MOJO's 75 Best Albums of 2021

Across a decade and a half of aliases and side-projects, Dean Blunt’s been known as an enigma. With a penchant for trolling and a disdain for genre boundaries, the Londoner is hard to pin down—from the masked post-punk of his Hype Williams duo to the weirdo noise-rap of Babyfather. But the sequel to 2014’s *BLACK METAL*, released under his own name, is mostly just…pretty. A pared-down collection of downcast avant-pop, *BLACK METAL 2* blurs acoustic strums, MIDI strings, and Blunt’s deadpan half-raps, telling fascinatingly unresolved stories—a gun on the beach, a mother without a son. These are lush, delicate songs that still feel profoundly unhappy: “Daddy’s broke/What a joke/Future’s bleak,” he sing-songs on folk downer “NIL BY MOUTH.” Even at its most accessible, Blunt’s work remains a bit of a mystery.

On the heels of her celebrated one-woman debut, *The Oracle*, Angel Bat Dawid is heard at JazzFest Berlin with her band Tha Brothahood on *Live*. The spell she casts on vocals, clarinet, and keyboards is rooted in the legacy of Chicago free jazz, with an approach to song that’s reminiscent of Sun Ra’s and Nina Simone’s. In fact, Sun Ra’s “Enlightenment,” reworked as a doleful out-of-tempo ballad, leads off the set, and already the emotion in Bat Dawid’s voice is palpable. The circumstances at this festival were not altogether happy—a story that rises to the surface on “VIKTORious Return,” which is simply Bat Dawid tearfully greeting bandmate and fellow vocalist Viktor Le Givens, whose arrival in Berlin was delayed by a frightening hospitalization. Working through these and other adversities, she and the group take a strong anti-racist stand from the stage, imploring audience members to join in the grooving communal chant of “Black Family” (“the Black family is the strongest institution in the world”). Bat Dawid offers several other compelling elaborations on material from *The Oracle*, including “London” and “We Are Starzz,” in the company of bassist Dr. Adam Zanolini, drummers Isaiah Collier and Asher Gamedze, and the rest of a deeply simpatico octet. But she also unveils a generous amount of new material, including “Melo Deez From Heab’N,” the rhythmic lilt and phrasing of which capture her funky songcraft at its best.

The identity of Toronto fusionists BADBADNOTGOOD has largely been shaped by the company they keep. This is, after all, a group with the stylistic fluidity and instrumental dexterity to bring Ghostface Killah’s ’70s-funk fantasias to life, turn up the heat on Charlotte Day Wilson’s slow-burning R&B ballads, and allow Future Islands’ Samuel T. Herring to channel a past life as a cabaret soul singer. But in contrast to 2016’s star-studded *IV*, BADBADNOTGOOD’s *Talk Memory* is conspicuously lacking in vocal features. Rather, the group’s first album in five years is an all-instrumental affair that puts the focus squarely on their most crucial quality: the ever-present tension between compositional sophistication and freaked-out improvisation. That said, *Talk Memory* still boasts the sort of enviable guest list only BADBADNOTGOOD could assemble. They built a dream team of instrumentalists—including Brazilian composer Arthur Verocai, ambient icon Laraaji, electro-psych voyager Floating Points, and Kendrick Lamar saxophonist Terrace Martin—to infuse their grooves with a cinematic grandeur (and also help fill the space vacated by keyboardist Matty Taveres, who left the band in 2019). But while the album’s lustrous string arrangements and psychedelic harp flourishes speak to the group’s ever-expanding musical vision, *Talk Memory* is also fueled by a primal energy that’s more conducive to head-banging than chin-stroking—when bassist Chester Hansen activates his fuzz pedal and starts shredding on the colossal nine-minute opener “Signal From the Noise,” BBNG practically resembles a free-jazz Death From Above 1979. “We come from a background of listening to a lot of rock music when we were younger,” Hansen tells Apple Music. “When we started to play our instruments, \[saxophonist\] Leland \[Whitty\] was learning Iron Maiden solos, and \[drummer\] Alex \[Sowinski\] was playing a bunch of Rush and Led Zeppelin, so it\'s nice to be able to incorporate some of those elements on this record.” Here, Hansen talks us through his memories of *Talk Memory*, track by track. **“Signal From the Noise”** “In the years of playing shows \[after *IV*\], we did a lot of improv stuff, and the intro to this song was a bass interlude we did on stage—I would essentially play stuff that sounded like this. And then when we were writing stuff for this album, we wanted to build it into a full song. So we added the arrangements and the bass solo, and our engineer Nic \[Jodoin\] made a tape loop that he faded in over the end. We also had some additional production from Floating Points at the very end to make it even more psychedelic.” **“Unfolding (Momentum 73)”** “I think the idea behind this title was that the human body is 73% water. And the \'unfolding\' part refers to the fact that the main sax part sounds like it\'s actually unfolding. Leland had the first arpeggio that you hear on sax, and we wanted to build a song around that. We finished the song right before the pandemic, and then, over the last year, we sent it to Laraaji, who\'s a legendary ambient artist. He has vocal songs but he also plays zither and other instruments, so we thought it\'d be a cool twist to get him to play zither on this.” **“City of Mirrors”** “A lot of our favorite records have incredible string arrangements on them, but logistically it\'s sometimes difficult to work them in. We\'ve been really lucky in the past because Leland plays violin and viola, so previously, we\'d just record him a hundred times stacked on top of each other to make an orchestral sound. But for this album, we were able to reach out to Arthur Verocai, who\'s a massive influence on us and a true legend. So we sent him every song and then he sent back all the string arrangements that you hear, which really took everything to the next level.” **“Beside April”** “Mahavishnu Orchestra was a big influence on this song. In the past, we haven\'t really had a lot of songs with riffs like this, so it\'s cool to be able to include some stuff that has a lot of riffs. It made sense for us to release this as a single before the album came out, because it has a pretty epic energy. Karriem Riggins played on this with us. He came by when we were running through it in the studio, and liked how it sounded. He\'s obviously an amazing drummer, but for this one, he was like, \'Just give me a snare drum!\' So Alex played the drum kit, and then Karriem had a snare drum with brushes and we just set up a mic for him. He was making sounds that I had never heard from just a single drum before. It was really amazing.” **“Love Proceeding”** “I was out of town, and Leland and Alex got together and jammed an early version of this. One interesting thing about this album is that it\'s the first thing we\'ve done with just the three of us, because Matty—our keyboard player and founding member of the band—went his own way a couple years ago, so this is us trying to figure out what we\'re going to do, and if we can cover all the parts. For this one, Leland played guitar for the first half and then ran over to the sax to play the solo, and we did it like all in one take, which was pretty fun.” **“Timid, Intimidating”** “Another difference about this album in general is that we would bring in stuff that we had written individually and take it to the next level with the rest of the group, instead of being there for every part of the writing process all together. I was trying to write songs that had crazy riffs in them, basically. I had a really funny MIDI demo version of this that got deleted, so I had to remember it and teach it to the other guys. And then it turned into what you hear. It was just a really good framework for a couple of solos. It has a Steely Dan vibe now that I hear it—I wasn\'t really thinking of them at the time, but they\'re a big influence on us.\" **“Beside April (Reprise)”** “Before we had recorded the original version of \'Beside April,\' I was visiting my mom and I was playing on her piano and came up with this alternate version of it. We had some extra studio time one day, so I just recorded the piano part and then Verocai did his thing on it.” **“Talk Meaning”** “It was one of the last days in the studio and Terrace Martin came by for a couple of hours. We had run into him a lot on the road, but never got to do anything together in the studio. He was very generous with his time. Leland and Alex wrote the main melody and the chords for this, and then we wanted to play it in a jazz context, so we just showed Terrace the melody. This song had the most old-school mic setup: There\'s maybe a couple mics on the drums, one mic on the bass, and then one mic for both saxophones. So Leland and Terrace were both standing behind a baffle, and they had to move \[toward the mic\] and back depending on who was taking the lead. Then we added some keyboards and Verocai put an amazing arrangement on it. And for the finishing touch, we sent it to Brandee Younger, who\'s an amazing harpist, and she really took it to the next level and played a beautiful outro. It\'s really the most in-depth collaboration on this record.”

Lorde’s third album *Solar Power* was born out of an epiphany. “I was very much raised outdoors by the beach, in the ocean, outside,” the New Zealand pop titan tells Apple Music. “But it wasn\'t until I got my dog that I understood how precious the natural world is and how many gifts there are for someone like me to receive. I felt like all I was doing was paying attention and being rewarded tenfold with things that would not just lift my mood, but legitimately inspire me.” The death of her dog, Pearl, in 2019, slowed down the production of the album, but what Lorde learned from him—the joy of being outside, even if it’s just at your local park—flows through the finished product. Expressing all of that in the twisted, spring-tight pop of 2013’s *Pure Heroine* and its dizzying 2017 follow-up *Melodrama* was never going to work. So she turned instead to a (somewhat unlikely) palette crafted alongside returning producer Jack Antonoff—shuttling between LA and New Zealand in 2019 and 2020 and finishing it remotely during the pandemic—of ’70s Laurel Canyon and early-2000s pop. “I think, on paper, it doesn’t make any sense,” she says. “But I was like, ‘What’s something that’s captured the experience of being outside or feeling the sun and a certain kind of joy?’” *Solar Power* might well be seen as just that: an album to kick back with on a summer’s day. But there is, as Lorde puts it, “deep and shallow” to this record. There are meditations on celebrity culture (“California”) and the wellness industry (“Mood Ring”), alongside sorrow for the destruction of the natural world. This isn’t, however, a climate change album (“It definitely wasn\'t a goal of mine to make people care; I can\'t make that happen for you”). If it’s about anything, she says, it’s about “the passing of time and being OK with that. All my work is sort of about that. All these works are just me trying to ask a series of questions. And if that makes people ask their own questions of their world, then I’ve done a good job.” Read on as Ella Yelich-O’Connor guides us through *Solar Power*, one track at a time. **“The Path”** “This was the first one I wrote for the album, and I always knew it would open it. I wanted to bring people right up to speed: This is where I\'m at. This is the wave. As I get older, I feel the absurd nature of our modern life more every day, and some of the images in this song really play into that. I’ve also been thinking more about people in my position and the worship that comes towards someone like me. I thought about dismantling that and saying, ‘Let\'s leave that at the door for this one and make it about something else.’ It was really fun, golden and sassy to be like, ‘It\'s not going to be me. I\'m sorry. Let\'s redirect.’” **“Solar Power”** “This song was featherlight. It’s just a song about being happy in the sunshine, which is kind of a crazy move for me. But It\'s a bit dark and weird, with lots of cult and commune imagery. I knew that people would kind of be like, ‘What the fuck is she talking about?’ On the surface it’s light, but it’s got a lot to it.” **“California”** “California and LA are places I have a huge amount of affection for. I find it really alluring and mystical and kind of dreamy, but it also totally freaks me out. It isn\'t where I am supposed to be right now, so I\'ve tapped out. I\'ve been listening to a lot of The Mamas & The Papas, so that was a melodic reference. There’s kind of an eeriness to this song, and a lot of people have tried to get at that when capturing LA in movies and in music. I love the line about the kids in the line for ‘the new Supreme.’ It\'s a classic me thing to say something that is modern, but could sound classic.” **“Stoned at the Nail Salon”** “This was one of the first few we wrote. I think of it as coming right at the tail end of *Melodrama*. My life is very low-key and very domestic. It\'s like the life of a hippie housewife. It really struck me when the Grammys or VMAs were on and I was trying to get a stream on my computer and I couldn\'t. It felt so outside of that part of my life. I was starting to have these thoughts like, ‘Am I choosing the right path here by hanging up the phone, so to speak? And just hanging out with my dog and making lunch every day?’ The vocals that are on the song are the ones that we recorded the day we wrote it. So it kind of has this loose, organic quality that came to be a big part of *Solar Power*.” **“Fallen Fruit”** “I was going to LA to write with Jack and I started this on the plane. There’s always a slightly kind of unhinged or unfiltered quality to songs I write on planes, because I’m at altitude or something. I had been very careful before that point about not being preachy or like, ‘Hi, I’m a pop star and this is my climate change album!’ But I just had this moment where I was like, ‘This is the great loss of our lives and this will be what comes to define all of our lives and our world will be unrecognizable for my children.’ I loved trying to make it sound like this flower child’s lament and making it sound very Laurel Canyon, essentially. At the same time, there’s only one 808 on this record—and it’s in the breakdown of this song. It’s me describing an escape to somewhere safe that takes place in the future when our world has become uninhabitable. I liked snapping into a kind of modern thing for that.” **“Secrets From a Girl (Who\'s Seen It All)”** “This is me talking to my younger self trying to impart some of the things that I learned. It was a fun place to write from. To me it’s very Eurythmics meets Robyn. And then we got Robyn to do the incredible spoken part. She’s someone I have learned a huge amount from, through song. She really completed the experience.” **“The Man With the Axe”** “I wrote this track almost as a poem. I was very hung over and I think that fragile, vulnerable quality made it in here. It’s funny because it’s kind of melancholy, but I also think of it as very cozy. I’m expressing a huge amount of love and affection for someone. To me, it sounds very private—I sort of don’t even like thinking about people listening to it because it\'s just for me. \[US producer\] Malay did the coolest chords. I really didn’t change the poem, apart from maybe taking one line out. That was one of the biggest accomplishments of the album.” **“Dominoes”** “*Solar Power* is about utopias, and wellness is very much a utopia. It was also a big facet of the kind of ’60s, ’70s, New Age enlightenment, Age of Aquarius—seeking this thing that will give us the answers and make us feel whole. I feel like everyone kind of knows someone like this. It really cracked me up to say, ‘It’s strange to see you smoking marijuana, you used to do the most cocaine of anyone I’ve ever met.’ We all know that guy.” **“Big Star”** “The title of this song is a nod to Big Star the band, who I absolutely love. When I think about a song like ‘Thirteen’ by Big Star, there’s something so kind of childlike about it, and the song channels a similar thing. But I also loved the image of the people that we love being like celebrities to us. When I see a picture of a loved one, I feel like you get the same chemicals as if I was seeing a celebrity. They’re famous in my heart. But really, this is just a song about my dog. I wrote it when he was a puppy. I was just like, ‘Holy shit, I’ve never loved anything as much in my life.’” **“Leader of a New Regime”** “I wanted to have a little reprieve and go in that Crosby, Stills & Nash direction a little bit and be like, ‘Where’s it going to go from here?’ Whether it’s culturally, politically, environmentally, socially, spiritually. I felt that desire for doing something new.” **“Mood Ring”** “It’s full satire, inhabiting a person who’s feeling really lost and disconnected in the modern world and is trying to feel well, however she can. I felt like so many people would be able to relate to that. It was funny and gnarly to write. The melodies and the production were a great blend of that early-2000s sound and then that kind of Age of Aquarius energy. They both very much had to be present on this song.” **“Oceanic Feeling”** “I knew this would be the last track. I really wanted it to sound like when I get up in the morning at home and go outside and think about what the day’s going to hold. Am I going to go to the beach? Am I going to go fishing? What’s going to happen? I wanted to make something that people from New Zealand would hear and would feel like, ‘Oh, I’m this. That\'s where I’m from.’ But I was also ruminating on a lot. My little brother had been in a car accident and had had a concussion and was really lost and confused. And I wanted to say to him that it was going to be OK. I was thinking a lot about my parents and this deep connection we have to our land. I was thinking about my children. I really liked the end saying, ‘I’ll know when it’s time to take off my robes and step into the choir.’ It sort of connects that first sentiment of ‘If you\'re looking for a savior, that’s not me’ and ‘One day, maybe I won’t be doing this. Who knows?’ My music is so singular. I’m pretty much at the center of it. I thought that was a really powerful image to leave with: ‘One day, I too will depart.’”

Baroque flourishes, fingerpicking arrangements, complex instrumental parts: These are some of the elements that characterize Ryley Walker’s crafty songwriting on *Course in Fable*, his fifth solo album. For an artist who’s regularly summoned the spirit of \'70s British folk rock while peppering in just a dash of rootsy flair—from 2015’s *Primrose Green* to his Dave Matthews Band covers album *The Lillywhite Sessions*—Walker builds on these foundations as he pushes further into improvisational jazz and prog rock. The native Illinois musician enlisted some of the major players in Chicago\'s experimental music scene to flesh out his vision, embracing virtuosic guitar tapping (“Clad With Bunk”), dub-tinged grooves (“Pond Scum Ocean”), and rough-edged jamming (“Rang Dizzy”) to bring his high-flying sound to life. And even if his city-dwelling observations are just as free-flowing, they capture the everyday essence of going on aimless strolls past nail salons and fluorescent-lit corner stores: “If only I gave to charity more often/The city streets would have a spit shine that is glowing.”

Steve Gunn thought he was ready to begin recording his sixth solo LP in early 2020. “In retrospect,” the Brooklyn singer-songwriter tells Apple Music, “I wasn’t. I was trying to force it.” As the pandemic scuttled all plans to record and tour, he began “immersing” himself in his demos, refining his work, trading ideas with longtime collaborator Justin Tripp, a key player on 2014’s *Way Out Weather*. “It was transformative,” Gunn says of the experience, which saw him embrace writing on piano and classical guitar. “We talked a lot about how we wanted to make the music more melodic, to give the music more space, to not overdo it, to let the songs live and breathe in a more simple way. I think I cracked through a certain shell of myself or something. I just calmed down.” You can certainly hear that in *Other You*, an iridescent set of bottomless folk and gentle rock that Gunn eventually recorded in a bubble, in LA, with producer Rob Schnapf (Elliott Smith, Beck, Guided By Voices) later that year. It’s a record that’s rooted in empathy, in stepping outside of yourself. And following the loss of a close friend to COVID in the early stages of the pandemic, it came at a crucial moment for Gunn. “It was a shock,” he says of his friend’s death. “I went through a really hard time in the beginning. But I did a lot of work to pull myself out of it, really relying on this record, on the process of making it. It was a real letting-go period for me—I started accepting a lot of things and I started feeling a lot better. Partially, I think that’s what it’s about.” Here, Gunn tells us the stories behind some of the album’s songs. **“Other You”** “I was doing a lot of harmonizing, which was new to me. I couldn’t get this one note and Rob was trying to help me, playing the note on the piano. He opened this program and replicated my voice to sing the note, and he played it back to me through headphones. It was pretty incredible—it was me, but it sounded like a robot. He was like, ‘Do you hear that? Sing to that. Sing to the other you.’ I was like, ‘Oh, my God. The other you: That’s the title of the record.’ It just made so much sense. That’s essentially what the song is—finding a different space, different sorts of inspirations, a different sound.” **“Fulton”** “Walking is very important to me, in particular when I was writing this record. I was wandering around my neighborhood, thinking about the people that are near and dear to me, how supportive they’ve been, and how sometimes joy and happiness can be just tapping you on the shoulder. I was thinking of me, shutting down and sitting in silence, letting a lot of things go, releasing a lot of stuff that I was holding onto really tightly. There was a particular moment that I reference in the song where I was listening to news radio, and the station just shut off. It represented what I’d been trying to achieve in enjoying silence and realizing how powerful that can be.” **“Circuit Rider”** “I came up with this riff, and it’s circular—goes backwards and then it goes the other way. It’s a reel or, in modern terms, a loop. It came from a British folk style that I learned how to play a lot of and, lyrically, I feel like we’re living in a time of real science fiction. I was trying to write a song from the perspective of a cyborg, the circuit rider, who’s observing someone in modern times, who’s in a current situation, and being super distraught as they’re observing. I feel like there are a lot of detriments to the way that people interact and socialize, and the way that people perceive reality and ego. It’s dangerous territory. I was imagining this creaky robot telling us, ‘You don’t have to submit yourself to this.’” **“Protection”** “In 2019, I was all over the world, and I just came back completely empty, feeling like I needed a break to figure out a lot of things in my life. I was thinking about how you can rely on a lighthouse to get back to where you’re going if you’re lost. It’s a hopeful song about trying to find your path and it’s not just about myself—it’s an empathetic song for others as well. And I have to say, it coincided with the heightened level of anxiety that we’ve been in—how unprotected we’ve all felt. There’s a new sense of vulnerability with everything.” **“Reflection”** “Originally, it was just this super-simple piano thing, and it helped me sing differently, in a more emphatic way, and really use my voice. I was thinking a lot about Robert Wyatt: It almost sounds like he’s visualizing certain things, playing these chords, almost doing some free-associative language. He’s very playful with his words, and it almost feels like he’s being spontaneous as he’s composing. I just did this off-the-cuff, in a style that, perhaps, Robert Wyatt would. It feels really free and not precious. It paints a picture.” **“Ever Feel That Way”** “There was this incident that happened in Atlanta—this young man, Rayshard Brooks, was murdered by the police. I was so heartbroken to read about it. He basically asked them for help. He was driving home to see his family, and he was drunk in a parking lot, trying to sober up. There’s this Tibetan exercise called Tonglen, which is where you sit and meditate and you think about others—the people you love, but also everyone that’s surrounding you and what they’re going through. This guy, he just needed a little bit of help. I was thinking about him, and turning it back on the cop to say, ‘Hey, man. Have you ever felt this way? You definitely have.’ I was just trying to convey the fact that I’ve certainly been there, and everyone I know has been there. Everyone needs help.”

After the release of 2018’s *Wide Awake!*, Parquet Courts guitarist Austin Brown was feeling the effects of nearly a decade of touring and recording. “To be frank, I was a bit disillusioned with music in general,” he tells Apple Music. “There was this exhaustion. Maybe I was just a little bit bored with the state of rock music or indie music—it was a hard world to relate to, and I’m not sure we ever did. But I wanted to figure out a way to reject ideas of whatever was being pushed as culture, and I wanted to do it in a productive way by offering up something better.” That something is *Sympathy for Life*, his Brooklyn outfit’s seventh full-length. In an effort to branch out both musically and socially, Brown became a member of The Loft, New York’s longest-running (and most influential) underground dance party, ground zero for disco in the 1970s. While there is still plenty of rock to be found here (see: the hypnotic crunch of “Homo Sapien”), it’s often braided together with elements of dance music, in the spirit of Talking Heads, Happy Mondays, and Primal Scream. The emphasis was on rhythm, the goal to write songs a DJ could easily unfurl at a party. And to get there, they largely switched up their lyrics-first approach to writing, recording and editing together long stretches of improvisation. “We’ve been together for 10 years now,” Brown says. “One of the biggest influences on the sound of the record is us utilizing that. Our biggest asset and our best instrument is just us, playing together as a band.” Here, Brown guides us through songs from the album. **“Walking at a Downtown Pace”** “Every day in the mix session, we would spend a few hours just on this song, listening to the drums and moving stuff around, finding that sweet spot—what makes you move and what doesn\'t. We really wanted a song that a DJ can play at a party, and that\'s why we really needed to get the kick drum to hit, the snare drum to really be on that right beat. It was important for us to have that crossover feel, between rock and dance. But in trying to find what that would mean for us, it felt like a really important song for the band and for the record.” **“Black Widow Spider”** “A lot of the songs were cultivated from improvisations, and this is one of them. That guitar sound is super unique, and it\'s integral to this sound on this record. We fed Andrew\'s \[Savage\] rhythm guitar—and I think maybe the lead guitar as well—through the MS-20 synthesizer. I had this space station dub set up, where I had a 16-channel mixer, five synthesizers, but then also effects like tape echo and the harmonizer—the one that you would hear on David Bowie\'s *Low*. It\'s this vintage 8-bit digital pitch-shifting thing that I just am obsessed with.” **“Marathon of Anger”** “It\'s about living in quarantine during Black Lives Matter and just all of the things that were happening around that time, but also looking forward to what happens next. It\'s about getting to work to make the change that we need to see collectively in our personal lives and in our community. And right now, this is the marathon of anger, but what happens next? You can\'t just be angry, there has to be something that comes after this.” **“Just Shadows”** “Within the band there\'s been an ongoing conversation about recycling. And I guess this song is sort of summed up by that conversation for me: It just gets really frustrating when you\'re in your kitchen being like, ‘I\'m not really sure if this is recyclable, but I feel like if I don\'t do this right I\'m a bad person.’ And the rules about recycling are honestly so confusing, and they\'re put onto us as individuals, rather than the corporations which are literally making the products. The song lists the ways that we have these false choices about doing the right thing, how we find the things that are good for us, how do we know what\'s good for us or good for the world, and have these choices put in front of us that don\'t always make sense.” **“Plant Life”** “The word that \[producer\] Roddy \[McDonald\] used to describe it was ‘Balearic.’ It hit all these notes, and I had them build this up to be this Mediterranean island vibe, a Grace Jones ‘Pull Up to the Bumper’ kind of groove—more of a feeling or a mood. It’s like a sunset or a sunrise, a song that you could play on the beach during that time, but at night or in the morning. That late-’80s rock-meets-dance in England vibe: It was never about hard acid house. It was just about this mellow groove. It helped these guys that were in rock bands understand that transition between what can we do to integrate ourselves into this new rave world, this dance world. ‘Plant Life’ is probably the most pure expression of that on this record.” **“Application/Apparatus”** “The lyrics are sort of about this conflict between a person versus the robot algorithm takeover. I feel like the music really matches that in quality—it’s very electronic, robotic, a really direct expression of the lyrics. That song is sort of this total package, a complete circle of aesthetic and lyrical content and deeper meaning.” **“Homo Sapien”** “This is a song that Andrew brought fully realized. At first, it was the kind of track I was trying to avoid on this record—just more of a rock song. But the more that we worked on it, the more I thought, ‘This is actually cool and it fits in aesthetically.’ It feels like one of our more accomplished high-energy tracks. It\'s not beating you over the head with speed or anything—it’s got a groove to it. But the sound of all the guitars and everything just feels like it actually expresses the energy in an intuitive way that we haven\'t always had. It growls and snarls and just feels very primitive and caveman. But in a way that\'s got swagger to it, which I can really appreciate, because I\'m just getting a little old for that finger-wagging kind of punk.” **“Sympathy for Life”** “I was really obsessed with the intersection between Afrobeat and dub when I was thinking about songs for this record—really into polyrhythm and really wanting to incorporate that. I worked really hard, ended up in some pretty funky zones that were really, really hard to recreate live in the studio.” **“Zoom Out”** “It was really inspired by being at some of these parties that I\'ve been going to—dance parties and disco parties, the experience at The Loft. That song is more about the joy that you can experience through community, what you have when you take materialism out of your relationships.” **“Trullo”** “I think this is maybe my favorite song on the record. It’s another one that was cut up from a long improvisation. It’s a very sample-heavy track. I put in a guitar solo that came off of the song \'Bodies Made Of,’ off \[2014’s\] *Sunbathing Animal*. And there\'s some other hidden samples in there as well that I can\'t even remember. It’s about living inside of a house in the shape of a head, kind of like living in a skull.” **“Pulcinella”** “Pulcinella is this creepy Italian clown, or a masked figure sometimes appearing as a clown. It’s playful, it\'s kind of scary, it\'s sort of like a visual or a metaphorical antagonist for themes that pop up throughout the album. The lyrics I always come back to are where it talks about carrying a chain, because I think that carrying around a relationship\'s worth of experiences or a life\'s worth of experiences can get quite heavy and burdensome when you\'re trying to connect with people. The thing that I love about this song is how naked it feels, especially considering the production on a lot of the other songs. It felt like a sensitive way to close out the album.”

On the intro to Tony Allen\'s posthumous *There Is No End*, we hear the voice of the iconic Nigerian-born, Paris-based drummer himself, explaining this album’s very title. Quite literally, he says “there is no end” to the hypnotic loop of a distinctive drum groove called Afrobeat, which Allen created and implemented as a cofounder of Fela Kuti’s groundbreaking band Africa 70. On a more spiritual note, there is no end to the creative legacy of a figure like Allen, despite his death in 2020 at 79. With Afrobeat’s supple accents and subdivisions, its calm yet inescapable funk, Allen impacted groove-based music in a league comparable to fellow drummers Bernard Purdie and Clyde Stubblefield. In his post-Fela years, Allen struck up collaborations with the likes of Blur’s and Gorillaz’s Damon Albarn, who coproduced “Cosmosis” here (featuring Nigerian British rapper Skepta and Nigerian poet and novelist Ben Okri). Allen also signed with Blue Note and released *The Source* in 2017, favoring a more acoustic sound with brass and saxophones. *There Is No End*, by contrast, places Allen in more of a hip-hop context, collaborating with younger rappers and singers. Allen completed the backbone of the project in 2019, but it was up to producers Vincent Taeger and Vincent Taurelle to finish it with Allen’s blessing after his death. Allen’s airborne beats hold it all together, and the rappers feed off of his drive and syncopation with riveting results—especially the female guests on “Stumbling Down” (Zambian-born Sampa the Great), “Mau Mau” (Kenyan-born Nah Eeto), and “One Inna Million” (West London underground phenom LAVA LA RUE). Detroit’s Danny Brown takes a ferocious turn on “Deer in Headlights,” its grungy, stripped-down feel highlighting Allen’s trademark groove with exceptional clarity.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor albums are typically accompanied by a collective ideological statement of intent from the Montreal instrumental ensemble. And coming in the midst of a pandemic that has greatly magnified the societal inequalities they’ve always railed against, the missive/press release that accompanies *G\_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END!* practically reads like a ransom note, with calls to “take power from the police and give it to the neighbourhoods that they terrorise” and “tax the rich until they\'re impoverished,” among others. But where they were once the doomsday prophets of pre-millennium post-rock, the band\'s response to the intensifying turmoil of 21st-century life is to radiate an ever-greater degree of positivity through their music. Godspeed\'s seventh album adheres to a similar structure as their post-reunion releases (with two mammoth, multi-sectional movements each flanked by a shorter piece) while tapping into a similar spirit of hard-fought perseverance. However, *G\_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END!* is distinguished by its heightened sense of clarity and levity. In contrast to the sustained, swelling drones of 2017’s *Luciferian Towers* and the defiant doom-metal behemoths of 2015’s *Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress*, this set’s opening four-track suite gradually blossoms from a minimalist, militaristic march into a delirious orchestral swirl, before entering an extended comedown jam that suggests ’70s Floyd jamming with Crazy Horse. The equally expansive companion piece (spread over tracks 6 and 7) likewise travels from desolate valleys to staggering peaks and back again, but rallies for a triumphant victory-lap gallop that could very well count as the most elating piece of music this band has ever produced. Even the brief meditative ambient symphony that closes the record is embedded with inspirational energy—it’s called “OUR SIDE HAS TO WIN,” so consider *G\_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END!* a sonic premonition of the better, more humane world that awaits us on the other side.

Lucy Dacus’ favorite songs are “the ones that take 15 minutes to write,” she tells Apple Music. “I\'m easily convinced that the song is like a unit when it comes out in one burst. In many ways, I feel out of control, like it\'s not my decision what I write.” On her third LP, the Philadelphia-based singer-songwriter surrenders to autobiography with a set of spare and intimate indie rock that combines her memory of growing up in Richmond, Virginia, with details she pulled from journals she’s kept since she was 7, much of it shaped by her religious upbringing. It’s as much about what we remember as how and why we remember it. “The record was me looking at my past, but now when I hear them it\'s almost like the songs are a part of the past, like a memory about memory,” she says. “This must be what I was ready to do, and I have to trust that. There\'s probably stuff that has happened to me that I\'m still not ready to look at and I just have to wait for the day that I am.” Here, she tells us the story behind every song on the album. **“Hot & Heavy”** “My first big tour in 2016—after my first record came out—was two and a half months, and at the very end of it, I broke up with my partner at the time. I came back to Richmond after being gone for the longest I\'d ever been away and everything felt different: people’s perception of me; my friend group; my living situation. I was, for the first time, not comfortable in Richmond, and I felt really sad about that because I had planned on being here my whole life. This song is about returning to where you grew up—or where you spent any of your past—and being hit with an onslaught of memories. I think of my past self as a separate person, so the song is me speaking to me. It’s realizing that at one point in my life, everything was ahead of me and my life could\'ve ended up however. It still can, but it\'s like now I know the secret.” **“Christine”** “It starts with a scene that really happened. Me and my friend were sitting in the backseat and she\'s asleep on my shoulder. We’re coming home from a sermon that was about how humans are evil and children especially need to be guided or else they\'ll fall into the hands of the devil. She was dating this guy who at the time was just not treating her right, and I played her the song. I was like, ‘I just want you to hear this once. I\'ll put it away, but you should know that I would not support you if you get married. I don\'t think that this is the best you could do.’ She took it to heart, but she didn\'t actually break up with the guy. They\'re still together and he\'s changed and they\'ve changed and I don\'t feel that way anymore. I feel like they\'re in a better place, but at the time it felt very urgent to me that she get out of that situation.” **“First Time”** “I was on a kind of fast-paced walk and I started singing to myself, which is how I write most of my songs. I had all this energy and I started jogging for no reason, which, if you know me, is super not me—I would not electively jog. I started writing about that feeling when you\'re in love for the first time and all you think about is the one person and how you find access to yourself through them. I paused for a second because I was like, ‘Do I really want to talk about early sexual experiences? No, just do it. If you don\'t like it, don\'t share it.’ It’s about discovery: your body and your emotional capacity and how you\'re never going to feel it that way you did the first time again. At the time, I was very worried that I\'d never feel that way again. The truth was, I haven’t—but I have felt other wonderful things.” **“VBS”** “I don\'t want my identity to be that I used to believe in God because I didn\'t even choose that, but it\'s inextricable to who I am and my upbringing. I like that in the song, the setting is \[Vacation Bible School\], but the core of the song is about a relationship. My first boyfriend, who I met at VBS, used to snort nutmeg. He was a Slayer fan and it was contentious in our relationship because he loved Slayer even more than God and I got into Slayer thinking, ‘Oh, maybe he\'ll get into God.’ He was one of the kids that went to church but wasn\'t super into it, whereas I was defining my whole life by it. But I’ve got to thank him for introducing me to Slayer and The Cure, which had the biggest impact on me.” **“Cartwheel”** “I was taking a walk with \[producer\] Collin \[Pastore\] and as we passed by his school, I remembered all of the times that I was forced to play dodgeball, and how the heat in Richmond would get so bad that it would melt your shoes. That memory ended up turning into this song, about how all my girlfriends at that age were starting to get into boys before I wanted to and I felt so panicked. Why are we sneaking boys into the sleepover? They\'re not even talking. We were having fun and now no one is playing with me anymore. When my best friend told me when she had sex for the first time, I felt so betrayed. I blamed it on God, but really it was personal, because I knew that our friendship was over as I knew it, and it was.” **“Thumbs”** “I was in the car on the way to dinner in Nashville. We were going to a Thai restaurant, meeting up with some friends, and I just had my notepad out. Didn\'t notice it was happening, and then wrote the last line, ‘You don\'t owe him shit,’ and then I wrote it down a second time because I needed to hear it for myself. My birth father is somebody that doesn\'t really understand boundaries, and I guess I didn\'t know that I believed that, that I didn\'t owe him anything, until I said it out loud. When we got to the restaurant, I felt like I was going to throw up, and so they all went into the restaurant, got a table, and I just sat there and cried. Then I gathered myself and had some pad thai.” **“Going Going Gone”** “I stayed up until like 1:00 am writing this cute little song on the little travel guitar that I bring on tour. I thought for sure I\'d never put it on a record because it\'s so campfire-ish. I never thought that it would fit tonally on anything, but I like the meaning of it. It\'s about the cycle of boys and girls, then men and women, and then fathers and daughters, and how fathers are protective of their daughters potentially because as young men they either witnessed or perpetrated abuse. Or just that men who would casually assault women know that their daughters are in danger of that, and that\'s maybe why they\'re so protective. I like it right after ‘Thumbs’ because it\'s like a reprieve after the heaviest point on the record.” **“Partner in Crime”** “I tried to sing a regular take and I was just sounding bad that day. We did Auto-Tune temporarily, but then we loved it so much we just kept it. I liked that it was a choice. The meaning of the song is about this relationship I had when I was a teenager with somebody who was older than me, and how I tried to act really adult in order to relate or get that person\'s respect. So Auto-Tune fits because it falsifies your voice in order to be technically more perfect or maybe more attractive.” **“Brando”** “I really started to know about older movies in high school, when I met this one friend who the song is about. I feel like he was attracted to anything that could give him superiority—he was a self-proclaimed anarchist punk, which just meant that he knew more and knew better than everyone. He used to tell me that he knew me better than everyone else, but really that could not have been true because I hardly ever talked about myself and he was never satisfied with who I was.” **“Please Stay”** “I wrote it in September of 2019, after we recorded most of the record. I had been circling around this role that I have played throughout my life, where I am trying to convince somebody that I love very much that their life is worth living. The song is about me just feeling helpless but trying to do anything I can to offer any sort of way in to life, instead of a way out. One day at a time is the right pace to aim for.” **“Triple Dog Dare”** “In high school I was friends with this girl and we would spend all our time together. Neither of us were out, but I think that her mom saw that there was romantic potential, even though I wouldn\'t come out to myself for many years later. The first verses of the song are true: Her mom kept us apart, our friendship didn\'t last. But the ending of the song is this fictitious alternative where the characters actually do prioritize each other and get out from under the thumbs of their parents and they steal a boat and they run away and it\'s sort of left to anyone\'s interpretation whether or not they succeed at that or if they die at sea. There’s no such thing as nonfiction. I felt empowered by finding out that I could just do that, like no one was making me tell the truth in that scenario. Songwriting doesn\'t have to be reporting.”

This is the AC/DC album that no one thought would happen. After a tumultuous period that saw the death of guitarist and co-founder Malcolm Young, the departures of bassist Cliff Williams and drummer Phil Rudd, and the (thought-to-be) career-ending hearing loss of vocalist Brian Johnson, it was widely assumed that 2014’s *Rock or Bust* would be AC/DC’s swan song. “You can’t call an album *Rock or Bust* and then go bust,” lead guitarist Angus Young says. With Johnson, Rudd, and Williams back in the fold, *POWER UP* is a massive triumph. True to AC/DC’s nearly half-century of domination, the album sees the Australian masters in top form, as evidenced by the groove-powered opener “Realize,” the frenetic “Demon Fire,” and anthemic lead single “Shot in the Dark.” Elsewhere, Johnson cowboys up on the western-themed “Wild Reputation” and delivers a classic AC/DC double entendre on the suitably lascivious “Money Shot.” Dedicated to Malcolm, the record features songs that he and his brother Angus worked on together back in 2007 and 2008. “These ideas came from just before we did *Black Ice*, when me and Malcolm had been in the studio for a long time just writing songs,” Angus reveals. “We had so much material.” With the COVID-19 pandemic keeping much of the world on lockdown and just about eliminating live music, AC/DC decided to release *POWER UP* to tide fans over until the band can safely hit the stage again. “I think we waited until the world hit a limit of misery with this thing,” Johnson says, “and just said, ‘Right, time to cheer it up.’”

Loretta Lynn may be approaching 90, but the country legend shows no sign of age on her 50th (!) studio album. The title is a clever nod to Lynn’s 1966 *You Ain’t Woman Enough*, a landmark release that notched Lynn her first No. 1 country album and spawned a lasting fan favorite with its feisty title track. Guests show the depth and breadth of Lynn’s ever-growing legacy, with living icons Tanya Tucker and Reba McEntire, commercial juggernaut Carrie Underwood, and fringe-country queen Margo Price all making appearances. McEntire and Underwood join Lynn on the title track, a new song that pays homage to “You Ain’t Woman Enough” while reflecting Lynn’s current station. Price lends her Lynn-indebted vocal to “One’s on the Way,” with Lynn sounding as good in 2021 as she did on the track’s original 1971 recording. And Tucker helps Lynn close out the LP with a new recording of “You Ain’t Woman Enough,” bringing the album—to crib a phrase from the title of Lynn’s own 2016 studio album—full circle. While the bulk of the album’s material draws from her storied catalog, *Still Woman Enough* is a fun, fresh reminder that Lynn’s still got it.

In a promo video for Dinosaur Jr.’s 2016 LP *Give a Glimpse of What Yer Not*, singer-songwriter Kurt Vile offered a hearty endorsement as he listened to the album for the very first time: “Riffs, sad lyrics—that’s my Dino,” he said, his daughter seated beside him and his speakers blaring. “That’s the Dino I like.” Five years later, Vile’s formally entered the fray as a co-producer on *Sweep It Into Space*, a follow-up that further reinforces the notion that the legendary indie rock outfit is the rare band to actually improve since reuniting, as they did upon restoring their original lineup in 2005. You can hear touches of Vile’s influence on the off-kilter, piano-driven pop of “Take It Back,” as well as in the bittersweet chimes of first single “I Ran Away,” which sounds like a clear (yet distinctly fuzzy) descendent of Jackson Browne’s 1977 classic “Running on Empty.” But by design, Dino’s 12th full-length delivers and continues to refine exactly what Vile has come to love and anyone who’s paid attention for the last four decades might expect: wave upon strangely comforting wave of J Mascis’ supernatural guitar work (“To Be Waiting”) and natural melancholy (“I Ain’t,” which features loopy backing vocals from Vile), plus a Lou Barlow-penned highlight that ranks among his best (“Garden”).

“Everything I make comes from the ethos of wanting to move the body, the mind, and the soul,” composer and trumpeter Emma-Jean Thackray tells Apple Music. “It’s music with a message, something to make us realize our common humanity, as opposed to focusing on our differences.” It is a musical mantra that perfectly reflects the Yorkshire-born musician’s open-ended approach to her craft. Having started out playing in local brass bands, the chance discovery of a Miles Davis version of a trumpet concerto sent Thackray crate-digging for jazz and ultimately to London to study jazz composition. Here, Thackray made a name for herself within the city’s burgeoning jazz scene, collaborating with the likes of pianist Elliot Galvin and drummer Dougal Taylor—but also acted as a creative resident with the London Symphony Orchestra and featured on work by UK post-punk band Squid and with MC Pinty. Her debut album on her own imprint Movementt is just as varied and creatively searching. “I was getting pissed off that I was only being called a trumpeter, when I am actually so much more than that—so I decided to make this record a showcase of all the creative facets of me,” she says. The resulting 14 tracks, *Yellow*, are produced by Thackray and feature her own vocals front and centre, singing about everything from psychedelic experiences on the ’70s jazz-funk of “Say Something” to Vedic mythology on the Afrobeat-inflected “Rahu & Ketu.” “*Yellow* is giving people the space to be moved, in whichever way they want,” Thackray says. Read on for her in-depth thoughts on the album, track by track. **“Mercury”** “This was the first track I wrote for the album—the bassline and melody just popped into my head fully formed after a meditation and the sound world was there. I love how McCoy Tyner voices melodies on the piano, and that was a reference I gave for how my keys player Lyle Barton could approach the Rhodes on this track. Mercury is the planet of communication, and I have a poem at the end of the song showing how we can build love through it, by talking and listening to each other.” **“Say Something”** “This follows on thematically from ‘Mercury’ as it’s about getting someone to speak their mind, rather than saying what they think they should say or saying nothing at all. There is a tight, housey beginning which should feel a little restricting and then it opens up into a bridge with a huge soundscape, like someone opening up their mind and finding their voice.” **“About That”** “I had this idea for a drum groove that I got Dougal to play and then I sampled and looped it to layer everything else on top at home. Usually I have the whole song worked out in my head before I begin, but for this it developed naturally, from the bass drum resonances to the bassline—it all has an electric Miles Davis, *Bitches Brew* feel to it.” **“Venus”** “Venus is the planet of love and passion, and I wanted to emulate that in this song, to get the listeners into a trancelike state. The music is in a measure of five but there is a 4/4 feeling going through it, and where these different time signatures intersect is where the trance happens—it is a sacred combination. There is also chanting in the song, calling out to love ourselves, which can be a really hard journey to go on in a world that sometimes feels set up to tell you not to.” **“Green Funk”** “A German promoter once brought my band some weed before a show and he called it ‘green funk,’ and from that moment, we just started calling it that too. I’m a big fan of P-Funk, and I wanted this to sound like my love for that music, rather than a copy of P-Funk itself—so it’s packed with playful vocals and horn stabs.” **“Third Eye”** “Charles Stepney from Rotary Connection is a massive hero of mine, and this track builds a sound world that is something of an homage to him. I’m really proud of this one, as it’s a bit of fun essentially playing around with two chords and encouraging people to use their intuition in the lyrics, to engage with that ‘third eye.’” **“May There Be Peace”** “This is an adaptation of a prayer that Alice Coltrane had recorded, and the tune plays as a dedication to her and her use of sound as a religious practice and spiritual connection. I have a few sizes and pitches of medicine bowls which feature on the song, and it all acts as a palate cleanser. We’re halfway through the record and this is a break to say you’re safe—you haven’t lost your mind!” **“Sun”** “This tune plays as if jazz met house, which is how I told my drummer Dougal to approach the groove. It also has an outro at the end, which is a nod to the outros I really love in hip-hop—these skits and short stories which come after something heavy in the song itself. That section just came from a jam in the studio that we played to shake off some nervous energy.” **“Golden Green”** \"This is about as close to a love song as I can get—if you listen to the lyrics, they’re about my partner, since he really does smell like biscuits and weed and cocoa butter! Musically, I wanted to create a mixture between an LA hip-hop feel and a 1970s spacious synth sound.” **“Spectre”** “‘Spectre’ is about dealing with mental health problems in yourself and in your loved ones—it can often feel like this spectral presence following you around. It was one of the first things I wrote for the album, since the image of someone feeling like a photocopy of themselves when they are in a bad period was so clear in my mind. Hearing it out loud in the studio was very cathartic, and there are bells at the end to cleanse the energy and to drive away any negative spirits.” **“Rahu & Ketu”** “This is based on a Vedic myth of this immortal being who is split into two after betraying the god Shiva and then these two parts are forced to live as opposites, like the head and the tail or the sun and moon. I love this duality of opposition and balance; it reminds me of the Taoist ideals I was brought up with. Musically, there is a representation of balance with this cyclical feel we create by not marking out the downbeat.” **“Yellow”** “This is another homage to the spiritual works of Alice Coltrane. I wanted to capture the spirit of an ashram, where people have shed all outside life and are focusing on truth, which is what I’ve tried to do in this record too. I use yellow to embody positivity and gratitude in my meditation, and the lyrics are the simplest way I can express the need for sharing love and providing oneness with each other.” **“Our People”** “The lyrics explain everything in this song. I’m singing that I want everyone to love each other and realize that we all come from the same stuff but that we’re also not all the same. Backgrounds and cultures give us a unique story, which we need to be respectful of. There’s a cosmic, jazz-funk vibe to the music, inspired by Stanton Davis.” **“Mercury (In Retrograde)”** “We recorded this straight after ‘Mercury’ in the studio, and it is a cosmic reference to bookend the record. It is musically retrograded, since the bassline and chord sequence is backwards and the voices are backwards, which sounds like ‘here we come,’ and I really love that. It feels like a new beginning in an ending.”

Over a decade in the making, *Abantu / Before Humans* is a retro-futurist prequel to BLK JKS’s momentous 2009 debut *After Robots*. Amongst a flurry of trumpets, brass, horns, and guitars, the art-rockers widen their palette alongside esteemed guests Madala Kunene, Money Mark, Vieux Farka Touré, Morena Leraba, and Ali Magassa. These matchups pair their Afrocentric manifesto with cascading takes on jazz, post-apocalyptic funk, dub, desert blues, and prog rock.