Magnetic's 30 Best Albums of 2020

The theme of the fourth Tame Impala album is evident before hearing a note. It’s in the song names, the album title, even the art: Kevin Parker has time on his mind. Ruminating on memories, nostalgia, uncertainty about the future, and the nature of time itself lies at the heart of *The Slow Rush*. Likewise, the music itself is both a reflection on the sonic evolution of Parker’s project as it’s reached festival headliner status—from warbly psychedelia to hypnotic electronic thumps—and a forward thrust towards something new and deeply fascinating. On “Posthumous Forgiveness,” Parker addresses his relationship with his father over a woozy, bluesy bass and dramatic synths, which later give way to a far brighter, gentle sound. From the heavy horns on “Instant Destiny” and acoustic guitars on “Tomorrow’s Dust” to the choppy synths and deep funk of “One More Year” and “Breathe Deeper,” the album sounds as ambitious as its concept. There’s a lot to think about—and Kevin Parker has plenty to say about it. Here, written exclusively for Apple Music, the Australian artist has provided statements to accompany each track on *The Slow Rush*. **One More Year** “I just realized we were standing right here exactly one year ago, doing the exact same thing. We’re blissfully trapped. Our life is crazy but where is it going? We won’t be young forever but we sure do live like it. Our book needs more chapters. Our time here is short, let’s make it count. I have a plan.” **Instant Destiny** “In love and feeling fearless. Let’s be reckless with our futures. The only thing special about the past is that it got us to where we are now. Free from feeling sentimental…we don’t owe our possessions anything. Let’s do something that can’t be undone just ’cause we can. The future is our oyster.” **Borderline** “Standing at the edge of a strange new world. Any further and I won’t know the way back. The only way to see it is to be in it. I long to be immersed. Unaware and uncontrolled.” **Posthumous Forgiveness** “Wrestling with demons of the past. Something from a long time ago doesn’t add up. I was lied to! Maybe there’s a good explanation but I’ll never get to hear it, so it’s up to me to imagine what it might sound like…” **Breathe Deeper** “First time. I need to be guided. Everything feels new. Like a single-cell organism granted one day as a human. We’re all together. Why isn’t it always like this?” **Tomorrow’s Dust** “Our regrets tomorrow are our actions now. Future memories are present-day current events. Tomorrow’s dust is in today’s air, floating around us as we speak.” **On Track** “A song for the eternal optimist. The pain of holding on to your dreams. Anyone would say it’s impossible from this point. True it will take a miracle, but miracles happen all the time. I’m veering all over the road and occasionally spinning out of control, but strictly speaking I’m still on track.” **Lost in Yesterday** “Nostalgia is a drug, to which some are addicted.” **Is It True** “Young love is uncertain. Let’s not talk about the future. We don’t know what it holds. I hope it’s forever but how do I know? When all is said and done, all you can say is ‘we’ll see.’” **It Might Be Time** “A message from your negative thoughts: ‘Give up now… It’s over.’ The seeds of doubt are hard to un-sow. Randomly appearing throughout the day, trying to derail everything that usually feels natural…*used* to feel natural. You finally found your place, they can’t take this away from you now.” **Glimmer** “A glimmer of hope. A twinkle. Fleeting, but unmistakable. Promising.” **One More Hour** “The time has come. Nothing left to prepare. Nothing left to worry about. Nothing left to do but sit and observe the stillness of everything as time races faster than ever. Even shadows cast by the sun appear to move. My future comes to me in flashes, but it no longer scares me. As long as I remember what I value the most.”

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.\'\"

Just after she’d released her second album, 2016’s *Oh No*, Jessy Lanza’s life was in a bit of an upheaval. She’d broken up with her partner and co-producer, Junior Boys’ Jeremy Greenspan, and moved from her hometown of Hamilton, Ontario, to New York City to start a new relationship. But things didn’t immediately gel. “I had a vision of what that move was going to mean and how I was going to feel,” the songwriter/producer tells Apple Music. “And then when I ended up feeling pretty much how I did before I left, I just started feeling lost and homesick. I think I just underestimated how moving away from my family and from familiarity and all that stuff would affect me.” But as the songs for her third LP, *All the Time*, began to take shape, “it just became this thing I could connect to and engage with that made sense,” she says. “I was a bit of an emotional mess writing this record. I was really depressed and I used the album as a way to claw myself out of this hole that I was in.” Listening to these tracks—by turns woozy and propulsive, ruminative and joyful, taking inspiration from ’80s funk and quiet storm, ’90s house and techno, and 2010s footwork and hip-hop—you wouldn’t necessarily suspect they’re the product of dark times. But it is, at its core, a dance record, meant more for catharsis than self-pity: “It was hard not to write these meaningful, really emotional lyrics,” she says. “It sounds like a cliché thing to say, but I do feel like overthinking the lyrics is my first step in ruining a song.” Despite having established a new working relationship with Greenspan, who helped produce the album, that feeling of upheaval hasn’t entirely gone away. When the pandemic hit, and her NYC lease was up, Lanza hit the road and landed—at least temporarily—in Palo Alto, California, where she told us more about the genesis of *All the Time*. **Anyone Around** \"That was the last song we wrote for the record. I wrote it while we had started mixing, so it was really late to be added to the tracklist, but it\'s one of my favorite songs. It’s about realizing that maybe you\'re the asshole in your life. I was just thinking about the plot, like in a film noir where it\'s at the end and the protagonist realizes they\'re the murderer or whatever. I was just thinking like, at the end of my life, I don\'t want to suddenly realize that actually I was the asshole the whole time. It\'s about pushing people away and not having self-awareness.\" **Lick in Heaven** \"I wrote that after I had a particularly bad fight with my partner. I was in the remorse phase of feeling like I really need to apologize for what I said, and then I started thinking about that moment in a fight when somebody really has the choice to either go back or let their pride or their ego get the better of them, and then they just go full nuclear. And then I thought of the idea of spinning out, and how that would be a fun lyric to write the chorus around.\" **Face** “This was an edit fest of a song; it was a lot of experimenting on new equipment that I just got. I had a bunch of semi-modular stuff that I didn\'t really know how to use, so I would do just really long takes at the BPM that I wanted ‘Face’ to be at, and then just edited stuff together after. I know Jeremy did the same thing; he was experimenting a lot with new modules he added to his Eurorack. It started with that bassline that\'s in the song. For me, the bassline is the hook. In house music, that bassline really is everything, so I was thinking about that a lot in ‘Face’—trying to get a good bassline—but it\'s a lot of editing. That song just became a clusterfuck of a song. The lyrics were the last thing I wrote. I was riding home on the subway in New York and just being a bit creepy and looking at everyone\'s expression and had this thought of \'I wonder what these people are actually thinking about. Are they pissed off?\' I thought it would be fun to write lyrics about that.” **Badly** \"I think ‘Badly’ is my favorite track from the album. I know I already said that maybe about \'Anyone Around,\' but I like ‘Badly’ a lot. The reason I have an affection for it is because it was a lot of happy accidents in that song. The sub line at the beginning of the song was kind of a mistake. I don\'t even know how the sampler in Logic made that...it just happened. I did a lot of modular experimenting in that song too, and then Jeremy added—in the breakdown there\'s this really cheesy Mariah Carey pop-ballad breakdown in the middle that when I first heard it, I was like, \'I don\'t know if I like this.\' But it really grew on me, and I think of that song really fondly.\" **Alexander** \"I was pretty sad when I wrote that one. I was trying to do a cover of the Alexander O\'Neal song \'A Broken Heart Can Mend.\' And then it just wasn\'t going anywhere and it just didn\'t sound very good, so I changed the key. I just started messing around with it over the course of a couple weeks, and it changed from that cover into \'Alexander,\' and I just kept the title.\" **Ice Creamy** \"I think the vocals ended up sounding that way because Jeremy and I passed that one back and forth quite a few times, and I would run it through some of my vocal effects and then Jeremy would have a go at processing it, and it just took on this weird shift. I kind of can\'t tell what key it\'s in. It\'s a weird song. I went on this tour in 2017, all by myself, which was a really bad idea. I was trying to be tough and thinking, \'Oh, I traveled around. I\'ll be fine.\' It just really fucked me up by the end of it. I was taking these pills that I bought over the counter in Mexico to sleep—tramadol. It just makes you not care about anything, and so by the end of that tour, I was taking tramadol to sleep, and it was just not good. It just was a big mistake to do that. It\'s not a problem for me anymore, but \'Ice Creamy\' was about basically taking tramadol and not giving a shit about anything, and how sad that is.\" **Like Fire** \"I kept hearing \'In My Feelings,\' the Drake song, because in 2018, when it came out, I would just hear it everywhere I went. I was just like, \'The drums are really good for this song. I\'m going to try and figure out what\'s going on,\' and so it was just an experiment trying to learn a Drake beat, and then also I was working on a HOMESHAKE remix at the same time, which wasn\'t going anywhere, so it became kind of like a failed HOMESHAKE remix and also me trying to figure out a Drake drum pattern, and then it turned into \'Like Fire.\'\" **Baby Love** \"I wrote it after coming home from the hospital after meeting my niece for the first time. It was just a different feeling than I\'ve ever felt before. I was really just so happy. So that song is dedicated to her.\" **Over and Over** \"I was really into this one S.O.S. Band song called \'Looking for You.\' In the first verse, Mary Davis does this little speaking thing where all of a sudden she breaks from singing. I just thought it sounded so good. At the time, I was feeling really angry, really sad, and just trying to write in opposition of that feeling, so I think \'Over and Over\' is a very good example of me trying to do that—and trying to copy Mary Davis. It comes back again to the theme of patterns in your life that, if you\'re lucky, you\'ll notice them before you die. Not to get too self-help, like we\'re in a therapy session, but it really is about just noticing things that just keep happening over and over, and I think it comes back to, \'Wow, these issues in my new relationship are the same issues I\'ve been having throughout my adult life with people.\'\" **All the Time** \"\'All the Time\' was like the catalyst for the whole record, because it was the oldest song on the record. Jeremy sent me a really simple chord progression and drums, and it was right when I was moving and we just weren\'t sure if we were going to make another record together. And then I wrote the vocal and the lyrics over top of what he sent me, and we were both so happy with it. I think it was a good omen or something. It was just a sweet, sad song that we both loved so much, and it was a really nice motivator. It was the spark to make a whole nother record together.\"

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

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

“It happened really naturally over time,” Harrison Mills tells Apple Music of BRONSON, a collaboration between Seattle duo ODESZA (Mills alongside Clayton Knight) and Sydney producer Golden Features (Tom Stell). “We were just friends. The first time we came to Australia, Tom was the first Australian person we met that we instantly started getting along with and we just got to know each other really well.” The project has been in production for years, with the bulk of it written in 2018, both online and during a weeklong recording trip to Berry, New South Wales. The resulting album is a rush to explore. More than blending elements of each artist’s sound, it was a collaboration in the truest sense, with each member working off one another, challenging their processes and experimenting beyond their typical boundaries. “I sent a melody \[to ODESZA\],” says Stell, “and they sent me back this incredible almost-finished song. They’d added these drums that I never would have picked, this bass that I never would have picked. That was the beauty of the whole project. Ideas that usually get a red light, where we’d normally be like, ‘This doesn\'t sound like ODESZA’ or ‘This doesn\'t sound like Golden Features,’ got a green light.” Mills adds: “It felt like we were all very open-minded. There weren’t any limitations; we weren\'t trying to put ourselves in a box. We were always learning.” Below, all three members of BRONSON break down each track on their debut album. **FOUNDATION** Mills: “This was one of the final songs we wrote, and ironically, it became the first track on the album. We’ve always been fans of the concept of having an intro to an album, and set out to do that here. We wanted something that set the tone for the record and invited the listener into the world of BRONSON. We wanted to make sure we gave the right first impression. Something that lived between dark and euphoric.” **HEART ATTACK (feat. lau.ra)** Mills: “lau.ra first sent a bunch of gibberish melodies over the demo and we ended up looping one section. It was so catchy and hypnotic. Her delivery was so intimate—it felt gorgeous yet dark, uplifting yet melancholy.” Stell: “It was the first vocal track we worked on for the record. It was one of those ideas that came together really quickly and felt very natural while writing with lau.ra. It was a confluence between the distinctive sounds of ODESZA and Golden Features, and served as a turning point for the album.” **BLINE** Knight: “The first version of this tune felt more laidback, but it didn’t seem to keep our attention—at least not enough to make it on the record. We kept experimenting with different leads until we found a melody that gave it a driving sound, which ultimately cranked the song up to a much higher energy level than we were initially intending. We focused a lot on using different analog elements and constantly modulating them to add layers to the song, inherently making it feel alive.” **KNOW ME (feat. Gallant)** Mills: “We’ve always been fans of Gallant’s work, so we reached out to him and tried setting up a studio session together in LA. When we did finally meet up, we ended up really hitting it off. He’s such a natural talent—it was incredible watching him work to a simple demo loop we had put together that he really connected to. During that session, we talked about the lyrical content—about someone you love never really knowing who you are and finally coming to the realization they never truly knew you. As a result, he matched the emotive R&B sound and tone we were going for perfectly; it really elevated the entire message of the song to an entirely different level of depth.” **VAULTS** Stell: “It was one of the earlier instrumentals we completed, and it acted as a cornerstone to the overall sound design and aesthetic. The track really proved a departure from each of our separate projects’ styles and set a definitive change in direction for the BRONSON project. We knew we had something special here and it served as a guiding light for the rest of the record.” **TENSE** Stell: “This was the first track we started as BRONSON and most likely the reason it’s so heavy. It really felt like a breakout of sorts from the worlds of ODESZA and Golden Features. It fueled us as a source of inspiration to keep working on the project. We wanted to make a heater, and hopefully we did.” **CALL OUT** Mills: “This track started with us just messing around with ’80s sounds and being inspired by that era’s energy. Eventually, after a few glasses of wine, we started singing over it...you can hear both myself and Tom in the vocals, which was certainly a departure from the norm.” **CONTACT** Knight: “‘CONTACT’ is the most distorted tune on our record. We wanted to make a dance song and then run it through amps, distortion, and saturation to give a chaotic feel. To us, it’s such a frenetic and charged moment on the album, which we wanted to fully embrace. We took a lot of risks in the writing process of this entire album and pushed the envelope, so to speak, which felt good.” Mills: “We were just really trying to make a distorted dance song. We had these cool elements, but the hard part was making all of that stay interesting for the full three minutes. We just wanted to keep your ears perked up throughout the whole song.” **KEEP MOVING** Mills: “This song is really about pushing through and the inner dialogue you have with yourself when facing an obstacle or opponent. Instrumentally and lyrically, we wanted to convey that intense emotion and the experience of channeling all of your energy to conquer whatever you’re facing. One interesting element of this track is that we sampled an army marching to give it this pulsing, percussive drive at its core. It just grew from there.” **DAWN (feat. Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs)** Mills: “TEED has been someone we\'ve been trying to work with for a long time. We showed him a couple of tracks, talked about the themes of the album. He went in a corner for literally 20 minutes and came back with this incredible lyrical content and melody. From there we just expanded it. It was pretty awesome to watch him work. I mean, it was done and written in three or four hours, which is insane.” Knight: “Creatively, we respect Orlando \[TEED\] so much. Not only do the lyrics provide this renewed sense of hope, but his vocals complement the tone and energy of the song perfectly. ‘DAWN’ is a song meant to take you on a journey and explore various concepts and emotions of the record. We couldn’t think of a more fitting song to end the album with.”

GRAMMY-nominated duo ODESZA and groundbreaking Sydney producer Golden Features have announced their new project BRONSON with the launch of two contrasting singles “HEART ATTACK (feat. lau.ra)” and “VAULTS” out now on Foreign Family Collective and Ninja Tune. The double release serves as the primer to the trio’s forthcoming self-titled debut album, set for July 17. Both tracks offer two distinct looks into BRONSON, embracing an alternate identity for the trio in which they discovered a newfound limitlessness and ability to explore new soundscapes, free from any expectations attached to their respective projects. “HEART ATTACK” finds a weightless dreamy soundscape in lau.ra’s vocals (of Ultraísta), while “VAULTS” explores a gripping intensity by way of distorted basslines and edgier cinematic tones. On “HEART ATTACK,” BRONSON reflects that it “was the first vocal track we worked on for the record. It was one of those ideas that came together really quickly and felt very natural while writing with lau.ra. Ultimately, it was a confluence between the two distinctive sounds of ODESZA and Golden Features. It served as a turning point in the writing process of the album and an inspiration for the other vocal tracks to come.” Nearly three years in the making, BRONSON originally formed through the personal connection that ODESZA members Harrison Mills and Clayton Knight shared with Golden Features’ Tom Stell. Out of mutual admiration on a creative level, they formed a digital record box of shared sounds sent across time zones and continents through Dropbox files and FaceTime calls. The product of those collective efforts culminated in 2018 when the trio spent a week, in the remote reaches of Berry, Australia, recording what would later become the first BRONSON album. Furthermore, “VAULTS” became an anchor in the writing process. As BRONSON observes, “it was one of the earlier instrumentals we completed and it acted as a cornerstone to the overall sound design and aesthetic of the album. The track really proved a departure from each artist's own respective styles and set a definitive change in direction for the BRONSON project. We knew we had something special here and it served as a guiding light for the rest of the record.” As the debut releases, “HEART ATTACK” and “VAULTS” are indicative of the opposing light versus dark elements that flow throughout the 10 track album. The record strikes a beautiful balance between intense, emotive instrumental-heavy tracks and cathartic, melodic vocal songs, with additional guest features from Gallant and Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs. An unexpected yet welcome addition includes Harrison and Tom themselves providing the vocals for “CALL OUT,” a song that lulls the listener into tranquility. The album reflects on their respective needs to challenge personal struggles, both internal and external. Moreover, the trio recognized that their own battles were merely microcosms of the surrounding world. The hope was to craft a body of work that was reflective of that duality of lightness and darkness inherent to the human condition. The result is a project with an extraordinary profundity and universal relatability. One can connect to it on a deeply personal level and find relief, no matter what they may be confronting in their own life. ODESZA and Golden Features have combined streaming numbers in the billions and hold multiple gold and platinum singles and albums respectively. They've remixed and collaborated with an array of impressive artists including Sia, Leon Bridges, Regina Spektor, Katy Perry, Charli XCX and others. Both leaders in the live circuit, they’ve cumulatively reached millions of fans on global headline tours, with ODESZA selling out massive venues including Los Angeles’ Staples Center, New York’s Barclays Center, London’s O2 Academy Brixton, as well as headlining world-famous festivals such as Coachella, Bonnaroo, Austin City Limits, Outside Lands and Lollapalooza.

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

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

On 6 th November Bristolian master Krust presents 'The Edge Of Everything' – his first album in 14 years. The pre-eminent electronic icon – who continuously prolifically blew minds throughout the 90s and 00s – has now fully returned from a long break, rejuvenated and artistically liberated. The album appears if beamed-in from the edge of the universe, way beyond the precipice in a metaphysical netherworld. This is Krust as futurist revisionist, making exhilarating, standout music of depth and substance, which is unlike anything else, above-and-beyond floor-focussed confines. Krust’s music is more individualistic; closer to the vivid brushstrokes of a fauvist painting, and less like a diagram on a grid. The sound is unmistakably Krust, but now wider, deeper, freer, more intense and more fully-realised. If past anthems like ‘Warhead’ and ‘Soul In Motion’ gave you a peek through the creator’s doors of perception, here they are flung wide open, pulling you across into awe-inspiring new worlds. It’s clear this electronic icon who constantly and prolifically blew minds throughout the 90s and 00s is back, and on his best ever form, having explored radical new philosophical, mental and creative processes. Keen to seek new paths and subvert the norm, Krust opted to release via Crosstown Rebels following the fervid advances of Damian Lazarus. The pair have a longstanding history, which began when the label owner played drum & bass in his former DJ duo, PM Scientists.

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

The ambient electronic producer Tycho (born Scott Hansen) received a Grammy nomination in 2019 for his fifth studio album *Weather*, which was unusually structured and vocal-heavy compared to his prior releases. With *Simulcast*, a sort of instrumental companion album, the Bay Area producer comes full circle. “I wanted to show those songs through two different lenses: the vocal and the instrumental,” he tells Apple Music. “I wanted to show how a single core concept can evolve into two completely different things. It proves how powerful the process is in shaping the song.” Hansen started writing *Simulcast* while he was touring *Weather* and reflecting on the past decade of his career. “I felt this urge to restart the whole story,” he says, “to go back to the way I produced music when I first started, as a way to clear the slate. *Simulcast* is my transition into a new phase.” Some of the songs here are identical to their counterparts on *Weather*, some have simply lost the vocals, and some morph into something entirely new. “I see the albums as two paths to the same place,” he says—like two routes on a hike. “There are little side trails, new terrain, and a few common landmarks that feel familiar.” **Weather** “This song closes the last album, and I wanted it to be the jumping-off point for this album. To me, it always felt like both a beginning and an end. So now it’s both. After you listen to *Weather*, you come back to this familiar place to find out what\'s next. If you wanted, you could delete the last song or the first song of either record and sandwich them together.” **Alright** “I felt like there was something beautiful about the simplicity of ‘For How Long,’ so I wanted to keep this iteration to the point. But because it was one of the first songs I’d written for *Weather*, I had all these different versions and new ideas. The challenge with ‘Alright’ was finding a way to integrate those ideas into an instrumental version that still felt clean.” **Outer Sunset** “‘Skate’ was meant to be a very stripped-down, delicate arrangement, but I always felt the main chord progression had an interesting rhythm that would pair nicely with a dirty, distorted drum break. This version has that. Once I added that in, I rewrote the lead guitar parts to give the song more movement.” **Into the Woods** “My whole career, people have told me how much my music evokes nature—even people who haven\'t seen the graphics in my live show. And over time, I started to think, ‘Wow, yeah, they’re right, this whole time I really *have* been referencing the ocean or the desert.’ ‘Into the Woods,’ though, was the first time I deliberately tried to soundtrack a specific experience. My friend and I do these long overnight hikes through the Redwoods, and it’s all bright and clear until you get into the forest. There, it’s dark, foreboding, and surreal, and can be pretty scary at night. To me, this song embodies that whole journey: coming to terms with your fears, having this psychedelic experience with nature, and finding your way out.” **Easy** “I wanted to get back to my old breakbeat style and let the drums carry the song. I wrote this at a time when I was trying to overcome all the built-up anxiety from those whirlwind first eight years of Tycho. For this album, I wanted to focus on my mental and physical health—to get into a sustainable space where I could do this and it wasn\'t killing me every time. For whatever reason, this song just flowed. It made for a great entry point into this record’s process, because it made me say, \'Just relax, don’t overthink it.\'” **PCH** “I\'ve lived in San Francisco for 14 years, and during the time that I made this album in particular, I spent most of the mornings surfing at Ocean Beach. I park on PCH and put on my wetsuit, and it\'s become a big part of my ritual. It shaped what this record meant to me. I also wanted to show how you can take a pop-forward song like ‘Pink & Blue’ and completely change the tone and mood by removing the vocal and adding a lead. Suddenly, it’s brand new. I thought that was a fascinating exercise.” **Cypress** “This song’s counterpart, ‘Japan,’ was inspired by my very first synthesizers. They were Japanese and from the ’90s and had a specific lo-fi analog sound. Eventually, I visited Japan and spent time in this forested region outside of Tokyo where there’s this super high contrast of vibrant green trees and dark red shadows. Everything, from the shapes to the sounds to the colors, felt simultaneously very familiar and also completely foreign. I wanted to speak to that quiet disorientation.” **Stress** “When I was working with Hannah \[Cottrell, the vocalist on *Weather*\], I’d send her WAV files named ‘something.wav.’ The original file for this song’s counterpart was something like ‘trouble.wav,’ and she decided to call it ‘No Stress.’ I thought, ‘Oh, that\'s a nice sentiment.’ But deep down, I guess that song always felt like tension to me. For this version, I wanted to turn back to the core meaning and be very literal, to express what stress sounds like to me. Because really, that’s the driving force behind a lot of my music. At some point, you can\'t disconnect the anxiety from the art.”

Coming at the tail end of a steady wave of solid 2020 Griselda Records projects, the Buffalo, New York-based imprint may very well have saved the best for last. While his core labelmates Westside Gunn and Conway the Machine may have had more prolific release years, Benny the Butcher’s first project since the 2019 trio effort *WWCD* for Eminem’s Shady Records presents him in a singular context. Part of what makes *Burden of Proof* such a standout stems from the beat selection, all of which comes via Hit-Boy. Fresh off of a career highlight with Nas’ *King’s Disease*, the producer meshes exceptionally well with Benny’s street-informed verses on cuts like “Famous” and the animated boom-bap “Trade It All.” And as if his vibrant and boisterous bars weren’t enough, esteemed guests like Freddie Gibbs and Rick Ross sound energized by the upstate lyricist’s dynamic flows here.

Musically, there are a number of things long familiar to fans of the Buffalo-hailing rap crew Griselda Records. There’s the fervent appreciation for both high fashion and professional wrestling; there’s the vivid and unending stories of local legacies built on the drug trade; and then, maybe most notably, there’s the incessant vocalized recreation of the sounds of guns firing (“Boom-boom-boom-boom,” goes a popular one). All of these are fully present on Westside Gunn’s *Pray for Paris*, an album which follows the crew’s hefty one-two punch of Gunn’s *Hitler Wears Hermes 7* solo mixtape and their *WWCD* Griselda compilation at the end of 2019. What fans might not have seen coming, however, are guest appearances from Wale, Joey Bada\$$, and Tyler, The Creator (among others), along with production credits from Tyler (separate from the song he raps on), hip-hop legends DJ Muggs and DJ Premier, and one-time Vine star Jay Versace. Gunn is clearly aiming to up the creative ante with *Pray for Paris*, having commissioned the project’s cover art from friend and admitted Griselda fan Virgil Abloh. It’s a lot to process at face value, but it all works under the discerning vision of Gunn, who has often said he is less a rapper than a proper *artist*. But lest we forget—amongst the wealth of artistic flourishes the MC has included here—who Westside Gunn actually is, he reminds us in his signature high-pitched delivery on “No Vacancy” that he is still the man who will “blow your brains out in broad daylight.”

‘Workaround’ is the lucidly playful and ambitious solo debut album by rhythm-obsessive musician and DJ, Beatrice Dillon for PAN. It combines her love of UK club music’s syncopated suss and Afro-Caribbean influences with a gamely experimental approach to modern composition and stylistic fusion, using inventive sampling and luminous mixing techniques adapted from modern pop to express fresh ideas about groove-driven music and perpetuate its form with timeless, future-proofed clarity. Recorded over 2017-19 between studios in London, Berlin and New York, ‘Workaround’ renders a hypnotic series of polymetric permutations at a fixed 150bpm tempo. Mixing meticulous FM synthesis and harmonics with crisply edited acoustic samples from a wide range of guests including UK Bhangra pioneer Kuljit Bhamra (tabla); Pharoah Sanders Band’s Jonny Lam (pedal steel guitar); techno innovators Laurel Halo (synth/vocal) and Batu (samples); Senegalese Griot Kadialy Kouyaté (Kora), Hemlock’s Untold and new music specialist Lucy Railton (cello); amongst others, Dillon deftly absorbs their distinct instrumental colours and melody into 14 bright and spacious computerised frameworks that suggest immersive, nuanced options for dancers, DJs and domestic play. ‘Workaround’ evolves Dillon’s notions in a coolly unfolding manner that speaks directly to the album’s literary and visual inspirations, ranging from James P. Carse’s book ‘Finite And Infinite Games’ to the abstract drawings of Tomma Abts or Jorinde Voigt as well as painter Bridget Riley’s essays on grids and colour. Operating inside this rooted but mutable theoretical wireframe, Dillon’s ideas come to life as interrelated, efficient patterns in a self-sufficient system. With a naturally fractal-not-fractional logic, Dillon’s rhythms unfold between unresolved 5/4 tresillo patterns, complex tabla strokes and spark-jumping tics in a fluid, tactile dance of dynamic contrasts between strong/light, sudden/restrained, and bound/free made in reference to the notational instructions of choreographer Rudolf Laban. Working in and around the beat and philosophy, the album’s freehand physics contract and expand between the lissom rolls of Bhamra’s tabla in the first, to a harmonious balance of hard drum angles and swooping FM synth cadence featuring additional synth and vocal from Laurel Halo in ‘Workaround Two’, while the extruded strings of Lucy Railton create a sublime tension at the album’s palatecleansing denouement, triggering a scintillating run of technoid pieces that riff on the kind of swung physics found in Artwork’s seminal ‘Basic G’, or Rian Treanor’s disruptive flux with a singularly tight yet loose motion and infectious joy. Crucially, the album sees Dillon focus on dub music’s pliable emptiness, rather than the moody dematerialisation of reverb and echo. The substance of her music is rematerialised in supple, concise emotional curves and soberly freed to enact its ideas in balletic plies, rugged parries and sweeping, capoeira-like floor action. Applying deeply canny insight drawn from her years of practice as sound designer, musician and hugely knowledgable/intuitive DJ, ‘Workaround’ can be heard as Dillon’s ingenious solution or key to unlocking to perceptions of stiffness, darkness or grid-locked rigidity in electronic music. And as such it speaks to an ideal of rhythm-based and experimental music ranging from the hypnotic senegalese mbalax of Mark Ernestus’ Ndagga Rhythm Force, through SND and, more currently, the hard drum torque of DJ Plead; to adroitly exert the sensation of weightlessness and freedom in the dance and personal headspace.

“Every time I make a record, I\'m learning something new about myself,” Kid Cudi tells Apple Music. “I didn\'t realize that my father\'s death really had an impact on me in the way that it did until I started writing about it: \'Oh, I guess being alone is an issue for me. I guess being depressed is an issue.\' I\'m just making music, I\'m just doing what feels right, but this shit is coming out and it\'s things that I probably didn\'t pinpoint \[in the moment\].” The issues Cudi mentions have been emerging for him since his beginnings as the “lonely stoner,” a New York City-via-Cleveland cool kid who assured a generation of rappers to follow him that it was plenty OK to acknowledge your own inexplicable melancholy. *Man on the Moon III: The Chosen*, which returns to a naming convention Cudi hadn’t utilized since 2010’s *Man on the Moon II: The Legend of Mr. Rager* (with four solo and two collaborative albums in between), finds him in a sort of post-discovery nirvana, coming clean about his mental-health journey (“Mr Solo Dolo III”), his relationship with his mother (“Elsie’s Baby Boy \[flashback\]”), and the power of his celebrity (“4 Da Kidz”). “I was already in a really good place working on *Entergalactic* \[his forthcoming animated series and soundtrack\], going crazy on ‘THE SCOTTS’—but then I was making something else that didn\'t fit those two projects. After two or three songs, I was like, \'Whoa, this shit really feels like a *Man on the Moon*. It sounds like you pick right back up where we left off 10 years ago.\'” Ten years ago, Kid Cudi was sidestepping being pigeonholed as an “emo rapper,” leaning even harder into his alias Mr. Rager, even when that meant looking at himself in the mirror after the partying was done, as reflected in *Man on the Moon II*’s latter half. For *Man on the Moon III*, he’s just as in touch with his feelings as he was on *II*—along with the rest of a dependably vulnerable catalog—it’s just that now those feelings are a bit more positive. “The whole flow of my life is like so in tune with like everything that I want it to be,” Cudi says. “I\'m solid with my baby’s mom. I\'m solid with my mom, I\'m solid with my sister. I\'m solid with my daughter. I\'m solid with my nieces. Everything\'s in place. And I\'m happy, you know?”

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

Ital Tek (a.k.a. Alan Myson) returns to Planet Mu with his sixth album ‘Outland‘. The album was written during a time of new beginnings following a move out of the city to a quieter space and the birth of his first child. During this period of seclusion Alan recorded a huge amount of source material and spent weeks and months sitting up at night with his newborn, listening back and making notes on how the new record should take form, focusing and developing ideas to shape this lean ten-track album. Alan talks of the record being a collaboration between two parts of himself, something that definitely comes across as the album unfolds. Textures are something Alan excels at and on his last album, the largely beatless ‘Bodied’, it felt as if he was building a new sound-world. On ‘Outland’ he expands upon this. The album brings together the extremes of Alan's sound, contrasting roughened bass and beats with starker more detailed atmospheres and emotions. The most beat-driven song here is ‘Deadhead’, with its gnarled bouncing bass, angular distorted melodies and cavernous textures. On tracks like ‘Bladed Terrain’ the contrasts are even more defined with buzzing drones and razor sharp drums plunging into a grainy fog, giving the track a dramatic 3D feel. Then there are the stop-start pauses of ‘Leaving The Grid’, where the song evaporates into space before reemerging with shuddering rhythms and ghostly textures. Melodies crawl around these tracks as if they’re just waking up, as heard on the atmospheric ‘Angel In Ruin’. The sleep-deprived fraying of the senses became Alan’s routine and one which he says gave him a renewed creative energy; half-asleep, working through the night, and then into the daytime super-focused but exhausted. Prone to audio hallucinations whilst writing the album, he aimed to capture these distortions in his perception of pitch and time, and you can hear these effects interpreted on tracks like ‘Endless’ and ‘Open Heart’ as melodies phase and slip out of time like an emotional Doppler effect. This is also true of the soaring atonal synths at the peak of ‘Diamond Child’, which feel like the aural equivalent of eye floaters.  These intuitive feelings and functions are a difficult thing to capture in sound, but Alan manages it beautifully and always makes the result feel warm and adventurous, heartfelt and epic.

Midwestern by birth and temperament, Freddie Gibbs has always seemed a little wary of talking himself up—he’s more show than tell. But between 2019’s Madlib collaboration (*Bandana*) and the Alchemist-led *Alfredo*, what wasn’t clear 10 years ago is crystal now: Gibbs is in his own class. The wild, shape-shifting flow of “God Is Perfect,” the chilling lament of “Skinny Suge” (“Man, my uncle died off a overdose/And the fucked-up part of that is I know I supplied the n\*\*\*a that sold it”), a mind that flickers with street violence and half-remembered Arabic, and beats that don’t bang so much as twinkle, glide, and go up like smoke. *Alfredo* is seamless, seductive, but effortless, the work of two guys who don’t run to catch planes. On “Something to Rap About,” Gibbs claims, “God made me sell crack so I had something to rap about.” But the way he flows now, you get the sense he would’ve found his way to the mic one way or the other.

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

A surprise release by Speaker Music in response to recent events. A twelve track album with 60 page PDF booklet designed by Make Techno Black Again, powered by HECHA / 做. Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry is an album of street-level fire music exploring poet Tsitsi Ella JajiI’s concept of “stereomodernism,” or as she describes: “dubbing in stereo for solidarity.” Rhythmanalyst DeForrest Brown Jr.’s second release for Planet Mu as Speaker Music channels the modernist Black tradition of rhythm and soul music as an intellectual site and sound of generational trauma, bursting through the frames of Western music and thought. A PDF booklet of collected writings by Black theorists and poets provides further context featuring “Amerikkka’s Bay” written and spoken by Maia Sanaa, and remixed by Brown, Jr. As Amiri Baraka saw it and Tsitsi Ella JajiI expanded, a Black music explores different perspectives and approaches to living in trauma within a prescribed future. The systematic displacement of Black communities in conversation with a linear consideration of Black music (from blues to rock to jazz to soul to funk to techno) shows a kind of communication emerging from a people learning to speak the way they would like to within a set of societal confines. The scope of JajiI’s “stereomodernism” evokes writer Amiri Baraka’s call for a Black “unity music” towards an “imagined community” for a newly constructed ethnicity. As Black people engage with White technologies powered by fractured European ideologies, the meaning and sound of “soul” for African Americans extends beyond genre classification and encapsulates a perennial situation of being considered categorically inhuman in the eyes of American governing bodies and people. Techno and its romantic qualities of Hi-Tech Soul come from a long history of endurance and adaptation to a future that is designed to systematically exploit and oppress Black bodies and lives. Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry arrives as a mobilization beyond the savage free market capitalist industrial system, and towards a future that isn’t indebted to the fictive and failing socio-economic “progress” imagined within the frames of White American techno-utopianism.

Pop Smoke opened the title track of his 2019 debut *Meet the Woo* with a series of bars that distill exactly what the Brooklyn MC is all about: “Baby girl, come and meet the Woo/She know we keep a tool/Big knockin\' on my body/Watch who you speaking to.” The album—propelled by the breakout single “Welcome to the Party”—made a star out of a previously unknown MC, at once familiarizing the rap game with this promising voice, as well as the Canarsie hood he came from. *Meet the Woo 2*, as its title suggests, is another helping of the consistently intimidating, endlessly catchy contemporary Brooklyn drill music that gave Pop Smoke his fame. Success has only served to fortify his earliest claims of citywide dominance (“Invincible,” “Christopher Walking,” “Element”), but he isn’t too self-important to share the mic with several of New York City’s most celebrated young voices (A Boogie wit da Hoodie, Fivio Foreign, Lil Tjay), spreading love in the Brooklyn tradition.

When the largely anonymous UK collective Sault released *Untitled (Black Is)* in June 2020, it arrived on the heels of global unrest spawned, this time, by the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. That album spoke to the profound grief and rage that so many Black people (and their allies) felt, offering a lifeline and a balm at the perfect moment. *Untitled (Rise)* comes three months later, celebratory in its spirit and poetic in its motion—the fresh air inhaled after a summer of drowning. Soulful disco and buoyant funk inform the album from the outset. “Strong,” complete with regal marching band flourishes, beckons to listeners to get up and move: “We\'re moving forward tonight,” a vocalist commands in the early seconds of the opener. “We won\'t back down tonight.” What follows is a monument to resilience and Black people\'s ability to conjure joy under any circumstances, and the songs keep the freedom of the dance floor (or the square) in their center. “I Just Want to Dance” is an intoxicating collage of percussion, while the loose groove of “Fearless” and the kineticism of “Street Fighter” keep up the energy. Elsewhere, “Son Shine,” with its affecting gospel choral arrangements, connects spiritual history with the present, a reminder that so much of this magic has long been intertwined with the sacred: “Let the son shine through my pain, so we will rise.” Towards the back, the tempo slows into the meditative, strings replace the much of the percussion, and the spaces between lyrics become more prominent leading into “The Black & Gold,” a solemn instrumental that evokes peace or rest. The final track offers one last thematic tie: the pain but also the divinity, a guilty world and the preservation of innocence. At its core, *Untitled (Rise)* is about duality and holding multiple truths in a single heart; it asks and extends levity while ensuring, also, that we do not forget.

In times of turmoil, some retreat inward, some draw closer to their fellow humans, and others lean into spirituality. The multifaceted collective Spillage Village does a little bit of all three. As pandemic and social upheaval gripped the country, the artists—duo EARTHGANG, rappers JID and Jurdan Bryant, singers 6LACK and Mereba, and producers Hollywood JB and Benji—holed up in an Atlanta rental and came back with *Spilligion*. Built around religious signifiers and iconography, the album teases out the theme to create something that is ambitious in its scope and lush in its musicality. “Baptize” playfully incorporates the language of the sacred in a display of nimble lyricism; elsewhere, \"Judas\" deals with betrayal and loss, while “Oshun,” named for the Yoruba goddess of sensuality, and “Cupid,” named for the Roman god of desire, juxtapose experiences of romance. Throughout, hope, love, and camaraderie take center stage amid a backdrop of injustice and doom. “End of Daze” is an apocalypse (“God packed his bags and said bye-bye,” Mereba sings on the hook) set to candied neo-soul, while “Hapi” is a prayer for survival that resembles a sermon. The songs are collagic and, like church services, offer themselves up to be mined for whatever it is you need to heal or get free. Despite the cerebral nature of what brought Spillage Village to this album in the first place, *Spilligion* feels fun and carefree, intentional but not self-serious and brimming with a soulful Southern hospitality that goes down easy.

A couple of months after releasing 2019’s *ZUU*, MC Denzel Curry joined the hardcore band Bad Brains for a rerecording of their 1986 classic “I Against I.” The point was clear: For as steeped as Curry is in the regional vernacular of southeastern rap, he also understood rap’s spiritual link to punk—music that channels the raw, noisy energy of youth. At eight tracks in 18 minutes, *UNLOCKED* is even shaped like a hardcore record, with tracks that mutate, Hulk-like, from sturdy weight-room rap to tangles of warped vocals and dissonant samples that play like experiments frothing over in real time (“Take\_it\_Back\_v2,” “DIET\_”). As exciting as Curry is—to paraphrase an old chestnut about great singers, one could listen to him yell the phone book—the anchor here is producer Kenny Beats, whose tracks mix the feel of classic boom-bap with a sample-splattered approach that captures the tabs-open fever of now.