Loud and Quiet's Albums of the Year 2022

London duo Jockstrap first gained attention in 2018 with an almost unthinkable fusion of orchestral ’60s pop and avant-club music. On their debut album, conservatory grads Georgia Ellery and Taylor Skye continue to push against convention while expanding the outline of their sui generis sound. Skye’s electronic production is less audacious this time out; *I Love You Jennifer B* is more of a head listen than a body trip. There are a few notable exceptions: The opener, “Neon,” explodes acoustic strumming into industrial-strength orchestral prog; “Concrete Over Water” violently crossfades between a pensive melody reminiscent of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and zigzagging synths recalling Hudson Mohawke’s trap-rave. But most of the album trains its focus on guitars, strings, and Ellery’s crystalline coo, leaving all the more opportunities to marvel at her unusual lyricism. Her writing returns again and again to questions of desire and regret, and while it can frequently be cryptic, she’s not immune to wide-screen sincerity: In “Greatest Hits,” when she sings, “I believe in dreams,” you believe her—never mind that she’s soon free-associating images of Madonna and Marie Antoinette. And on “Debra,” when she sings, “Grief is just love with nowhere to go” over a cascading beat that sounds like Kate Bush beamed back from the 22nd century, all of Jockstrap’s occasional impishness is rendered moot. At just 24 years old, these two are making some of the most grown-up pop music around.

When Georgia Ellery and Taylor Skye make music as Jockstrap, the process and result has one definition: pure modern pop alchemy. Meeting in 2016 when they shared the same com- position class while studying at London’s Guildhall School of Music & Drama, Ellery and Skye founded Jockstrap as a creative outlet for their rapidly-developing tastes. While Ellery had moved from Cornwall to the English capital to study jazz violin, Skye arrived from Leicester to study music production. Both were delving deep into the varied worlds of mainstream pop, EDM and post-dubstep (made by the likes of James Blake and Skrillex), as well as classical composition, ‘50s jazz and ‘60s folk singer-songwriters. The influence of the club and a dancier focus, which was hinted at on previous releases, now scorches through their new material like wildfire. Take the thumping, distorted breakbeats of ‘50/50’ –inspired by the murky quality of YouTube mp3 rips –as well as the sparkling synth eruptions of ‘Concrete Over Water’, as early evidence of where Jockstrap are heading next. Jockstrap’s discography is restless and inventive, traversing everything from liberating dancefloor techno to off-kilter electro pop, trip-hop and confessional song writing; an omnivorous sonic palette that takes on a cohesive maturity far beyond their ages of only 24 years old. They have cemented themselves as one of the most vital young groups to emerge from London’s melting pot of musical cultures.

Kai Whiston’s new album ‘Quiet As Kept, F.O.G.’ is an overwhelmingly ambitious, devastatingly beautiful symphony. Distorted through a crunchy stereo of a decaying nomadic bus, echoed through a bleak moor, shrouded with a thick blinding mist. Whiston’s latest full-length release continues his trademark eclecticism while forging radical new ground, both sonically and thematically. From the banger-infused hilarity of 2018’s ‘Kai Whiston Bitch’ or the post-rock cascading landscapes of 2019’s ‘No World As Good As Mine’, Whiston’s ‘sound’ is never contained through a singular sub-genre or scene, but through a maximal approach to editing and sound design that creates arrangements which feel cross-referential and entirely new. It is this unbound perspective and commitment to building musical worlds that makes Whiston’s work feel limitless in its storytelling and leaves you wondering what’s coming next. Whiston was born into dance music in the late 90s - a reality he confronts more than ever in QAKFOG. His mother and father were young ravers of the New Age Traveller community, who had spent their lives bouncing between the free parties of South England to witness the rise of Massive Attack, The Prodigy & Orbital. Kai’s mother, Helene Whiston, had an artistic touch, designing flyers and murals for the warehouse raves throughout the trance, hardcore & breakbeat movements. His father was a charming pub pianist and grafter, unfortunately led down a darker path towards the drugs & violence that so commonly devastates disadvantaged communities, sadly losing /his life to a heroin addiction early Kai's childhood. In his own words, Whitson describes QAKFOG as creating a realistic exploration of his memories growing up as a New Age Traveller, his upbringing with raver parents and the impact of this community on his life - part-celebratory, part-critique, part-reality & part-fantasy. Whiston explains, “It took years of hindsight, creating a distance from my upbringing to view it all rationally, and in that I saw the story was bigger than my experience and was about the traveller community as a whole. It was through the impulse to write this project, hearing the stories from my mum (told throughout the album via phone interview interludes) and doing my own research that I found the beauty in growing up in that environment and accepted how it shaped me.” Sonically, “Quiet As Kept, F.O.G.” offers a take on dance music that doesn’t rely on its nostalgia, with its primary function to be totally versatile, original and personal. Tracks are threaded together with live string quartets, arranged by Whiston and recorded at Air Studios, juxtaposed with otherworldly sound design to bring an cinematic intensity that lands somewhere between Bjork’s ‘Homogenic’ and Jóhann Jóhannsson’s ‘Arrival’ soundtrack. The driving hardcore breakbeats of ‘Q’, featuring iconic punk feminist collective Pussy Riot, embrace the traveller raves of 90s - redesigned and repurposed to euphoric heights of futurism and fantasy. Throughout QAKFOG, Whiston delivers his raw and cryptic vocals - a technique honed in during his 2021 hybrid-alien themed mixtape ‘Drayan!’ -, offering an honest glimpse on the struggles and joys of his family upbringing. He remarks on the prelude of the self-directed ‘Between Lures’ music video, “It crept into the site like a thief / It stole the colour from our lives”, the ‘F.O.G.’ is sentient, an approaching cloud that creeps on all those in despair. His self-directed music video for ‘Between Lures’ visualises the album’s concept, with Whiston struggling to pull the weight of a caravan up a hill using his bare hands and a rope. At the peak of the hill, he sets fire to the caravan and a spectacular orange hue dances and dazzles, the film bursting into colour for the first time. Kai explains, “I'm beginning to understand where my own habits and preconceptions come from, and starting to grow from what I spent so long to keep quiet, out of fear of judgement from others or myself. It’s as if a fog has been lifted.”

“Right now, I’m still very much restless,” Charli XCX tells Apple Music. “Because I know that I would be an excellent humongous pop star. But I also unfortunately know that there’s a vision of who I am in the mainstream’s mind. It’s a constant headfuck, to be honest. While I’m a very defiant person, I’m also a human, and sometimes I do just want to be accepted, and I don’t understand why I’m not totally—even though sometimes I relish in the fact that I’m not.” Charlotte Aitchison is one of pop music’s more self-aware, self-deprecating, and self-examining artists. *CRASH* is her fifth studio album, and the final one to be released as part of a longtime record deal. It’s partly, as Charli says, an experiment. An opportunity to utilize a major label’s resources and dress up her left-leaning pop in something ultra luxe. A bold and refreshingly transparent attempt to move up a few rungs, it’s a considered move also designed to clear up some of Charli’s nagging what-ifs. “I’ve always questioned myself,” she says. “And it’s why I’ve made this entire album, really. I ask myself, am I a likable artist? Am I too opinionated? Do I look too weird? Am I too annoying? If I shut up and put out certain songs and do the right features, will I become more accepted, more liked, more commercial?” Of course, Charli’s notoriously engaged fanbase—with whom she exchanged ideas, including song lyrics, directly online for 2020’s quarantine album *how i’m feeling now*—would argue she doesn’t need any such validation. “It’s a blessing and a curse, to be extremely honest,” she says of her “Angels.” “I’m very lucky to have the fanbase that I have, who are extremely invested in literally every breath I take. They are very vocal and very smart, which draws me to them, because they’ve got great taste and amazing ideas—as I found out when doing *how i’m feeling now*. But you can’t please everyone. I’ve done so many different things that people are always going to gravitate to certain eras. Plus, I think that there’s an element where they like to root for an underdog, or an on-the-fringes personality like mine. Because we feel like we’ve been in it together for a really long time, the online discourse can be so vigorous. So I can’t lie, sometimes it’s a bit of a headfuck, because whilst I absolutely adore them, I don’t make music for them specifically when I’m sat in the studio—I’m making it for me. And I don’t think they would admire me as the artist I am if I just kept giving them what they expected.” It’s time to listen for yourself. Explore Charli’s premium pop with her own track-by-track guide. **“Crash”** “Until maybe a week before I made this song, the album was going to be called *Sorry If I Hurt You*. But one day, I was driving in my car and *CRASH* just came to me, and I called A. G. Cook. Even though he wasn\'t a *huge* part of this record, he\'s still very much my creative confidant. He agreed it made sense with the constant car references in my work—and I like the onomatopoeia, I like how it references \[2014 single\] ‘Boom Clap,’ and I like how it feels much more punchy and in-your-face than *how i’m feeling now*. I felt that the title needed a song, so A. G. and I got in the studio pretty quickly and knew we needed to make it sound extremely ’80s—if you could bottle the album into one song, this is it. We—plus the song’s co-producer George Daniel—had been sending a lot of new jack swing beats back and forth, and I knew I wanted this guitar solo, and to add these crazy Janet-esque stabs.” **“New Shapes” (feat. Caroline Polachek & Christine and the Queens)** “Caroline, Christine, and I had worked together many times in different forms, and it was time for the three of us to come together. And actually, this song was recorded a long time ago—pre-pandemic. I like how it\'s an antihero song. We’re saying to the love figure, ‘I haven\'t got what you need from me, because I am not typical. I don\'t operate in the way that you want me to. I want multiple partners. I want somebody else. I want no convention within sex and love.’ And I like that as a statement right after the sound of a car crash in the previous song. To do that song with them—two artists who I really feel have such a unique, defiant, and topsy-turvy vision of what pop music is—felt really classic and right for us. There’s a true connection between us now, in music and in our personal lives.” **“Good Ones”** “I think this song deserved to be bigger, but I will always think that of my work. But I do think it established the Cliffs Notes version of what the record is—it\'s got a darkness to it, and it\'s very pop. I like how drastic the jump was between coming out of *how i’m feeling now* into this, both sonically and in how they were made. *how i’m feeling now* was obviously my quarantine album made in my living room over five weeks by me and two trusted collaborators. This song is produced by Oscar Holter—an extremely active part of the Max Martin camp—and not really written hugely by myself but by two amazing topliners, Caroline Ailin and Noonie Bao. So it’s the absolute polar opposite.” **“Constant Repeat”** “This song features an imaginary scenario I created in my head, where I fell for somebody but imagined that they didn\'t want me—which turned out to not be the case. But it was this fear that I had, and my prediction of the situation. I think it\'s interesting that you can convince yourself of that. When you are falling for someone, unfortunately, I think human nature just crushes in on you and tells you you\'re not good enough, and fills you with doubt and dread and fear and all of those things. This song really poured out of me quite late in the album process, and it just felt so real and natural.” **“Beg for You” (feat. Rina Sawayama)** “Rina wanted to do something uptempo together, and give our fans a bit more of a moment. So when this song idea bubbled up, I called her immediately. She rewrote the second verse, and sounded incredible on it. It’s a very perfect-storm moment, because we’re two artists operating within the pop sphere, but always challenging it and doing something a little bit more left. She also has that hardcore, diehard fanbase—there’s a lot of crossover. Whilst maybe some of them were expecting something a little bit more experimental from us, I think, in a way, you can\'t deny that this actually is the perfect song for us in that we are paying a homage to a gay anthem \[‘Cry for You’ by September\]. She\'s queer, I\'m a queer ally, we\'re coming together to really just live our best lives and sing an iconic pop song.” **“Move Me”** “This song came from a writing camp that I was invited to by \[US producer and songwriter\] Ian Kirkpatrick. I hadn’t done a very classic camp for a while. Not because I\'m anti them—I actually think I thrive quite well in them and enjoy them. I ended up writing this with \[US songwriter and producer\] Amy Allen. We’re actually polar opposites in terms of our styles, which is why this song ended up being so beautiful—the aggressive parts of the song where I was basically yelling into a mic are very me, then you have the balance of Amy’s gorgeous verses. As we were doing it, everyone kept talking about how it’d be a great song for Halsey. I was like, ‘No, I love Halsey, but this is a great song for me and I’m fucking keeping it.’ People talk about writing-camp songs being fake and constructed in a test tube or whatever. But it’s very real. We write from our reality. That’s why we’re good songwriters.” **“Baby”** “This was one of the first tracks I made for this album, probably pre-pandemic, and with Justin Raisen—who was a very crucial part of my first album, *True Romance* \[2013\]. So it felt really good to be going back and working with him in the same house where we made part of the first album. This was a song that I always felt was so passionate and fiery and sexy. And I think the making of this song helped me feel powerful, and want to explore the sexier side of pop music and my artistry. It’s the song that helped me decide that I wanted to dance for this campaign, because I just couldn\'t stop wanting to move to it whilst we were making it.” **“Lightning”** “It began as one of those half demos that I took away and lived with. I then called up Ariel Rechtshaid, who was also a huge part of the first album, alongside Justin Raisen, and said, ‘OK, I have this song. I want to do *True Romance in 2022* with it.” And while I know he’s not really on that hype currently, I told him he was the king of the ’80s and if he felt it needed to go down that road, I trusted him because he has the most impeccable taste. So he sent it back to me, and there was a question mark over the Spanish guitar moment, which goes into a chorus. I sent it to A. G. to ask his opinion. He was like, ‘It\'s insane. I laughed out loud.’ And I was like, ‘OK, great. We\'re keeping it.’” **“Every Rule”** “It\'s the true story of me meeting my previous partner, and both of us being in relationships but knowing that we were meant to be together. I think that that\'s a story that a lot of my friends have also experienced—and obviously there\'s a lot of controversy that comes with that circumstance. People are afraid to talk about it. People feel shame. But it\'s also, it\'s really real. I think you have to be really brave to admit to yourself that you\'re not in love with maybe the person that you\'re with, and that you are in love with someone else. It\'s cruel on both sides, and I think you can really hear that. It was a song that I really only felt comfortable enough to make with A. G. He would never judge me for saying these things. It’s another pre-pandemic song, and A. G. was living in a place with a studio in his garage. There was a tree outside that was always covered in crickets. You can hear the crickets in the recording, which I think is really sweet and charming. Once we’d lived with the song for about a year, A. G. had the idea of asking Oneohtrix Point Never to add some things to the song, which I loved.” **“Yuck”** “I like the drastic gear change here. I like that it makes you laugh. I like those jarring moments on albums and in live shows where you\'re going from the most intimate, quiet song to the most hilarious or poptastic. That was the reasoning behind putting ‘Every Rule’ and ‘Yuck’ back to back. I really struggle with that feeling of being smothered. It\'s probably an only-child thing, or something. When you\'re like, ‘Get away from me, give me some fucking space’—that is seriously how I feel 50% of the time. It also reminds me of that gang vocal element of ‘Boom Clap’ and ‘Boys.’ Not sonically, but more in terms of the way that I\'m singing. I\'m definitely not the most technical singer ever—if you put me next to Ariana Grande and made us both sing the same song, I would sound absolutely insane, and she would sound absolutely gorgeous—but when it comes to singing like this, I feel pretty confident. That’s really nice for me, just in a technical way. It\'s really fun to be like, ‘Yeah. You know what? I can sing this song.’ Which I know sounds stupid because I am a professional ‘singer.’” **“Used to Know Me”** “I was trying to emulate myself on ‘Fancy’—or get back into that headspace. I really remember searching for the chorus melody to ‘Fancy’ in a way that I hadn\'t really searched for a melody before. Normally I\'m very instinctual and spontaneous when it comes to melodies, but with ‘Fancy,’ I had to really maneuver my brain around different corners to figure it out—to understand the formation of the notes. I wrote this on my own at Stargate’s studios, which probably made me feel like I had to write a really big pop song, and then when I was listening to it on repeat in my car, I just started singing the synth line to ‘Show Me Love’ by Robin S. So I called a few people and was like, ‘Is this possible?’ And everyone said, ‘Yes, but do you care about publishing?’ And I was like, ‘I guess not.’ It feels to me like a big song—it’s about reshaping who you are after a breakup.” **“Twice”** “I had reservations about making this the last song because it\'s such an obvious choice with the key change and outro. And generally speaking, I\'m anti the obvious choice. But then George Daniel, who is very good with tracklisting, simply said, ‘You\'re an idiot if you don\'t put this song last.’ It’s actually interesting lyrically, because it\'s about the end of the world and that you shouldn\'t think twice about intimate moments, or these off-the-cuff moments. Essentially, YOLO, and enjoy delving into these once-in-a-lifetime situations that everybody ends up in. I was picturing the scene from \[Lars von Trier’s 2011 film\] *Melancholia* where Kirsten Dunst’s character is sat on a hill waiting for the end of the world. It’s a perfect closer, and I also think it’s a very beautiful song.”

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.

When Kendrick Lamar popped up on two tracks from Baby Keem’s *The Melodic Blue* (“range brothers” and “family ties”), it felt like one of hip-hop’s prophets had descended a mountain to deliver scripture. His verses were stellar, to be sure, but it also just felt like way too much time had passed since we’d heard his voice. He’d helmed 2018’s *Black Panther* compilation/soundtrack, but his last proper release was 2017’s *DAMN.* That kind of scarcity in hip-hop can only serve to deify an artist as beloved as Lamar. But if the Compton MC is broadcasting anything across his fifth proper album *Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers*, it’s that he’s only human. The project is split into two parts, each comprising nine songs, all of which serve to illuminate Lamar’s continually evolving worldview. Central to Lamar’s thesis is accountability. The MC has painstakingly itemized his shortcomings, assessing his relationships with money (“United in Grief”), white women (“Worldwide Steppers”), his father (“Father Time”), the limits of his loyalty (“Rich Spirit”), love in the context of heteronormative relationships (“We Cry Together,” “Purple Hearts”), motivation (“Count Me Out”), responsibility (“Crown”), gender (“Auntie Diaries”), and generational trauma (“Mother I Sober”). It’s a dense and heavy listen. But just as sure as Kendrick Lamar is human like the rest of us, he’s also a Pulitzer Prize winner, one of the most thoughtful MCs alive, and someone whose honesty across *Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers* could help us understand why any of us are the way we are.

Although Dry Cleaning began work on their second album before the London quartet had even released their 2021 debut, *New Long Leg*, there was little creative overlap between the two. “I definitely think of it as a different chapter,” drummer Nick Buxton tells Apple Music. “I think one of the nicest things was just knowing what we were in for a bit more,” adds singer Florence Shaw. “It was less about, ‘What are we doing?’ and more thinking about what we were playing.” Recorded in the same studio (Wales’ famous Rockfield Studios) with the same producer (PJ Harvey collaborator John Parish) as *New Long Leg*, *Stumpwork* sees Shaw, Buxton, bassist Lewis Maynard, and guitarist Tom Dowse hone the wiry post-punk and rhythmical bursts of their debut. The jangly guitar lines are melodically sharper and the grooves more locked in as Shaw’s observational, spoken-word vocals pull at the threads of life’s big topics, even when she’s singing about a missing tortoise. “When we finished *New Long Leg*, I always felt a bit like, ‘Ah, I’d like another chance at that.’ With this one, it definitely felt like, ‘Really happy with that,’” says Buxton. The quartet take us on a tour of *Stumpwork*, track by track. **“Anna Calls From the Arctic”** Nick Buxton: “It was a very late decision to start the album with this. I think it’s quite unusual because it’s very different from a lot of the other songs on the album.” Florence Shaw: “I quite liked that the album opened with a question: ‘Should I propose friendship?’ In the outro, we were thinking about the John Barry song ‘Capsule in Space,’ from *You Only Live Twice*. There’s quite a bit of that in the outro. At least, it was on the mood board.” **“Kwenchy Kups”** NB: “It’s named after those little plastic pots you get when you’re a kid—pots full of some luminous liquid, and you pierce the film on the lid with a straw.” FS: “We were at a studio in Easton in Bristol, and I wrote a lot of the lyrics on walks around the area. It’s a really nice little area, and there’s lots of interesting shops. We wanted to write a few more joyful songs, at least in tone, and the song is so cheerful-sounding. So, some of the lyrics came out of that, too, wanting to write something that was optimistic, the idea of watching animals or insects being just a simple, joyful thing to do.” **“Gary Ashby”** NB: “This is about a real tortoise.” FS: “On a walk in lockdown, I saw a ‘lost’ poster for ‘Gary Ashby.’ The rest of the story came out of imagining the circumstances of him disappearing and the idea that it’s obviously a family tortoise because he’s got this surname. It’s thinking about family and things getting lost in chaos, when things are a bit chaotic in the home and pets escape. We don’t know what happened to him. We don’t know if he’s alive or dead, which is a little bit disturbing, but hopefully we’ll find out one day.” **“Driver’s Story”** NB: “We were rehearsing at a little studio in the basement at our record label \[4AD\]. It was just me, Tom, and Lewis, and we weren’t there very long, but quite a few ideas for songs came out of that. The main bit of ‘Driver’s Story’ was one. It felt different to anything we’d done on *New Long Leg*. It’s just got such a nice, oozy feel to it. FS: “There’s a bit in the song about a jelly shoe and the idea of it being buried in your guts. A photographer called Maisie Cousins does photos of lots of bodily stuff and liquids, but with flowers and beautiful things as well. I was looking at a lot of those at the time. The jelly-shoe thing is about that—something pretty, plastic-y, mixed with guts.” Tom Dowse: “It’s got my dog barking on the end of it as well. He’s called Buckley. He is credited on the record.” **“Hot Penny Day”** TD: “I’d been listening to a lot of Rolling Stones, so this is an attempt at that. We were jamming it through, and it started to take on a bit more of a stoner-rock vibe. ‘Driver’s Story’ was also meant to be a bit more stoner-rock until John Parish got his hands in it and took the drugs out of it.” Lewis Maynard: “I found a bass wah pedal in my sister’s garage. I just plugged it in and started playing, and I was like, ‘This is fun.’ I’ve unfortunately not stopped playing bass wah.” NB: “It conjures up quite a lot of imagery. I was listening to some of Jonny Greenwood’s music for the film *Inherent Vice*, and it’s got a washed-out, desert-y feel. This sounds like Dry Cleaning in an alternate, parallel universe somewhere.” **“Stumpwork”** FS: “Quite a lot of the lyrics were gleaned from this archive of newspaper clippings that I went to in Woolwich Arsenal. It’s millions and millions of newspaper clippings on different subjects. There’s a bit \[in ‘Stumpwork’\] about toads crossing roads from this little article I found about a special tunnel being built, so that toads could traverse the street without being run over.” NB: “When we were trying to figure out a name for the record, it felt like the best option. We loved it, and it was really succinct. We liked that the word ‘work’ was in the title.” **“No Decent Shoes for Rain”** TD: “This was two of those jams from the basement of 4AD. We were quite unsure about this song. We took it to show John at the pre-production rehearsals, and he really liked it, and he didn’t really have anything to say about it, which is quite unusual. A lot of people ask, ‘Why did you record with John again?’ And it’s things like that—because he notices things that are good about you that you don’t notice. I was really self-conscious that the end section sounded too trad, classic rock. It sounded like the safest bit of guitar I’ve ever written. But once he said he was into it, I started to look at it from a different way, and it grew from that.” **“Don’t Press Me”** FS: “This has some recorder on it, which I had to play at half-time because it was really fast. I was like, ‘Oh, this would be nice if it had this little bit of a recorder on.’ I tried to play it, and I was completely incapable. I’d thought, ‘Oh, I’ll be able to do this. Kids play the recorder all the time. It’s easy.’ Even at half-time, I had to have loads of goes at it. So, it’s me playing the recorder, sped up, because I have no skills.” **“Conservative Hell”** NB: “I think this song’s really important because through the course of the record there’s two different types of song. There’s these upbeat, jangle, poppy ones and then there’s slightly slower, more groovy ones. This song has two very distinct elements that we’re really happy with. It’s nice as well to be so overtly political, which is not usually our scene.” FS: “The reason it ended up being such an on-the-nose phrase is I was thinking it would be really nice to write a song that was something like ‘Conservative Hell.’ And then, after a while, I was like, ‘That’s pretty good.’ I think it almost sounds like a silly headline, but accurate too.” **“Liberty Log”** FS: “The title comes from thinking about spring rolls. They’re like little logs, aren’t they? Then, later, I was thinking about a stupid monument, something that would be a really dumb statue in a town—just a big log and it’s called the Liberty Log.” LM: “This is one of the ones we took to the studio expecting it to be a shit-ton of editing, structuring, and that John would really fuck with it. We jammed it, and it just stayed the same. This one was first-take vibes, playing it in that way, expecting it to be changed.” **“Icebergs”** NB: “I think this is quite a bleak moment for us. Definitely the most icy-sounding track on the album. It feels like a really good end to the record to suddenly have this explosion of brass come in, and then it just peters out very slowly. I like that the album ends on quite an icy tone, even though that doesn’t necessarily represent us in how we feel about things. It’s a slightly more poignant ending rather than a nice, lovely outro.”

Unique, strong, and sexy—that’s how Beyoncé wants you to feel while listening to *RENAISSANCE*. Crafted during the grips of the pandemic, her seventh solo album is a celebration of freedom and a complete immersion into house and dance that serves as the perfect sound bed for themes of liberation, release, self-assuredness, and unfiltered confidence across its 16 tracks. *RENAISSANCE* is playful and energetic in a way that captures that Friday-night, just-got-paid, anything-can-happen feeling, underscored by reiterated appeals to unyoke yourself from the weight of others’ expectations and revel in the totality of who you are. From the classic four-on-the-floor house moods of the Robin S.- and Big Freedia-sampling lead single “BREAK MY SOUL” to the Afro-tech of the Grace Jones- and Tems-assisted “MOVE” and the funky, rollerskating disco feeling of “CUFF IT,” this is a massive yet elegantly composed buffet of sound, richly packed with anthemic morsels that pull you in. There are soft moments here, too: “I know you can’t help but to be yourself around me,” she coos on “PLASTIC OFF THE SOFA,” the kind of warm, whispers-in-the-ear love song you’d expect to hear at a summer cookout—complete with an intricate interplay between vocals and guitar that gives Beyoncé a chance to showcase some incredible vocal dexterity. “CHURCH GIRL” fuses R&B, gospel, and hip-hop to tell a survivor’s story: “I\'m finally on the other side/I finally found the extra smiles/Swimming through the oceans of tears we cried.” An explicit celebration of Blackness, “COZY” is the mantra of a woman who has nothing to prove to anyone—“Comfortable in my skin/Cozy with who I am,” ” Beyoncé muses on the chorus. And on “PURE/HONEY,” Beyoncé immerses herself in ballroom culture, incorporating drag performance chants and a Kevin Aviance sample on the first half that give way to the disco-drenched second half, cementing the song as an immediate dance-floor favorite. It’s the perfect lead-in to the album closer “SUMMER RENAISSANCE,” which propels the dreamy escapist disco of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” even further into the future.

Listen to the fourth album by Scotland-born, LA-based Ross Birchard and you’re liable to feel a little overwhelmed. Sugar rush or religious epiphany? The elation of a good roller coaster or the nausea that sets in when the ride loses control? Birchard likes it all, and by the fistful. Nearly a decade out from his public christening as a producer for Kanye West (“Mercy,” “Blood on the Leaves”) and half of the jock-jam festival phenomenon TNGHT (with Lunice), he’s become the kind of musician it seems like he wanted to be all along: bright, weird, funky, funny, and guided by an optimism so irrepressible you wonder if, deep down, he feels a little sad. “Stump” is the most beautiful music that didn’t make *Blade Runner*. “Bicstan” is Aphex Twin for a seven-year-old’s birthday party. He can balance tracks as abstract as “Kpipe” with ones as direct as “3 Sheets to the Wind,” and the soulful lag of American rap (“Redeem”) with the momentum of UK bass (“Rain Shadow,” “Is It Supposed”), not to mention whatever neon-halo hybrid “Behold” is. This is opera for people raised on anime. And as easy as it is to imagine listening in a big, sweaty room, he knows that most of us will end up taking it in alone on headphones—and he wants us to have fun.

Pop in your earpiece, close your eyes and embrace the wonders (and horrors) of augmented reality and prepare to travel 500 years into the future as Richard Dawson returns with…The Ruby Cord. These seven tracks plunge us into an unreal, fantastical and at times sinister future where social mores have mutated, ethical and physical boundaries have evaporated; a place where you no longer need to engage with anyone but yourself and your own imagination. It’s a leap into a future that is well within reach, in some cases already here.

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.

Shygirl toyed with simply self-titling her debut album, but *Nymph* felt far more evocative—and fitting. “A nymph is an alluring character but also an ambiguous one,” the artist and DJ, whose real name is Blane Muise, tells Apple Music. “You don’t quite know what they’re about, so you can project onto them a little bit of what you want.” Co-written with collaborators including Mura Masa, BloodPop®, and longtime producer Sega Bodega, it’s an album that defies categorization, its stunning, shape-shifting tracks blending everything from rap and UK garage to folktronica and Eurodance. Along the way, it reveals fascinating new layers to the South London singer, rapper, and songwriter. While *Nymph* contains moments that match the “bravado” (her word) of earlier EPs *Cruel Practice* and *ALIAS*, Shygirl says this album is “ultimately the story of my relationship with vulnerability.” As ever, sensuality is central, but she resists the “sex-positive” label. “With a track like ‘Shlut,’ I’m not saying my desire is good or bad,” she says. “I’m just saying it’s authentically who I am.” Read on as Shygirl guides us through her beguiling debut album, one song at a time. **“Woe”** “This song is me acclimatizing to the audience’s presence and how vocal they are. Sometimes it’s annoying to have all these other voices \[around you\] when you’re trying to figure out your own. But then, on the flip of that, isn’t it nice that people actually want something from you? I often do that: give myself space to express some frustration or an emotion, then look at it in different ways. Sometimes I do that with sensitivity, and sometimes I’m just taking the piss out of myself. Like, ‘OK now, just get over it.’” **“Come For Me”** “For me, this song is a conversation between myself and \[producer\] Arca because we hadn’t met in person when we made it. She would send me little sketches of beats, then I would respond with vocal melodies. Working on this track was one of the first times I was experimenting with vocal production on Logic, manipulating my voice and stuff. It was really daunting to send ideas over to Arca because she’s such an amazing producer. But she was so responsive, and that was really empowering for me.” **“Shlut”** “I said to Sega \[Bodega\], ‘I want to use more guitar.’ I love that style of music, more folky stuff, because I used to listen to Keane and Florence + the Machine in my younger days. So, that’s definitely an undercurrent influence here, but the beat is a horse galloping. The horse was a very prevalent idea when I was making this album because it’s this powerful animal that is oftentimes in a domestic setting being controlled by someone. At the same time, there’s an element of choice in that relationship because the horse could easily not be tamed. I love that and relate to it a lot.” **“Little Bit”** “I have to give Sega credit for the beat. The way I work, mostly, is in the same room \[as my collaborators\], and we start from scratch. When most producers send me beats, I’m not inspired by them. But when Sega plays me stuff, I’m like ‘Wait, no—can I have that?’ I think because we started working together in 2015, he can probably anticipate what I want now. I never imagined hearing myself on a beat like this. It reminds me of a 50 Cent beat, which takes me back to my childhood. So, even the way I’m rapping here is nostalgic. I’m being playful and inserting myself into a sonic narrative that I didn’t think I would occupy.” **“Firefly”** “I started this song with Sega and \[producer\] Kingdom at a studio in LA, but then Sega had to leave for some reason. I was feeling a bit childish because I was like, ‘What’s more important than being in this room right now?’ So, then, with just me and Kingdom, I was like, ‘If I was going to make an R&B-style song, this is what it would sound like.’ I’d been listening to a lot of Janet Jackson, and I’d just watched her documentary. But really, I was kind of just taking the piss as I started freestyling the melodies. I really like being a bit flippant with melodies and not being too formulaic.” **“Coochie (a bedtime story)”** “The title is a Madonna reference. When I was shooting a Burberry campaign last year, her song ‘Bedtime Story’ was playing on repeat. It became the soundtrack to this moment where I was acclimatizing to a space \[in my career\] that was bigger than I had anticipated. I started writing this song at an Airbnb in Brighton with Sega and \[co-writers\] Cosha, Mura Masa, and Karma Kid. We were up super late one evening, and I was just sitting there, humming to myself. And I was like, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to have a cute song about coochie?’ Growing up as a girl, there’s not even a cute word for \[your vagina\]. Everything is so sexualized or anatomical. I was like, ‘I need to make this cute song that I would have liked to hear when I was younger.’” **“Heaven”** “This track is quite experimental. The production started quite garage-y, but then it got weird fast. And then we reworked it again because I wanted it to sound sweet. I was thinking about when I broke up with my ex-boyfriend; there were moments where I was like, ‘Can we just forget everything and get back together?’ Obviously, you can’t just forget everything—it’s childish to want to erase those parts, but I can have that space in my music. In some moments, my ex was my peace and my place of absolute escape. And that’s what I equated to heaven at that point.” **“Nike”** “This is me revisiting my childhood, being that teenager at the back of the bus. It started when \[co-writer\] Oscar Scheller played me this recording he’d made of girls talking on the bus, and in the original production, we even had that \[chatter\] in there. You know when a girl is talking and saying nothing but also saying everything? I was that person! My friends used to ask me for advice about stuff I had no experience in, and I would dish it out with such vim. I thought it would be funny to dip back into that space on this track and be playful with it. Because no matter how sensitive I get, there is always this part of me with real bravado.” **“Poison”** “I love Eurodance music. When I DJ, it’s what I play the most. I just find it really fun and sexy and flirtatious, and I relate to the upfront lyrics. Some of my audience probably isn’t as familiar with my musical references here, such as Cascada and Inna, so it’s fun to introduce them to that sound a little bit. And I love that we found a real accordion player to play on the track. I really enjoy the tone and texture that you can get from using a real instrument.” **“Honey”** “I made this track predominantly with \[producer\] Vegyn. It came out of a real jam session where we had music playing in the room, and I was speaking on the mic over it. You get the texture of that as the song starts. There’s a lot of feedback that reminds me of The Cardigans and stuff with that ’90s electronica vibe. For me, this track is all about sensualness. I had this idea of being in an orgasmic experience that keeps on intensifying, so I wanted to replicate that sonically. That’s why I’m repeating myself a lot and why the melody tends to rearrange just a little bit as I rearrange the order of the words as well.” **“Missin u”** “This song is about me being annoyed at my ex-boyfriend. We’d broken up like six times, and we weren’t even together at this point, and I was just being really petulant about that. I write poems when I’m feeling any intensity of emotion, and so I wrote this poem where I was just really dismissive of the whole situation. Then, when I was in the studio with Sega, I put the poem to the beat he was working on. I wanted this track to feel a bit disruptive at the end of the album. Because no matter how sensitive I get, there is also this sharper energy to me and my approach to lyrics.” **“Wildfire”** “This track has a very Joshua Tree title because I wrote it with Noah Goldstein at his house there. I was imagining looking across a bonfire at someone I don’t even know but kind of fancy and seeing the fire reflecting in their eyes. I romanticize situations a lot in this way, so this song is really me riffing off that idea. It’s main-character syndrome, I guess! I don’t really like closed beginnings and endings. If I was to write a story, I would always give myself space for it to continue, and I think ‘Wildfire’ does that a little bit. That’s why it’s the final track.”

Black Thought may be best-known as part of The Roots, performing night after late night for Jimmy Fallon’s TV audience, yet the Philadelphia native concurrently boasts a staggering reputation as a stand-alone rapper. Though he’s earned GOAT nods from listeners for earth-shaking features alongside Big Pun, Eminem, and Rapsody, his solo catalog long remained relatively modest in size. Meanwhile, Danger Mouse had a short yet monumental run in the 2000s that made him one of that decade’s most beloved and respected producers. His discography from that period contains no shortage of microphone dynamos, most notably MF DOOM (as DANGERDOOM) and Goodie Mob’s CeeLo Green (as Gnarls Barkley). Uniting these low-key hip-hop powerhouses is the stuff of hip-hop dreams, the kind of fantasy-league-style draft you’d encounter on rap message boards. Yet *Cheat Codes* is real—perhaps realer than real. Danger Mouse’s penchant for quirkily cinematic, subtly soulful soundscapes remains from the old days, but the growth from his 2010s work with the likes of composer Daniele Luppi gives “Aquamarine” and “Sometimes” undeniable big-screen energy. Black Thought luxuriates over these luxurious beats, his lyrical lexicon put to excellent use over the feverish funk of “No Gold Teeth” and the rollicking blues of “Close to Famous.” As if their team-up wasn’t enough, an intergenerational cabal of rapper guests bless the proceedings. From living legend Raekwon to A$AP Rocky to Conway the Machine, New York artists play a pivotal role here. A lost DOOM verse, apparently from *The Mouse and the Mask* sessions, makes its way onto the sauntering and sunny “Belize,” another gift for the fans.

“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

New Orleans no-wave punks Special Interest announce ‘Endure’, their third album and Rough Trade Records debut, for release on Friday, November 4th, 2022. Endure was self-produced and recorded at HighTower in New Orleans with engineering by James Whitten, mixed by Collin Dupuis (Angel Olsen, Yves Tumor, Lana Del Rey). Special Interest's songs recall the art rock of Sparks and The B-52s as much as politically-minded punk, and on “Midnight Legend,” the group is more overtly pop than ever before — making something fun during a time of frequent sadness became a central priority. But that doesn’t mean anything is simple or surface-level, with a darkness often treading beneath the smooth production. For as much as the band plays with dissonance, Maria Elena’s expressive guitar work and Nathan Cassiani’s grooving bass lines effortlessly weave together, and shade out the soundscape brought into existence by Alli Logout’s commanding vocal presence.

Rina Sawayama thought she was done with trauma. Her debut album, *SAWAYAMA*, which was released to widespread critical acclaim under the isolating restrictions of the global pandemic, was a deceptively bombastic pop record, the production serving as a disguise for the heavy, existential lyrical content. Had it not been for the paradigm-shifting events of 2020, which left Sawayama experiencing her breakthrough success through screens, the electrifying follow up, *Hold the Girl*, would probably have been a very different record. “The thought I was really confronted with during lockdown was that I just did not feel connected to myself or my body,” Sawayama tells Apple Music. “I was constantly running on adrenaline because so many exciting things were happening, the album was doing better than I ever imagined, but I was so mentally unwell and completely numb to any real emotion.” *Hold the Girl* is the result of two years’ worth of forced self-reflection and “brutal” therapy, or what Sawayama calls a “‘can you be alone with your thoughts for two years?’ experiment.” Musically rooted in country and western—inspired by what she calls the “beautiful” writing on Kacey Musgraves\' *Golden Hour* and Dolly Parton’s appearance in the film *Dumplin’*—the album was intended to be recorded in Nashville to ground the songs in the culture she was referencing, but closed borders made travel impossible. Despite the unavoidable limitations, Sawayama has succeeded in capturing the spirit of the genre, tipping a Stetson to Shania Twain on the irreverent lead single “This Hell,” tapping into the atmosphere of a saloon at closing time with “Forgiveness,” and stitching mismatched elements of other genres like industrial metal and electronica into tracks like “Your Age” and “To Be Alive.” “I really connect with the storytelling aspect of country,” says Sawayama. “It’s very authentic, and grounded in reality, and that’s what I needed to tell the story of this record.” Here, she takes us through that story, track by track. **“Minor Feelings”** “The title of this song is kind of the secondary title of the record. It was inspired by a collection of essays called *Minor Feelings* by Cathy Park Hong. It’s the name she gives to this collective feeling that a lot of Asian Americans have about racial microaggressions, and I really connected with that, because for me it was a collection of all these minor feelings that has now led to a pretty major shutdown of emotions. In the music I wanted to play with the minor and the major chords, so in the chorus when I say ‘minor feelings’ it’s minor and then major when I say ‘majorly getting me down.’” **“Hold the Girl”** “I wrote this with Barney Lister and Jonny Lattimer in the first session I ever did with Barney. He was producing the song and I was throwing out all these ideas, like: ‘So, I want it to be country, and I want the beginning to sound like Bon Jovi, and I really also want to then do a garage drop.’ Luckily he agreed! It was a very, very hard song to balance: I think we must have gone back and forth about 20 times on the production, and then another 20 times on the mix. I was trying to make it really big and orchestral, but also a pop song. ‘Hold the Girl’ was the song that really unblocked me and made me excited to write again. It reminded me of how much fun you can have with production.” **“This Hell”** “On first listen, ‘This Hell’ could be a romantic love song, and I love that. It sort of has a double meaning—during lockdown there were certain people that I really held on to and it truly felt like ‘this hell is better with you’—but I’m specifically talking about my friends’ experiences of being shut out of religious communities for being queer. I wanted the music to channel the confidence Shania Twain has and tell the story like a country song, a bit tongue-in-cheek. I worked on it with Vic Jamieson, Lauren Aquilina, and Paul Epworth, who is one of my ultimate production idols. We were in Church Studios, which felt really apt, and I just remember ‘line dancing’ and lighting the whole studio up in red. It was one of the best moments.” **“Catch Me in the Air”** “One of the first in-person sessions I did for this album was with GRACEY in Oscar Scheller’s flat, and we couldn’t come up with anything. I just wasn’t feeling it. Halfway through, GRACEY was like, ‘Oh my god, Gwen Stefani is coming out with new music!’ As a writing exercise, we pretended we were going to be pitching to Gwen, and then the first melody flowed out. The song is about getting to a certain point in my relationship with my mum, and being able to see things from her perspective now I’m around the same age she was when she had me.” **“Forgiveness”** “I had to write this song over Zoom because I had just come into contact with someone who had COVID, so Jonny Lattimer and Rich Cooper were in one room and I was at home. The lyrics are about forgiving people in my past, and things I couldn’t control. It’s quite stripped back, as if I was in a grunge band, but doing pop. I asked Freddy Sheed to play the drums like he was exhausted and hungover, a little bit behind the beat. I wanted this feeling of dragging your feet down this path that you’re walking to get to forgiveness. I remember that I came out with the chorus melody pretty much straight away, but I hate using GarageBand and Logic so I was having to record it to my voice notes, then AirDrop it to myself, then send to Rich to put it in the song. It’s great when you have those moments where it just flows out, but actually getting the idea down on paper was so boring!” **“Holy (Til You Let Me Go)”** “This is where the record starts to get dark. The previous track talks about the idea that forgiveness is a winding road, and now we’re going off the beaten path for the next four or five songs. ‘Holy (Til You Let Me Go)’ is like the counterpart to ‘This Hell.’ I went to a Church of England school and I grew up hearing so much about religion and spirituality, but there was some dark stuff that went on there that was not handled very well, and I’m alluding to it in these songs. I think going to Christian girls’ schools can be very confusing. There’s this idea that girls are holy until a certain point in their life, and then they’re not. So I’m asking: ‘What does youth mean in that situation? What is good and bad?’ You can hear my friends Louis \[a school friend\] and Lauren Aquilina at the end, talking about what happened, and they’re just in shock about how the adults were behaving.” **“Your Age”** “‘Your Age’ started off with a banjo riff, but it’s massively inspired by Nine Inch Nails. The song is about the anger I had towards the adults that were around me when I was younger. Now that I’m an adult myself, I think I can legitimately be quite angry towards the adults of my youth, because I just never would have done things that way. I think when you get older, you look back at certain things you’ve experienced and the way the adults handled it, and you kind of can’t believe it. This was one of the last songs I wrote for the album; I wanted it to have this really dark moment. It’s a pretty direct message.” **“Imagining”** “So much of the confusion around so many mental health issues is that you don’t know if it’s real, and you assume that everyone else is feeling this way, so you minimize what you’re experiencing. It\'s like being in a club and feeling completely lost, which is the energy I wanted to have in the production. It’s very repetitive, the chorus is really shouty, and the lyrics don’t make the most sense. It’s sensory overload.” **“Frankenstein”** “I had two days in the studio with Paul Epworth, and we wrote ‘Frankenstein’ on the first day and ‘This Hell’ on the second. I was writing about realizing that it’s not okay to give one person in your life all this baggage to deal with—whether it\'s a lover or a best friend or someone else close to you—and asking them to put you back together when that’s not their job. I love Paul’s pop production, but for me it’s about the work he did with Bloc Party. It’s actually Matt Tong playing drums on this track, which is insane. I grew up going to gigs around my area in Camden, and it was one of the best, most hedonistic and chaotic times of my life, and I wanted to reference that frantic energy. I might incite a mosh when I perform it live.” **“Hurricanes”** “A little pop-rock moment: It’s about self-sabotage and running into situations that aren’t good for you. I originally wrote this with Clarence Clarity, and the production sounded a bit like The Cardigans, a bit ’60s surf, and it just wasn’t working. I needed it to sound more driving, like being propelled forward throughout the song, like a hurricane. When Stuart Price came on board later on, he was also working with The Killers, and he suggested listening to them as a reference for the drums. Once we rerecorded the drums, it all fell into place. ‘Hurricanes’ is probably my favorite track on the album right now. It ends on that nice major chord, and it’s like this resolve. The end of the chaos. It’s such a fun song to sing.” **“Send My Love to John”** “One of my really good friends has quite actively homophobic parents, and they’ve had a very difficult time because their parents have never been supportive of their queerness. Then one day my friend was on the phone with their mum and at the end of the call she said, ‘OK, I’ll speak to you soon, and send my love to John,’ meaning my friend’s long-term boyfriend. It was a breakthrough. And it’s insane because the mum is never going to say sorry, but this is something they can hold on to. A lot of people need to hear the word ‘sorry’ from their parents and they’re never going to get it, so I wanted to write from the perspective of a parent who regrets not supporting their child to the fullest extent.” **“Phantom”** “I can’t quite remember how this song came about, but I think I had written ‘phantom’ in my notes and I was like, ‘Let’s just try things and see how it sounds.’ We were having quite a free session, just coming up with ideas. It’s a proper rock ballad, almost a love song, about losing yourself and wanting that person back because you don’t like the person that you are now. I wanted it to have a real Aerosmith vibe.” **“To Be Alive”** “The production on ‘To Be Alive’ is inspired by ‘Ray of Light’ by Madonna. It’s got those propulsive breakbeats. I wanted to make an extremely euphoric last song, about the really pure realization that simple things can give us joy if we want them to. The last line of the song, and of the whole album, ‘Flowers are still pretty when they’re dying,’ is actually a lyric Lauren Aquilina suggested. It ends on a hopeful note, but it’s sad at the same time.”

Following on from her critically acclaimed debut “SAWAYAMA”, Rina Sawayama’s highly anticipated new record “Hold The Girl” sees Rina once again juxtapose intimate storytelling with arena-sized songs, creating another ambitious and original album to excite fans and critics alike. Written and recorded over the last ​​year and a half, Rina once again teamed up with longterm collaborators Clarence Clarity and Lauren Aquilina as well as enlisting help from the likes of the legendary Paul Epworth (Adele, Florence & the Machine), Stuart Price (Dua Lipa, The Killers, Madonna) and Marcus Andersson (Demi Lovato, Ashnikko) for their magic touch. The product of Rina and these collective minds coming together is an album which melds influences from across the pop spectrum and is a bold and honest statement of Rina’s personal evolution; coming to terms with her own past and the jubilation of turning to the future.

The roots of Naima Bock’s music are far reaching. Born in Glastonbury to a Brazilian father and a Greek mother, Naima spent her early childhood in Brazil before eventually returning to England and various homes in South-East London. This heritage combines with more recent pursuits in Naima’s music; from the Brazilian standards that the family would listen to driving to the beach, to the European folk traditions she tapped into on her own, and the pursuits that interest her today – studies in archaeology, work as a gardener, and walking the world’s great trails – Naima’s music draws from family, the earth and the handing down of music through generations. Naima’s debut album Giant Palm is undoubtedly infused with the Brazilian music of her youth and regular family visits. She found inspiration in “the percussion, the melodies, chords - and particularly the poetic juxtaposition of tragedy and beauty held within the lyrics”. By the age of 15 Naima was embedded in the music scene of South-East London, slotting into a group of like-minded friends writing and playing music. This led to the creation of Goat Girl, the band she toured the world with playing bass and singing alongside her school friends. After six years, Naima decided to leave Goat Girl to try something new. In the intervening years she set up a gardening company and started a degree at University College London in archeology because, as she jokes, “I liked being near the ground”. During this time she was writing music, playing guitar, and learning violin. She was also introduced to producer and arranger Joel Burton through Josh Cohen and his label, Memorials of Distinction. Over the time he and Naima worked together, Joel’s burgeoning interest in Western Classical music, global folk music, experience in large scale arrangement and orchestration informed the collaborative process that eventually culminated in Giant Palm. Naima had been writing songs for years without any strong idea of where to take them. However, over a gradual process of rehearsing and performing with Joel, the compositions began to settle into something more concrete. It wasn’t until restrictions began to ease post- lockdown that they were able to focus on getting the songs finished and recorded. Fortunately, Dan Carey of Speedy Wunderground offered his spare studio space in Streatham, in south east London, free of charge. Informed by a desire to create music that was considered and intentional, they spent the month leading up to the recording expanding the arrangements, to be performed by a large and varied group of musicians - with Joel scoring parts and recording the synth and electronic elements in advance. Once they managed to schedule slots for the more-than 30 musicians on the record - the expansive yet delicate arrangements were brought to life and captured with the help of engineer Syd Kemp. Naima loves the collective voice of traditionals that belong to everyone. She’s recently found a home for this passion in her role in the ever-shifting line-up of South-London folk collective Broadside Hacks, but it’s long been a way for her to explore her own artistry. She learned to play guitar and violin through these songs, but she also found her voice in them. “All the other representations that I’d had of singing felt so unattainable” she recalls, but in folk music she found that singing can take on so many forms without the need to exactly replicate something. Here, qualities that make her voice unique were able to flourish. This is present all through her music, as well as a feeling of community and the sharing of ideas. Written over the space of years, each of Naima’s songs represents a snapshot of a specific feeling, of brief moments in Naima’s life that make up a larger whole. “I never change lyrics” she says, “even if I don’t relate to them anymore, I related to them once which means someone else could, somewhere”. Whether that’s in the playful humour of ‘Campervan’, the peaceful exhale of ‘Giant Palm’ or in the darker moments like in the stark, self-critical honesty of ‘Every Morning’, whatever the form it’s always laid bare. There’s also a feeling of clarity to the songs, which Naima largely credits to the fact that many of them were written while walking. She finds inspiration in the meditative and revealing nature of long walks with a fixed but far-off destination. “There’s a stripping away that takes place”, she says, the slowing of thoughts by the rhythm of walking is often to thank for the sharp focus of her lyrics. Be that during a period of three years where she would return to Spanish pilgrimage network Camino de Santiago for weeks at a time, or simple hours spent in the English countryside.

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.”

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. 

Tresor (Treasure) is Gwenno Saunders’ third full length solo album and the second almost entirely in Cornish (Kernewek). Written in St. Ives, Cornwall, just prior to the Covid lockdowns of 2020 and completed in Cardiff during the pandemic along with her producer and musical collaborator, Rhys Edwards, Tresor reveals an introspective focus on home and self, a prescient work echoing the isolation and retreat that has been a central, global shared experience over the past two years. The wider project also includes a companion film, written and directed by Gwenno in collaboration with Anglesey based filmmaker and photographer Clare Marie Bailey. Tresor diverges from the stark themes of technological alienation in Y Dydd Olaf (The Final Day) and the meditations on the idea of the homeland on the slyly infectious Le Kov (The Place of Memory). Accessible and international in outlook, peppered with moments of offbeat humor, Le Kov presented Cornish to the world. It highlighted the struggle of Kernewek and the concerns of Cornish cultural visibility as the perceptions of a timeless and haunted landscape often clash with the reality of intense poverty and an economy devastated by the demands of tourism. The impact of Le Kov was resounding, providing for the Cornish language an unprecedented international platform, that saw Gwenno touring and headlining in Europe and Australia, and supporting acts such as Suede and the Manic Street Preachers. Her performance of ‘Tir ha Mor’ on Later with Jools Holland was a triumph, and the album prompted wider conversations on the state of the Cornish language with Michael Portillo, Jon Snow, and Nina Nannar. After Le Kov, interest in learning Cornish hit an all-time high, and the cultural role of the language was firmly in the spotlight. Cornish is now enjoying increased visibility in some commercial contexts, yet Cornish is importantly also a language which is spoken in families and communities. This context is the starting point for Tresor and it’s where this dreamy album finds its bite. Gwenno occupies a singular position, raised speaking Cornish alongside Welsh in the home with her family as a living mother tongue. Cornish is not only a cultural legacy or a politicized project; it is the language in which one thinks and dreams, a language of loving and longing. To be able to share in this private world is the gift of Tresor. On Tresor, Gwenno shifts focus from the external to the internal, exposing the walls of gems hidden within the caves. Inspired by powerful woman writers and artists such as Ithell Colquhoun, the Cornish language poet Phoebe Proctor, Maya Deren and Monica Sjöö, Tresor is an intimate view of the feminine interior experience, of domesticity and desire, a rare glimmer of life lived in and expressed through Cornish. Don’t ever be fooled by Gwenno’s pop sensibility and her ability to create plush and immersive moods. Gwenno always has something to say, often signposting powerful commentary with discordant notes and sonic friction. Tresor is no different: like a soothing mermaid’s call it lures the listener into strange and beautiful depths. Although Tresor evokes the waters that shape the Cornish experience, it is musically far reaching with influences spanning from Eden Ahbez to Aphex Twin. More overtly psychedelically tinged than her previous work, Tresor embeds found sounds ranging from Venice to Vienna, layering cultural and historical atmospheres, decoupling the use of Cornish from any geographic determinism. The personal and political are fully entwined in Tresor with stories showing the complex tension of both integration and resistance, of feeling decentered yet also fully belonging to several places at once. Languages are symbolically contradictory: they are indelibly embedded in place, yet they travel with bodies and in dreams, taking up root wherever they are planted or abandoned out of necessity. They signal identities and histories, yet are also indifferent tools of communication and commerce belonging to everyone and to no one. How do both speakers and non-speakers navigate these legacies? In Tresor Gwenno explores the perspective that living through Kernewek allows for an expression of imaginative spaces that are truly free. As such, Tresor also recalls the waters of the unconscious, the undulating elemental tides suggesting emotion, intuition, those features long associated with the archetypal anima. In “Anima” Gwenno asks how do we fully inhabit different parts of the self, acknowledging convergent cultural and personal histories, embracing the shadow. She explores how the power of the feminine voice inspired by the Cornish landscape asserts itself, presenting a richly melodic counterpoint to a place and people known for rugged survival and jagged edges. The title track “Tresor” (Treasure) confronts the contradictions that come with visibility as a woman and the challenges of wielding women’s power. “Tonnow” shows the watery depths of woman’s desire and knowing, an invitation to liberation. The Welsh language track, “NYCAW” (Nid yw Cymru ar Werth - Wales is not for Sale) widens the frame outward from the personal to the collective, condemning the urgent crisis caused by second home ownership in Wales, denouncing the neoliberal marketing of place that is shattering communities and exploiting cultures. Tresor the film, is inspired by surrealist filmmakers such as Sergei Parajanov, Agnes Varda, and Alejandro Jodorowsky, and reflects Gwenno’s growing interest in film and the intersection of music with visual components. Filmed in Wales and Cornwall, Tresor evokes a dreamworld from another time, surreal, and sensual, saturated with light and colour. Although Tresor is a project birthed from introspection and intimacy, the implications of the messages are much broader. Ultimately Gwenno is asking what are other ways of understanding and being in relation to one another? What are the spaces where we can best see each other and ourselves in our most raw and authentic state? Can we find balance individually and as a species, and can we sit with the discomfort that comes with growth? What are our roles in both shaping and being shaped by the cultures we move in, in a world that is ever changing, and where we all have a place? Tresor does not provide easy answers, for Gwenno shows us that we exist in paradox, our threads of place and story entwined like knotwork, our many selves shining as beautiful entanglements.

“I\'ve made an album about fear and shame, it’s definitely been uncomfortable,” Oliver Sim tells Apple Music. As one third of British indie electronic group The xx, Sim—alongside bandmates Romy Madley Croft and producer Jamie xx—became adept at writing sparse and haunting love songs. For his solo debut, however, he turned his gaze inward to confront the internalized shame that has colored his life. “Initially, it was like, why would I want to share the things that I think make me feel hideous in some way?” he says. “But concealing that hasn’t really worked for me in the past. If anything, the whole idea of concealing things just feeds into shame.” Here, Sim gets straight into it: The album’s first track, “Hideous”—which features guest vocals from queer pop music royalty Jimmy Somerville—sees Sim share for the first time that he’s been living with HIV since he was 17 years old. “My whole way of navigating my status was just control,” Sim says. “I know exactly who knew and if they told anybody else. But writing that down was a real ‘fuck it’ moment.” For the record, Sim worked almost exclusively with bandmate Jamie xx. “It would have been a very different album if I\'d made it with somebody else,” he says. “Jamie\'s been my friend since I was 11 years old. I don\'t think I would have been as vulnerable with someone else. Also, he\'s a straight man and he got involved in some real queer conversations. He just had no ego. He was making my world come to life.” Part of that involved indulging Sim’s love of horror films—he has created an entire short horror film to accompany the album with director Yann Gonzalez—but also helping Sim to unpack his experiences with homophobia, loneliness, and self-sabotage. “I got worried that this record was going to be perceived as perpetuating the idea of self-loathing gay men, which would just be this downer,” Sim says. “But this whole process, and how I see the record, is not a downer. It’s the opposite of shame. It’s not hiding.” Read on for Oliver Sim’s track-by-track guide to *Hideous Bastard*. **“Hideous”** “Jimmy Somerville became my pen pal quite a few months before I asked him to appear on the song. I\'ve known that voice all my life, but as an adult I’ve come to understand what he represented and everything he’s done. He’s been so visible and vocal about queer issues for such a long time. I think I wanted some of that fearlessness. When I finally asked him to be a part of the song, I expected him to be quite militant and for the cause, but he was very gentle with me. He was like, ‘I hope you\'re doing this for yourself.’ He also said, ‘I’m 60, so don’t be expecting me to hit those high notes.’ But he came in and the moment he started singing, Jamie and I cried. His voice is incredible. It\'s so strong and in person it’s really loud.” **“Romance With a Memory”** “For this album I’ve done a lot of playing around with my voice. I have only ever sung in duet with Romy—if I step out of that, where can my voice go? I love trying to see how high can my voice go or how low can my voice go, even if I\'m pitching it down to a point of it either sounding like a parody of what a masculine voice would sound like to it being totally demonic. I like hearing male voices sing together. There is something very masculine about it, but also something romantic and tender, too. The whole idea of men harmonizing together, I think, is quite queer.” **“Sensitive Child”** “This is something that I’ve definitely been called. It’s definitely a euphemism for a certain type of kid, in particular a little boy. I think hearing it as an adult, and as a gay man, brings up a lot of childhood feelings of not being acknowledged. It’s also probably one of the fullest songs I’ve ever made. Normally, for me songs start as words on a piece of paper, but this started with a Del Shannon song called ‘Break Up’ and then I did all the writing around that. I\'m the kind of person that spends months on a song, but this song happened very quickly. I see this as quite an angry song.” **“Never Here”** “I talk a lot about memory on this album, and this song asks the question of just how reliable my memory can be and how, maybe, technology warps how I remember things. It\'s also, sonically, one of the heaviest songs on the record, which was really fun for me. The music that I really got into as a teenager was either from my sister\'s record collection, which was just mid-’90s American R&B like Aaliyah, TLC, En Vogue, and Ginuwine, or it was heavy music like Placebo and Queens of the Stone Age. It was fun to get into that a bit more with \'Never Here\' and to scream. I think that\'s the few times that I\'ve allowed myself to scream, which is a real release.” **“Unreliable Narrator”** “I\'ve come into this record with just tons and tons of questions, but not necessarily the answers. I wrote this song as, in my head, this album is a movie, and this was a plot point I wanted halfway through the record. It was inspired by this monologue Bret Easton Ellis wrote for Patrick Bateman in *American Psycho*. In the film, it\'s where Christian Bale\'s doing his 14-step morning routine and about how he’s not really there. I’m not a psychopath, but I think that idea of facade and wearing a mask, to any degree, is so relatable. I also thought halfway through this film of my album if I was to admit that anything I could be saying is unreliable would be quite fun.” **“Saccharine”** “I’ve made my whole career on love songs—that is my home. For this record, I’ve tried not to write too many love songs because I think that I could have done a lot of hiding if I did. But to me, this song is still quite revealing about myself. It has much more to do with myself than anyone else; it’s my fear of intimacy. I didn’t want this album to be sweet. It could have a sense of humor, but it had to be savage. This is very much about my inner saboteur and how I react when things become too sweet.” **“Confident Man”** “It’s funny: At school, I felt like an outsider because of my sexuality. I didn’t know I was gay at primary school, but it was always made apparent that I was a bit of a dandy. I was never invited to play football. I didn’t want to play football—I hate football—but it’s not nice to not be included, especially when I’m drawn to these boys for reasons I didn’t quite understand. But then, to experience that as an adult within the gay community, a community of outsiders… I don’t know. There’s that feeling of performative masculinity and of what confidence actually looks like. I think there’s something very insecure about feeling like you have to perform masculinity. What do people actually even consider masculinity? I think there’s something very confident about saying, ‘I don’t feel so confident.’” **“GMT”** “Jamie and I had gone to Australia. This was before COVID and we’d started the record. I had gone there to bypass the English winter because seasonal depression is real. We\'d started in Sydney and we road-tripped down to Byron Bay just listening to lots of music. We were listening to The Beach Boys and I started singing things in the car. When we got to Byron Bay, we ended up sampling The Beach Boys on the song. I was in this beautiful sunshine yet still pining for London a little bit. I think there is an inherent melancholy about London, which has been the driving force for so much amazing creativity. This was a jet-lagged love song about London.” **“Fruit”** “Funny enough, this is the hardest song to explain, because I think it kind of says it all. It\'s the very *Drag Race* moment of ‘What would you say to five-year-old Oliver?’ So it is talking to five-year-old me, but it\'s also very much talking to me today, because there is a part of me that is still five years old. I’m still a sensitive child, but now I’m hearing the things that I would want to hear.” **“Run the Credits”** “When I was talking about ‘Unreliable Narrator’ being a plot point, this was the song I wrote exactly for the end of the album. It was the note that I want to end on and mirrors the scariest thing I find in cinema, which is the open-ended ending. A Disney-style bow to close everything is so tempting, but there is nothing scarier than leaving it open-ended. Your imagination\'s always going to tailor-make the scariest outcome.”

Hideous Bastard, the debut album from Oliver Sim—best known for his work as songwriter, bassist,and vocalist of The xx—is set for release on September 9th via Young. Produced by bandmate Jamie xx, Hideous Bastard is the culmination of two years of writing and recording, inspired by Sim’s love of horror movies and his own life experience, unpacking themes of shame, fear, and masculinity. These themes are front and centre on new single “Hideous”. Enlisting the help of lifelong hero and “guardian angel”Jimmy Somerville on guest vocals, the single sets the scene for the forthcoming album and sees Sim speaking publicly for the first time that he’s been living with HIV since the age of seventeen. It debuts with a video by another personal hero, French director Yann Gonzalez, who has also collaborated with Sim on a forthcoming queer horror short film of the same name that premiered yesterday as part of the Semaine de la Critiqueat the Cannes Film Festival.

The most jarring part about listening to the London band black midi isn’t how much musical ground they cover—post-punk, progressive rock, breakneck jazz, cabaret—but the fact that they cover it all at once. A quasi-concept album that seems to have something to do with war (“Welcome to Hell,” “27 Questions”), or at least the violence men do more generally (“Sugar/Tzu,” “Dangerous Liaisons”), *Hellfire* isn’t an easy listen. But it’s funny (main character: Tristan Bongo), beautiful, at least in a garish, misanthropic way (the Neil Diamond bombast of “The Defence”), and so obviously playful in its intelligence that you just want to let it run over you. The first listen feels like being yelled at in a language you don’t understand. By the third, you’ll be yelling with them.

black midi’s new album Hellfire will be released on 15th July. Hellfire builds on the melodic and harmonic elements of Cavalcade, while expanding the brutality and intensity of their debut, Schlagenheim. It is their most thematically cohesive and intentional album yet.

If The Smile ever seemed like a surprisingly upbeat name for a band containing two members of Radiohead (Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood, joined by Sons of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner), the trio used their debut gig to offer some clarification. Performing as part of Glastonbury Festival’s Live at Worthy Farm livestream in May 2021, Yorke announced, “We are called The Smile: not The Smile as in ‘Aaah!’—more the smile of the guy who lies to you every day.” To grasp the mood of their debut album, it’s instructive to go even deeper into a name that borrows the title of a 1970 Ted Hughes poem. In Hughes’ impressionist verse, some elemental force—compassion, humanity, love maybe—rises up to resist the deception and chicanery behind such disarming grins. And as much as the 13 songs on *A Light for Attracting Attention* sense crisis and dystopia looming, they also crackle with hope and insurrection. The pulsing electronics of opener “The Same” suggest the racing hearts and throbbing temples of our age of acute anxiety, and Yorke’s words feel like a call for unity and mobilization: “We don’t need to fight/Look towards the light/Grab it in with both hands/What you know is right.” Perennially contemplating the dynamics of power and thought, he surveys a world where “devastation has come” (“Speech Bubbles”) under the rule of “elected billionaires” (“The Opposite”), but it’s one where protest, however extreme, can still birth change (“The Smoke”). Amid scathing guitars and outbursts of free jazz, his invective zooms in on abuses of power (“You Will Never Work in Television Again”) before shaming inertia and blame-shifters on the scurrying beats and descending melodies of “A Hairdryer.” These aren’t exactly new themes for Yorke and it’s not a record that sits at an extreme outpost of Radiohead’s extended universe. Emboldened by Skinner’s fluid, intrepid rhythms, *A Light for Attracting Attention* draws frequently on various periods of Yorke and Greenwood’s past work. The emotional eloquence of Greenwood’s soundtrack projects resurfaces on “Speech Bubbles” and “Pana-Vision,” while Yorke’s fascination with digital reveries continues to be explored on “Open the Floodgates” and “The Same.” Elegantly cloaked in strings, “Free in the Knowledge” is a beautiful acoustic-guitar ballad in the lineage of Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees” and the original live version of “True Love Waits.” Of course, lesser-trodden ground is visited, too: most intriguingly, math-rock (“Thin Thing”) and folk songs fit for a ’70s sci-fi drama (“Waving a White Flag”). The album closes with “Skrting on the Surface,” a song first aired at a 2009 show Yorke played with Atoms for Peace. With Greenwood’s guitar arpeggios and Yorke’s aching falsetto, it calls back even further to *The Bends*’ finale, “Street Spirit (Fade Out).” However, its message about the fragility of existence—“When we realize we have only to die, then we’re out of here/We’re just skirting on the surface”—remains sharply resonant.

The Smile will release their highly anticipated debut album A Light For Attracting Attention on 13 May, 2022 on XL Recordings. The 13- track album was produced and mixed by Nigel Godrich and mastered by Bob Ludwig. Tracks feature strings by the London Contemporary Orchestra and a full brass section of contempoarary UK jazz players including Byron Wallen, Theon and Nathaniel Cross, Chelsea Carmichael, Robert Stillman and Jason Yarde. The band, comprising Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood and Sons of Kemet’s Tom Skinner, have previously released the singles You Will Never Work in Television Again, The Smoke, and Skrting On The Surface to critical acclaim.

The New Yorker has finally gotten his flowers as one of the finest MCs in the contemporary underground after a cool couple decades grinding it out with his label, Backwoodz Studioz; 2021’s *Haram*, from Woods’ Armand Hammer duo with E L U C I D, felt like a high watermark for a new NY scene. On *Aethiopes*, Woods’ first solo album since 2019, he recruits producer Preservation, a fellow NY scene veteran known for his work with Yasiin Bey and Ka; his haunted beats set an unsettling scene for Woods’ evocative stories, which span childhood bedrooms and Egyptian deserts. The guest list doubles as a who’s who of underground rap—EL-P, Boldy James, E L U C I D—but Woods holds his own at the center of it all. As he spits on the stunningly skeletal “Remorseless”: “Anything you want on this cursed earth/Probably better off getting it yourself, see what it’s worth.”

DIGITAL VERSION OF THE ALBUM DROPS ON APRIL 8, 2022. Aethiopes is billy woods’ first album since 2019’s double feature of Hiding Places and Terror Management. The project is fully produced by Preservation (Dr Yen Lo, Yasiin Bey), who delivered a suite of tracks on Terror Management, including the riveting single “Blood Thinner”. The two collaborated again on Preservation’s 2020’s LP Eastern Medicine, Western Illness, which featured a memorable billy woods appearance on the song “Lemon Rinds”, as well as the B-side “Snow Globe”.

Since releasing her debut album Don’t Let the Kids Win in 2016, Melbourne’s Julia Jacklin has carved out a fearsome reputation as a direct lyricist, willing to excavate the parameters of intimacy and agency in songs both stark and raw, loose, and playful. If her debut announced those intentions, and the startling 2019 follow-up Crushing drew in listeners uncomfortably close, PRE PLEASURE is the sound of Jacklin gently loosening her grip. Stirring piano-led opener ‘Lydia Wears A Cross’ channels the underage confusion of being told religion is profound, despite only feeling it during the spectacle of its pageantry. The gentle pulse of ‘Love, Try Not To Let Go’ and dreamy strings of ‘Ignore Tenderness’ betray an interrogation of consent and emotional injury. The stark ‘Less Of A Stranger’ picks at the generational thread of a mother/daughter relationship, while the hymnal ‘Too In Love To Die’ and loose jam of ‘Be Careful With Yourself’ equate true love with the fear of losing it. Recorded in Montreal with co-producer Marcus Paquin (The Weather Station, The National), PRE PLEASURE finds Jacklin teamed with her Canada-based touring band, bassist Ben Whiteley and guitarist Will Kidman, both of Canadian folk outfit The Weather Station. It also introduces drummer Laurie Torres, saxophonist Adam Kinner and string arrangements by Owen Pallett (Arcade Fire) recorded by a full orchestra in Prague. PRE PLEASURE presents Jacklin as her most authentic self; an uncompromising and masterful lyricist, always willing to mine the depths of her own life experience, and singular in translating it into deeply personal, timeless songs.

The body count on alt-J’s fourth album is high. At least three songs portray a death, another (“Losing My Mind”) explores the psyche of a serial killer, and “Get Better” is an intensely moving depiction of grief. That said, *The Dream* also delights in the pleasures of drinking Coke (“Bane”), instant attraction (“Powders”), and getting wasted at festivals (“U&ME”). “If you want to move people, it’s with storytelling,” singer/guitarist Joe Newman tells Apple Music. “You want to tell the best story, and that is by giving people both sides of the coin.” Here, that storytelling is set to characteristically adventurous music. The Leeds-formed trio finds improbable tessellations between pneumatic art-rock and Stravinsky, psychedelic folk and Chicago house, and Jimi Hendrix and Cormac McCarthy, binding those patterns with iron-strong hooks. “We’ve always seen ourselves as cowboy writers,” says Newman. “We don’t know how to write a pop song, but we know that we have catchy ideas. So we just sew them together, regardless of whether it makes much sense structurally. Maybe in this album, we’re also mastering the craft of writing more traditionally.” Pre-add *The Dream* now—once it’s released on February 11, the complete album will arrive in your library.

From his formative days associating with Raider Klan through his revealing solo projects *TA13OO* and *ZUU*, Denzel Curry has never been shy about speaking his mind. For *Melt My Eyez See Your Future*, the Florida native tackles some of the toughest topics of his MC career, sharing his existential notes on being Black and male in these volatile times. The album opens on a bold note with “Melt Session #1,” a vulnerable and emotional cut given further weight by jazz giant Robert Glasper’s plaintive piano. That hefty tone leads into a series of deeply personal and mindfully radical songs that explore modern crises and mental health with both thematic gravity and lyrical dexterity, including “Worst Comes to Worst” and the trap subversion “X-Wing.” Systemic violence leaves him reeling and righteous on “John Wayne,” while “The Smell of Death” skillfully mixes metaphors over a phenomenally fat funk groove. He draws overt and subtle parallels to jazz’s sociopolitical history, imagining himself in Freddie Hubbard’s hard-bop era on “Mental” and tapping into boom bap’s affinity for the genre on “The Ills.” Guests like T-Pain, Rico Nasty, and 6LACK help to fill out his vision, yielding some of the album’s highest highs.

Melt My Eyez See Your Future arrives as Denzel Curry’s most mature and ambitious album to date. Recorded over the course of the pandemic, Denzel shows his growth as both an artist and person. Born from a wealth of influences, the tracks highlight his versatility and broad tastes, taking in everything from drum’n’bass to trap. To support this vision and show the breadth of his artistry, Denzel has enlisted a wide range of collaborators and firmly plants his flag in the ground as one of the most groundbreaking rappers in the game.

On the cover of her second album, LA indie polymath Sasami Ashworth—aka SASAMI—appears in the form of the Nure-onna, a mythical half-woman/half-serpent creature from Japanese folklore. It’s more than just a badass image: On *Squeeze*, SASAMI re-emerges utterly transformed and all-powerful. With the untamed opener, “Skin a Rat,” she unleashes a torrent of moshable nu-metal that obliterates any trace of the dream-pop artisan heard on her 2019 self-titled debut. “I feel a little bit like a sci-fi or fantasy novelist this time,” SASAMI tells Apple Music. “And in a lot of ways, this album is my first book, whereas my last album was more like my diary entries being leaked.” But the skull-crushing heaviness of “Skin a Rat” is just the first steep drop on a thrill ride that sends you careening through aesthetic shifts—a volatile mood-ring reflection of her existence as a queer woman of color and a working musician entering her thirties. “The songs are much less about explicit experiences and much more about feelings,” she says. “Narratively, this album is inspired by movies like *Parasite*, where there’s a lot of different genres—one second it’s a dark comedy, one second it’s a thriller, the next second it’s romantic, and then it’s a horror. It keeps you on your toes, and I wanted to make an album that has that same dynamic range.” Here, SASAMI guides us through *Squeeze*, one scene at a time. **“Skin a Rat”** “Making art during the pandemic, you’re not having experiences—you’re just drawing from memories of experiences. And so, knowing that I wanted to make these angsty, aggressive tracks, it’s natural that I went back to middle school and high school, when you’re at your most angsty and emotional and rageful. And so, nu-metal creates an emotional portal to that time for me. This song is basically about systemic oppression and reclaiming some of this violent discourse that’s usually aimed towards femmes and using sonic elements that are usually used by cis men. I also wanted to be very clear about who the album was for: Patti Harrison and Laetitia Tamko from Vagabon are screaming the lyrics with me, and I really wanted it to be an anthem for my community.” **“The Greatest”** “‘The Greatest’ was really influenced by power ballads—like Bonnie Tyler and Heart and Aerosmith. I wanted to touch on a lot of different types of emotions and sounds on the album, and I wanted to stretch out as far as I could in each direction. So, the syrupy schmaltziness of power ballads was really inspiring for this one. But because there’s this mission statement of anti-toxic positivity on the album, I wanted this to be kind of an un-love ballad. You can’t take dirty laundry and put it directly into the dryer without first putting it into the washing machine—you can’t skip straight to healing and brightness and happiness without processing the dark shit that’s going on. A lot of power ballads are about the absence of love, but this song is basically my grungy power ballad about how the absence of love can sometimes be a bigger force than love itself.” **“Say It”** “This song and a couple of other ones are basically about the pain of someone not communicating with you. I feel like it’s a very in-my-early-thirties sentiment—it’s basically saying, ‘I don’t even need you to apologize or tell me what I want to hear; I just want to communicate. Just tell me how you’re actually feeling and release the toxicity of not being honest with people.’ It’s kind of a communication jam.” **“Call Me Home”** “This song is about synthesizing that feeling of nothing being wrong, but you still blow everything up just to feel something, and how numbness and a lack of feeling emotion can be just as heavy and dark as feeling something outright. This song is an ode to the wanderer—it’s an ode to someone who has restless legs and needs to be on the move and needs to be feeling things in extremes.” **“Need It to Work”** “This is another song about a lack of communication and a lack of connection and how that can kind of fester, and how we can obsess over not getting that attention or getting that reciprocation of feelings. Making yourself vulnerable to someone and then not having that be returned can make you feel fucking crazy. I’m a Cancer, so when people don’t respond to my texts, I completely freak out.” **“Tried to Understand”** “I really wanted to make a heavy album, but at the same time, songs are kind of like children: No matter how much you want them to be something, you just have to support them and let them be whatever they want to be. I’ve made so many different versions of ‘Tried to Understand,’ and, at the end of the day, she just wanted to be like a folk-pop song. ‘Tried to Understand’ is kind of like turning the lights on for a second before something dark happens again.” **“Make It Right”** “I wanted to put together something that was snappy and punk but also had this kind of pop sensibility. This song bridges the gap between the lightness of ‘Tried to Understand’ and ‘Sorry Entertainer,’ so it kind of feeds both beasts in that way.” **“Sorry Entertainer”** \"Honestly, if you listen to the \[Daniel Johnston\] original, my version doesn’t deviate too much from that guitar part. I just heard the original and I immediately heard the metal version in my head. It’s like I read the screenplay of the scene and imagined the big-budget action movie of it. Of course, I couldn’t get explicit permission from Daniel Johnston, so I hope he’s not rolling in his grave over this one. I liked having this kind of pathetic-loner vibe with this really aggressive sound. I think that’s a feeling a lot of musicians are familiar with: ‘I have all this power in my instrument, but I also still kind of feel like a loser.’” **“Squeeze” (feat. No Home)** “I was a fan of No Home’s first record, *F\*\*\*\*\*g Hell*. When I heard it, I was like, ‘She is completely pushing the bounds of genre. She has total pop chops, but is also down to make the weirdest, freakiest aggressive music too.’ And so, I felt like she was a kindred spirit. When I make music, I usually create all the menus and touch every piece of food before it goes out in the restaurant, whereas with this one I wanted to kind of let go and see what happens when I bring someone in to collaborate in a deeper way. She wrote all the verses and, as a black femme in the UK, she has a different experience and perspective. I really connect to a lot of metal and heavy rock songs where the imagery and the lyrics are really violent, but oftentimes they’re objectifying women. So, I wanted to reclaim some of that language and create something on my terms, but with the aggression and rawness of the lyricism that we bring.” **“Feminine Water Turmoil”/“Not a Love Song”** “I feel like the first three-quarters of the record kind of deals with these concepts of human nature—like systemic oppression and unrequited love and desperation and rage and anger. And I wanted to end the album by floating into a more existential place. I feel like an instrumental track \[‘Feminine Water Turmoil’\] can help us to detach from the human language and these human ideas. And then ‘Not a Love Song’ is really a lot more about humans’ relationship with nature and questioning why we always center ourselves in everything, and maybe posing the idea to the listener that we could be in more humility and harmony with nature. I just wanted to end the movie with a more philosophical ending, as opposed to hitting a raw nerve. The song is like aftercare—it’s a respectful way to end an arduous, whiplashing album. I wanted to end it in a way that someone might actually want to listen to it again.”

Squeeze, the second full length from Sasami, surveys the raw aggression of nu-metal, tender plainspokeness of country-pop and folk rock, and dramatic romanticism of classical music.

Luke Abbott - synths + piano Laurence Pike - drums + percussion Jack Wyllie - saxophones

Megan Thee Stallion wastes no time getting to the heart of the matter on *Traumazine*, the long-awaited follow-up to the Houston MC’s 2020 album, *Good News*. “I ain’t perfect/But anything I did to any of you n\*\*\*\*s, y’all deserved it!” she raps at the outset of album opener “NDA.” Indeed, Thee Stallion, who’s unwittingly made more headlines over the past two years for her role as a victim of a high-profile shooting than she has for the hits she continues to deliver, is not here to apologize. In fact, she’s here to remind both well-wishers and detractors alike that she’s going to win regardless, because that’s just how she’s built. “Fuck it, bitch, I’m not nice/I’m the shit/I’m done with being humble/’Cause I know that I’m that bitch,” she declares on “Not Nice.” Now, that’s “real hot girl shit.” And you’ll find it in abundance across *Traumazine*, Meg making time to address “fake-ass, snake-ass, backstabbing, hating-ass, no-money-getting-ass bitches” (“Ungrateful”), fair-weather friends (“Flip Flop”), and even her own mental health struggles (“Anxiety”). She’s having plenty of fun here, too, mostly in describing what sounds like really amazing sex (“Ms. Nasty,” “Who Me,” “Red Wine”), but also on a four-on-the-floor house jam (“Her”), a high-energy duet with Future (“Pressurelicious”), and an ode to her H-Town roots (“Southside Royalty Freestyle”). Thee Stallion draws power here from surviving fame as she knows it, basking in her own greatness on “Star” as she proclaims, “I’m a motherfuckin’ superstar.”