Louder Than War's Top 50 Albums of the Year 2020

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

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

Released on Juneteenth 2020, the third album by the enigmatic-slash-anonymous band Sault is an unapologetic dive into Black identity. Tapping into ’90s-style R&B (“Sorry Ain’t Enough”), West African funk (“Bow”), early ’70s soul (“Miracles”), churchy chants (“Out the Lies”), and slam-poetic interludes (“Us”), the flow here is more mixtape or DJ set than album, a compendium of the culture rather than a distillation of it. What’s remarkable is how effortless they make revolution sound.

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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.

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.\'\"

To order the album on signed VINYL or CD please head to www.suziestapleton.com. Purchasing via the website will help support the artist directly. WE ARE THE PLAGUE is the debut album from Suzie Stapleton. It is a rallying cry, a howl into the abyss, the defiant call of a generation sold down the river and acutely aware of its own imminent demise - a bold soundtrack to the apocalypse. The album was recorded at OX4 Studios, produced by Stapleton and mixed by award-winning engineer Dan Cox (Thurston Moore, Laura Marling, Pete Doherty) at London’s Urchin Studios. Bassist Gavin Jay (Jim Jones Revue/Righteous Mind) and drummer Jim Macaulay (The Stranglers) provide a solid, seething backbone to Stapleton’s expressive guitar playing and midnight vocal traversing through alternative rock to gothic-blues through to alt-folk. Includes singles Thylacine and Blood On The Windscreen and nine previously unheard tracks including new arrangements and recordings of Negative Prophet and You Were There.

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

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

“I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig” reasoned George Bernard Shaw. “You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.” True to form, Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs have left the wiser of us aware that they are no band to be messed with. In the seven years since this band’s inception, the powerful primal charge at their heart has been amplified far beyond the realms of their original imagination. What’s more, no one has been more taken aback by this transformation than the band themselves. This culminated recently at a sold-out show at London’s renowned former fleapit Scala “That was the first gig where we were properly smacked with a feeling that something had shifted” reflects vocalist Matt Baty. “Something big and bold and positive. I felt quite overwhelmed with emotion at one point during that show. I’m not sure anyone paid to see me cry onstage, but I was close.” This upward trajectory has done nothing to make the Newcastle-based quintet complacent however, as they’ve used the cumulative force behind them as fuel for their most ambitious and hard-hitting record yet. ‘Viscerals’, their third proper is an enormous leap forward in confidence, adventure and sheer intensity even from their 2018 breakthrough ‘King Of Cowards’. Incisive in its riff-driven attack, infectiously catchy in its songcraft and more intrepid than ever in its experimental approach, ‘Viscerals’ is the sound of a leaner, more vicious Pigs, and one with their controls set way beyond the pulverising one-riff workouts of their early days. Whilst the fearsome opener ‘Reducer’s battle cry “ego kills everything” brings a philosophical bent to its Sabbathian abjection, elsewhere ‘Rubbernecker’ may be the most melodious ditty this band has yet attempted, redolent of the debauched swagger of Jane’s Addiction. Meanwhile the sinister sound-collage of ‘Blood And Butter’ delves into jarring abstraction anew, ‘New Body’ countenances a bracing Melvins-and-Sonic-Youth demolition derby and - perhaps most memorably of all - the perverse banger ‘Crazy In Blood’ marries MBV-ish guitar curlicues in its verses to a raise-your-fists chorus worthy of Twisted Sister or Turbonegro. Yet Pigsx7 have effortlessly broadened their horizons and dealt with all these new avenues without sacrificing one iota of their trademark eccentricity, and the personality of this band has never been stronger. “We’re a peculiar bunch of people - a precarious balance of passion, intensity and the absurd” notes Baty. Indeed, locked into a tight deadline in the studio, the band were forced to rally forces and to throw everything they had into created as concise and powerful a statement as could be summoned forth. “We booked dates in Sam’s studio before we’d written 80% of the album” reveals guitarist Adam Ian Sykes “We definitely thrive under pressure. It’s stressful but that stress seems to manifest itself in a positive way”. Yet for all that this record is the most far-reaching yet, its ability to get down to the nitty-gritty of the human condition is implicit from its title outwards. “Viscerals is reflection of many things I guess” says guitarist Sam Grant, whose Blank Studios was the venue in question for the band (whose rogues gallery is completed by bassist John-Michael Hedley and drummer Christopher Morley). “It’s the internal; it’s our health and physicality; it’s bodily and unseen; it’s essence that forgoes intellect; and it’s not a real word!” “At times it feels like we’re on a playground roundabout and there’s a fanatical group of people pushing it to turn faster” reckons Baty. “Then when it’s at peak speed they all jump on too and for just a few minutes we all feel liberated, together.” Such is the relentless momentum of this unique and ever-porcine outfit; hedonists of the grittiest and most life-affirming ride in the land, and still the hungriest animals at the rock trough. ---

The dream of 1970s downtown New York—contrasting avant-garde art rock and jittery No Wave skronk—is alive in Brooklyn post-punks Public Practice. On their debut album, *Gentle Grip*, the quartet (featuring members of indie-pop group Beverly and clangorous punks WALL) reimagines vintage sounds for modern counterculture, delivered through frontwoman Sam York’s disaffected staccato voice. Anti-capitalist anthem “Disposable” is dystopic B-52’s, making a good partner to the anti-materialist, bass-forward banger “Compromised.” “My Head” is unexpectedly groovy, like something straight out of the downtrodden dance music of Liquid Liquid; “Disposable” is punk-funk New Wave. While Public Practice wears their influences on their sleeve, the band has managed to shape those familiar sounds into something entirely new on *Gentle Grip*: an innovative and tense disco for listeners begging to be challenged.

Digital id out on 5/15 & LPs & CDs ship on 6/26. First 150 black vinyl records hand-numbered on a first come, first served basis. Public Practice is reanimating the spirit of late ‘70s New York with their intoxicating brand of no wave-tinged dark disco. The band came in hot with their punchy balance of punk, funk, and pop on the critically acclaimed Distance is a Mirror EP in 2018, paving the way for their highly anticipated freshman record. Now, after a year of intimate and experimental songwriting in their home studio, they have fleshed out the energetic, playfully oblique sound captured on their debut full-length Gentle Grip. Together, the foursome creates bold, slinky rhythms and groove-filled hooks that get under your skin and into your dancing shoes. The musicians’ unique chemistry and approach to songwriting is part of what makes their world so intriguing. Magnetic singer and lyricist Sam York and guitarist and principal sonic architect Vince McClelland, who were creative music partners for years prior to Public Practice’s formation, come to the table with an anarchic perspective that aims to eradicate creative barriers by challenging the very idea of what a song can be. Paradoxically, Drew Citron, on bass/vocals/synth, and drummer/producer Scott Rosenthal are uncannily adept at working within the framework of classic pop structures. But instead of clashing, these contrasting styles challenge and complement one another, resulting in an album full of spiraling tensions and unexpected turns. Inspired by influential New York bands like Liquid Liquid and ESG, the foursome has a natural inclination toward music that sounds rough-hewn. “We were thinking about classic New York dance albums, and the thing that stuck out is that many sounded like they were recorded in less-than-ideal situations,” McClelland says. “There was always something about them that felt somewhat home-cooked.” McClelland has spent the past few years constructing a home studio with carefully chosen and occasionally hand-made equipment in an effort to recreate that “cobbled together” sound. As three quarters of Public Practice are engineers as well as instrumentalists, their collection of gear, combined with the recording rig McClelland built, allowed the band to record Gentle Grip largely at their own hybrid practice space/studio in Brooklyn. “Having a space and setup that is unique, you're always going to have more of a signature sound,” McClelland explains. They spent the better part of 2019 playing with sounds, riffing on McClelland’s demos, and recording a number of songs live to tape. Although a handful of sessions occurred in traditional recording studios, the band’s autonomy and ability to record themselves imbues their music with a sense of freedom and gives it a distinct character — a home-cooked sound that is purely Public Practice. York, who writes all of Public Practice’s lyrics, with the exception of the McClelland-penned “How I Like It,” explores the complexities and contradictions of modern life overtop danceable rhythms and choruses that disarmingly open up the doors to self-reflection. “You don’t want to live a lie / But it’s easy" York sings on “Compromised," the record’s brisk, gyrating lead single. As York puts it, “No one's moral compass reads truth north at all times. We all want to be our best green recycling selves, but still want to buy the shiny new shoes — how do you emotionally navigate through that? How do you balance material desires with the desire to be seen as morally good?” Towards the slinkier end of the album's auditory spectrum, songs like the supremely danceable “My Head” — which is about tuning out the incessant influx of external noise and finding your own internal groove — are more personally political but still hearken the last days of disco. While York’s songwriting focuses on the existential, McClelland has a serious aptitude for the technical aspects of music-making. He talks about music like an engineer with a sculptor’s mind and is especially drawn to ideas and structures antithetical to the standard pop repertoire. This unconventional creative drive gives rise to songs that play around with chord changes, instrumentation, and timbral qualities like “Hesitation,” Gentle Grip’s final track, which was constructed around the same note repeated on three different instruments. It also accounts for the bold experimentation found on songs like “See You When I Want To,” which was created by the band improvising with sounds over a steady beat while York free-associated lyrics. Far-ranging as Gentle Grip may be topically and stylistically, on their debut long-player Public Practice never lose sight of the fact that they want to have fun, and they want you to have fun too — a fact is inescapably evident in their frenetic live set, with York’s stage presence casting a spell like a young Debbie Harry, or Gudrun Gut circa Malaria! They make it almost impossible not to dance, and reveal that they are a band with a knack not only for curious, catchy songwriting but also for old school New York drama. And whether they are poking holes in commonly held ideas centered around relationships, creativity, capitalism, or chord structures, Public Practice stay on the same plane as their audience and remain part of conversation. After all, who wants to stand on top of a soapbox when there’s a dark, sweaty dance floor out there with room for all of us?

Get the CD/Vinyl here: shop.tapeterecords.com/eight-rounds-rapid-love-your-work.html Southend stalwarts Eight Rounds Rapid release their third album ‘Love Your Work’ on August 21, 2020 with German label Tapete. Rooted in the infamous Canvey Island R’n’B tradition, Eight Rounds Rapid channel the fervour of Dr Feelgood, Wire, Gang of Four and Public Image Limited with their gritty tales of the Essex underworld.

'Day Ripper' is the new awaited album from Bee Bee Sea. It will be released on Wild Honey Records on October 9th 2020.

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

SHIPPING NOTICE!!! FOR VINYL!!! TO : UNITED STATES OF AMERICA - PLEASE NOTE.!!!! YOU CAN CHOOSE THE 'SURFACE' POSTING OPTION, WHICH IS £9.00, BUT WILL TAKE A MINIMUM OF 43 DAYS TO ARRIVE. PLEASE JUST PAY THE SET PRICE, MESSAGE US, AND WE'LL REFUND THE DIFFERENCE. WE APPRECIATE YOUR SUPPORT SO ARE HAPPY TO HELP YOU. The Total Rejection bring you 'The Time Traveller's 3rd Will And Testament'. Their Third long playing album. Filled with 'Class A' Garage Punk, Pop-Psych belters, that will eat their way into your brain, and you'll find yourself screaming "Gammon Pink faced 'politician' beaming down on me through my TV" in the strangest of places! TTR’s new LP builds on the raw sound of it’s predecessors with a further blast of psych n’ roll. Tremelo and wah wah pedals get abused to squalling effect, Keith Moon-esq drums clatter and the Hammond wails. It’s ALIVE! And THRILLING! The songs are stuffed with pop melodies and the sound has it tentacles over all manner of 60’s bands – the cover of Bohemian Vendetta’s ‘Enough’ gives a clue as to where the band’s collective head is. Elsewhere, the opener ‘Gravy’ is taut and desperate before giving way to the fuzz bass driven ‘Drilling Holes’. The ghost of Dr. Robert & Boyce & Hart oversee ‘Too Late’ and ‘She’s Gotta Go-Go’ brings the pop stomp. Standout track ‘Fly’ starts off like a violent ’65 Who before turning into a Hawkwind style psych-wigout and the meditative ‘Caravan’ gives a pause for contemplation. ‘Next Time I See You’ cheekily proves you can indeed get some 60’s ‘Satisfaction’ in the 21st Century. ‘Tracy Said’ is a breathless tale of slapstick teenage naughtiness before live favourite ‘Ain’t Gonna Lie’ leads into the mighty closer, ‘Distress Signals’. This final track is a fuzzy, violent, claustrophobic assault on the ears – A frenzy of throbbing keyboads, wah guitar and all manner of sonic mischief and madness, vibrations and sensations, The album is beautifully produced in a way it sounds like it wasn’t produced at all. Totally raw and occasionally rough-edged, exactly how music was recorded, before technology smoothed everything out to near blandness. Guitars twang, chime, fuzz and wah-wah into a frenzy of excitement, Vocals stretch beyond their abilities and occasionally scream and break, Organs swirl, and a variety of ‘strange sounds’ all of which were created by experimentation, rather than using modern day ‘plug ins’ or ‘pressing buttons’, will have you wondering, what is that?...

We all inhabit Hoorahland. It's the great bemusement park in your head and what Walt would have wanted. We never leave. Trapped by its turnstiles, looping the loop of uncertainty for eternity or, at least, until the Chessington World of Dementia kicks in and brings blissful release. Oh, and Jello Biafra duets with The Shend on Now The Magic Has Gone, a song about two ageing theatre queens whose everlasting love has tragically fragmented into a thousand shards of bitter hate. It's a tango. You what? After 43 years, Hoorahland is The Cravats totally in control of where they want to be sonically. A polished progression from 2017's critically-acclaimed Dustbin of Sound album. Twelve Carollian compositions chronicling the view from Shend's brain laid like a sumptuous set of doilies upon the sax-riddled, bass-laden engine that Biscuits, 91, Garstang and Naan have whittled. It's an intricate Dada Vinci design for the dysfunctional dodgems in which we nervously perch as they bounce off the buffers and each other while we fumble frantically for the imaginary steering wheel. Without employing too many cliched Theme Park music metaphors such as 'white knuckle roller coaster ride' and 'spinning teacups of terror' what do we get? Apart from last year's single 'Shy' and 'Good For You' which were championed on the wireless by Gideon Coe, Marc Riley and Henry Rollins amongst others, there are ten other opuses covering everything from the lack of god, Austin Allegros and granny's faded jeans to tight fitting jar lids, grouted portholes in Cartel submersibles and Bryan May's shirt. Plus, of course, that duet with Jello. As I said we all inhabit Hoorahland but it's not about the rides, it's more about the view from the queue. And no, it's not a ruddy concept album . . . although the definition of 'concept' is 'an abstract idea' and as The Cravats have been as abstract as fuck for 43 years then maybe it is.

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

1 Affirmations (Skit) 2 Jillian 3 Do You Want To Go To Work (Skit) D 4 Corporate Realness 5 Text Me Back (Chirpse Degree Burns) 6 Women And Non-Binary People To The Front (Skit) 7 Vagina Police 8 DIY 9 People Are Like Cities D 10 Swimming Pool 11 This Is the Summer 12 Fighting Tips (Skit) 13 Payback 14 In Other News (Skit) 15 Kiss My Fist

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

Ren Harvieu has today announced news of her long-awaited new album Revel In The Drama, due for release 3rd April via Bella Union. The album is a brilliant and bolder take on her timeless pop classicism, a compelling diary of a struggle with self-belief and a celebration of liberation and survival, seven years after her Top 5 debut album and having overcome a life-threatening injury. Think of Revel In The Drama as Harvieu’s second debut album; a new beginning. Harvieu’s defiance against the odds and her willingness to lay herself open to make what she believed was within her is baked into every groove of the record, across every stylistic turn: the giddy pop of ‘Strange Thing’, the gothic swoon of ‘Cruel Disguise’, the smokey seductiveness of ‘Yes Please’ through to the stirring torchsong finale ‘My Body She Is Alive’. Harvieu has come a long way from the 17-year-old who was signed to Island Records and who had no intention of becoming a singer-songwriter. Even when she made her debut album “Through The Night”, her confidence was low. “I did help write a few of the songs on that record, which I’m still very fond of, but I felt more of a mouthpiece for someone else’s talent, which eats away at you especially because I had so much to say lyrically I just hadn’t learnt how to as yet.” Her injury - a broken spine following “a freak accident” between recording and releasing her debut album - undermined Harvieu even further. Likewise, Island parted ways with her six months after it’s release, despite a Top 5 chart entry, making the BBC’s Sound Of 2012, a 5-star live review from The Guardian and TV exposure. What followed was what Harvieu describes as “some very dark years” which she addresses in songs like ‘Spirit Me Away’ and the 50’s ballad-evoking ‘You Don’t Know Me.’ A split with her long term partner, her manager and then her beloved Salford. “In one fell swoop everything was gone. I knew I had to get away, start again, rebuild myself.” It wasn’t until 2015 to be exact, when she met Romeo Stodart, the Magic Numbers frontman and songwriter who had emailed after seeing her perform on Later… With Jools Holland, to ask if she’d consider writing together. “When we started, the energy was immediately different to anyone I’d worked with before, there was this insane instant musical connection” she says. “I loved that Romeo really embraced who I was and encouraged it, I was starting to realise that I didn’t have to be anything other than myself.” The pair spent the next two years co-writing: “I wasn’t in a massive hurry, because at last I was having fun” Harvieu says. ‘We’d stay up all night drinking, dancing and playing music, I felt like I was re-discovering a girl who had been hidden, quietened. I’d tell Romeo, I don’t just want to paint pretty pictures I want to revel in the drama of my life, the good and the bad, before I was afraid to say something in my lyrics, but no longer. I felt free.” The album was co-produced by Romeo Stodart and Dave Izumi Lynch, owner of Echo Zoo studio in Eastbourne where recording took place. “It was a truly magical experience working with Dave & Romeo, they are two absolute nurturing musical wizards.” says Harvieu. Harvieu’s lyrical confidence is evident throughout the album and has you leaning in to absorb line after line. Her voice, soaring and caressing in equal measure, is matched in force by her flirtatious personality. From the album’s opening lyric “Let me put my paws on you, strange thing” through to the feminine bite of ‘Curves And Swerves’ “I’ve got some curves and some swerves, what you gonna do about it?” which crackles with sexual tension and an aching vulnerability. Among Harvieu’s new songs are messages of hope to her younger, anxious self. To the teenage goth Ren in ‘Little Raven’, she says: “I want you to know, that I’m starting to feel, but its gonna take time, but I’m ready to heal”. ‘Tomorrow’s Girl Today’ is to the Ren “who would make bad decisions… we can all be very self-destructive, but will we make it this time?” So what now, Ren Harvieu? “I’ve created a second chance for myself“ she says. “And I will keep creating second chances for myself, because this is my life and I’m not afraid to revel in it anymore.” Revel In the Drama of Ren Harvieu - finally we all can too…

Some punk rock bands talk as though their music is entirely original, without influence or precedent in rock history, sprung solely from their brilliant brains. X, one of punk’s greatest, has always been blunt about the inspiration they take from 1950s and 1960s music, and on *ALPHABETLAND*, they make that connection clearer than ever. “To me, that was the whole point of punk rock,” singer and bassist John Doe tells Apple Music. “Rock ’n’ roll had gotten away from its roots, and from the freedom it represented. We wanted to bring it back. We wanted to remind people of Little Richard and Gene Vincent, and then, later, country singers like Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette.” *ALPHABETLAND*, the LA band’s first album in 35 years with the original lineup—Doe and singer Exene Cervenka (who were married from 1980 to 1985), pompadoured guitarist Billy Zoom, and drummer D.J. Bonebrake—similarly broadcasts its influences, from The Doors (whose keyboard player, Ray Manzarek, produced X’s 1980 debut, Los Angeles) to the 1960s girl group The Shangri-Las to the grimy, desperate LA of Raymond Chandler, Nathanael West, and Ross Macdonald novels. This new set of 11 songs (only one of which is longer than three minutes) follows up on earlier X songs both sonically and in its depiction of not just a city that’s falling down, but a generation, a country, even a world. “The more political songs, or just songs about the world being on an edge, that’s not a unique subject for us,” Doe says. Here he tells the story behind each track on X’s inspired, and inspiring, return. **ALPHABETLAND** “It’s probably the most adventurous song on the record, which is one reason we used it as the album title. It’s about the god Mercury, who either brings carnage or brings riches. The bridge goes, ‘Mercury, you will skate on silver blades/Figure eights on a frozen lake.’ Billy came up with the music for the bridge, which feels completely unexpected. Originally, the song was called ‘Mercury,’ but Billy kept referring to it as ‘Alphabetland,’ like it was some 1950s board game he remembered, even though the lyrics never use the word ‘Alphabetland’—only ‘alphabet wrecked’ and ‘alphabet mine.’ A relationship gets destroyed, so the alphabet gets wrecked and words are meaningless. We finally relented, because it’s like, okay, Billy’s going to call it ‘Alphabetland’ regardless of what the title is.” **Free** “I wrote ‘Free’ in the character of another person, a woman. It’s for all my female partners, sisters, and women I respect. At first, it was called ‘Promised Land,’ but the band gave me a bunch of shit: ‘You can’t use the name of a Chuck Berry song.‘ I also had three different types of music for the verse, different chords that didn’t seem to fit right. D.J. coming up with his drum part, the jungle drums, gave the song the right tension. I wish someone like Pussy Riot would cover this.” **Water & Wine** “It was inspired by seeing a band I love, Shannon & The Clams, who have kind of a surf-rock element. ‘Who gets water and who gets wine’ is about the financial divide in society: who has access, who’s double platinum. We shot some footage, and our friend Bill Morgan, who made *The Unheard Music* \[a 1986 documentary about X\], made a video from that and old footage of a movie called *Ivan the Terrible* from the ’20s. It’s a silent movie, and the characters pour gold coins over one another’s heads—just incredible excess. Billy loves playing the sax, so we say, ’OK, throw it on there.’ It’s nice to bring it in at the very end. We’re not one for high concept, but we do like having a little bit of fun with production.” **Strange Life** “Exene wrote most of the lyrics. We thought about The Doors a lot on this, and their song ‘Strange Days.’ It’s about driving down the road and seeing all the images, mile markers or wooden crosses, and that being a metaphor for going down the road of life, not to get too high-minded. After you’ve been on the road for a while, you take stock of the road, or your life, and you say, ‘Boy, this is strange. How did we get *here*?” **I Gotta Fever** “I wrote that in 1977, and it was called ‘Heater’: ‘I got a heater.’ It’s on an anthology we put out \[in 1997\], *Beyond and Back*. It was about an antihero breaking into someone’s apartment and falling in love, or in lust—a literary exercise for my love of film noir and the Los Angeles of that time. We wanted to rerecord it, but the words were stupid. The whole idea of calling a gun a heater, that didn’t ring true, so I rewrote it. It still has a cinematic quality—the diamond touch and molten lead, people being obsessed and lusting after each other.” **Delta 88 Nightmare** “The second of three old songs we rerecorded, it’s also on *Beyond and Back*. Around 1978, Exene and I and a few friends drove up to Monterey, California, because we’d been reading \[the John Steinbeck novel\] *Cannery Row*. We drove up there in my rattletrap car, an International Travelall, to look for hobos and bohemians. We got there and Monterey was the first time we’d seen a city that had been gentrified. It was full of rich people. We realized we were the bums, the rats crawling out from under the cracks. The music was just too much fun to not have a good version of it. It’s the fastest song of the record.” **Star Chambered** “Exene wrote this in the character of a railroad wife—a person who hangs out in honky-tonk bars. It seemed like a Bob Dylan song to me. And this is where the difference between writing a song in character and writing about ourselves gets blurry. Exene and I define ourselves as the characters we write about. It’s a playful song; I happened on some new chords in the verse, and didn’t expect it to sound so much like ‘Fortune Teller,’ the 1960s song by Benny Spellman. I hope people go back and listen to that. And there’s a reference to \[Tennessee Ernie Ford’s\] ‘Sixteen Tons,’ but it’s ‘I played 16 bars and what did I get?/Another hangover and drunker in debt.’ I think a lot of people can relate to the line ‘I bet on odd ’til I broke even, and then just had to go.’ You do bet on odd. You bet on the chance that you might get through, and you either get what you want, settle for what you got, or you move on. If there’s anything to be said about the band at this point, it’s that we’re grateful to be around.” **Angel on the Road** “Exene wrote this as a poem, and I said, ‘Please give me the words, because I know that’s a song.’ That was the first new song we wrote, back at the end of 2018. It’s about a woman who runs away and her car dies. She’s listening to the Allman Brothers, and then she gets picked up by Duane Allman, and that’s her version of heaven: to ride forever in a big rig with Duane Allman. I love Billy’s guitar solo. It sounds kind of like Robby Krieger of The Doors. There’s also a 1950s-style spoken chorus, like The Ink Spots or something, which I never thought we’d be able to do.” **Cyrano deBerger’s Back** “I never liked the version we recorded on \[X’s 1987 album\] *See How We Are*. This is more like the way it was originally written. The title—maybe I was inspired by that Television song about ‘the arms of Venus de Milo.’ There’s a funk guitar lick, or maybe it’s more like Ben E. King—funk or doo-wop, one or the other. Lou Reed was all about doo-wop, and so were the Ramones.” **Goodbye Year, Goodbye** “That was the last song we worked on. I took the lead, and Exene did some editing and additional lyrics. The music is just straight-up punk rock, because I thought the record needed a good old-fashioned punk rock song. Originally, it sounded too much like \[1980’s\] ‘Your Phone’s Off the Hook,’ so we added a few different things. I was inspired by reading the book *Midnight Cowboy*. Exene gave it to me for my birthday, and the lyric ‘Brother and sister pretend to be lovers’ is from a moment in the book where Joe Buck goes to an Andy Warhol-type party. The first verse, ‘Beats keep beating my brains in,’ means there’s just too much going on. Everybody is so overscheduled, and there’s so much noise.” **All the Time in the World** “Robby Krieger and I know each other and have gotten a little closer in the last five years. He left a long message on my phone, mistaking me for someone else, so I texted back and said, ‘I think you’ve got the wrong person.’ He called and said, ‘I’m so sorry. How are things?’ I said, ‘I’m finishing up making an X record.’ He said, ‘You should have me come down and jam on a song.’ It was perfect, because it ended up being similar to some of the stuff he played on \[The Doors album\] *American Prayer*—it’s very beatnik. Billy played the piano part; my bass part was bad, so we took it off, and it’s just Exene, Billy, and Robby on the song. As Exene says, ‘We have all the time in the world... Turns out not to be that much.’ We have whatever time we have, and goddamn, we better make use of it. What a way to end the record.”

While everyone is social distancing, closing ranks and donning masks while they shop, life can seem somewhat surreal to the senses. Yet, through all of the chaos, one thing is constant, music brings us together. Now, on the 40th Anniversary of the landmark, Los Angeles, and 35 years since the original band have released an album – X, one of the greatest Punk Rock bands in music history, releases ALPHABETLAND today via Bandcamp. The original foursome - Exene Cervenka, John Doe, Billy Zoom, and DJ Bonebrake have now made the album available for fans to purchase and by adapting to this moment, X continues to embody the same spirit they did when they began in 1977. “When your heart is broken you think every song is about that. These songs were written in the last 18 months & it blows my mind how timely they are,” explained John Doe. “We all want our family, friends & fans to hear our records as soon as it's finished. This time we could do that. Thanks to Fat Possum & our audience.” The bands record label, Fat Possum, listened and agreed. Plans were quickly set in motion to release the new music via Bandcamp and have said they're working to get the record available elsewhere as quickly as possible.

Since they burst out of Toronto during the mid-2000s in a tangle of pawn-shop keyboards and effects pedals, Holy Fuck has inspired all manner of colorful descriptors—they’re a psychedelic synth-funk machine, an avant-improv dance-tent attraction, and a Krautrock party band all in one. What they haven’t been is a tune generator for other featured artists. “We never wanted to make that electronic record where every song had a different singer on it,” band co-founder Brian Borcherdt tells Apple Music. \"A lot of those records always felt too disjointed and too much of a gimmick.” However, over time, Borcherdt has come to see the practical benefits of outsourcing vocal duties. Where past Holy Fuck albums treated Borcherdt and Graham Walsh’s voices as textural elements that get emulsified in the band’s noisy swirl, their fifth album, *Deleter*, sees them recruit guest singers like Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor, Liars’ Angus Andrew, and Pond’s Nick Allbrook. “The cameo-core thing seems to make more sense in the streaming era,” Borcherdt says. \"You can release tidbits and different one-offs, and there\'s a connectivity that draws in fans of different bands. There\'s a different way of absorbing music now, so we feel differently about some of these things than we would’ve 10 years ago.” He tells us more about what inspired that change of heart as he breaks down each of the album’s songs. **Luxe (feat. Alexis Taylor)** “I had a vocal melody that I wrote and recorded over this whole song, and Graham\'s reply was, \'We should get Alexis to sing on it!\' We wanted the vocal to sound like a found sample, or something from an old record. And so Alexis was like, ‘Well, if that\'s the case, then why don’t I go to Nashville and sing it through the Voice-o-Graph \[a vintage recording booth at Jack White’s Third Man studio\], and it\'ll literally be an old record, and I\'ll send you the sound files.\' We actually cleaned up his vocal, because he basically gave us a digital version of a scratchy record, and we thought, ‘If this is going to go on to a track that has all these different rhythms and textures going on, we\'re actually going to have to take out some of these pops and clicks and scratches.’” **Deleters (feat. Angus Andrew)** “We\'ve played lots of shows with Liars, and we actually reached out to Angus to sing on a different track, but didn\'t end up keeping that vocal. With \'Deleters,’ I originally imagined a woman singing the hook. And we reached out to a lot of friends, but nobody really could commit. Katie \[Monks\] from Dilly Dally actually tried singing it, but in the end, she wasn\'t happy with it. So we were just kicking it around and Angus was already going to sing some other bit for us, and he\'s got his cool falsetto that\'s kind of iconic to the way he sings, so it just made sense for him to do it. My original vocal harmonies are layered in there, so having Angus is just like the icing on the cake that just makes it that much cooler.” **Endless** “That’s Graham singing. He brought in all the different parts, but everything within this band is a conversation, it\'s never one-sided. So Graham had some ideas, but then we parse through those ideas and connect them with the band that we are. We had just toured with Explosions in the Sky, so we were like, ‘We want it to be like that, but not *too* much like that!\'” **Free Gloss (feat. Nicholas Allbrook)** “As much as we wanted to keep things organic and reach out to our friends, our management was a little more savvy. But still, it wouldn’t seem right to us if we didn\'t have a personal connection with the person. So we actually did go see Pond when they came to town and met them all and hung out, and had a really good time. And Nick was actually supposed to sing vocals with us the next morning, but he was too hung over from the night before! Still, at least it felt like, ‘Okay, this is grounded in something. This feels like someone we could hang out with.\' In the end, he made a true cameo: He comes in for that vocal on the bridge, much like a rapper would have in a late-\'90s R&B song.” **Moment** \"In a way, this is almost like the most Holy Fuck of the songs—to my ear, it sounds kind of like where we\'ve gone in the past. But it does have a bit more Moroder and Italo-disco in there. In a lot of ways, we did our best to write our own language for the first 10 years of being a band. We tried to do things in a very idiosyncratic way. But after so many years of doing that, and flying all over the world, playing on these festivals, all those old keyboards just broke. They just don\'t last! So where we\'re going now is applying that old language to more conventional means, like programmable drum machines and MIDI. And with that kind of dynamic, it\'s suddenly going to sound more Italo-disco, because we have those tools now.” **Near Mint** “This started with the bassline—Punchy \[aka Matt McQuaid\] had his chorus pedal on, and we thought it sounded like an early Cure song off of *Faith*. And then at some point, it just turned into Krautrock, because everything we do eventually becomes Krautrock. But it feels like it picks up on some of the more obvious Krautrock influences—like the first three Can records or the first Neu! record—and then in the next phase, it turns into something more synthy and dreamy, like Harmonia and Cluster. It starts in one place and then ends up somewhere else unexpected. There\'s something very relaxing about that song.” **No Error** “That vocal is part of a live performance, but I sang it into my Casio SK-8, so I grabbed that sample and dropped it in. I was like, \'It\'d be cool if this song had a sample for a vocal,\' and I was like, ‘Well, I guess I can do that right here, right now.\' That\'s why it sounds kind of messed up: I\'m singing over top of the sample, so it sort of flanges a little bit between a live vocal repeating the same thing as the sample. It ends up being really minimal, because there\'s no click track or drum machine beat. On most of our songs, there\'s usually something keeping a rhythm or a pulse, and that one was a little bit more off the cuff, which was fun for us, because we weren\'t locked into some metronome.” **San Sebastian** “Almost every one of these songs started somewhere on the road—like ‘Luxe’ started in Luxembourg, from an encore where we just made something up, and this one started at a sound check in San Sebastian. That\'s just a vocal mic running through the mixer, live. But it\'s the same mixer that I\'m playing the guitar through, so what you\'re hearing on that signal is the guitar and vocal fusing together. And then you have Graham playing those weird pulses and eerie drones.” **Ruby** “This one almost didn’t make it—the \[phone-recorded\] demo just sounded way too shitty. I would hear the song and be like, ‘This sounds amazing,\' but every time I tried to play it for the guys, they\'d be like, ‘I can\'t hear what\'s going on! It’s too murky.’ So we tried to reverse engineer it, and the first attempt was just lame. We were like, \'This sounds like Tom Cochrane—what happened? It sounds like some *Graceland*-meets-Bruce Springsteen tune.’ It totally went off the rails in the wrong direction, because it was hard to really hear that initial seed that made the demo exciting. So we had to go back and really listen to it for the 10th time and then we realized, ‘No, this is a weird, droney, scary song.’ And the moment we did get it, we were like, ‘It\'s also going to be the last song\'—we just knew it would pull everything together.”

*“It’s beauty meets aggression.” Read an interview with Abe Cunningham about Deftones’ massive ninth album.* “My bags are still packed,” Deftones drummer Abe Cunningham tells Apple Music. The California band was set to embark on a two-year touring cycle when the pandemic hit. “We were eight hours away from flying to New Zealand and Australia,” he says, when they received the news that the festival that was to signal the start of their tour had been canceled. The band had spent nearly two years before that chipping away at their ninth album, *Ohms*, while also planning to celebrate the 20th anniversary of 2000’s *White Pony* with a remix album, *Black Stallion*—which is to say, they had more than a few reasons to take their show on the road. “There was talk of delaying the album,” he says, “but we were like, ‘Shit, if we can help somebody out, if we can get somebody through their doldrums and their day-to-day shit, let’s stick to the plan.” *Ohms* is a triumph that serves the stuck-at-home headphone listener every bit as much as it would, and eventually will, the festival-going headbanger. It reaches into every corner of Deftones’ influential sonic repertoire: chugging grooves, filthy rhythms, extreme vocals, soaring emotions, experimental soundscapes, and intentionally cryptic lyrics, open for each individual listener’s interpretation. “We try to make albums,” Cunningham says. “Sequencing is definitely something that we put a lot of thought and energy into.” Opening track “Genesis” begins with an eerie synth, a slow, wavering riff. And then, with a hint of reverb and Cunningham’s sticks counting it in, there’s an explosion. Guitars and bass pound out an enormous, droning chord as Chino Moreno screeches: “I reject both sides of what I’m being told/I’ve seen right through, now I watch how wild it gets/I finally achieve balance/Approaching a delayed rebirth.” “Ceremony” opens with staccatoed guitar and muffled vocals, followed by a feverish riff. “The Spell of Mathematics” is an epic album highlight that combines doomy basslines, breathy vocals, and screams, before a midsection breakdown of finger snaps that you can easily imagine resonating across a festival field or concert hall. “It’s one of those things that just happened out of nowhere,” Cunningham says. “Our buddy Zach Hill \[Death Grips, Hella, and more\] happened to be in LA when we were tracking everything, so we all walked up to meet him and had one beer, which led to three and four. He came back to the studio with us. The snaps are our little attempt at a barbershop quartet. It just worked out organically, and we have one of the baddest drummers ever just snapping.” The band took time off after touring their 2016 album, *Gore*, allowing them to take things slow. “In the past, it’s been, ‘All right, here’s your two months, you’re off tour, take a break. All right, you’ve got studio coming up, go, be productive!’ And we’re like, ‘Okay, but what if I don’t feel productive today?’ Tensions can come in. So we decided to take that year off.” Each band member lives in a different city, so they’d get together for a week or so once every month to jam and write songs, ultimately creating *Ohms*, in the order it was written. “Each time we would jam, we started making songs and we treated it as a set list,” Cunningham says. “We’d go home, stew on that for the month and see what we had, live with it, then come back and play those songs in order.” Summing up their approach, Cunningham says, “It’s beauty meets aggression. We’re trying to make a lovely mix of things that flow. I think we have more to offer than that, but it’s definitely one of our trademarks. I think our frustration is just trying to fit all these things that we love into one album.”

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

Since Bruce Springsteen last released an album with the E Street Band—*High Hopes*, 2014’s collection of re-recorded outtakes and covers—he’s spent a lot of time thinking about his past. He followed his 2016 memoir *Born to Run* the next year with a one-man Broadway show in which he reimagined his songs as part of an intimate narrative about his own life and career. And while his 20th LP was recorded completely live with the band in a four-day sprint—for the first time since 1984’s *Born in the USA*—the songs themselves bear the deliberation and weight of an artist who knows he’s running out of time to do things like this. “The impetus for a lot of the material was the loss of my good friend George Theiss,” Springsteen tells Apple Music. “When he passed away, it left me as the only remaining living member of the first band that I had, which was a very strange thought, and it gave rise to most of the material. There\'s aging and loss of people as time goes by, and that\'s a part of what the record is. And then at the same time, you\'re sort of celebrating the fact that the band goes on and we carry their spirits with us.” That combination of wistfulness and joy—propelled by the full force of an E Street Band that’s been playing together in some form for nearly 50 years, minus two departed founding members, Clarence Clemons and Danny Federici—drives “Last Man Standing” and “Ghosts” most explicitly, but imbues the entire project. Though this may have been recorded live and fast, nothing sounds ragged or rambunctious; the efficiency owes to the shorthand of a unit that knows each other’s moves before they make them. While most of the songs were written recently, “Song for Orphans,” “If I Was the Priest,” and “Janey Needs a Shooter” date back to the early ’70s, only adding to the feeling of loose ends being tied. And it’s not lost on Springsteen after this long period of reflection that this album fits into a larger story that he’s been telling for most of his life. “If you wanted to find a body of work that expressed what it was like to be an American, say from 1970 to now, in the post-industrial period of the United States—I\'d be a place you could go and get some information on that,” he says. “And so in that sense, I always try to speak to my times in the way that I best could.” Here he digs deeper into just a few of the highlights from *Letter to You*. **One Minute You’re Here** “It\'s unusual to start a record with its quietest song. The record really starts with \'Letter to You,\' but there\'s this little preface that lets you know what the record is going to encompass. The record starts with \'One Minute You\'re Here\' and then ends with \'I\'ll See You in My Dreams,\' which are both songs about mortality and death. It was just sort of a little tip of the hat to where the record was going to go and a little slightly connected to \[2019\'s\] *Western Stars*. It was a little transitional piece of music.” **Last Man Standing** “That particular song was directly due to George\'s passing and me finding out that out of that group of people, I\'m kind of here on my own, honoring the guys that I learned my craft with between the ages of 14 and 17 or 18. Those were some of the deepest learning years of my life—learning how to be onstage, learning how to write, learning how to front the band, learning how to put together a show, learning how to play for all different kinds of audiences at fireman\'s fairs, at union halls, at CYO \[Catholic Youth Organization\] dances, and just really honing your craft.” **Janey Needs a Shooter** and **If I Was the Priest** and **Song for Orphans** “We were working on a lot of stuff that I have in the vault to put out again at some time, and I went through almost a whole record of pre-*Greetings From Asbury Park* music that was all acoustic, and these songs were inside them. The guys came in and I said, ‘Okay. Today we\'re going to record songs that are 50 years old, and we\'re going to see what happens.\' The modern band playing those ideas that I had as a 22-year-old—and for some reason it just fit on the record, because the record skips through time. It starts with me thinking about when I was 14 and 15, and then it moves into the present. So those songs added a little touchstone for that certain period of time. I went back and I found a voice that really fit them, and they\'re a nice addition to the record.” **House of a Thousand Guitars** “Every piece of music has its demands—what tone in my voice is going to feel right for this particular piece of music—and you try to meet it in the middle. That\'s one of my favorite songs on the record; I\'m not exactly sure why yet. It\'s at the center of the record and it speaks to this world that the band and I have attempted to create with its values, its ideas, its codes, since we started. And it collects all of that into one piece of music, into this imaginary house of a thousand guitars.” **The Power of Prayer** “I grew up Catholic, and that was enough to turn me off from religion forever. And I realized as I grew older that you can run away from your religion, but you can\'t really run away from your faith. And so I carried a lot of the language with me, which I use and write with quite often—\'Promised Land\' or \'House of a Thousand Guitars\' and \'The Power of Prayer\' on this record. Those little three-minute records and the 180-second character studies that came through pop music were like these little meditations and little prayers for me. And that\'s what I turned them into. And my faith came in and filled those songs, and gave them a spiritual dimension. It\'s an essential part of your life.” **I’ll See You in My Dreams** “I remember a lot of my dreams and I always have. But that song was basically about those that pass away don\'t ever really leave us. They visit me in my dreams several times a year. Clarence will come up a couple times in a year. Or I\'ll see Danny. They just show up in very absurd, sometimes in abstract ways in the middle of strange stories. But they\'re there, and it\'s actually a lovely thing to revisit with them in that way. The pain slips away, the love remains, and they live in that love and walk alongside you and your ancestors and your life companions as a part of your spirit. So the song is basically about that: \'Hey. I\'m not going to see you at the next session, but I\'ll see you in my dreams.\'”

*Tap* More *to read our track-by-track guide with Trevor Dunn.* It’s almost impossible to quantify the volume of music that’s come from Trevor Dunn, Mike Patton, and Trey Spruance since they founded Mr. Bungle in 1985 as high school metalheads in Eureka, California. It laid the foundation for the bands, collaborations, performances, and compositions across every imaginable corner of music that came after. And though they were known as experimental, avant-garde Frankensteins in their approach to metal, punk, ska, surf, jazz fusion, pop, and much, much more, it all comes back to *The Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny*, their insane thrash metal demo that for years has mostly been available as a shoddy YouTube stream. “For whatever reason, that demo was always close to our hearts,” bassist Trevor Dunn tells Apple Music. “It represents a really specific period of our life. We took the writing of that music really seriously, it just never had its proper representation.” Mr. Bungle disbanded in 2000. Reunion rumors popped up anytime members performed together in their many other groups, and eventually, Dunn, Patton, and Spruance found themselves backstage at a Dead Cross show (one of Patton’s other bands, which also includes ex-Slayer and Suicidal Tendencies drummer Dave Lombardo). It was here that Dunn floated the idea to re-record with Lombardo—Slayer had been a massive influence when they first wrote it. “He essentially invented that style of drumming,” he says. “That was the whole catalyst, because he was the guy we had in mind when we were writing it in the ’80s.” Patton later suggested adding Anthrax and Stormtroopers of Death guitarist Scott Ian, who, it turns out, was already a massive fan. “That blew our minds,” says Dunn. “The first Anthrax record was big for us, too.” Mr. Bungle’s first live shows since 2000 took place right before the pandemic hit, but it allowed them time to warm up and relearn the music. “It wasn\'t easy,” he says. “I could pick a lot faster when I was 17 and full of angst. But it was super fun.” All but one track from the original demo was rerecorded, alongside three extra songs written at the time and two covers. “In the studio, Trey, Mike, and I were looking at each other as we were recording, like, ‘Can you believe this? We got these guys to agree to do this?’” Below, Dunn talks through each track on *The Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny Demo*. **Grizzly Adams** “‘Grizzly Adams’ was Trey\'s creation. It’s a song we\'ve never played live, ever. Initially we just decided the band needed an intro. So he went home and made this. It\'s still hilarious to me because it’s too long for an intro, but that\'s what\'s great about it. I think Mike came up with the title. We didn\'t have a title for it—and this is the typical Bungle attitude—it’s just the most inappropriate title we can think of. It has nothing to do with Grizzly Adams, but in a way it’s this kind of heroic, melancholy piece.” **Anarchy Up Your Anus** “It\'s hard to remember exactly why we decided to \[sample Disney\'s *Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House*\]. We always liked that ungodly scream after the narration. It\'s supposed to be a ghoul or something. And screaming at the top of the song, when the beat kicks in, is such a metal thing to do. We decided it was going to be too much trouble to get the rights to use the actual Walt Disney version. We happen to know Danny DeVito, so we asked Rhea \[Perlman\] if she would narrate it. I think the way she did was really great. She’s also one of the most un-metal people you can think of. That\'s part of our MO.” **Raping Your Mind** “I feel like songwriting-wise, and lyrically, I can definitely tell it was written by a 17-year-old. At a pretty young age I definitely liked to mess around lyrically with the figurative and the literal. That\'s why I\'m using this sort of like a brainwashing metaphor—the idea of the brain being something that can actually be ‘raped.’” **Hypocrites / Habla Español O Muere** “‘Hypocrites’ on the original demo is a bit of a joke song. It was premeditating the direction we started to go in later, which is why we chopped off the second part—it didn\'t really fit with the rest. The lyrics are acknowledging our own hypocrisy. Now that I\'m a little bit wiser, I feel like it could be a mantra for human beings in general, if they\'re willing to self-reflect. With adding the Stormtroopers \[of Death\] song on there, well, we did a Slayer cover in the live set, and we wanted to do either Anthrax or Stormtroopers. It just became part of ‘Hypocrites,’ and plays into that because the original is a big, sarcastic joke that a lot of people might not get. So to redo it but then flip it around with the Spanish seemed to make sense.” **Bungle Grind** “That\'s Trey\'s song. When Bungle started, me and Mike were 17, and Trey was 15. Trey was sort of this guitar whiz kid who I met in a music class in high school, and he already had a really developed ear. That was always my favorite song on the demo because it\'s got this really interesting harmonic movement to it. It\'s unusual, almost leaning towards prog in a way. Trey wrote the lyrics too. I don\'t even know if he knows what it\'s about. Who knows what the Bungle Grind is? We\'re not sure.” **Methematics** “This one has complicated history. I think I wrote it after we recorded the demo, thinking we would eventually record more songs. At that point, we changed drummers, added a horn section, and totally started going in different directions. We never even learned those songs. They only existed as guitar demos I made at home. Then, as we were relearning this stuff, I started thinking it would be cool to ‘pay tribute’ to our hometown—I mean, there is some tribute in the lyrics that Mike wrote, but there\'s also some references to things that were kind of dark up in this part of north California. I sent Trey an email, asking for some stories. He sent me some ideas, and I had some other ideas, and then we gave it to Mike, who went with it and wrote these great lyrics. I think there are some definitely some references to meth addicts, and that\'s when we thought of the title, which totally worked.” **Eracist** “It’s almost a brand-new song, except for the main riff that was written in the ’80s. Mike had those two main riffs. I don\'t even know if there was a recording of it, but for some reason Trey remembered the riffs. So Mike arranged it and wrote a bridge for it, which is that double-time section in the middle, and he wrote the lyrics. We had the other \[previously unreleased\] songs on a cassette at my parents\' house. I’m a bit of a hoarder, and I have this box of tapes from my youth. Rehearsals, or riffs I was working on, songwriting stuff. So I had them in there and I knew where to find them. I had to digitize those from a cassette tape to send to the other guys. Keep all your crap. We\'re like the anti-Marie Kondo.” **Spreading the Thighs of Death** “The whole song is based on specific intervals. I was treating it like a composition, like, ‘What can I do with this one scale?’ The lyrics are somewhat existentialist in a way. I can\'t remember what it\'s called now, but there was some movie from the early ’80s where some geek kid keeps being harassed, being bullied by other people, and then he turns to the occult and conjures up evil spirits. Then it all goes haywire, of course, because he can\'t control him. It’s also making fun of Satanism in metal. And obviously the title has this sexual reference—I won\'t go into detail, but as a teenager there were some personal references there. Like, don\'t mess around with something you don\'t know about. Being horrified by the opposite sex at a young age is probably a better way to describe it.” **Loss for Words** “We used to play it in the ’90s with Bungle ‘proper,’ with Danny \[Heifetz, drummer\] and Bär \[Clinton McKinnon, saxophonist\]. That record, *Animosity* \[by Corrosion of Conformity\], was big for all of us in high school. We were rehearsing for the live shows when we found out that Reed \[Mullin\] had died. But that song was already in the set list. The slower section played into the sequencing for the record, especially after a song like ‘Spreading’ which is really intense.” **Glutton for Punishment** “It’s another one of the songs I dug out of my archives. The songs were so unclear from the YouTube feed, which is the only way we had access to them. So me and Trey went back and sort of re-demoed them so they were clear for everyone else, especially for Dave and Scott. The lyrics were complete; they\'re typical of where my mind was as a 17-year-old. Totally indecisive about how to deal socially with people, what I was going to do with the rest of my life, all that sort of stuff.” **Sudden Death** “The lyrics are so ’80s. It\'s essentially about fear of nuclear war. The heartfelt fear, the Cold War, worrying about whether the Russians are going to blow us up or not. For me, it\'s probably one of the hardest songs. Mike wrote it—aside from the main parts of ‘Hypocrites,’ it was his one contribution to the original demo. It\'s funny because he\'s the one guy who didn\'t have any musical training. He writes everything by ear. It rarely goes back to any previous idea. It’s hard to remember. You just have to keep playing it over and over again.”