Loud and Quiet's Best Albums of 2020

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

A vibrant electronic fusion of lounge, jazz, and disco is maybe not the first (or fifth) thing you would expect to hear from one of the world’s most renowned modern composers and ambient tape loop pioneers, but upon first listen, it makes so much sense that one wonders why it didn’t happen sooner. After years of producing and mentoring slews of young artists in 1990s Williamsburg, Brooklyn, William Basinski moved to Los Angeles. There he hired a young studio assistant, Preston Wendel (aka Shania Taint), who eventually introduced his own works to the curious composer. That spawned a creative partnership that inspired Wendel to persuade Basinski to haul out his saxophone. Five years later, SPARKLE DIVISION has arrived with their enchanting debut album, To Feel Embraced. Produced by SPARKLE DIVISION at Basinski’s Musex International in Los Angeles, the duo were joined by a few notable friends: Mrs. Leonora Russo (who Basinski affectionately calls “the true Sicilian Sparkle Division, my Brooklyn Mom, the Queen of Williamsburg”) offers her sparkling voice to “Queenie Got Her Blues”; fabled free-jazz icon and genuine bodhisattva, the late Henry Grimes, contributed upright bass and violin to the aptly-named “Oh Henry!” (“Lotta babies gonna be born from this one,” Henry and Margaret Davis Grimes playfully declared); and London vocalist Xeli Grana offers her ethereal voice to the album’s meditative title track. Conceived and nearly completed in 2016, the increasing environmental and political infernos gave Basinski and Wendel cold feet about unleashing a record intended to be fun, loving, and prone to bouts of euphoria. But as Basinski exclaimed, “Well, damn it, if the time ain't right now, it never will be! Let’s do this!”

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

Of the many meanings behind *Dark Matter*—London jazz drummer Moses Boyd’s debut LP—the most vital comes from above. “It’s astronomy,” Boyd tells Apple Music, “this invisible fabric that brings us all together. *Dark Matter* isn’t meant to be a negative record; it\'s meant to unify, to make people think.” It’s also the rare political record that doesn’t lean entirely on lyrics. As both a producer and bandleader—contributors include Poppy Ajudha, Obongjayar, Joe Armon-Jones, and Nonku Phiri—Boyd wanted to capture the gravity of our current moment in both rhythm and atmosphere, by combining elements of Bjork’s *Vespertine* and Aphex Twin’s *Selected Ambient Works* with the funk of James Brown and Tony Allen. “I wanted nuance,” he says of the album\'s many textures. “That air and earth feeling. Floaty bits that are kind of beautiful, but thickness and weight, where it\'s like, if I put this on, it\'s going to hit me right in my stomach, and it\'s going to move me. I don\'t see myself as overtly political, but I guess I am. I\'m just responding to what\'s going on around, which maybe all art should do.” Here, he walks us through his debut, track by track. **Stranger Than Fiction** “I had just come back from holiday in Sri Lanka with my family to what was going on in the UK—so from palm trees and beaches to Brexit. At the moment, in the world, you can pick a country and look at what’s happening and just be like, ‘Is this actually real?’ I wanted to mirror what\'s going on around me musically. When you listen to it, it’s like, ‘What is real, what\'s not? Is that a real drum kit? Is that not a real drum kit?’ I wanted to really blur the lines and make people have to really listen carefully to decipher what\'s real and what\'s not. That was my musical metaphor for something stranger than fiction, which is also just referencing what\'s going on in politics, in nature, in life—full stop.” **Hard Food (Interlude)** “Amongst all of this craziness, you realize there\'s so much you have in common with the person next to you. Hard food is a Jamaican term—it\'s a type of dish that might consist of boiled dumplings, boiled plantains, a really hearty meal that brings people together. I’d reached out to \[jazz composer/bassist\] Gary Crosby, one of my mentors. That recording is our conversation. He\'s grown up with his own struggles and challenges in the UK. He used this analogy of ‘I’m from West Indian background and I defy anyone, from anywhere in the world, whether they know about my food or not: If they\'re hungry they\'re going to eat it, and they\'re going to enjoy it, and it will fill them up.’ He was trying to say, ‘Look, we\'re all similar. We all want the same things in life. We\'re not different to each other. There\'s far more that unites us than separates us.’” **BTB** “‘BTB’ is one of only two tracks that are complete live takes. BTB stands for ‘blacker than black,’ another play on dark matter. Just being me, and my experience being a young black person in England—it’s a celebration of culture. I\'m from the West Indies, and I really wanted to have my sort of take on those sounds and those rhythms. So it\'s very sort of soca, calypso-driven. Also quite dark—you couldn\'t play that at carnival, but it makes sense to me, as somebody that\'s grown up in that culture, but not necessarily born in it and from it. It might be like being born in New York, but your family is from Puerto Rico. You have a very different reference in the way you visualize and present your culture.“ **Y.O.Y.O** “‘Y.O.Y.O’ stands for ‘you\'re on your own,’ and ‘yo-yo’ in the sense of just like a yo-yo goes up and down and round and round, and if you listen to the drum beat, it\'s like a cycle of a loop. But when I was making this music, I was thinking like, \'Man, all of this is going on. You really are on your own in this world.\' And I don\'t necessarily think that\'s a bad thing. When it sort of hit me, it was like, ‘That at first is very sad, but it\'s also very liberating.’ You are in control. You go as far, or as close, as you want to go. You can\'t rely on anyone but your own brain and yourself, and in that there is power. It was influenced by sad things I was seeing around me, but out of that came positivity.\" **Shades of You** “I had the bassline and the drum beat, but I felt I’d given as much as I could to the song and it wasn\'t done yet. I was thinking about vocalists, and I\'m quite good at kind of hearing somebody\'s voice on it. That was it—I heard Poppy’s voice. I just knew she\'d understand it musically. And as I sort of explained it to her, she went away and came back without any direction from me. I’ve known her for a long time, I’m a big fan of what she does, and I wanted to try and push to see if she could try something different to maybe what you\'ve heard from her, because I\'ve seen her do loads of interesting things that aren\'t recorded or aren\'t on YouTube, and I just wanted to kind of get somebody that would get it, and I think she did.” **Dancing in the Dark** “What\'s the word when someone can read your mind? Telepathic. I had this loop, and even before I exhausted my part on it, I just heard Steven Obongjayar. He’s got this kind of raspy tone that could just cut through and make it kind of feel almost like Afrobeat and punk rock. We got in a studio together, and I played it to him, and then after two seconds he was like, ‘Man, can I have this for my album?’ After about an hour arguing: ‘No, you can\'t have it.’ What was crazy was that I had not explained anything to do with *Dark Matter*, or the subjects. He just got it. I was like, ‘Man, look at that. There\'s something going on. There\'s something in the air.’” **Only You** “I was talking to Theon Cross, who\'s a tuba player, and I remember playing him some sketches. He’s like, ‘Moses, man, why do you never feature on your music?’ And I think because I write it, because I produce it, because I help mix it, because I\'m putting it together, to me, it just feels a bit weird to then have solo stuff. And also, I don\'t want it to sound like a drummer\'s record. I don\'t want it to sound like you can tell who I am on the record. But he managed to convince me. I was in the club and I had an idea: I love listening to techno and garage, but why do I never hear a drum? I know it sounds weird, a drum solo through a sound system. But I didn\'t want it to be like a typical feature—here’s the song and it\'s framed just for me. I wanted it to kind of exist in its own sort of texture, to take you on this journey. Like you could close your eyes and sort of vibe to in a club. Maybe I got it, maybe I didn\'t. But that was the vibe.” **2 Far Gone** “There\'s an album by Herbie Hancock called *Inventions & Dimensions*, and Herbie doesn\'t need help, but it just showcases him so well. It\'s got these incredible grooves, and he\'s just going at it on the piano. I was like, ‘How do I do that with my thing?’ I remember going around to \[composer/producer\] Joe \[Armon-Jones’\] house and he had recently got a little upright piano in his front room. Typically, if you go to a studio and you record piano, they\'ll have really good stereo mics, and it\'s really pristine, and everything\'s got to be good. What was great about this one was he just had this one microphone and it wasn\'t the best microphone. He just put it somewhere and did one take at this upright. People were walking around the house—it was so rough and ready. But it worked so perfectly. Even when I was trying to mix it, the rawness of it sounded so great.” **Nommos Descent** “A lot of this stuff started as me really experimenting with loops. That one wanted a vocal. On a trip to South Africa last year, I was working with a friend of mine, Nonku Phiri. She\'s from Cape Town, but she lives in Jo’burg, and her father was a musician on *Graceland*, back with Paul Simon, so she knows everybody. While I was hanging out with her, a lot of the music she was showing me, people like Beverly Glenn-Copeland, a lot of folk music, vocal music, really fit the sound I was going for when I was experimenting. So when I got back to England, I sent her the track. Even if I took all the music away—I might do that one day—and just release her vocals, it would be so beautiful. It’s referencing the Nommos people, really talking on the element, the metaphor. \'Dark matter\' is a reference for the plight of the diaspora, black people, and sort of how we\'ve come from greatness and whether you choose to do with that what you will. What was cool: We\'re never actually in the same room. I sent the music to her and she did her thing, and it just worked.” **What Now?** “It\'s easy to feel helpless, but I\'m not really like that—I’m very solution-based. There\'s no point in sort of posing the statement without thinking about a solution. \[\'What Now\'\] was a nice summary for me, because I wanted it to be very meditative. It’s that real strong mix of trying to have the acoustic and the electronic worlds coexist without battling each other. You’ve got this 808 sort of vibe going, as well as horns that sound like they\'re almost suffocated. I was messing a lot with modular synths, and I think I sampled a note on a piano and sort of held it and saturated it a bit. I remember just listening to it in my home setup, and it just put me in this real trance. I think music has that power to cleanse and make you recollect, think, hope—all that stuff. Across the whole album, I could\'ve just recorded things in a very normal, clean fashion, but it was more about how do I get that vibration? How do I get that texture, that tone? And I wanted to end the record on that sort of note: ‘Well, where are we going from here?’”

For his band’s fifth LP, Protomartyr guitarist Greg Ahee took inspiration from working with DJ/producer (and fellow Michigan native) Matthew Dear. “He comes from a completely different world and has a completely different way of making songs,” Ahee tells Apple Music of Dear, with whom he collaborated on the latter’s 2018 album *Bunny*. “I thought that it\'d be cool to bring other people into Protomartyr to try to get some new perspectives. I wanted to approach things like a jazz record, but one where there\'s no real lead instrument. Everything blends together and flows in a way I haven\'t heard very much in rock music—nothing stands above anything else.” Featuring contributions from Nandi Plunkett (vocals), Jemeel Moondoc (alto saxophone), Izaak Mills (bass clarinet, saxophone, flute), and Fred Lonberg-Holm (cello), *Ultimate Success Today* finds the Detroit post-punk outfit adding new textures and tones to some of Ahee and frontman Joe Casey’s most urgent and upsetting work to date. “I was sick, and I don\'t know if that\'s just because I\'m getting old and you get sick when you get old, but you start feeling every ache and pain that you\'ve been putting off,” Casey says. “And if there was anything that I was putting off writing, anything that I was like, ‘Oh, someday I would like to do that,’ I was definitely going to try to push it and make sure it was on this record.” Here, Ahee and Casey take us inside every song. **Day Without End** Greg Ahee: “We wanted to try something a little bit different and open with this thing that\'s just a repetitive build. We\'ve always, in my mind, been pretty good at building tension and building it to where it almost releases, but you never really get that satisfaction. The whole idea of this song is building tension and then just stopping it—I feel like that sums up what we like to do as a band.” Joe Casey: “Lyrically, it was just an easy way for me set the tone for the album. When people are describing us, ‘dark and gloomy’ is kind of a go-to, which I think is wrong. And the idea of having a summer album—or an album about light that still had some dark themes to it—was kind of my goal. This song is about a day when the sun never goes down—quite disturbing. I’ve suffered from not being able to go to sleep, and there\'s nothing more sickening than lying in a bed, being there all night trying to fall asleep, and the sun starts coming up and you hear birds chirping. The world has reset and you have not.” **Processed by the Boys** JC: “People have—for good reason—been focusing on that line ‘A foreign disease washed up on the beach.’ And I feel kind of bad to then go, ‘Yeah, but the song says all these things that you think are going to be the end of the world—a foreign disease or someone stabbing you—are not really what brings down society.’ What brings down society is corrupt governments or a police force having too much power—the boys running amok. You don\'t want the annoying guy that you knew in high school to be in charge, but as you get older, you realize that the idiots that you knew in high school are the people that are now in charge, and it becomes a very frightening, frightening thing. ‘Processed’ is also one of those words that institutions use that can mean so many different things. Processed meat. When you get any sort of paperwork, when you\'re trying to apply for unemployment or you\'re trying to apply for health insurance, you have to wait till your documents get processed. I don\'t like how dehumanizing that is.” **I Am You Now** JC: “The main thing about ‘I Am You Now’ is just how corporations will—or anybody—will take people that are marginalized or suffering, and then draw them into this world and make them feel like they\'re important by selling things to them. And how the person that is suffering will immediately be turned into a symbol for the status quo: ‘Oh, as long as somebody\'s selling something to me, I must be included.’ It’s probably one of the more raucous songs on the album. I like songs I have to fight against. Like, ‘Okay, Greg\'s guitar is fighting for space—I need to fight for my space.’ We\'re kind of doing a back-and-forth like that. Those are all some of my favorite songs.” GA: “When I write a riff, I’m always conscious that it\'s going to either be a thing where Joe needs to find a way to sing over it or we\'re going to have that back-and-forth. And pretty early on with this one, it was clear that it was going to be a back-and-forth. We were playing around with this idea of all of us fighting against each other, but also trying to make a really tight piece of music.” **The Aphorist** JC: “I don\'t think the band, on our first record \[2012’s *No Passion All Technique*\], would have thought to even consider doing something like this. Now, I feel confident enough, after five albums, that, like, ‘Okay, I\'m going to try as best I can to sing it.’ And I\'m glad for the opportunity, especially after something like ‘I Am You Now.’ This is definitely one of those songs about writing songs. To me, shouting slogans is stupid. The first verse is a poem my brother wrote that I adjusted a little bit. I always liked my brother Jim; I always like to go to him for writing advice or if I\'m stuck on something. That was a song that we were working on for a while where the slight tempo changes would completely alter it, so it was hard to find the tone that would work for it. I was trying lots of different things and Jim was like, ‘Oh, I got this poem,’ and it fit the vibe of the record and what I was going for—the impermanence of things. That helped lock it in.” GA: “That was a really hard one for us to get tight with as a band, because of the time signature, and if we would have played that song even a couple BPMs too fast, I couldn\'t play that riff. It took a while to just play that song over and over again before we really got it.” **June 21** JC: “June 21 is the beginning of summer. It was actually kind of written around that time, too. You know it\'s summer \[in Detroit\] when you just hear the cars starting to drive fucking insane on the expressways. Everybody usually thinks that summer is a great time of year, but if you\'re physically and mentally diminished, summer is rough as any other season.” **Michigan Hammers** JC: “The song’s about workers, and the line about Veracruz is about mules. Because in the Mexican-American War, the army used lots of them. And off the coast of Veracruz, they couldn\'t get close enough to shore, so they just threw all the mules off the side of the boat. The ones that could swim to the shore, they used—but over half of them drowned. America won that war, and afterward, Ulysses S. Grant was celebrating the victory, so he went on a camping trip outside of Mexico City and he had a bunch of mules carrying stuff, one of which fell down the side of the mountain. They were like, ‘Well, that mule’s dead,’ and they continued to the top of the mountain. Then, two days later, the mule just showed up. It had climbed back up to the top of the mountain. It shows the reliance of these animals. Musically, it was another kind of rocking song and I wanted to write a rallying song about something fictional so it wouldn\'t be weighed down with any sort of meaning. I wanted it to be free of specificity.” GA: “A lot of times, Joe will take lyrics and just talk about it and joke about it with us. In the studio’s kitchen, they had magnet fridge poetry, and somebody put together, like, ‘champagne bath, half empty.’ Joe was like, ‘Oh, that\'s like the saddest four-word short story that I\'ve ever read.’ And then a variation of that ended up in the song.” **Tranquilizer** GA: “We knew we wanted some fucking freaky jazz saxophone on that one, and we wanted to get someone that really comes from that world, and Jemeel does. That song has almost no guitar. It was kind of supposed to be based around ‘If There\'s a Hell Below We\'re All Going to Go,’ by Curtis Mayfield, where it\'s just like a distorted, driving bassline that never changes and then all these things kind of float on top of it and then it kicks off in this kind of dramatic way. It was originally combined with ‘Modern Business Hymns’ and we ended up splitting those into separate songs—partially because we thought they were both solid enough on their own, and partially because the moods of them are very different. But I wanted to still have a connection between them, so the bassline that plays throughout ‘Tranquilizer’ is the same as the outro of ‘Modern Business Hymns.’ But in ‘Modern Business Hymns,’ you almost can\'t tell because it\'s kind of pretty. ‘Tranquilizer’ is menacing.” JC: “That was definitely one where I had to kind of go back to the idea of not overthinking lyrics. Because I really wanted to try to capture the feeling of when you\'re in pain. Writing about pain is impossible to do, because it is such an unthinking feeling. You’re not thinking about it. You\'re not having heady thoughts when you\'re in pain. You\'re immediately kind of reduced to very animalistic thoughts and fears, and I wanted to keep it that way. It\'s less about the words and more about the feeling of saying them almost. Once Greg explained the connection between this and the next song, it was easy to take the idea that you\'re dealing with pain until you take something to dull it or kill it. Because then on the next song, the first line is ‘Once the tranqs had hit.’ So it\'s like once you have gotten rid of the pain, then your mind can kind of formulate more thoughts about it.” **Modern Business Hymns** JC: “I always wanted to write a science fiction song, or a song about the future, but it\'s easier said than done. You don\'t want to make it too cheesy. So I wanted to kind of tie it into dreams, where when you\'re thinking about your future, if things are going well, you can imagine it as very bright. But when things are going very bad, the future can be just as dire as what you\'re going through. In the past, I\'ve sometimes maybe wanted to double my vocals during the chorus, and this was definitely one that I\'m like, this song will work if there\'s a female vocalist in the song, and I wanted it to be more of a duet. It ended up being maybe less of that, but I\'m glad. I think Nandi makes the song. Her voice has a purity to it that I don\'t think people would expect to be in a Protomartyr song. For some reason, I feel like it elevates it in a way that I would have never imagined before I heard it.” **Bridge & Crown** JC: “I have a friend who is studying to be a dentist, and she is always trying to throw in different dental ideas. And the thing that she gave me for this song that really sealed it for me was the four different kinds of patients. That\'s something that you\'ll learn, I guess, if you study to be a doctor or a dentist or anything, is the different attitudes patients will have. It was a perfect way to get into talking about dealing with mortality, specifically your own mortality. The thing that will survive long after you\'re gone is your dental work. Out of all the songs, that was the one where the lyrics came the easiest for me.” GA: “I had written it start to finish, just on my phone. I think I was on an airplane and just messing around with how to structure it and trying different things. And it sounded insane. I made some really crazy drumbeats on it where I had just layered three different drum machines on top of each other. I brought it to the band and \[drummer\] Alex \[Leonard\] somehow learned how to play it, which he\'s actually really good at—when we just drum something that seems impossible, he can oftentimes figure out a way to make it work. It ended up being one of the craziest songs, because it wasn\'t really meant to be played.” **Worm in Heaven** GA: “When I was writing those chords, I was kind of just trying to write a country song. But it\'s also one of those things where immediately in writing it, I was like, \'This is the last song on the album.\' But unlike that first song, you actually get the tension released by the end. It still cuts off as drastically as the first song does, but not before actually reaching a point where you feel like this tension that\'s been building the entire album finally has some sort of resolution and the song is able to actually explode.” JC: “It has a certain stillness to it, a confidence to it. The guitar takes a while to really announce itself, which isn’t something we would have necessarily felt comfortable doing before. I didn\'t have the lyrics until right before we recorded it. I really wanted to have the last thing be very of-the-moment, and I think, with that one, I wrote half of it up in my room at the studio ten minutes before it was time to record the vocals, and finished the second half of the lyrics in the booth as we were recording it. It’s happened a couple times on different albums where I just feel like the music is so beautiful that the lyrics have to kind of rise to the occasion for it. I don\'t want to get too corny about it, but it was like, ‘All right, no matter what happens to this record, this is kind of the point that we\'ve been building, this moment.’ And it worked for me.”

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

Minor Science presents his debut album 'Second Language', out on the 3rd April 2020. The LP gives us a widescreen view of a musical world previously glimpsed through the producer’s series of 12" releases. A kaleidoscope of tempos and intensities, the record is often fast but rarely heavy, fizzing with detail but full of space, euphoric in places but frequently blue in mood. As the title suggests, the album takes translation as a guiding principle, putting an idiomatic spin on familiar styles - from Detroit-ish techno and hyperspeed electro to twilit electronica, musique concrete and sour modal jazz. Minor Science's language is a knotty one, packed with odd time-signatures, brain-bending sound design and a playful palette of switch-ups, fake-outs and digital hiccups. But it's also soft and emotive, and shot through with vibrant melody. Minor Science’s relationship with languages is a strong feature of the record. More precisely the relationship between a second and third language, and a mother tongue. It signals an effort to get out of familiar habits, echoing the relationship he has with his own music writing and music making. Regardless of attempts to be precise, a translation can never fully capture the original meaning. “Parce que c'est plus facile d'écrire sans style” - Samuel Beckett The cover of ‘Second Language’ devised by Alex McCullough, shows the handling of a tablet carved in Portuguese Limestone (and later painted) by architectural sculptor George Edwards. Immortalising the phrasing of Samuel Beckett alongside the album title. The stone artefact was photographed by Oskar Proctor directly after completion, documented in transit whilst being manoeuvred. Sleeve credits: Design and art direction by Alex McCullough Limestone tablet carved by George Edwards Photograph courtesy of Oskar Proctor

If there is a recurring theme to be found in Phoebe Bridgers’ second solo LP, “it’s the idea of having these inner personal issues while there\'s bigger turmoil in the world—like a diary about your crush during the apocalypse,” she tells Apple Music. “I’ll torture myself for five days about confronting a friend, while way bigger shit is happening. It just feels stupid, like wallowing. But my intrusive thoughts are about my personal life.” Recorded when she wasn’t on the road—in support of 2017’s *Stranger in the Alps* and collaborative releases with Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker (boygenius) in 2018 and with Conor Oberst (Better Oblivion Community Center) in 2019—*Punisher* is a set of folk and bedroom pop that’s at once comforting and haunting, a refuge and a fever dream. “Sometimes I\'ll get the question, like, ‘Do you identify as an LA songwriter?’ Or ‘Do you identify as a queer songwriter?’ And I\'m like, ‘No. I\'m what I am,’” the Pasadena native says. “The things that are going on are what\'s going on, so of course every part of my personality and every part of the world is going to seep into my music. But I don\'t set out to make specific things—I just look back and I\'m like, ‘Oh. That\'s what I was thinking about.’” Here, Bridgers takes us inside every song on the album. **DVD Menu** “It\'s a reference to the last song on the record—a mirror of that melody at the very end. And it samples the last song of my first record—‘You Missed My Heart’—the weird voice you can sort of hear. It just felt rounded out to me to do that, to lead into this album. Also, I’ve been listening to a lot of Grouper. There’s a note in this song: Everybody looked at me like I was insane when I told Rob Moose—who plays strings on the record—to play it. Everybody was like, ‘What the fuck are you taking about?’ And I think that\'s the scariest part of it. I like scary music.” **Garden Song** “It\'s very much about dreams and—to get really LA on it—manifesting. It’s about all your good thoughts that you have becoming real, and all the shitty stuff that you think becoming real, too. If you\'re afraid of something all the time, you\'re going to look for proof that it happened, or that it\'s going to happen. And if you\'re a miserable person who thinks that good people die young and evil corporations rule everything, there is enough proof in the world that that\'s true. But if you\'re someone who believes that good people are doing amazing things no matter how small, and that there\'s beauty or whatever in the midst of all the darkness, you\'re going to see that proof, too. And you’re going to ignore the dark shit, or see it and it doesn\'t really affect your worldview. It\'s about fighting back dark, evil murder thoughts and feeling like if I really want something, it happens, or it comes true in a totally weird, different way than I even expected.” **Kyoto** “This song is about being on tour and hating tour, and then being home and hating home. I just always want to be where I\'m not, which I think is pretty not special of a thought, but it is true. With boygenius, we took a red-eye to play a late-night TV show, which sounds glamorous, but really it was hurrying up and then waiting in a fucking backstage for like hours and being really nervous and talking to strangers. I remember being like, \'This is amazing and horrible at the same time. I\'m with my friends, but we\'re all miserable. We feel so lucky and so spoiled and also shitty for complaining about how tired we are.\' I miss the life I complained about, which I think a lot of people are feeling. I hope the parties are good when this shit \[the pandemic\] is over. I hope people have a newfound appreciation for human connection and stuff. I definitely will for tour.” Punisher “I don\'t even know what to compare it to. In my songwriting style, I feel like I actually stopped writing it earlier than I usually stop writing stuff. I usually write things five times over, and this one was always just like, ‘All right. This is a simple tribute song.’ It’s kind of about the neighborhood \[Silver Lake in Los Angeles\], kind of about depression, but mostly about stalking Elliott Smith and being afraid that I\'m a punisher—that when I talk to my heroes, that their eyes will glaze over. Say you\'re at Thanksgiving with your wife\'s family and she\'s got an older relative who is anti-vax or just read some conspiracy theory article and, even if they\'re sweet, they\'re just talking to you and they don\'t realize that your eyes are glazed over and you\'re trying to escape: That’s a punisher. The worst way that it happens is like with a sweet fan, someone who is really trying to be nice and their hands are shaking, but they don\'t realize they\'re standing outside of your bus and you\'re trying to go to bed. And they talk to you for like 45 minutes, and you realize your reaction really means a lot to them, so you\'re trying to be there for them, too. And I guess that I\'m terrified that when I hang out with Patti Smith or whatever that I\'ll become that for people. I know that I have in the past, and I guess if Elliott was alive—especially because we would have lived next to each other—it’s like 1000% I would have met him and I would have not known what the fuck I was talking about, and I would have cornered him at Silverlake Lounge.” **Halloween** “I started it with my friend Christian Lee Hutson. It was actually one of the first times we ever hung out. We ended up just talking forever and kind of shitting out this melody that I really loved, literally hanging out for five hours and spending 10 minutes on music. It\'s about a dead relationship, but it doesn\'t get to have any victorious ending. It\'s like you\'re bored and sad and you don\'t want drama, and you\'re waking up every day just wanting to have shit be normal, but it\'s not that great. He lives right by Children\'s Hospital, so when we were writing the song, it was like constant ambulances, so that was a depressing background and made it in there. The other voice on it is Conor Oberst’s. I was kind of stressed about lyrics—I was looking for a last verse and he was like, ‘Dude, you\'re always talking about the Dodger fan who got murdered. You should talk about that.’ And I was like, \'Jesus Christ. All right.\' The Better Oblivion record was such a learning experience for me, and I ended up getting so comfortable halfway through writing and recording it. By the time we finished a whole fucking record, I felt like I could show him a terrible idea and not be embarrassed—I knew that he would just help me. Same with boygenius: It\'s like you\'re so nervous going in to collaborating with new people and then by the time you\'re done, you\'re like, ‘Damn, it\'d be easy to do that again.’ Your best show is the last show of tour.” Chinese Satellite “I have no faith—and that\'s what it\'s about. My friend Harry put it in the best way ever once. He was like, ‘Man, sometimes I just wish I could make the Jesus leap.’ But I can\'t do it. I mean, I definitely have weird beliefs that come from nothing. I wasn\'t raised religious. I do yoga and stuff. I think breathing is important. But that\'s pretty much as far as it goes. I like to believe that ghosts and aliens exist, but I kind of doubt it. I love science—I think science is like the closest thing to that that you’ll get. If I\'m being honest, this song is about turning 11 and not getting a letter from Hogwarts, just realizing that nobody\'s going to save me from my life, nobody\'s going to wake me up and be like, ‘Hey, just kidding. Actually, it\'s really a lot more special than this, and you\'re special.’ No, I’m going to be the way that I am forever. I mean, secretly, I am still waiting on that letter, which is also that part of the song, that I want someone to shake me awake in the middle of the night and be like, ‘Come with me. It\'s actually totally different than you ever thought.’ That’d be sweet.” **Moon Song** “I feel like songs are kind of like dreams, too, where you\'re like, ‘I could say it\'s about this one thing, but...’ At the same time it’s so hyper-specific to people and a person and about a relationship, but it\'s also every single song. I feel complex about every single person I\'ve ever cared about, and I think that\'s pretty clear. The through line is that caring about someone who hates themselves is really hard, because they feel like you\'re stupid. And you feel stupid. Like, if you complain, then they\'ll go away. So you don\'t complain and you just bottle it up and you\'re like, ‘No, step on me again, please.’ It’s that feeling, the wanting-to-be-stepped-on feeling.” Savior Complex “Thematically, it\'s like a sequel to ‘Moon Song.’ It\'s like when you get what you asked for and then you\'re dating someone who hates themselves. Sonically, it\'s one of the only songs I\'ve ever written in a dream. I rolled over in the middle of the night and hummed—I’m still looking for this fucking voice memo, because I know it exists, but it\'s so crazy-sounding, so scary. I woke up and knew what I wanted it to be about and then took it in the studio. That\'s Blake Mills on clarinet, which was so funny: He was like a little schoolkid practicing in the hallway of Sound City before coming in to play.” **I See You** “I had that line \[‘I\'ve been playing dead my whole life’\] first, and I\'ve had it for at least five years. Just feeling like a waking zombie every day, that\'s how my depression manifests itself. It\'s like lethargy, just feeling exhausted. I\'m not manic depressive—I fucking wish. I wish I was super creative when I\'m depressed, but instead, I just look at my phone for eight hours. And then you start kind of falling in love and it all kind of gets shaken up and you\'re like, ‘Can this person fix me? That\'d be great.’ This song is about being close to somebody. I mean, it\'s about my drummer. This isn\'t about anybody else. When we first broke up, it was so hard and heartbreaking. It\'s just so weird that you could date and then you\'re a stranger from the person for a while. Now we\'re super tight. We\'re like best friends, and always will be. There are just certain people that you date where it\'s so romantic almost that the friendship element is kind of secondary. And ours was never like that. It was like the friendship element was above all else, like we started a million projects together, immediately started writing together, couldn\'t be apart ever, very codependent. And then to have that taken away—it’s awful.” **Graceland Too** “I started writing it about an MDMA trip. Or I had a couple lines about that and then it turned into stuff that was going on in my life. Again, caring about someone who hates themselves and is super self-destructive is the hardest thing about being a person, to me. You can\'t control people, but it\'s tempting to want to help when someone\'s going through something, and I think it was just like a meditation almost on that—a reflection of trying to be there for people. I hope someday I get to hang out with the people who have really struggled with addiction or suicidal shit and have a good time. I want to write more songs like that, what I wish would happen.” **I Know the End** “This is a bunch of things I had on my to-do list: I wanted to scream; I wanted to have a metal song; I wanted to write about driving up the coast to Northern California, which I’ve done a lot in my life. It\'s like a super specific feeling. This is such a stoned thought, but it feels kind of like purgatory to me, doing that drive, just because I have done it at every stage of my life, so I get thrown into this time that doesn\'t exist when I\'m doing it, like I can\'t differentiate any of the times in my memory. I guess I always pictured that during the apocalypse, I would escape to an endless drive up north. It\'s definitely half a ballad. I kind of think about it as, ‘Well, what genre is \[My Chemical Romance’s\] “Welcome to the Black Parade” in?’ It\'s not really an anthem—I don\'t know. I love tricking people with a vibe and then completely shifting. I feel like I want to do that more.”

clipping.\'s second entry in their horror anthology collection follows up 2019\'s *There Existed an Addiction to Blood* by conjuring up an atmosphere that rarely allows a moment to catch your breath. William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes\' experimental production pushes their concepts even further, drawing inspiration from traditional hip-hop (\"Say the Name\" mixes a Geto Boys sample within a Chicago house music vibe, while \"Eaten Alive\" is a disorienting tribute to No Limit Records), power electronics (the blown-out blast of \"Make Them Dead\"), and EVP field samplings (the urgent \"Pain Everyday\"). These textured compositions allow Daveed Diggs\' narration to take center stage as he reconceptualizes scary-movie tropes with today\'s modern societal terrors, fleshed out by a couple of eclectic features. Cam & China flip the \"final girl\" cliché on its head on the uptempo \"’96 Neve Campbell,\" while alt-rap duo Ho99o9 relate inner city violence to auto-cannibalism on the industrial-leaning \"Looking Like Meat.\" Here the Los Angeles-based trio takes Apple Music through the record\'s many horrors. **Say the Name** William Hutson: “I had always wanted to make a track using that phrase from the Geto Boys, and we had talked about doing a Dance Mania Chicago ghetto house track about *Candyman*. I always liked that idea of a slow, plodding, more dance-oriented track, using that line repeated as a hook.” Daveed Diggs: “We had always talked about how that line is one of the scariest lines in rap music, it\'s just really good writing. Scarface does that better than anybody. What we had was this very Chicago, these really specific reference points, to me, that I had to connect. That\'s how I saw the challenge in my head, was like there\'s this very Texas lyric and this very Chicago concept. Fortunately, *Candyman* already does that for you. It\'s already about the legacy of slavery in this country. So I just got to lean into those things.” **’96 Neve Campbell (feat. Cam & China)** Jonathan Snipes: “This was actually the second thing we sent them—we made an earlier beat that had a sample that we couldn\'t clear. We wanted to make something that sounds a little more like jerk music and something that\'s a little bit more tailored for them.” WH: \"We didn\'t have our *Halloween*, *Friday the 13th* slasher song. The idea was to not have Daveed on it at all, except to rap the hooks, and just to have female rappers basically standing in for the final girl in a slasher movie. But then we liked Daveed\'s lines, we wanted him to keep rapping on it.” DD: “It felt too short with just two verses. We were like, ‘Well, put me on the phone and make me be the killer.’” WH: “There\'s a Benny the Butcher song called \'’97 Hov,\' this idea of referring to a song by a date and a person that\'s the vibe you\'re going for. So some of the suggestions were like, \'’79 Jamie Lee Curtis\' or \'’82 Heather Langenkamp.\' But then with Daveed on the phone and making a *Scream* reference, \'’96 Neve Campbell\' made more sense.” **Something Underneath** DD: “There\'s a whole batch of songs we recorded in New York while I was also doing a play, and so we\'d work all day and then I\'d go do this show at night. For a long time, there was a version of this one that I couldn\'t stand the vocal performance on. It\'s obviously a pretty technical song, and I just never nailed it and I sound tired and all of this. So it ended up being the last thing we finished.” **Make Them Dead** WH: “We did ‘Body & Blood’ and ‘Wriggle,’ which both take literal samples from power electronic artists and turned them into dance songs. The idea for this was, let\'s do a song that instead of borrows from power electronics and makes it into a dance song, let\'s try to just make a heavy, slow, plodding thing that feels like real power electronics.” DD: “When we finally settled on how this song should be lyrically, it was actually hard to write. Just trying to capture that same feel. There\'s something about power electronics that feels instructional, feels like it\'s ordering you to do something. The politics around it are varied, depending on who is making the stuff. But in order to sit within that, it had to feel political and instructional, but then that had to agree with us.” **She Bad** WH: “That\'s our witchcraft track.” JS: “Obviously, this ended up having some melodies in it, but it started as those, but it really is just field recordings and modular synths, and there isn\'t a beat so much and the melody is very obtuse in the hooks. It\'s mostly just looped and cut field recordings.” DD: “I\'ve been moving away from something that we did in a lot of our previous records, like really super visual, like precise visual storytelling that feels really cinematic, where I\'m just actually pointing the camera at things, so that was fun to try that again.” **Invocation (Interlude) (with Greg Stuart)** WH: “It\'s a joke about Alvin Lucier\'s beat pattern music, his wave songs and things like that, but done as if it was trying to summon the devil.” **Pain Everyday (with Michael Esposito)** DD: “I love this song so much. Also, I definitely learned while writing it why people don\'t write whole rap songs in 7/8. It\'s not easy. The math, the hidden math in those verses is intense. It kept breaking my brain, but now that it\'s all down, I can\'t hear it any other way, it sounds fine. But getting there was such a mindfuck.” WH: “So then the idea was it\'s in 7/8, it\'s about a lynched ghost, so the idea we had was a chase scene of the ghost of murdered victims of lynching.” **Check the Lock** WH: “This was conceived as a sequel to a song by Seagram and Scarface called ‘Sleepin in My Nikes.’ That was a rap song about extreme paranoia that I always thought was cool and felt like a horror, like an aspect of horror.” JS: “This is the one time on this album that we let ourselves do that like John Carpenter-y, creepy synth thing.” **Looking Like Meat (feat Ho99o9)** DD: “I think they reached out wanting to do a song, and this had always felt, we always wanted this to be like a posse track, kind of. This was another one that I wasn\'t going to write a voice for actually, we were going to try to find a better verse.” JS: “Which is why the hooks are all different—we were going to fill them in specifically with features, but sometimes features don\'t work out. This is like our attempt at making the more sort of aggressive, like a thing that sounds more like noise rap than we usually do.” WH: “The first thing on this beat was I bought 20 little music boxes that all played different songs, and I stuck them all to a sounding board and put contact microphones on it, and just cranked them each at the same time.” **Eaten Alive (with Jeff Parker & Ted Byrnes)** DD: “I had been in this phase of listening to Nipsey \[Hussle\] all day, every day, and all I wanted to do was figure out how to rap like that. So from his cadence perspective, it\'s like my best Nipsey impression, which we didn\'t know was going to turn into a posthumous tribute.” WH: “And the rapping was also partly a tribute, just spiritually a tribute to No Limit Records. That\'s why it\'s called \'Eaten Alive,\' which is named after a Tobe Hooper horror movie about a swamp.” **Body for the Pile (with Sickness)** WH: “It already came out \[in 2016\]. It ended up being on an Adult Swim compilation called *NOISE*. We did it with Chris Goudreau, our friend who is just a legendary noise artist called Sickness.” JS: “We always thought that would be a great song to save for a horror record, and then years went by and we weren\'t going to include it, because we thought, ‘Well, it\'s out and it\'s done.’ We looked around and I don\'t know, that comp isn\'t really anywhere and that track is hard to find, and we really like it and we thought it fit really nice. When we started putting it in the lineup of tracks and listening to it as an album, we realized it fit really nicely.” **Enlacing** WH: “The cosmic pessimism of H.P. Lovecraft is all about the horror of discovering how small you are in the universe and how uncaring the universe is. So this song was about accessing that fear by getting way too high on Molly and ketamine at the same time, then discovering Cthulhu or Azathoth as a result of getting way too fucking high.” JS: “My memory is that this was never intended to be a clipping. song, that you and I made this beat as an example of, ‘Hey, we can make normal beats.’” DD: “That Lovecraftian idea was something that we played in opposition to a lot on *Splendor & Misery*, so it was good to revisit in a way where we were actually playing into it, and also it definitely feels to me like just being way too high.” **Secret Piece** WH: “We wanted to really tie the two albums together, so the idea was to get everyone who played on any of the albums to contribute their one note. So we assembled the recordings of dawn and forests, and then almost everyone who played on either of these two albums contributed one note.” JS: “We have a habit of ending our albums with a piece of processed music or contemporary music. We ended *midcity* with a take on a Steve Reich phased loop idea, and we ended *CLPPNG* with a John Cage piece, and then *There Existed* ends with Annea Lockwood\'s \'Piano Burning.\' So we wanted something that felt like the sun was coming up at the end of the horror movie, a little bit.” WH: “That was the idea was that we were exiting, it\'s dawn in a forest. So dawn in a forest in a slasher movie or a horror movie usually means you\'re safe, right? The end of *Friday the 13th* one, the sun comes up and she\'s in the little boat, but that doesn\'t end well for her either. We did not have the jump scare at the end like *Friday the 13th*.” DD: “I pushed for it a little bit, but some people thought it was too corny.”

“Place and setting have always been really huge in this project,” Katie Crutchfield tells Apple Music of Waxahatchee, which takes its name from a creek in her native Alabama. “It’s always been a big part of the way I write songs, to take people with me to those places.” While previous Waxahatchee releases often evoked a time—the roaring ’90s, and its indie rock—Crutchfield’s fifth LP under the Waxahatchee alias finds Crutchfield finally embracing her roots in sound as well. “Growing up in Birmingham, I always sort of toed the line between having shame about the South and then also having deep love and connection to it,” she says. “As I started to really get into alternative country music and Lucinda \[Williams\], I feel like I accepted that this is actually deeply in my being. This is the music I grew up on—Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, the powerhouse country singers. It’s in my DNA. It’s how I learned to sing. If I just accept and embrace this part of myself, I can make something really powerful and really honest. I feel like I shed a lot of stuff that wasn\'t serving me, both personally and creatively, and it feels like *Saint Cloud*\'s clean and honest. It\'s like this return to form.” Here, Crutchfield draws us a map of *Saint Cloud*, with stories behind the places that inspired its songs—from the Mississippi to the Mediterranean. WEST MEMPHIS, ARKANSAS “Memphis is right between Birmingham and Kansas City, where I live currently. So to drive between the two, you have to go through Memphis, over the Mississippi River, and it\'s epic. That trip brings up all kinds of emotions—it feels sort of romantic and poetic. I was driving over and had this idea for \'**Fire**,\' like a personal pep talk. I recently got sober and there\'s a lot of work I had to do on myself. I thought it would be sweet to have a song written to another person, like a traditional love song, but to have it written from my higher self to my inner child or lower self, the two selves negotiating. I was having that idea right as we were over the river, and the sun was just beating on it and it was just glowing and that lyric came into my head. I wanted to do a little shout-out to West Memphis too because of \[the West Memphis Three\]—that’s an Easter egg and another little layer on the record. I always felt super connected to \[Damien Echols\], watching that movie \[*Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills*\] as a teenager, just being a weird, sort of dark kid from the South. The moment he comes on the screen, I’m immediately just like, ‘Oh my god, that guy is someone I would have been friends with.’ Being a sort of black sheep in the South is especially weird. Maybe that\'s just some self-mythology I have, like it\'s even harder if you\'re from the South. But it binds you together.” BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA “Arkadelphia Road is a real place, a road in Birmingham. It\'s right on the road of this little arts college, and there used to be this gas station where I would buy alcohol when I was younger, so it’s tied to this seediness of my past. A very profound experience happened to me on that road, but out of respect, I shouldn’t give the whole backstory. There is a person in my life who\'s been in my life for a long time, who is still a big part of my life, who is an addict and is in recovery. It got really bad for this person—really, really bad. \[\'**Arkadelphia**\'\] is about when we weren’t in recovery, and an experience that we shared. One of the most intense, personal songs I\'ve ever written. It’s about growing up and being kids and being innocent and watching this whole crazy situation play out while I was also struggling with substances. We now kind of have this shared recovery language, this shared crazy experience, and it\'s one of those things where when we\'re in the same place, we can kind of fit in the corner together and look at the world with this tent, because we\'ve been through what we\'ve been through.” RUBY FALLS, TENNESSEE “It\'s in Chattanooga. A waterfall that\'s in a cave. My sister used to live in Chattanooga, and that drive between Birmingham and Chattanooga, that stretch of land between Alabama, Georgia, into Tennessee, is so meaningful—a lot of my formative time has been spent driving that stretch. You pass a few things. One is Noccalula Falls, which I have a song about on my first album called ‘Noccalula.’ The other is Ruby Falls. \[‘**Ruby Falls**’\] is really dense—there’s a lot going on. It’s about a friend of mine who passed away from a heroin overdose, and it’s for him—my song for all people who struggle with that kind of thing. I sang a song at his funeral when he died. This song is just all about him, about all these different places that we talked about, or that we’d spend so much time at Waxahatchee Creek together. The beginning of the song is sort of meant to be like the high. It starts out in the sky, and that\'s what I\'m describing, as I take flight, up above everybody else. Then the middle part is meant to be like this flashback but it\'s taking place on earth—it’s actually a reference to *Just Kids*, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. It’s written with them in mind, but it\'s just about this infectious, contagious, intimate friendship. And the end of the song is meant to represent death or just being below the surface and being gone, basically.” ST. CLOUD, FLORIDA “It\'s where my dad is from, where he was born and where he grew up. The first part of \[\'**St. Cloud**\'\] is about New York. So I needed a city that was sort of the opposite of New York, in my head. I wasn\'t going to do like middle-of-nowhere somewhere; I really did want it to be a place that felt like a city. But it just wasn’t cosmopolitan. Just anywhere America, and not in a bad way—in a salt-of-the-earth kind of way. As soon as the idea to just call the whole record *Saint Cloud* entered my brain, it didn\'t leave. It had been the name for six months or something, and I had been calling it *Saint Cloud*, but then David Berman died and I was like, ‘Wow, that feels really kismet or something,’ because he changed his middle name to Cloud. He went by David Cloud Berman. I\'m a fan; it feels like a nice way to \[pay tribute\].” BARCELONA, SPAIN “In the beginning of\* \*‘**Oxbow**’ I say ‘Barna in white,’ and ‘Barna’ is what people call Barcelona. And Barcelona is where I quit drinking, so it starts right at the beginning. I like talking about it because when I was really struggling and really trying to get better—and many times before I actually succeeded at that—it was always super helpful for me to read about other musicians and just people I looked up to that were sober. It was during Primavera \[Sound Festival\]. It’s sort of notoriously an insane party. I had been getting close to quitting for a while—like for about a year or two, I would really be not drinking that much and then I would just have a couple nights where it would just be really crazy and I would feel so bad, and it affected all my relationships and how I felt about music and work and everything. I had the most intense bout of that in Barcelona right at the beginning of this tour, and as I was leaving I was going from there to Portugal and I just decided, ‘I\'m just going to not.’ I think in my head I was like, ‘I\'m actually done,’ but I didn\'t say that to everybody. And then that tour went into another tour, and then to the summer, and then before you know it I had been sober six months, and then I was just like, ‘I do not miss that at all.’ I\'ve never felt more like myself and better. It was the site of my great realization.”

The songs comprising Keeley Forsyth’s debut are, she states simply, “like blocks of metal that drop from the sky.” With its minimal arrangements placing her recollections and dissections of sometimes harrowing experiences front and centre, Debris showcases her elemental voice and an outpouring of candid, haunting lyrics detailing the seismic ruptures which take place behind closed doors. “There was a lot going on in my life that was heavy and hard,” she adds. “Songs were made under that moment.” Born and raised in Oldham, Forsyth first made her name as an actor, and while the creation of music has been a constant feature in her life, she’s taken the long road to its release. A deeply intuitive and singular musician, she began writing several years ago, accompanying herself on harmonium and accordion. “I came up with lots of songs in a very short space of time,” Forsyth recalls. “Most songs were written in the time it took to sing them. But I held them close, and often thought I needed to do something with them. It never felt right to go out and look for it. I felt like I needed to wait and move when I felt inspired.” That inspiration struck one evening while listening to the radio, where she first encountered pianist and composer Matthew Bourne’s work. “I heard his music and suddenly I could hear them both together,” she says of her songs and his compositions. “I felt compelled to write to him. He got straight back and said he loved what I was doing.” What followed were quick and instinctive collaborations with Bourne and producer and musician Sam Hobbs, with the initial burst of momentum Forsyth felt when writing carried through into the studio, preserving the intricacies and accidents that make an album human.

*The Long Goodbye* is a turbulent exploration of identity and belonging, and serves as a painstaking yet necessary passage for British rapper and actor Riz Ahmed. It’s the first music released under his full name, and alongside Swet Shop Boys compadre Redinho—who handles production—he weaves a rich tapestry of formative influences, turning a romantic relationship into a detailed extended metaphor for life in post-Brexit Britain. “It’s a breakup album, but with your country,” he explains. Taking cues from Sufi devotional music and poetry, the result is an urgent, chaotic piece that holds up a mirror to the rising tide of division in the land he calls home. “I wanted to make something that lets people into the feeling of this heartbreak, the anger, the denial, the acceptance, the realization, self-esteem and self-love,” he says. Further contextualized through feature skits, the album stars an extended support cast that includes the artist’s mother, Oscar winner Mahershala Ali, activist Yara Shahidi, and *People Just Do Nothing* actor Asim Chaudhry (playing the glorious Chabuddy G). Here, Ahmed talks us through each of the album’s tracks. **The Break Up (Shikwa)** “‘Shikwa’ is an epic poem by Muhammad Iqbal. It’s Iqbal complaining to God saying, ‘Yo, you abandoned us. Look at us. We\'re being killed in the streets. We\'re homeless, we\'re unloved, we\'re unwashed, we\'re uneducated, we\'ve lost our way. God, where are you?\' With Sufi poetry, they use this metaphor of being separated from your beloved as a way of talking about feeling distant from God. It\'s a way of saying, \'I want to feel spirituality back in my life.\' I had written a lot of the tracks that take you through this journey, and then I realized how many haven\'t been answered in the backstory, and I need to explain how we get to this point where one day I come home and she\'s changed the locks. Let me give you the full story, the messy truth of this relationship.” **Toba Tek Singh** “Toba Tek Singh is a place in Pakistan and it\'s also the name of a short story by this satirical writer \[Saadat Hasan\] Manto, who was often jailed for his writing. It\'s about a character who refuses to choose between India and Pakistan, who refuses to pick a side and makes their home in no man’s land instead—in a space between the two countries. We\'re living in a world that\'s increasingly polarized and it\'s being painted in terms of \'us versus them.\' But there are a lot of us who neither belong to \'us\' nor \'them\'—we are culturally hybrid and we have complex identities. And to me I always think that we\'re in this ‘no man\'s land’ but actually there\'s so many of us there, it\'s not ‘no man\'s land,’ it\'s *our* land.” **Mindy: Take Half** “This is really setting up the concept for the next track, \'Fast Lava,’ which is, ‘How did Britain become Great Britain? How did America become the richest country in the world? On whose backs was that built? If there is going to be a separation, then there needs to be some reparations.’” **Fast Lava** “‘I’ll spit my truth and it\'s Brown.’ I think that means actually no longer apologizing for your identity or having to edit your identity. It\'s about saying, ‘You know what, I\'ve been told to hide who I am. I\'ve been told to kind of tailor who I am to your tastes, for your acceptance. But actually, if you\'re going to try and kick me out, then if you\'re going to stop playing rough with me, then why should I hide who I am anymore?’” **Ammi: Come Home** “That\'s \[Ammi\] my mum, and what she\'s saying in Urdu is, \'Look, I told you, she\'ll be no good for you. There\'s no common ground between you culturally. When are you going to listen to me? Now what can we do? What we are going to do is pray? You know what, just leave with your head held high and come back home if you have to.’ I just say, ‘Mummy, can you leave me a voicemail?’ and she does it. It’s probably the reason I\'m an actor, \'cause she\'s just got such a big personality. She\'s such a natural performer.” **Any Day (feat. Jay Sean)** “This is me taking my mum’s advice: ‘You know what, just leave it, man. Just let it go. Let go of the idea that she\'s ever going to accept you.’ It\'s that moment of looking back at the relationship with all of the nostalgia and feeling a bit of heartache. I was so happy Jay Sean could jump on it, too—an absolute pioneer and also a West Londoner.” **Mahershala: Don’t Do Anything Stupid** “So Mahershala is someone I\'ve got to know, just as we were both gaining some momentum in our careers. He\'s just a real dude with a massive heart, and he\'s just been so supportive. We\'re at the point of the story now where I\'ve taken my mum’s advice, ended the relationship, but now I\'m really depressed. Now I\'m feeling really isolated and rejected, and that\'s what Mahershala talks to, leading into the next track.” **Can I Live** “This is about how rejection, hatred, and prejudice affects our mental health. It makes us hate ourselves, it makes us question ourselves. And over the course of the track, what you have is, I question my place in this relationship, in this world, in this country. I also question what the fuck I\'m doing as an artist. I\'m like, ‘What good is it doing\'? I say \'East and West are clashing but cash is the only outcome.’ By me kind of performing my trauma and performing my pain, is it kind of minstrels-y? What is it? Am I putting my foot down or am I tap-dancing to the man?” **Yara: Look Inside** “Yara is such a young woman but such an inspirational leader, an amazing young voice. She comes in with real wisdom at this point to say, ‘You know what? Just because you\'re not accepted in a relationship doesn\'t mean you can\'t still have acceptance in your life. It doesn\'t mean you can\'t have love in your life.\'” **Where You From** “I guess this is a question that is so common, and to some of us can be annoying. But it\'s also a question we all ask ourselves sometimes: Where are you really from? And a lot of us have quite complex identities. Maybe I\'m not from this place or that place. Maybe I\'m from this \'no man\'s land\' in between, and if I am from this ‘no man\'s land,\' it doesn\'t mean we can\'t plant a flag there and make it habitable. Let\'s still find some dignity.” **Mogambo** “This is an anthem of resilience. You may kind of feel like your position is sometimes under threat, or feel sometimes like you’re on the back foot, but they can\'t take us all out, mate. It\'s like a middle finger.” **Chabuddy: Go Southall** “Chabuddy comes in with the voicemail. It gives it the old ‘You know what? Connect. Connect with other people in this no man’s land with you.’ Let’s go Southall. There are people with you on this journey. Not ‘let\'s get on a plane and go to India, or LA\'—nah, let\'s go Southall: No Man\'s Land HQ.” **Deal With It** “‘Slap two pagans saying that’s too Asian.’ It’s about being your unapologetic self. It’s saying, ‘I don’t need your acceptance, Britney. I don’t need you to love me, I accept myself.’” **Hasan: You Came Out on Top** “Hasan \[Minhaj\] comes on and lets you know that by going on this journey, reconnecting with self-love, you’ve come out resilient. You’ve come out on top.” **Karma** “It’s like a victory lap, I guess. It’s saying we’ve all been through some crazy shit and we’re still here. We’re not going anywhere, because the people that are pushed to the periphery of a society are often the people that make that society special.”

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

“It is a reflection of the highs and lows of my own journey of self-discovery, rehabilitation, and reflection across the past two years,” Zach Choy, drummer, vocalist, and de facto spokesperson for Crack Cloud, tells Apple Music about the Canadian collective’s debut full-length. “I can hear where I was when it started, and I can hear where I was when we ended it.” Crack Cloud has been described as its members’ “recovery program” from their own personal battles, and Choy assesses *Pain Olympics*’ blend of post-punk, hip-hop, electronica, and industrial sounds as being a concept album of sorts, fundamentally about “finding your way through the world with a lot of baggage and trauma in tow. The medium is the message. Each individual song operates as an organ upon which the others rely.” Allow him, then, to act as your guide through the labyrinthine world of *Pain Olympics*. **Post Truth (Birth of a Nation)** “We wanted to create a world for the album, and to set the tone in a really grandiose, melodramatic way. This is that world’s ‘big bang’—it was a very visual concept. A frame of reference was the original Willy Wonka movie—going down that tunnel that Willy Wonka guides the children down, with its psychedelic nightmare sequence and range of emotions. The joy of working with a collective of people is that everyone specializes in and is geared towards different things. Here, a lot of the string arrangements were facilitated by one of our members who’s a connoisseur of that sort of thing—similarly, the industrial section. You hear these different elements and you hear the different people in our collective. This track is one of the best representations of the stitching-together that takes place within the collective and how things are pooled together based on one fundamental idea.” **Bastard Basket** “‘Bastard Basket’ felt like the natural antithesis to ‘Post Truth.’ It’s pensive and brooding where ‘Post Truth’ is big and bombastic. We wanted to strip away the magnificence and extravagance and sober the listener down. The general concept for reference for all of us while constructing the album was the idea of the rise and fall of a society, all of the discovery and contention and plateaus that you’ll read about in history. We wanted to represent those plateaus and draw parallels with personal life. I think anyone can relate to retaining an ambition and aspiration, and then waking up the next day and feeling the complete opposite. COVID even is a very tangible manifestation of that. One day you have your trajectory for 2020—and the next it’s out the window.” **Somethings Gotta Give** “This retains a despondency, but with a chorus that delivers more aggression and frustration. Musically, every song reveals the microscopic influence of what we were listening to along that two-year timeline. This was our attempt at an homage to the pop music we were listening to at the time, everything from The Tea Party to The Cure to blink-182. *Pain Olympics* as a whole concept took direct influence from Pink Floyd’s *The Wall*, The Beatles’ *Sgt. Pepper’s*, and Kendrick Lamar’s *To Pimp a Butterfly*. Those albums were lifesavers for me. They showed me how far you can take music and how visual it can actually be, and how emotionally engaging it can become when there’s a story that lasts not three minutes, but 45. As an artist, I want to tell stories that are informed by my personal experiences and hopefully resonate with people who have gone through similar things.” **The Next Fix** “This is a particularly personal song for me, and I think it came out onto the page in only 20 minutes. Daniel \[Robertson, multi-instrumentalist\] came with a riff and a rhythm, and the lyrics just poured out of me. I generally find lyrical inspiration to be very sporadic. This album was my first attempt at being more personal and more vulnerable as a songwriter; in the past I’ve written in a more abstract and broader manner. That was perhaps more to fit the niche of the genre we were operating within—a lot of punk music is steered by broader politics, whereas we approached this album without any sort of stylistic limitations. I’ve found it exciting to learn how to translate thoughts and emotions without hiding behind abstraction.” **Favour Your Fortune** “‘The Next Fix’ and ‘Favour Your Fortune’ are companion pieces—the two songs directly feed off one another, in terms of their conflicting energy, and I very much thrive off exploring those dichotomies. They’re two sides of the same coin, and I find it hard to manifest one side but not the other. I think there was a bit of a subliminal link in the songs’ creation, a certain residual headspace that carried into ‘The Next Fix’ from writing ‘Favour Your Fortune’ first. They were flipped in their positioning on the record to meet the album’s flow of high-low-high-low. Presenting the alternation in that way is a projection of my own personality and navigation of the world. I think I’m a pretty motivated person, but I supress a lot of anxieties and doubts. There’s a lot of highs and a lot of lows—and it’s not consistent, either.” **Ouster Stew** “I wanted this song to be really funny—and I thought it would be really funny to have a drum solo in the middle. That one’s an anthem. Musically it’s a ‘high’ moment, but it’s balanced by lyrics that are pretty sardonic, pretty cynical. If there’s any song on the album that has an equilibrium, it’s ‘Ouster Stew.’ It’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing—it’s manufactured as the ‘radio song’ but deals with conflict, morality, the world’s dog-eat-dog nature. I think it’s direct projection of the contention within our culture when it comes to all politics, and I thought it’d be opportunistic to cloak that within a pop song.” **Tunnel Vision** “For all intents and purposes, ‘Tunnel Vision’ is a classic climax: It has a meandering jam in the middle, and its lyricism and use of dual vocalists with back-and-forth lines is there to fully realize the contention and duality that is such a major theme on the album. It was the most straightforward track, and one of the earliest we wrote for the album. I felt like I didn’t want to end the album with a rock song, though, which is ultimately why it wasn’t positioned to close the album.” **Angel Dust (Eternal Peace)** “We end with a pseudo resolution to an otherwise chaotic story, to bring the cyclical nature of *Pain Olympics* across. This isn’t the end, it’s merely the beginning. *The Wall* and *To Pimp a Butterfly* were heavily influential on the narrative device of closing an album and yet trying to leave it open-ended. We want to leave the listener in a state of mind where they are compelled to consider what they have just heard. Art can be such a profound experience when you abandon any societal or cultural hindrances that would otherwise prevent you from being able to experience a record or a painting in a pure, instinctual way. It’s about open-mindedness, and letting the music drive you on a spiritual level, as opposed to letting your own analysis drive your interpretation.”

Written and recorded between July 2017 and December 2019 Produced by Crack Cloud Engineer Jonathan Paul Stewart Mastering Christian Wright Logo by Wei Huang Cover by Marc Gabbana

Fresh off fostering a movement like #HotGirlSummer, one would think Megan Thee Stallion had little if anything left to prove, but her *Suga* EP tells a bit of a different story. Megan uses the moment to level up as an increasingly important voice of female empowerment and at the same time remind us how easily she can traverse some of the most beloved sounds of contemporary rap. First, she sounds extremely comfortable in a Detroit street rap vibe courtesy of producer Helluva on “Ain\'t Equal.” A little further in, she dips her toes in West Coast G-funk for the Kehlani collaboration “Hit My Phone.” She channels the legendary 2Pac on “B.I.T.C.H.,” which takes inspiration from the late MC’s “Ratha Be Ya N\*\*\*a,” and then teams up with ATL drip music innovator Gunna for “Stop Playing.” As for who she is as an MC, Thee Stallion has a couple choice ways of describing herself on “Savage” (“Classy, bougie, ratchet/Sassy, moody, nasty”) which, grouped together, only remind us that this is who we need to be listening to.

The West Midlands-born and London-based electronic duo Delmer Darion (comprising Oliver Jack and Tom Lenton) announce their debut album ‘Morning Pageants’ will be released on the 16th October via Practise Music. Their debut album has been five years in the making: a sprawling, industrial ten-track account of the death of the devil, inspired by a line in the Wallace Stevens poem ‘Esthétique du Mal’: “The death of Satan was a tragedy for the imagination.” A vast aural landscape is covered from the opening melodies coded in the constructed language of Solresol. When sequenced together, ‘Morning Pageants’ is shrouded in the same intricate noise of self-sampling and tape degradation. De-centred rhythmic assemblies of analogue drum machines play through a series of guitar pedals, thunderous bass swells from a self oscillating filter feedback patch, and folk songs dissolve into thin air. The artwork for Morning Pageants was designed by Oliver, based from a series of 16th Century prints called “The Dance of Death” by Hans Holbein, depicting different people being led away by Death. Recreating one of the prints, he replaced the figure being led away with an original drawing of Satan. The final artwork is printed on Nepalese Lokta paper, a waxy yellow paper that has been used for lots of sacred texts. Even if you’re not following the descent of the devil step by step through their unspooling archives, you’ll have little chance not to be transfixed.

one long song recorded nowhere between May 2019 and May 2020 released Aug. 7th, 2020 as a 2xLP by P.W. Elverum & Sun box 1561 Anacortes, Wash. U.S.A. 98221

The old aphorism goes that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, but trying to convey in words exactly what London duo Jockstrap sounds like might be even trickier than that. Georgia Ellery and Taylor Skye met while studying at London’s Guildhall School of Music & Drama (Ellery studying jazz violin and Skye electronic music) and formed after they noticed via Facebook that they’d both been to the same James Blake show. Their 2018 debut EP *Love Is the Key to the City* introduced their idiosyncratic approach to music, taking in classic, dreamy pop songwriting—echoing everyone from ’50s jazz singer Julie London to alt-pop including Broadcast or Stereolab—and obtuse beats from Skye that could easily have come from the PC Music stable. The EP won them a fan in Björk, who came to a 2018 show at Iceland Airwaves and eventually helped them sign to the iconic Warp label for this, their follow-up EP. “It’s a bit more of everything,” says Skye. “It’s funnier, it’s definitely a bit more ridiculous at some points, but it’s more serious too.” “I think it’s a lot more confident and we pushed ourselves creatively a lot further,” adds Ellery. “This is new to us and it’s really exciting.” Read their track-by-track guide below. **Robert** Taylor Skye: “All the tracks on the EP are in the order we made them, and this one went back and forth for ages as it just kind of felt like the dregs of the last EP. The idea to put a rap feature on it came almost immediately, but we had to spend ages finding the right person.” Georgia Ellery: “We used Groggs from \[Arizona hip-hop trio\] Injury Reserve. We met them at Iceland Airwaves a few years ago and then they invited us to support them on their UK tour. We got something from them and then Taylor really manipulated and distorted the vocals so it feels more like an instrument on the track or part of the mix than standing out as a rap on the track.” TS: “They already had the rap recorded, so it wasn’t made specifically for the song, which was quite nice. It felt right for the rap to not mean anything specific. I think you have to make a rap feature a little ridiculous, too.” GE: “The track’s inspired by the American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. I got really obsessed with his work for a while.” **Acid** GE: “This song’s about my brother. We went through a period of not having much of a relationship, so I was just kind of figuring that out through song, I guess. When Taylor sent over a version which was quite close to this final version, I remember feeling like he was telling a different story through his production to the story I was telling, and it just sounded crazy and awesome and really helped shape the song.” **Yellow in Green** GE: “All the songs start with me writing a poem, and this was written on a train from Glasgow to London. I got an early train and it was really frosty and I sat and wrote this.” TS: “This track was a case of Georgia writing a song and then me producing it in a way that is right and not trying to make too much of a different statement from what it was in the first place. We got a friend to record the piano for it, and it really came together when we put a sub-bass note underneath the big piano chords. That was the big moment!” **The City** GE: “Usually with songs I’ll pick away at a progression and come back to it day after day, but ‘The City’ just kind of poured out of me, and it’s rare but amazing when that happens.” TS: “The first and second half of this song are quite different, and in some senses it falls into a bit of a trope of ‘girl does nice piano ballad and boy does big angry stompy thing’, but I actually did something much softer first, which Georgia didn’t like, and then came back with something harder, which she *did* like. It’s my job in Jockstrap to add a decent amount of production to it and do something that’s reasonably radical. Sometimes that can be something quite subtle and sometimes it’s quite big.” **City Hell** TS: “This almost feels like the whole EP in one song. There’s about ten specific people that influenced moments in this song, and we’re happy to admit that.” GE: “For example, the guitars at the beginning are influenced by a couple of tracks on the first Beyoncé album. I was like, ‘Taylor, can we have that sound?’ and he said, ‘Yeah, they’re reversed MIDI guitars.’ We were inspired by Roxy Music, too, with their glamorous marriage of synths and guitars on their early albums.” TS: “There’s a bit in there that really reminds me of Panic! At the Disco too. It was a really meaty piece to tackle and get the structure down. Mixing it was difficult as it was all these different elements, but the vocals helped tie it all together.”

Something of a rap veteran approaching 30, Chip almost gave up on the idea of a joint project with friend and fellow Tottenham MC Skepta after a decade of false starts. “I told him, ‘You always say that, though, it\'s been 10 years,’” he tells Apple Music. “This time, he’s like, \'No, I\'m serious, man, and we need to get \[D-Block Europe MC\] Young Adz on a couple of tunes, too.’ I was working on a joint thing with Adz, kind of, just making tracks. They didn\'t know each other, but I made sure we all met up the next day at 6 pm, and it started.” The product of these sessions is 12 tracks which blur creative lines and crash through the current UK rap atmosphere. “Skepta\'s the triple OG, Chip’s a double OG,” says Young Adz. “And me? I’m the Young OG.” *Insomnia* is a celebration of all three’s ability to outlast, adapt, and reinvent in the most cutthroat of environments. Testament to this, Chip explains how the trio pushed themselves through a gauntlet of intense recording, pushing boundaries and testing out new elements. “There\'s no trace. There\'s nothing, no pens, no writing down, just straight off the top,” he says. “The three of us have a tattoo that says ‘PAIN,’” Chip says. “I don’t think that we’ve ever spoken about it. I\'ve got it on my shin, A\'s got it on his forehead, and Skep\'s is on his wrist. I think there\'s something a bit deeper that aligns us, more than just the music stuff.” Here, Chip pulls back the curtain on the trio’s connection, revealing the all-night workings behind *Insomnia* with a track-by-track guide. **Mains** “This was the first beat that Skep sent me, and I thought, \'Yeah, Adz will like this,\' so I told him to park it. Adz came to the studio late—that was the first day. The first song we made. No one had spoke. No one said, ‘Wagwan.’ Bear in mind those two had never met. Adz went in, we just kept going back to back, off the back of it. And after the first song we had a chat. ‘You all right, mate? How are you doing?’ They\'re both more…*anti*. I\'m the middle generation that connects them both.” **Golden Brown** “When we decided on doing this, we realized we needed different dynamics for songs like this. As soon as I ran the beat in the studio, everyone just started gliding, arms like wings, flying. Skepta put down that hook, but he kept saying, \'It\'s the intro. It\'s not the hook, just an intro.\' I did my verse after, Adz did his verse, and then we lived with it for a few days. Once we\'d all lived with it, we said to him, ‘Listen, bro, that\'s the hook,’ and he was like, ‘I know, man, I was just shook, ’cause I was singing!’ Now you\'ve got a SK \[Skepta\] melody, no Auto-Tune.” **Waze** “You don\'t see three separate entities coming together like for this project. It\'s clearly a higher calling for all of us. Our energies brought us together at this time, in this moment—besides the music.” **Demons (feat. Dirtbike LB)** “LB \[D-Block Europe member\] made me go back in. I heard his \[verse\], I was like, ‘Nah, fam. I need to attack this one again.’ There was a time where if you were *too* rage they wouldn\'t let you in this thing, and now the internet\'s here, it\'s out of anyone’s control. DBE \[D-Block Europe\], they\'ll say things that everyone else is experiencing but scared to say, and that\'s why my respect for them is so high.” **St Tropez** “When Skepta made the production, he wasn\'t too sure we would like it, but I love some different shit. I said, \'This is fire.\' He was like, \'It\'s gotta be hit right.’ He was just saying that, \'It\'s got to be hit *right*.’ That\'s all he kept saying. And I just jumped in there, straight off the top.” **Insomnia Interlude** “‘A madman would never look for a zebra crossing on the A406. Greatness only.’ That’s Greatness Dex \[Skepta’s business partner\] at the end there. That\'s the quote of the whole project.” **Star in the Hood** “Da Beatfreakz \[London-based production duo\], big them up. We recorded this at their studio and they was on us like, ‘We’ve got to get one on there.’ They came through with this one and the interlude.” **Mic Check** “Skep didn\'t like this at first, then he told me he was driving to Tower Bridge listening to the instrumental and it hit him like: \'What the fuck, this is crazy.’ By then, me and Adz had our bits down already. It was important to me that, on a project with Skep and Adz, that we represent British culture throughout the production. You have us spittin\' grimy on ‘Waze’ but then you get that garage-y production here. If you listen carefully, we\'re bigging up all the classic garage tunes from our childhood that got us gassed. ‘Star in the Hood’ has that drill element. These are all sounds stemmed out of the UK. We wanted to make it a broad, versatile representation production-wise.” **Traumatised** “It\'s just naked, honesty, man. It\'s not every day you get songs where men are just honest about the things we deal with mentally. I think for me also, what I love the most on this is the saxophone. When that sax hits, it makes the lyrics *feel* like the sax, does that makes sense? It\'s a feeling. These are the situations that people make songs about to get stripes for; that\'s never been my angle, but I\'ve been through mad shit. I\'ve been through so much that you\'ll never hear a song about. I\'ll cause my real life too much problems—it\'s about finding ways to express that without spilling too much.” **Sin City** “SOS produced ‘Sin City’ and ‘High Road’ here too—he’s \[UK producer\] Harmony’s little brother. Harmony made \'Champion,\' \'Take Off,\' \'In the Air\' from *Transition* \[Chip’s 2011 album\]. I always knew H had a little brother that was murderous on the keys. As long as I\'ve worked with one of them on any project I do, that\'s me staying true to my musical core.” **High Road** “I had to make it clear here, my whole angle. I’ve never sold drugs. This is the same me that you saw at 16, getting GCSEs, and then in the charts by 17. This is who I am at 30.” **Intro** “We wanted this one, the last one, to be a hidden track at the end of ‘High Road.’ It’s because of some streaming politics you\'re not allowed to do that, apparently. So we had to put it at the end here. It\'s more of a preview.”

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

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

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

Released in June 2020 as American cities were rupturing in response to police brutality, the fourth album by rap duo Run The Jewels uses the righteous indignation of hip-hop\'s past to confront a combustible present. Returning with a meaner boom and pound than ever before, rappers Killer Mike and EL-P speak venom to power, taking aim at killer cops, warmongers, the surveillance state, the prison-industrial complex, and the rungs of modern capitalism. The duo has always been loyal to hip-hop\'s core tenets while forging its noisy cutting edge, but *RTJ4* is especially lithe in a way that should appeal to vintage heads—full of hyperkinetic braggadocio and beats that sound like sci-fi remakes of Public Enemy\'s *Apocalypse 91*. Until the final two tracks there\'s no turn-down, no mercy, and nothing that sounds like any rap being made today. The only guest hook comes from Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Mavis Staples on \"pulling the pin,\" a reflective song that connects the depression prevalent in modern rap to the structural forces that cause it. Until then, it’s all a tires-squealing, middle-fingers-blazing rhymefest. Single \"ooh la la\" flips Nice & Smooth\'s Greg Nice from the 1992 Gang Starr classic \"DWYCK\" into a stomp closed out by a DJ Premier scratch solo. \"out of sight\" rewrites the groove of The D.O.C.\'s 1989 hit \"It\'s Funky Enough\" until it treadmills sideways, and guest 2 Chainz spits like he just went on a Big Daddy Kane bender. A churning sample from lefty post-punks Gang of Four (\"the ground below\") is perfectly on the nose for an album brimming with funk and fury, as is the unexpected team-up between Pharrell and Zack de la Rocha (\"JU$T\"). Most significant, however, is \"walking in the snow,\" where Mike lays out a visceral rumination on police violence: \"And you so numb you watch the cops choke out a man like me/Until my voice goes from a shriek to whisper, \'I can\'t breathe.\'\"

In the realms of heavy amplification and monstrous riffage, one crucial ingredient can make the difference between an outfit doggedly hammering away at their chosen art and another whose graft is alchemically transformed into something of compelling fury and primal satisfaction. That ingredient is malevolence, pure and simple; the sense that something authentically vicious and debauched is going on at the root of the racket assaulting the sensibilities. Needless to say, Sex Swing - the London-based group whose mercurial and uncompromising onslaught now sees its second iteration to the wider world - have no shortage of this elixir. Since their foundation in 2014, this rogues gallery of luminaries of the UK underground have consistently proven to be capable of projecting vibrations that transcend and usurp any idea of the sum of their component parts. It is true that they’ve clocked up notable experience sparking tinnitus with everyone from Mugstar and Bonnacons Of Doom (bassist Jason Stoll) to Dethscalator (vocalist Dan Chandler and drummer Stuart Bell) and from Earth (guitarist Jodie Cox, who also introduced keyboard player Ollie Knowles to the melee) to a dizzying variety of endeavours from the paint-stripping skronk of Dead Neanderthals to the righteous ire of Idles (all via saxophonist Colin Webster) . Yet Sex Swing represents less a group of disparate musicians pooling their resources, and more a peculiar spark of collective chemistry, with all forces gravitating towards the pursuit of the same dissolute and mysterious goal. ‘Type II’ - recorded by Martin Ruffin at Hastings’ Savage Studios and mixed at Bear Bites Horse by Wayne Adams - is that goal reached in effortless style and amplified to intimidating aural vistas. This mighty monument of swagger and malice also sees fit to add a certain amount of glitter to the trademark grit this time around. Just as the artwork from long-term collaborator Alex Bunn boasts a luminous sheen absent from the unsettling abjection of the sleeve of their 2016 debut on The Quietus Phonographic Corporation, so the rolling grooves and mantric hypnosis here boast a new-found structure and a feline sleekness fresh and unusual for this pugilistic outfit, just as Chandler’s brooding presence disguises a twisted lyricism. Nonetheless, this remains a band fundamentally obsessed with the expression of decadence and wrongdoing through the mediums of repetition and overloaded frequencies. Opener ‘The Passover’ hits like hammer to skull right from the off, a relative moment of calm soon being broken by an ungodly squall of horror from Webster’s sax, before a fearsome and naggingly catchy debacle ensues akin to Suicide grappling with downers in dancefloor rapture. Elsewhere, rock abjection is filtered notably through an electronic prism, as krautrock grace and garage brawn engage in a strangely beguiling wrestling match to the death – ‘Valentine’s Day At The Gym’ is this vision at its apotheosis, rising like a Birthday Party-esque phoenix from the ashes of bad decisions and late nights - a tapestry of croon and warped groove that gathers momentum and power on a pathway to a particularly handsome kind of oblivion. ‘Type II’ is more than the mere machinations of a rock band - it’s a howl of malfunction rendered terrifyingly visceral. It’s the lightning flash and unearthly roar of the primeval battle between Godzilla and Mechagodzilla that provokes awe and disquiet in the realm of fantasy, It’s the haunted clangour of the faullty air conditioning unit that lurks in the anonymous office building yet lends it eerie ambience. It’s man vs machine where discord becomes harmony, and it’s a fearsomely invigorating spectacle to behold. ---

In April 2020, just freed from his fourth prison stint, Headie One flew back to a locked-down London in a helicopter. Sitting in the passenger seat and reflecting on his sentence, the capital’s biggest drill star set out his intentions for the rest of the year. “The plan was to shock the world,” he tells Apple Music. “I had my mind right, my energy right and I knew that I was coming out to make some serious moves.” Revealing a strong aversion to taking breaks, the prolific Tottenham rapper quickly set about on executing a much-delayed debut LP that he’d already titled whilst incarcerated. *EDNA* bears the name of his late mother but also carries promise of a new chapter for Headie One—facing up personal demons and sitting with his life’s lessons. “She was a really positive person,” he says of Edna Duah. “I think that’s gotta be my strongest memory of her.” And in this image, “Teach Me” and “Psalm35” open the album in stunning fashion. The running theme of facing up to uncomfortable truths is explored further on “The Light” and “Breathing”. Concurrent to his path of self-evolution, Headie carries a drill crown that comes with increasing weight and contention. Few artists have negotiated a bumpier ride to UK rap’s top table, but fewer artists still arrive at this moment co-signed by such illustrious contemporaries. With an all-star list of features that include Future, Skepta, Aitch and Drake, the album completes a turnaround almost unthinkable this time last year. “Every mistake I made I feel like I’ve learned from it and it’s got me to this point here,” he says. “Tough times don’t last but tough people do.” Here, Headie talks us through some highlights of his debut album. **Psalm 35** “I would read this verse in the Bible quite a lot; in troubled times it would always bring me peace. It’s really simple but it always makes a lot of sense to me. Most people wouldn’t expect my album to start off like this but I don’t really think about expectations from fans or other people when my music gets made, trust me. Do that in life and you’ll be going around in circles.” **Bumpy Ride (feat. M Huncho)** “There’s a lot of energy to this one and a lot of melody. That’s almost expected though, with me and Huncho here together. We were in the studio when we cooked this one up and it all happened quite quickly. I feel like the title speaks for itself too, we’re just going in about the realities of what’s going on right now. It’s one of my favorites. The thing about the drill scene and the way our words and terms change around over time is that you just can’t force these things. That’s what makes it so good. The inspiration is all in the air—it’s just an energy—you pick up what you can and go with it.” **Mainstream** “I say, ‘Labour or Conservatives I ain’t got a preference/The only thing that they consider is two-thirds of a sentence’, because truthfully politics is something I don’t pay any mind. It’s all a joke in the UK. I’ve always kept my views to myself generally, but even in looking at the way they’ve tried to block and blackball drill music to stop us when we were on the rise? It’s not for me. I’m a guy that works with energy and I can’t get with that. I’d rather not involve my thought process in those games. I’d rather move forward and try and be positive.” **Breathing** “That’s one of my little broskis I’ve recorded at the beginning here. He’s in custody right now but he called to tell me that he’d been writing loads inside. So I threw a bit of that on here. He’s one of the \[three\] young Gs I mention in the first verse here. We all grew up in the same estate and I’m a bit older than them but I would see them constantly. Back then, there wouldn’t always be a lot of positive things going on to tell you the truth but I’d be trying to speak to them. I’d be trying to get them to see things differently, you know, pick alternatives. But…yeah it hasn’t worked out for them. They all received life sentences. And to be honest, when I was their age there wasn’t really anyone around to show me the reality of these things either. No-one told us how certain things could lead to other serious consequences.” **Only You Freestyle \[Headie One & Drake\]** “There was so much stuff going on in the background around this time I remember it so clearly. All the George Floyd protests, it was crazy. I called my manager on FaceTime after Drake hit me up. The first thing he said to me, ‘Well, what type of song is he looking to do?’ So we waited, and when they sent over the beat we were laughing, like, ‘This is *too* easy!’ It was a bit of genius from him to send that too, because it’s perfect production for me and I hadn’t really got on something like that in a while. It was love from Drake and I’m happy that it came out so natural and unforced. I get that some people out there thought Drake was offbeat, but nah. Straight away I understood what he was doing. It was a very intentional thing. I completely understand those flows. When I’m in the studio, my team tell me the same thing at times: ‘Can you re-do this here and make it tighter?’ or ‘The flow’s a bit off here.’ But this is how it sounds to me, in my ears, when I’ve got a flow. If you wanna come off beat for four bars and then land on beat for the fifth, then that’s what you wanna do! As artists we should be allowed to do what we want.” **Try Me (feat. Skepta)** “The beat’s really energetic. I really like this one, it’s a bit different to \[2019 single\] ‘Back to Basics’, our first track together. The best way to describe this is ‘straight to the point’. It’s hard-hitting and Skepta brought his A-game. To me, it’s just two rappers rapping. Skepta would always be a person to help out or give me advice, people might not know that. From when me met, it was a matter of time before we got in and recorded something. We linked up earlier in the year at Fashion Week, we were just rollin’, having a good time. We didn’t have to rush to get to it because the energy has always been great with him.” **Everything Nice (feat. Haile)** “To go back to the start of this song, it could have been really, really different. I think I only had my melody on it. I kept on working on it and the sample on the track was so crazy, and the production—it was almost like a hit a bit of a brick wall with the song. I tried so many different things but truthfully I just wasn’t feeling it. So we sent it to Haille, and he literally sent the song back. Complete. Now it’s a movie!”

*Read the Canadian singer and composer’s recollections of the tracks on this career-spanning collection.* Beverly Glenn-Copeland possesses the kind of voice and songwriting sensibility that comes around perhaps only once a generation. A heartfelt tenor whose voice soars from the spoken rhythms of folk to the quivering vibrato of an operatic contralto, he has provided in his 60 years in music a little-known yet vitally important catalog of late-20th-century musical movements, as well as a consistently futuristic purview which has always set his creations on their own track. Emerging in the late 1960s as a classical singer, Glenn-Copeland soon had “an understanding,” as he tells Apple Music, that this was not the life he was meant to lead. There followed two beautiful folk-influenced albums on the GRT and CBC labels in 1970 before he seemed to retreat from the limelight, self-releasing synthesizer-based meditations in the 1980s and ’90s while appearing as a regular guest on children’s television and as a writer for *Sesame Street*. Following a recent crate-digger-fueled resurgence, 2020 was the perfect time for a retrospective release. “Oh, this wasn’t my idea,” he says, typically understated. “It was my label and publisher who went through all of my music and came up with these choices. They are excellent, though.” Read on for his commentary on *Transmissions*, track by track. **La Vita** “My mother had said the refrain of this song to me so much during my lifetime: ‘Enjoy your life.’ I always found it really encouraging and I really got what she meant. As far as she was concerned, you have one life on this planet and so you have to enjoy the fact that you are alive, since you will suffer, you will encounter difficulties, and you will have wonderful things happen, but you must overall just enjoy the fact that you actually had the opportunity to be alive. I woke up one morning and this song just came through. One of my very dearest friends, the late Maggie Hollis, was an incredible singer, and you can hear her on this.” **Ever New** “I have lived most of my life primarily in the woods, in the wild. These pieces on *Keyboard Fantasies* in the 1980s were created in that environment and it was speaking to me. I never go in with any idea when I write music. It just comes to me. In this particular case, I was checking out making music on computers, which was wonderful because it allowed me to actually flesh out and orchestrate the sounds that I was always hearing in my mind, inspired by that space.” **Colour of Anyhow (CBC Q Live Version)** “CBC said that they wanted to do an album with me in the late 1960s, and I was accompanied by this beautiful orchestra, mainly of classical players. At that point in time, I was thinking of myself as a folk musician and I was writing music on guitars. When you really listen to this album and the 1970 release on the GRT label, though, you hear it\'s not actually folk music. There\'s a couple things on there that are folk-influenced, but there\'s also one thing that\'s avant-garde classical music of the 20th century, there\'s stuff that\'s jazz, there’s so much difference.” **Deep River (Live at Le Guess Who?)** “I hadn\'t toured since the early ’70s and I was never with a band, I couldn\'t afford that. It became obvious that if I wanted to be able to come anywhere close to the music that was on the *Keyboard Fantasies* album live, I was going to need a group, because I didn’t want to go onstage hitting buttons and playing the computer. And so it was a wonderful opportunity to be able to get a band together for this live performance in 2018. I sing ‘Deep River’ often in live concerts because it comes from my Black tradition in the United States and we\'re still experiencing slavery now. It\'s not just Black folks, it\'s mostly women now who are being taken—thousands a day, actually. It\'s really a very sad commentary on the reality of our current situation that we still objectify people as commerce, and it’s important for me to talk to my audience about it.” **Don’t Despair** “I have lived in silence for the past 40 years, ever since I left university and I stopped taking classical music lessons. I was initially a classical singer for approximately two years, and things were going quite well; I was representing Canada at Expo 67 as a classical singer, and I was doing concerts for CBC. But I had an understanding one day that I was reliving a life that I\'d already lived. That\'s why it had all felt so familiar for me, as well as the fact that my father was a classical pianist. At that point I decided to start writing my own music and I ceased to listen to almost anything else. I wrote this in 1969 when I was in my early twenties and after I had stopped listening. It was a time when the most important thing going on for me was relationships. It was a song with a relationship in mind.” **Durocher** “This was written in 1968 and it just made its way onto my first album. The thing to understand about that record was that I was still extremely influenced by my classical tradition then. In the classical tradition, everything is bigger than life, most especially tragedy, or heart, or loss. That had been my world for so long, it was natural for me to write melodramatically in that way. But it wasn\'t until the second album, which also came out in 1970, that I actually switched to who I was at this time in terms of my musical expression.” **River Dreams** “I\'m constantly receiving music from the Universal Broadcasting System. In terms of what gets recorded, it\'s always something that suddenly comes to me when I\'m busy doing something else. Then I have to run to put it down as fast as I can and also try not to overwork it and not get overly involved. I have to allow it to be what it was when it came to me. That was the case for ‘River Dreams,’ a new composition for this album.” **This Side of Grace** “If you\'ve listened to the album that this track is on \[2004’s *Primal Prayer*\], it\'s actually a devotional record to that which is spiritually common to us all around the world. It\'s all talking about the fact that we have to look at ourselves honestly and understand that there is a universal reality. We humans may have different paths, but it\'s all coming from the same place, it\'s just translated according to our cultures.” **Sunset Village** “When I was between the ages of 12 and 17, I listened to every kind of music that existed in the world. I listened to a lot of Chinese music, music from India, Black funk music, everything I could find, as well as my father, who was playing Chopin, Brahms, and Beethoven for five hours a day on the piano. And so ‘Sunset Village’ may sound like it has ‘Eastern’ melodies to your ears, but it is just an expression of who I am. Everything on this album \[1986’s *Keyboard Fantasies*\] is all synthesizer music. The wonderful aspect of the synthesizer is that it can create sounds that no musician can. I could imagine what a star might sound like and then approximate my concept of it.” **In the Image** “I had a drum machine at the time of making this track and I loved it; I was programming it like crazy. I also had a hand drum machine that you played, and while I was jamming with it I realized it had some prerecorded things in it. I didn\'t know enough about what was going on in the world to know that they were prerecorded beats from other people, so I just began layering my own drumming on top of it, and that’s how ‘In the Image’ came to be and came to be so rhythmic.” **A Little Talk** “‘A Little Talk’ is very Buddhist in its orientation. I\'ve been practicing Buddhism for 27 years, and it really speaks more from that perspective; it has what I interpret as a Buddhist energy behind it, and the song feeds into all the different cultures of spirituality I was exploring on *Primal Prayer*.” **Montreal Main (The Buddha in the Palm)** “This is a song that I wrote for an underground movie that I was asked to score for in 1973. The film’s name is *Montreal Main*, and it still continues to have resonance today. The inclusion of this composition nods towards the different ways that my music has been created and used over the years.” **Erzili** “This track was the expression of my West African heritage. It was my own personal way of relating to my roots. I wrote all these songs for the GRT 1970 album in the course of maybe a year and a half. The producer who approached me to record them, Doug Riley, just gathered a bunch of jazz musicians and we all got into a studio. I didn\'t know who these people were, I just played them the songs and then we would record. The whole album was first takes, live off the floor. It was unheard of, and the experience was incredible. I had no concept of what brilliant company I was keeping, in their ability to hear something once and know exactly what it was and know exactly how to finesse it. It was unbelievable.”

Transmissions is a career-spanning album that includes compositions from Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s early works and his cult-status release, Keyboard Fantasies. It also includes both new and archival unreleased tracks and live versions. It includes the first pieces of newly recorded music that Glenn has released in almost 20 years with the track ‘River Dreams’. The album is nominated for Best Outlier Album at the A2IM Libera Awards. Transmissions is available now on vinyl, CD and all streaming platforms featuring extended liner notes written by Dev Hynes of Blood Orange. Stained Glass Cover Art of The Raven by Evelyn Wolff, www.wolffglass.ca

When LA-based vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Georgia Anne Muldrow isn’t releasing such underground R&B gems as *Overload*, she records as the one-woman ensemble Jyoti (a name bestowed on her by the late Alice Coltrane). But *Mama, You Can Bet!*, the third Jyoti release after *Ocotea* and *Denderah*, is the first to feature Muldrow’s singing. There are still instrumental cuts, including “Zane, The Scribe,” “Swing, Kirikou, Swing!,” “Hard Bap Duke,” and “The Cowrie Waltz,” which capture her way with sonic mystery, atmospheric harmony, and abstract funk as compellingly as ever. There are also two head-turning Charles Mingus “Geemixes”: “Beemoanable Lady,” which employs Eric Dolphy’s yearning alto sax as raw material in a collage of Muldrow’s radical design; and “Fabus Foo,” based on “Fables of Faubus,” with its punctuated horn theme lurking strangely within. There are elements of acoustic jazz texture that Muldrow often brings to the fore, but also timbres that evoke West African drumming, or electronic sound sources that are more elusive, even unidentifiable. The sparse and haunting meditations “Orgone” and “Quarrys, Queries” are in a category of their own, evidence of Muldrow’s next-level compositional gift.

No map is a match for Kate NV. On her third album, the Moscow electronic musician shreds conventional geographical boundaries, leaving border fences splintered in the rearview. Her music is, very roughly speaking, a mixture of Japanese city pop and the sort of avant-disco that used to soundtrack downtown New York spots like the Mudd Club. The synths and marimba are straight out of ’80s Tokyo; the sumptuous production and dubbed-out vocals suggest ZE Records artists like Cristina; the layered horns might as well be those of session players from Arthur Russell’s orbit. We haven’t even touched upon her singing, which flits between French, English, and Russian as she juggles experimental vocal techniques with the breathy sighs of dream pop. For all their idiosyncrasies, these songs have a way of sinking into your psyche. “Not Not Not” smooths its staccato phrasing into a form lilting and hypnotic; “Sayonara” smears slap bass, streaks of synth, and hiccupping sighs into a splotchy pointillism that’s both abstract and intuitive. On their own, any one of these tracks might be mistaken for an artifact from an alternate-universe ’80s; taken together, they amount to a triumph of world-building. Kate NV has said that she wrote these songs during an emotionally difficult period, but you’d never know it: Every one quivers with the thrill of unlimited possibility.

Adrianne Lenker had an entire year of touring planned with her indie-folk band Big Thief before the pandemic hit. Once the tour got canceled, Lenker decided to go to Western Massachusetts to stay closer to her sister. After ideas began to take shape, she decided to rent a one-room cabin in the Massachusetts mountains to write in isolation over the course of one month. “The project came about in a really casual way,” Lenker tells Apple Music. “I later asked my friend Phil \[Weinrobe, engineer\] if he felt like getting out of the city to archive some stuff with me. I wasn\'t thinking that I wanted to make an album and share it with the world. It was more like, I just have these songs I want to try and record. My acoustic guitar sounds so warm and rich in the space, and I would just love to try and make something.” Having gone through an intense breakup, Lenker began to let her emotions flow through the therapy of writing. Her fourth solo LP, simply titled *songs* (released alongside a two-track companion piece called *instrumentals*), is modest in its choice of words, as this deeply intimate set highlights her distinct fingerpicking style over raw, soul-searching expressions and poignant storytelling motifs. “I can only write from the depths of my own experiences,” she says. “I put it all aside because the stuff that became super meaningful and present for me was starting to surface, and unexpectedly.” Let Lenker guide you through her cleansing journey, track by track. **two reverse** “I never would have imagined it being the first track, but then as I listened, I realized it’s got so much momentum and it also foreshadows the entire album. It\'s one of the more abstract ones on the record that I\'m just discovering the meaning of it as time goes on, because it is a little bit more cryptic. It\'s got my grandmother in there, asking the grandmother spirit to tell stories and being interested in the wisdom that\'s passed down. It\'s also about finding a path to home and whatever that means, and also feeling trapped in the jail of the body or of the mind. It\'s a multilayered one for me.” **ingydar** “I was imagining everything being swallowed by the mouth of time, and just the cyclical-ness of everything feeding off of everything else. It’s like the simple example of a body decomposing and going into the dirt, and then the worm eating the dirt, and the bird eating the worm, and then the hawk or the cat eating the bird. As something is dying, something is feeding off of that thing. We\'re simultaneously being born and decaying, and that is always so bewildering to me. The duality of sadness and joy make so much sense in that light. Feeling deep joy and laughter is similar to feeling like sadness in a way and crying. Like that Joni Mitchell line, \'Laughing and crying, it\'s the same release.\'” **anything** “It\'s a montage of many different images that I had stored in my mind from being with this person. I guess there\'s a thread of sweetness through it all, through things as intense as getting bit by a dog and having to go to the ER. It\'s like everything gets strung together like when you\'re falling in love; it feels like when you\'re in a relationship or in that space of getting to know someone. It doesn\'t matter what\'s happening, because you\'re just with them. I wanted to encapsulate something or internalize something of the beauty of that relationship.” **forwards beckon rebound** “That\'s actually one of my favorite songs on the album. I really enjoy playing it. It feels like a driving lullaby to me, like something that\'s uplifting and motivating. It feels like an acknowledgment of a very flawed part of humanness. It\'s like there\'s both sides, the shadow and the light, deciding to hold space for all of it as opposed to rejecting the shadow side or rejecting darkness but deciding to actually push into it. When we were in the studio recording that song, this magic thing happened because I did a lot of these rhythms with a paintbrush on my guitar. I\'m just playing the guitar strings with it. But it sounded like it was so much bigger, because the paintbrush would get all these overtones.” **heavy focus** “It\'s another love song on the album, I feel. It was one of the first songs that I wrote when I was with this person. The heavy focus of when you\'re super fixated on somebody, like when you\'re in the room with them and they\'re the only one in the room. The kind when you\'re taking a camera and you\'re focusing on a picture and you\'re really focusing on that image and the way it\'s framed. I was using the metaphor of the camera in the song, too. That one feels very bittersweet for me, like taking a portrait of the spirit of the energy of the moment because it\'s the only way it lasts; in a way, it\'s the only way I\'ll be able to see it again.” **half return** “There’s this weird crossover to returning home, being around my dad, and reverting back to my child self. Like when you go home and you\'re with your parents or with siblings, and suddenly you\'re in the role that you were in all throughout your life. But then it crosses into the way I felt when I had so much teenage angst with my 29-year-old angst.” **come** “This thing happened while we were out there recording, which is that a lot of people were experiencing deaths from far away because of the pandemic, and especially a lot of the elderly. It was hard for people to travel or be around each other because of COVID. And while we were recording, Phil\'s grandmother passed away. He was really close with her. I had already started this song, and a couple of days before she died, she got to hear the song.” **zombie girl** “There’s two tracks on the record that weren\'t written during the session, and this is one of them. It\'s been around for a little while. Actually, Big Thief has played it a couple of times at shows. It was written after this very intense nightmare I had. There was this zombie girl with this really scary energy that was coming for me. I had sleep paralysis, and there were these demons and translucent ghost hands fluttering around my throat. Every window and door in the house that I was staying in was open and the people had just become zombies, and there was this girl who was arched and like crouched next to my bed and looking at me. I woke up absolutely terrified. Then the next night, I had this dream that I was with this person and we were in bed together and essentially making love, but in a spirit-like way that was indescribable. It was like such a beautiful dream. I was like really close with this person, but we weren\'t together and I didn\'t even know why I was having that dream, but it was foreshadowing or foretelling what was to come. The verses kind of tell that story, and then the choruses are asking about emptiness. I feel like the zombie, the creature in the dream, represents that hollow emptiness, which may be the thing that I feel most avoidant of at times. Maybe being alone is one of the things that scares me most.” **not a lot, just forever** “The ‘not a lot’ in the title is the concept of something happening infinitely, but in a small quantity. I had never had that thought before until James \[Krivchenia, Big Thief drummer\] brought it up. We were talking about how something can happen forever, but not a lot of it, just forever. Just like a thin thread of something that goes eternally. So maybe something as small as like a bird shedding its feather, or like maybe how rocks are changed over time. Little by little, but endlessly.” **dragon eyes** “That one feels the most raw, undecorated, and purely simple. I want to feel a sense of belonging. I just want a home with you or I just want to feel that. It\'s another homage to love, tenderness, and grappling with my own shadows, but not wanting to control anyone and not wanting to blame anyone and wanting to see them and myself clearly.” **my angel** “There is this guardian angel feeling that I\'ve always had since I was a kid, where there\'s this person who\'s with me. But then also, ‘Who is my angel? Is it my lover, is it part of myself? Is it this material being that is truly from the heavens?’ I\'ve had some near-death experiences where I\'m like, \'Wow, I should have died.\' The song\'s telling this near-death experience of being pushed over the side of the cliff, and then the angel comes and kisses your eyelids and your wrists. It feels like a piercing thing, because you\'re in pain from having fallen, but you\'re still alive and returning to your oxygen. You expect to be dead, and then you somehow wake up and you\'ve been protected and you\'re still alive. It sounds dramatic, but sometimes things feel that dramatic.”