring ended, they recorded the bass and drum tracks at his rehearsal space in Boise. After Almeida and Casaes flew home, Martsch began overdubbing guitars and vocals by himself. Martsch, Almeida, and Casaes had planned to mix the album together later in 2020 somewhere in Brazil or the US, but the pandemic kept them from reuniting in person. “We were able to send the tracks back and forth though, so we were still able to collaborate on the mixing process.” What emerged is When the Wind Forgets Your Name, a complex and cohesive blend of the artists’ distinct musical ideas. Alongside Built to Spill’s poetic lyrics and themes, the experimentation and attention to detail produces an album full of unique, vivid, and timeless sounds. The spare, power trio guitar riff in “Gonna Lose” is an anxiety-fueled joyride in song (“What could be more disorienting than being on acid in a dream?”). “Spiderweb” and “Never Alright” are classic-sounding, guitar-driven odes to REM and Dinosaur Jr (“No one can ever help no one not get their heart broken”). If there is such a thing as a Built to Spill sound, “Rocksteady” is maybe the band’s furthest departure from it yet with its reggae and dub-inspired instrumentation. The album also contains bittersweet songs like the lo-fi ‘60s-style anthem “Fool’s Gold,” with its mellotron strings, and bluesy, wailing guitars (“Fool’s gold made me rich for a little while”), and “Understood,” a song about misunderstanding, which also takes inspiration from Evel Knievel’s failed stunt in Martsch’s hometown when he was a child. (“The deaf hear, the blind see. Just different things than you and me.”) Martsch was also able to champion his love of comics by recruiting Alex Graham to illustrate the cover of When the Wind Forgets Your Name. “Alex published Dog Biscuits (Fantagraphics Books) online during the pandemic and it really spoke to me. I was thrilled when she agreed to paint the album cover.” What evolved was even better than he had imagined, with Graham also drawing a fifty panel comic strip for the gatefold. “I just asked for a painting and a comic. She created it all completely on her own.” Almeida and Casaes have returned to their duties in Oruã, and Martsch has begun playing with yet another Built to Spill lineup that features Prism Bitch’s Teresa Esguerra on drums and Blood Lemon’s Melanie Radford on bass. Built to Spill and Oruã are currently touring and have a string of shows planned together in September. Martsch concludes, “Making When the Wind Forgets Your Name was such a great experience. I had an incredible time traveling and recording with Almeida and Casaes. I also learned so much about Brazilian culture and music while creating it. My Portuguese was terrible when I first met Almeida and Casaes, but by the end of the year it was even worse.” (He also learned that when Billy Idol sings “Eyes Without a Face” it sounds like “Help the Fish'' in Portuguese.) It may have taken us 30 years of obvious fandom and courtship, but on September 9, 2022, Sub Pop Records is unabashedly proud to finally release an excellent new album from Built to Spill: When the Wind Forgets Your Name. Sometimes persistence pays off.

“Just to be able to get together and make some music was enough of an impetus to pour lots of enthusiasm into recording and writing,” Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor tells Apple Music. “We had so much pent-up energy that came out in the recordings.” The 11 tracks that make up the group’s eighth album see Hot Chip pushing further into thumping, danceable territory on the infectious “Down” and “Miss the Bliss,” while other numbers like “The Evil That Men Do” and “Out of My Depth” touch on a new vein of introspection and social commentary. “We were responding to an uncertain time,” guitarist Al Doyle says. “We were hoping that, with these tracks, we’d all be able to come together and enjoy the music once more.” Read on for Taylor and Doyle’s in-depth thoughts on the album, track by track. **“Down”** Alexis Taylor: “This was the first track we made, as Joe \[Goddard\] came into the studio with a sample from Universal Togetherness Band’s track ‘More Than Enough’ at the start of our session, and we all got to work right away responding to it. The song summarizes what it feels like to be back together with your bandmates and having fun at work, in the studio.” Al Doyle: “It came together very quickly. Everybody was throwing themselves at different instruments, and it didn’t really change from the original demo that we made in two days. It became a touchstone for a lot of the other songs on the record because it has this infectiously raw and raucous energy to it.” **“Eleanor”** AT: “‘Eleanor’ was written towards the end of the album. We were responding to Joe playing a few chords on the CS-80 synth in the studio, and I wrote the words right there and then. We can usually all tell when a song we’re making is going to be a single—we had the same feeling with ‘Over and Over’ and ‘Ready for the Floor.’ There’s an excitement about throwing in as many good ideas as you can and helping to make that single happen. This song was a bag full of hooks and we’re all very proud of it.” **“Freakout / Release”** AT: “Joe had an idea that, the whole way through this song, a bass riff should continue to play, going from loud to quiet and vice versa, in the same way that ‘Seven Nation Army’ by The White Stripes has a riff that drives the whole setup. That led to us getting the instrumental ingredients and the explosive moments of the track together, but we struggled with the rest of it.” AD: “We knew there was a really good song, but we couldn’t figure out how to find the best version of it. Then we had the idea to see what Soulwax would do if they were given the song, and they ultimately came up with something that we all really liked.” AT: “The lyrics are about people being stuck and locked down, and perhaps they’re freaking out at home. But we’re also talking about a moment of release, a moment of being able to freak out publicly with other people in a crowd, and we were projecting forward to when we could do that together by playing this song.” **“Broken”** AT: “I was feeling emotionally quite exhausted at this point in our writing period, and I had a few friends of mine who were going through difficult times in their personal lives too. I wanted to sum up that feeling of approaching desperation and trying to find the language to express yourself, since then somebody might be able to support you. It came together quite quickly in the studio, which was exciting because we all contributed to it as we were recording. Musically, we were thinking of George McCrae, Robyn, and ABBA.” **“Not Alone”** AT: “This was, perhaps, the last song we wrote on the album. Joe had recorded this very heavily processed vocal sound at home, and the words I’m singing in response to him are partly about having your outlook changed by collaborating with somebody new and also about questioning the morals and values of those you might have once idolized. It’s all pretty hidden away in the song, but it was what I was thinking through at the time.” **“Hard to Be Funky” (feat. Lou Hayter)** AT: “I thought of this as a solo track first, before playing it to the band. I came up with the demo and I was imagining Bill Callahan singing it in his low voice, since when I think of giving a track to someone else, I can explore a different facet of how I write. The track is playing with the idea of what it means to be funky and how that is intrinsically linked to the idea of sexiness.” AD: “We collaborated with Lou Hayter quite spontaneously, since she only lives around the corner from the studio. We wanted somebody else’s voice and perspective on the chorus, and we knew she would do a great job, so we called her in. She nailed it all in one afternoon.” **“Time”** AD: “‘Time’ went through a hell of a lot of iterations. Joe and I worked on it a bit as a separate venture, and then Alexis had this very catchy chorus that came out as a response to that. We ultimately let it be something that was quite dance-floor-oriented, since we wanted it to be representative of that side of Hot Chip.” **“Miss the Bliss”** AD: “Joe had been working on this for a while. The track has a choral aspect of group vocals, and he decided that it would be fun to get his brother to come in and do some of the backing for it. Having him in the studio was fantastic because he’s a wonderful spirit that we have known for years.” AT: “Joe’s kids and my daughter and my younger brother and various other friends joined in, too, to create a choir of voices. The song is all about offering support to each other and encouraging people not to be afraid to reach out if they need to.” **“The Evil That Men Do” (feat. Cadence Weapon)** AT: “We have written songs that are political before, but nothing quite so overt as this. The song is telling men that they need to recognize and take responsibility for their own behavior and the behavior of those who came before them. We can’t ignore the atrocities that continue to go on around us. We had Cadence Weapon opening for us on tour in America and Canada years ago, and we got in touch to ask him to add a verse for us based on the themes I was writing about. What he came up with was perfect.” **“Guilty”** AD: “This was a satisfying one to write, as I was just testing my bass guitar in the studio one day and I played the main four chords that we ended up using in this track.” AT: “It sounded really good, and we responded to Al’s bassline with the other elements of the song. It felt like mid-’80s Prince musically, and I was trying to write about the things that go on in people’s heads while they’re asleep—how they can compartmentalize their thoughts to be so different from who they are when they’re awake.” **“Out of My Depth”** AT: “I wrote most of this track at home on the guitar and then came straight into the studio so we could all build on it from there. That was a good way of starting a song because it didn’t already foreground a potential style. We ended up coming up with something quite psychedelic then, with a krautrock feel to it. It’s a good song to end on, as it summarizes a lot of the themes of the record: telling yourself that if you’re approaching a place that’s emotionally bleak, there are ways to get help and get yourself out of that headspace of feeling trapped. It’s a necessary message to end on.”

The vibey, moody LA rock quartet (guitarist/vocalists Emily Kokal and Theresa Wayman, drummer/vocalist Stella Mozgawa, and bassist/vocalist Jenny Lee Lindberg) formed in 2004, albeit with a slightly altered lineup—which is to say, its members, now into their forties, have been playing together for nearly half their lives. Throughout that time, Warpaint’s hallmark was their electric live chemistry, its members known to shut their eyes, zone out, and jam with cosmic synchronicity. Their fourth full-length arrives after a six-year hiatus, during which its members pursed their respective solo projects and otherwise settled into their adult lives. But their inexorable bond brought them back together, although this time, songwriting and recording transpired mostly over remote Zoom sessions in makeshift home studios. Elements of the thousand-yard-stare desert rock and wallowy post-punk of their early records remain (the downcast “Trouble,” the lurching “Proof”), but there’s a newfound warmth to *Radiate Like This* inspired by motherhood, stability, and friendships that have stood the test of time and touring. Think chilled-out grooves for road trips to Joshua Tree, laidback love songs about sun and rain and eternity (and the occasional request to send nudes).

It has nearly become a cliché unto itself for so many albums released in 2021 and 2022: an accomplished work of art that perfectly articulates themes of isolation and desperation and fatalism, only for the artists to reveal that the songs that express these ideas most acutely were written *before* the pandemic. “It was already sort of all in the world,” Arcade Fire’s Win Butler tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “In order to write music, you have to have this antenna up that kind of picks up little signals from the future and signals from the past. And so I think a lot of times we\'re just getting these like aftershocks of things that are about to happen.” *WE* is 10 tracks, but really more like five songs, taking into account various parts and chapters that give the album its epic scope, capturing the joy-in-the-face-of-peril spirit of their beloved 2004 debut *Funeral*, only with the peril a bit heightened. The songs that Butler and his wife Régine Chassagne started in their backyard New Orleans studio prior to March 2020 form a narrative that opens in a state of despair and winds up in an unlikely place of hope and optimism, with all the exuberance that marks the band’s most memorable songs. Like all Arcade Fire albums, *WE* is a family affair, featuring not just Butler, Chassagne, and Butler’s younger brother Will—who has since left the group, amicably—but Butler’s mom, a harpist, as well as guest vocals from Peter Gabriel. Read on as Butler expounds on a few key moments from *WE*. **“End of the Empire I-III”** “It\'s easy to interpret everything as being about the present, and I think there\'s an element of that, but I think you\'re trying to pick up on smoke signals. To me, the end of the empire isn\'t about now, it\'s about the future. It\'s about what\'s coming. I\'m still waiting to wake up and check my phone and see the stock market has finally crashed. I mean, it\'s just an inevitability. This stuff is so cyclical, and it\'s like we\'re just printing money and pretending everything\'s okay. My grandfather lived through the Depression and was a musician in World War II and lived through some pretty intense stuff, and so I think this generation is up to the task as well. We have an eight-year-old, and the tools that he has compared to the tools that I had at that age are incredible.” **“End of the Empire IV (Sagittarius A)”** “‘End of the Empire’ is four parts; we had the first three parts and it was already six and a half minutes. For some reason I just knew that there was a fourth part to it, and I had this index card that said, ‘Sagittarius A,’ which is a black hole in the middle of our solar system. I just had the card on my wall and I would just walk by it. As soon as I was vaccinated and was able to travel, I went with my son to go visit my parents because I hadn\'t seen them in a long time. I went back to their house in Maine and I brought my 4-track and I put it in the basement of their house and ran a bunch of cables up to the top floor. I felt like I was 15. It was exactly like the shit I was doing when I was 15. I was like, \'Mom, I\'m working on this song.\' We would play \'Sagittarius A\' together. There were a couple other songs that I did these 4-track recordings of playing it with her, and it sort of helped me to work through it and to just figure out what it is.” **“The Lightning II”** “What was in my head when I was singing that song was all the Haitians at the border trying to get into the US who had taken a boat from Haiti to Brazil and then walked or taken a train all the way to the Mexican border. Just to find a better life for your family—imagine what it would take, the bravery. The governor of Texas can honestly...I don\'t hate a lot of people, but I hate that motherfucker. I don\'t even believe in hell, but if there\'s a hell, that motherfucker\'s going there. Just to meet people with the absolute absence of compassion, these fake fucking Christians. That\'s not necessarily what the song\'s about, but that was what was in my head: What does it mean to not quit and to reach the end and then to be turned back, and you still can\'t quit because you still have your family, so then you get sent back to where you started and you still can\'t give up because it\'s still your life and it\'s still your family and you\'re still fighting for survival.” **“Unconditional I (Lookout Kid)”** “I was really just thinking about my son and the world that he\'s facing and how I was a very depressed kid, particularly in high school. I was trying to imagine the way that I\'m wired, just chemically, having to deal with that now, not to mention 10 years from now, whenever the fuck he\'s going to be dealing with it. He\'s going to need to have a thick skin and to just really be able to take a hit and have some fortitude. And basically just the idea of unconditional love, which is this impossible thing to achieve. But we do it naturally, somehow. And it\'s something that I think we naturally have with our kids, but I think it\'s something that we\'re supposed to have for people that we\'re not related to as well.” **“WE”** “I think the journey of the record, the first half is: Imagine this character\'s like, \'Get me the F out of here, get me off this planet, get me out of my own skin, get me away from myself. I don\'t want to be here.\' It\'s anxiety and it\'s depression and it\'s heaviness, it\'s the weight of the world. And he looks at this black hole like, \'Well, maybe if I could get through that black hole, that would be far enough away.\' And when he gets there, he finds that it\'s himself and it\'s everyone he ever loved and the lives of his ancestors. There\'s nothing to escape, because it\'s all the same thing anyway. Stories and films are always building towards this big conclusion and then the credits roll. And to me, the sentiment is, \'Let\'s just fucking do it again, with all of it—all the pain, all the loneliness, all the sadness, all the heartbreak. I just want to do it over and over again. Just run it back.”