musicOMH's Top 50 Albums Of 2020

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

A mere 11 months passed between the release of *Lover* and its surprise follow-up, but it feels like a lifetime. Written and recorded remotely during the first few months of the global pandemic, *folklore* finds the 30-year-old singer-songwriter teaming up with The National’s Aaron Dessner and longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff for a set of ruminative and relatively lo-fi bedroom pop that’s worlds away from its predecessor. When Swift opens “the 1”—a sly hybrid of plaintive piano and her naturally bouncy delivery—with “I’m doing good, I’m on some new shit,” you’d be forgiven for thinking it was another update from quarantine, or a comment on her broadening sensibilities. But Swift’s channeled her considerable energies into writing songs here that double as short stories and character studies, from Proustian flashbacks (“cardigan,” which bears shades of Lana Del Rey) to outcast widows (“the last great american dynasty”) and doomed relationships (“exile,” a heavy-hearted duet with Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon). It’s a work of great texture and imagination. “Your braids like a pattern/Love you to the moon and to Saturn,” she sings on “seven,” the tale of two friends plotting an escape. “Passed down like folk songs, the love lasts so long.” For a songwriter who has mined such rich detail from a life lived largely in public, it only makes sense that she’d eventually find inspiration in isolation.

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

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

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

AFTER THE GREAT STORM finds Brun in questing mode, her crystal-clear, affecting voice haunted by electronic and analogue textures. The emotionally charged ‘Don’t Run And Hide’ and ‘Honey’’s laidback, soulful grooves reflect Brun’s love of trip hop while acknowledging contemporary acts including SiR, Kendrick Lamar, Anderson Paak and Solange, and ‘Take Hold Of Me’ nods to The Knife’s ‘Silent Shout’. Jennie Abrahamson and Linnea Olsson also guest on ‘Crumbs’, before ‘We Need A Mother’ closes the album in mournful but optimistic style. “Both albums deal with the bigger questions in life,” says Brun, “but in 2020 these questions have become even bigger. Even though I wrote most of them before this whole pandemic started, I feel they all have a message that fits the situation we’re in…” AFTER THE GREAT STORM is Brun’s eighth album, mostly written in the Norwegian mountains during summer 2019. It was largely recorded at Stockholm’s Atlantis Studios and Studio Bruket, home to Tonbruket and the studio where musician and co-producer Martin Hederos – who also co-wrote a number of songs – and Studio Bruket’s own house sound technician Anton Sundell reside. Hederos and Sundell co-produced with Brun, and others present include Tonbruket’s Johan Lindström and Dan Berglund, bassist Felisia Westberg, Per Eklund (who drums on the album and co-produced ´We Need a Mother´) and Samuel Starck (who created many of the signature synth sounds and co-produced ‘Take Hold of Me’), as well as five further drummers.

When it came to crafting her fourth album, Jessie Ware had one word in mind. “Escapism,” the Londoner tells Apple Music of *What’s Your Pleasure?*, a collection of suitably intoxicating soul- and disco-inspired pop songs to transport you out of your everyday and straight onto a crowded dance floor. “I wanted it to be fun. The premise was: Will this make people want to have sex? And will this make people want to dance? I’ve got a family now, so going out and being naughty and debauched doesn’t happen that much.” And yet the singer (and, in her spare time, wildly popular podcaster) could have never foreseen just how much we would *all* be in need of that release by the time *What’s Your Pleasure?* came to be heard—amid a global pandemic and enforced lockdowns in countless countries. “A lot of shit is going on,” says Ware. “As much as I don’t think I’m going to save the world with this record, I do think it provides a bit of escapism. By my standards, this album is pretty joyful.” Indeed, made over two years with Simian Mobile Disco’s James Ford and producers including Clarence Coffee Jr. (Dua Lipa, Lizzo) and Joseph Mount of Metronomy, *What’s Your Pleasure?* is a world away from the heartfelt balladry once synonymous with Ware. Here, pulsating basslines reign supreme, as do whispered vocals, melodramatic melodies, and winking lyrics. At times, it’s a defiant throwback to the dance scene that first made Ware famous (“I wanted people to think, ‘When is she going to calm this album down?’”); at others, it’s a thrilling window into what might come next (note “Remember Where You Are,” the album’s gorgeous, Minnie Riperton-esque outro). But why the sudden step change? “A low point in music” and \"a shitty time,” says Ware, nodding to a 2018 tour that left her feeling so disillusioned with her day job that her mother suggested she quit singing altogether. “I needed a palate cleanser to shock the system. I needed to test myself. I needed to be reminded that music should be fun.” *What’s Your Pleasure?*, confirms Ware, has more than restored the spring in her step. “I feel like what I can do after this is limitless,” she says. “That’s quite a different situation to how I felt during the last album. Now, I have a newfound drive. I feel incredibly empowered, and it’s an amazing feeling.” Here\_,\_ Let Ware walk you through her joyous fourth record, one song at a time. **Spotlight** “I wrote this in the first writing session. James was playing the piano and we were absolutely crooning. That’s what the first bit of this song is—which really nods to musical theater and jazz. We thought about taking it out, but then I realized that the theatrical aspect is kind of essential. The album had to have that light and shade. It also felt like a perfect entry point because of that intro. It’s like, ‘Come into my world.’ I think it grabs you. It’s also got a bit of the old Jessie in there, with that melancholy. This song felt like a good indicator of where the rest of the album was going to go. That’s why it felt right to start the record with that.” **What’s Your Pleasure?** “We had been writing and writing all day, and nothing was working. We\'d gone for a lunch, and we were like, ‘You know, sometimes this happens.’ Later, we were just messing about, and I was like, ‘I really want to imagine that I\'m in the Berghain and I want to imagine that I\'m dancing with someone and they are so suggestive, and anything goes.’ It\'s sex, it\'s desire, it\'s temptation. We were like, ‘Let’s do this as outrageously as possible.’ So we imagined we were this incredibly confident person who could just say anything. When we wrote it, it just came out—20 minutes and then it was done. James came up with that amazing beat, which almost reminds me of a DJ Shadow song. We were giggling the whole time we were writing it. It\'s quite poppy accidentally, but I think with the darkness of all the synths, it’s just the perfect combination.” **Ooh La La** “This is another very cheeky one. It’s very much innuendo. In my head, there are these prim and proper lovers—it’s all very polite, but actually there’s no politeness about. So it’s quite a naughty number. The song has got an absolute funk to it, but it’s really catchy and it’s still quite quirky. It’s not me letting rip on the vocal. It’s actually quite clipped.” **Soul Control** “I had Janet Jackson in my head in this one. It’s a really energetic number. There is a sense of indulgence in these songs, because I wasn’t trying to play to a radio edit and I was really relishing that. But it’s not self-indulgent, because it’s very much fun. These are the highest tempos I’ve ever done, and I think I surprised myself by doing that. I wanted to keep the energy up—I wanted people to think, ‘When is she going to calm this album down?’” **Save a Kiss** “It’s funny because I was a bit scared of this song. I remember Ed Sheeran telling me, ‘When you get a bit scared by a song, it usually means that there’s something really good in it.’ My fans like emotion from me, so I wanted to do a really emotive dance song. We just wanted it to feel as bare as possible and really feel like the lyrics and the melody could really like sing out on this one. We had loads of other production in it, and it was very much like a case of James and I stripping everything back. It was the hardest one to get right. But I’m very excited about playing it. It has the yearning and the wanting that I feel my fans want, and I just wanted it to feel a bit over the top. I also wanted this song to have a bit of Kate Bush in there and some of the drama of her music.” **Adore You** “I wrote this when I got pregnant. It was my first session with Joseph Mount and I was a bit awkward and he was a bit awkward. When I\'m really nervous I sing really quietly because I don\'t want people to hear anything. But that actually kind of worked. I love this—it shows a vulnerability and a softness. Actually it was me thinking about my unborn child and thinking about, like, I\'m falling for you and this bump and feeling like it\'s going to be a reality soon. I think Joe did such an amazing job on just making it feel hypnotic and still romantic and tender, but with this kind of mad sound. I think it’s a really beautiful song. It was supposed to be an offering before I went away and had a baby, to tell my fans that I’ll be back. They really loved it and I thought, ‘I can\'t not put this on the record, because it\'s like it\'s an important song for the journey of this album.’ I’m really proud of the fact that this is a pure collaboration, and I have such fond memories of it.” **In Your Eyes** “This was the first song that me and James wrote for this whole album. I think you can feel the darkness in it. And that maybe I was feeling the resentment and torturing myself. I think that the whirring arpeggio and the beats in this song very much suggest that it’s a stream of consciousness. There’s a desperation about it. I think that was very much the time and place that I was in. I’m very proud of this song, and it’s actually one of my favorites. Jules Buckley did such an amazing job on the strings—it makes me feel like we\'re in a Bond film or something. But it was very much coming off the back of having quite a low point in music.” **Step Into My Life** “I made this song with \[London artist\] Kindness \[aka Adam Bainbridge\]. I’ve known them for a long time. In my head I wanted that almost R&B delivery with the verse and for it to feel really intimate and kind of predatory, but with this very disco moment in the chorus. I love that Adam’s voice is in there, in the breakdown. It feels like a conversation—the song is pure groove and attitude. You can’t help but nod your head. It feels like one that you can play at the beginning of a party and get people on the dance floor.” **Read My Lips** “James and I did this one on our own, and it’s supposed to be quite bubblegummy. We were giving a nod to \[Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam with Full Force song\] ‘I Wonder If I Take You Home.’ The bassline in this song is so good. We also recorded my vocal slower and lower, so that when you turn it back to normal speed, the vocals sound more cutesy because it sounds brighter and higher. I wanted it to sound slightly squeaky. My voice is naturally quite low and melancholic, so I don’t know how I’m going to sing this one live. I’ll have to pinch my nose or something!” **Mirage (Don’t Stop)** “The bassline here is ridiculous! That’s down to Matt Tavares \[of BADBADNOTGOOD\]. He’s a multi-instrumentalist and is just so talented and enthusiastic, and I also wrote this with \[British DJ and producer\] Benji B and \[US producer\] Clarence Coffee Jr. I think it really signified that I had got my confidence and my mojo back when I went into that session. Usually I\'d be like, ‘Oh, my god, I can\'t do this with new people.’ But it just clicked as sometimes it does. I was unsure about whether the lyric ‘Don\'t stop moving’ felt too obvious. But Benji B was very much like, ‘No, man. You want people to dance. It’s the perfect message.’ And I think of Benji B as like the cool-ometer. So I was like, \'Cool, if Benji B thinks it cool, then I\'m okay with that.’” **The Kill** “There’s an almost hypnotic element to this song. It’s very dark, almost like the end of the night when things are potentially getting too loose. It’s also a difficult one to talk about. It’s about someone feeling like they know you well—maybe too well. There are anxieties in there, and it\'s meant to be cinematic. I wanted that relentlessly driving feeling like you\'d be in a car and you just keep going on, like you’re almost running away from something. Again, Jules Buckley did an amazing job with the strings here—I wanted it to sound almost like it was verging on Primal Scream or Massive Attack. And live, it could just build and build and build. There is, though, a lightness at the end of it, and an optimism—like you’re clawing your way out of this darkness.” **Remember Where You Are** “I’m incredibly proud of this song. I wrote it when Boris Johnson had just got into Downing Street and things were miserable. Everything that could be going wrong was going wrong, which is behind the lyric ‘The heart of the city is on fire.’ And it sounds relatively upbeat, but actually, it\'s about me thinking, ‘Remember where you are. Remember that just a cuddle can be okay. Remember who’s around you.’ Also, it was very much a semi-sign-off and about saying, ‘This is where I’m going and this is the most confident I’ve ever been.’ It was a bold statement. I think it stands up as one of the best songs I\'ve ever written.”

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.

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.\'\"

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.

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

“This feels like \[2017’s\] *Crack-Up*’s friendly brother,” Robin Pecknold tells Apple Music of his fourth LP under the Fleet Foxes name. Written and recorded alongside producer-engineer Beatriz Artola (Adele, J Cole, The Kills) throughout much of 2019 and 2020, *Shore* is an album of gratitude—one that found its lyrical focus in quarantine, as Pecknold began taking day-long drives from his New York apartment up to Lake Minnewaska and into the Catskills and back, stopping only to get gas or jot down ideas as they came to him. “It was like the car was the safest place to be,” he says. “I had this optimistic music but I’d been writing these kind of downer lyrics and it just wasn\'t gelling. It was realizing that in the grand scheme of things, this music is pretty unimportant compared to what\'s going on.” At the album\'s heart is “Sunblind,” an opening statement that pays glimmering tribute to some of Pecknold’s late musical heroes—from Richard Swift to Elliott Smith to David Berman, Curtis Mayfield, Jimi Hendrix, Judee Sill, and more. “I wanted the album to be for these people,” Pecknold says. “I’m trying to celebrate life in a time of death, trying to find something to hold on to that exists outside of time, something that feels solid or stable.” Here, Pecknold walks us through every song on the album. **Wading in Waist-High Water** “I would have a piece of music and then I would try and sing it, but I would always try and pitch my voice up an octave or manipulate my voice to make it match the calming, mourning tone of the music a little more. And then a friend of mine sent me a clip of Uwade Akhere covering \[2008’s\] ‘Mykonos’ on Instagram, and I was just in love with the texture of her voice and just how easy it was. That was a signal that this was going to be a different kind of album in some ways. It was like I finally found a song where I was like, ‘You know what? This is just going to be more of what I want it to be if someone else sings it.’ And that\'s been an awesome mindset to be in lately, just thinking more about writing for other voices and what other voices can naturally evoke without just trying to make my voice do a ton of different things to get to an emotional resonance.” **Sunblind** “I knew I wanted it to be kind of a mission statement for the record—kind of cite-your-sources energy a little bit. And then find a way to get from this list of names of dead musicians that I\'m inspired by—whose music has really helped me in my life—to somewhere that felt like you were taking the wheel and doing something with that feeling. Or trying to live in honor of that, at least in a way that they\'re no longer able to, or in a way that carries their point of view forward into the future. ‘Sunblind’ is like giving the record permission to go all these places or something. Once it felt like it was doing that, then the whole record kind of made more sense to me, or felt like it all tied into each other in a way that it hadn\'t when that song wasn\'t done.” **Can I Believe You** “That riff is the oldest thing on the album, because I wrote that in the middle of the *Crack-Up* tour and tried working on it then but never got anywhere with it really. Once I was thinking less about some second party that\'s untrustworthy and more just one person\'s own hang-ups with letting people in—like my own hang-ups with that—then the lyrics flowed a little better. Those choral voices are actually 400 or 500 people from Instagram that sent clips of them singing that line to me. And then we spent days editing them together and cleaning them up. There\'s this big hug of vocals around the lead vocal that’s talking about trust or believability.” **Jara** “I wanted ‘Can I Believe You’ to be kind of a higher-energy headbanger-type song, and then after that, have a more steady groove—a loop-based, almost builder-type song. That\'s the single-friend kind of placement on the record. Jara is a reference to Victor Jara, the Chilean folk singer. A national hero there who was killed by Pinochet’s army. But it\'s not about Victor Jara— it\'s more like with ‘Sunblind,’ where you\'re trying to eulogize someone, to honor someone or place them in some kind of canon.” **Featherweight** “It\'s the first minor-key song, but it\'s also the first one that\'s without a super prominent drumbeat. It’s lighter on its feet. I thought it was following a train of thought—where with ‘Jara’ there is a bit of envy of a political engagement, in ‘Featherweight,’ I feel like it\'s kind of examining privilege a little bit more. This period of time accommodated that in a very real way for me, just making my problems seem smaller. Acknowledging that I\'ve made problems for myself sometimes in my life when there weren\'t really any.” **A Long Way Past the Past** “Everything I tried was either too Michael McDonald or too Sly Stone or too Stevie Wonder. At that tempo it was just hard to find the instrumentation that didn\'t feel too pastiche or something. While I was writing the lyrics to it, I was thinking, ‘How much am I living in the past? How much can I leave that behind? How much of my identity is wrapped up in memories?’ And asking for help from a friend to maybe fend through that or come on the other side of that. So I thought it was funny to have that be the lyric on the most maybe nostalgic piece of music on the record in terms of what it\'s referencing.” **For a Week or Two** “The first couple Fleet Foxes records, it was a rural vibe as opposed to an urban vibe. I think on the first album, that was just the music I liked, but it wasn\'t like the lyrics were talking about a bunch of personal experiences I had in nature, because I was just 20 years old making that album and I didn\'t have a lot to draw from. ‘For a Week or Two,’ that\'s really about a bunch of long backpacking trips that I was taking for a while. And just the feeling that you have when you\'re doing that, of not being anyone and just being this body in space and never catching your reflection in anything. Carrying very little, and finding some peace in that.” **Maestranza** “Musically, I think for a while it had something in it that had a disco or roller-skating kind of energy that I was trying to find a way out of, and then we found this other palette of instruments that felt less that way. I was trying to go for a Bill Withers-y thing. I feel like a lot of the people that get mentioned in ‘Sunblind,’ their resonance is there, influencing throughout the record. In the third verse, it’s about missing your friends, missing your people, but knowing that since we\'re all going through the same thing that we\'re kind of connected through that in a way that\'s really special and kind of unique to this period. I feel more distant from people but also closer in terms of my actual daily experience.” **Young Man’s Game** “I thought it would be funny if Hamilton \[Leithauser\]’s kids were on it. My original idea was to have it sung by a 10-year-old boy, and then that was just too gimmicky or something. But I wanted there to be kids on it because it\'s referencing immaturity or naivete—things about being young. Because people say ’a young man’s game’ in kind of a positive way. Sometimes they\'re sad they aged out or something. But in this song I use it more in the negative sense of ‘glad you\'ve moved on from some of these immature delusions’ or something. When I was younger I would be much too insecure to make a goofy song, needing everything to be perfect or dramatic or whatever mindset I was in.” **I’m Not My Season** “A friend of mine had been telling me about her experience helping a family member with addiction. As she was describing that, I was imagining this sailing lesson I had taken where we were learning how to rescue someone who had fallen overboard and you have to circle the boat around the right way and throw the ropes from the right place. Time is just something that\'s happening around us, but there\'s some kind of core idea that you\'re not what\'s happening to you. Like wind on a flag.” **Quiet Air / Gioia** “The chords had this kind of expectant feel or something, like an ominous quality, that\'s never really resolving. And I think that kind of led me to want to write about imagining someone, speaking to somebody who is courting danger. Some of the lyrics in the song come from talking to a friend of mine who is a climate scientist, and just her perspective on how screwed we are or aren’t. Just thinking about that whole issue hinges on particulate matter in air that is invisible. You can just be looking at the sky and looking at what will eventually turn into an enormous calamity, and it\'s quietly occurring, quietly accruing. It\'s happening on a time scale that we\'re not prepared to accept or deal with. The ending is this more ecstatic thing. Just imagining some weird pagan dance, like rite of spring or something, where it just kind of builds into this weird kind of joy. Like dancing while the world burns.” **Going-to-the-Sun Road** “The Sun Road is a place in Montana, a 60-mile stretch of road that’s only open for a couple months every year. It’s where they filmed the intro to *The Shining*, where they\'re driving to the lodge and it’s just very scenic. I grew up fairly close to there. A lot of the studios that I worked at on this record were places that I had always wanted to go and work, places where I’ve been like, ‘Oh, one day I\'ll make a record there.’ That song is about being tired of traveling, wanting to slow down a bit and wanting to not fight so hard personally against yourself. Or trying to have as many adventures as possible, but then having this one place—almost like a Rosebud kind of thing—where it\'s like going to the Sun Road is the last big adventure. The one that\'s always on the horizon that you have to look forward to that keeps you going.” **Thymia** “Getting back to work on the record \[after the pandemic hit\] was so rewarding. And I feel like if there was a relationship being discussed on the record, it\'s between me and my love affair with music. ‘Thymia’ I think means ‘boisterous spirit’ or something. The image and the lyrics to that song in my head were kind of me driving around with some camping gear in my back seat that\'s clanging out a rhythm of some kind. And that feeling of, even if I\'m driving alone, there\'s something. That sound is pulling me to the thought of music. It\'s kind of accompanying me. I\'ve known it for a long time. Even though it\'s ephemeral, it\'s the most solid thing that I have.” **Cradling Mother, Cradling Woman** “I wanted to use the sample of Brian Wilson because that clip meant a lot to me growing up, him layering vocals on ‘Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder).’ That song has the most stuff I\'ve ever put on a song, and it\'s the most overdubby—very much in that lineage of just layer after layer after layer. Emotionally, it’s similar to that idea of, like, ‘My clothes are torn but the air is clean.’ That feeling like it can be okay to be a little ragged and you can still feel good, like being exhausted at the end of a long run or something. That image of the maternal and feminine would again be a reference to music. Like my receiver, cradling me again. Kind of like being subsumed by music and comforted and consoled by it.” **Shore** “‘Cradling Mother’ could be the climax maybe, and ‘Shore’ felt like an epilogue. In the same way that ‘Wading in Waist-High Water’ is a prologue. Lyrically, it\'s tying up some loose ends, talking to the kin that you rely on—your family or your heroes—and thanking them. It references the shore as this stable place and questions whether you\'re really at the boundary between danger and safety when you\'re there. I\'d actually had a surfing accident where I snapped my leash and I really felt like I was going to drown. It took me 15 minutes to swim to shore and I kept getting pummeled by waves. I was so happy to make it back. I\'ve been pretty afraid since then to do that much surfing in bad conditions. But to me, that image was this comforting thing that then kind of dissolves. The vocals break apart and then it\'s like you\'re getting back in the water and you\'re catching one sound and your voices are blending together and falling apart. You\'re subsumed by water, and then the seas calm, but you\'re floating into the future.”

Today, on the Autumnal Equinox, Fleet Foxes released their fourth studio album Shore at 6:31 am PT/9:31 am ET. The bright and hopeful album, released via Anti-. Shore was recorded before and during quarantine in Hudson (NY), Paris, Los Angeles, Long Island City and New York City from September 2018 until September 2020 with the help of recording and production engineer Beatriz Artola.The fifteen song, fifty-five minute Shore was initially inspired by frontman Robin Pecknold’s musical heroes such as Arthur Russell, Nina Simone, Sam Cooke, Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guebrou and more who, in his experience, celebrated life in the face of death. “I see “shore” as a place of safety on the edge of something uncertain, staring at Whitman’s waves reciting ‘death,’” commented Pecknold. “Tempted by the adventure of the unknown at the same time you are relishing the comfort of the stable ground beneath you. This was the mindset I found, the fuel I found, for making this album.” Pecknold continues: Since the unexpected success of the first Fleet Foxes album over a decade ago, I have spent more time than I’m happy to admit in a state of constant worry and anxiety. Worried about what I should make, how it will be received, worried about the moves of other artists, my place amongst them, worried about my singing voice and mental health on long tours. I’ve never let myself enjoy this process as much as I could, or as much as I should. I’ve been so lucky in so many ways in my life, so lucky to be born with the seeds of the talents I have cultivated and lucky to have had so many unreal experiences. Maybe with luck can come guilt sometimes. I know I’ve welcomed hardship wherever I could find it, real or imagined, as a way of subconsciously tempering all this unreal luck I’ve had. By February 2020, I was again consumed with worry and anxiety over this album and how I would finish it. But since March, with a pandemic spiraling out of control, living in a failed state, watching and participating in a rash of protests and marches against systemic injustice, most of my anxiety around the album disappeared. It just came to seem so small in comparison to what we were all experiencing together. In its place came a gratitude, a joy at having the time and resources to devote to making sound, and a different perspective on how important or not this music was in the grand scheme of things. Music is both the most inessential and the most essential thing. We don’t need music to live, but I couldn’t imagine life without it. It became a great gift to no longer carry any worry or anxiety around the album, in light of everything that is going on. A tour may not happen for a year, music careers may not be what they once were. So it may be, but music remains essential. This reframing was another stroke of unexpected luck I have been the undeserving recipient of. I was able to take the wheel completely and see the album through much better than I had imagined it, with help from so many incredible collaborators, safe and lucky in a new frame of mind.

Stephen Bruner’s fourth album as Thundercat is shrouded in loss—of love, of control, of his friend Mac Miller, who Bruner exchanged I-love-yous with over the phone hours before Miller’s overdose in late 2018. Not that he’s wallowing. Like 2017’s *Drunk*—an album that helped transform the bassist/singer-songwriter from jazz-fusion weirdo into one of the vanguard voices in 21st-century black music—*It Is What It Is* is governed by an almost cosmic sense of humor, juxtaposing sophisticated Afro-jazz (“Innerstellar Love”) with deadpan R&B (“I may be covered in cat hair/But I still smell good/Baby, let me know, how do I look in my durag?”), abstractions about mortality (“Existential Dread”) with chiptune-style punk about how much he loves his friend Louis Cole. “Yeah, it’s been an interesting last couple of years,” he tells Apple Music with a sigh. “But there’s always room to be stupid.” What emerges from the whiplash is a sense that—as the title suggests—no matter how much we tend to label things as good or bad, happy or sad, the only thing they are is what they are. (That Bruner keeps good company probably helps: Like on *Drunk*, the guest list here is formidable, ranging from LA polymaths like Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Louis Cole, and coproducer Flying Lotus to Childish Gambino, Ty Dolla $ign, and former Slave singer Steve Arrington.) As for lessons learned, Bruner is Zen as he runs through each of the album’s tracks. “It’s just part of it,” he says. “It’s part of the story. That’s why the name of the album is what it is—\[Mac’s death\] made me put my life in perspective. I’m happy I’m still here.” **Lost in Space / Great Scott / 22-26** \"Me and \[keyboardist\] Scott Kinsey were just playing around a bit. I like the idea of something subtle for the intro—you know, introducing somebody to something. Giving people the sense that there’s a ride about to happen.\" **Innerstellar Love** \"So you go from being lost in space and then suddenly thrust into purpose. The feel is a bit of an homage to where I’ve come from with Kamasi \[Washington, who plays the saxophone\] and my brother \[drummer Ronald Bruner, Jr.\]: very jazz, very black—very interstellar.\" **I Love Louis Cole (feat. Louis Cole)** \"It’s quite simply stated: Louis Cole is, hands down, one of my favorite musicians. Not just as a performer, but as a songwriter and arranger. \[*Cole is a polymathic solo artist and multi-instrumentalist, as well as a member of the group KNOWER.*\] The last time we got to work together was on \[*Drunk*’s\] \'Bus in These Streets.\' He inspires me. He reminds me to keep doing better. I’m very grateful I get to hang out with a guy like Louis Cole. You know, just me punching a friend of his and falling asleep in his laundry basket.\" **Black Qualls (feat. Steve Lacy, Steve Arrington & Childish Gambino)** \"Steve Lacy titled this song. \'Qualls\' was just a different way of saying ‘walls.\' And black walls in the sense of what it means to be a young black male in America right now. A long time ago, black people weren’t even allowed to read. If you were caught reading, you’d get killed in front of your family. So growing up being black—we’re talking about a couple hundred years later—you learn to hide your wealth and knowledge. You put up these barriers, you protect yourself. It’s a reason you don’t necessarily feel okay—this baggage. It’s something to unlearn, at least in my opinion. But it also goes beyond just being black. It’s a people thing. There’s a lot of fearmongering out there. And it’s worse because of the internet. You gotta know who you are. It’s about this idea that it’s okay to be okay.\" **Miguel’s Happy Dance** \"Miguel Atwood-Ferguson plays keys on this record, and also worked on the string arrangement. Again, y’know, without getting too heavily into stuff, I had a rough couple of years. So you get Miguel’s happy dance.\" **How Sway** \"I like making music that’s a bit fast and challenging to play. So really, this is just that part of it—it’s like a little exercise.\" **Funny Thing** \"The love songs here are pretty self-explanatory. But I figure you’ve gotta be able to find the humor in stuff. You’ve gotta be able to laugh.\" **Overseas (feat. Zack Fox)** \"Brazil is the one place in the world I would move. São Paulo. I would just drink orange juice all day and play bass until I had nubs for fingers. So that’s number one. But man, you’ve also got Japan in there. Japan. And Russia! I mean, everything we know about the politics—it is what it is. But Russian people are awesome. They’re pretty crazy. But they’re awesome.\" **Dragonball Durag** \"The durag is the ultimate power move. Not like a superpower, but just—you know, it translates into the world. You’ve got people with durags, and you’ve got people without them. Personally, I always carry one. Man, you ever see that picture of David Beckham wearing a durag and shaking Prince Charles’ hand? Victoria’s looking like she wants to rip his pants off.\" **How I Feel** \"A song like \'How I Feel’—there’s not a lot of hidden meaning there \[*laughs*\]. It’s not like something really bad happened to me when I was watching *Care Bears* when I was six and I’m trying to cover it up in a song. But I did watch *Care Bears*.\" **King of the Hill** \"This is something I made with BADBADNOTGOOD. It came out a little while ago, on the Brainfeeder 10-year compilation. We kind of wrestled with whether or not it should go on the album, but in the end it felt right. You’re always trying to find space and time to collaborate with people, but you’re in one city, they’re in another, you’re moving around. Here, we finally got the opportunity to be in the same room together and we jumped at it. I try and be open to all kinds of collaboration, though. Magic is magic.\" **Unrequited Love** \"You know how relationships go: Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose \[*laughs*\]. But really, it’s not funny \[*more laughs*\]. Sometimes you—\[*laughing*\]—you get your heart broken.\" **Fair Chance (feat. Ty Dolla $ign & Lil B)** \"Me and Ty spend a lot of time together. Lil B was more of a reach, but we wanted to find a way to make it work, because some people, you know, you just resonate with. This is definitely the beginning of more between him and I. A starting point. But you know, to be honest it’s an unfortunate set of circumstances under which it comes. We were all very close to Mac \[Miller\]. It was a moment for all of us. We all became very aware of that closeness in that moment.\" **Existential Dread** \"You know, getting older \[*laughs*\].\" **It Is What It Is** \"That’s me in the middle, saying, ‘Hey, Mac.’ That’s me, getting a chance to say goodbye to my friend.\"

GRAMMYs 2021 Winner - Best Progressive R&B Album Thundercat has released his new album “It Is What It Is” on Brainfeeder Records. The album, produced by Flying Lotus and Thundercat, features musical contributions from Ty Dolla $ign, Childish Gambino, Lil B, Kamasi Washington, Steve Lacy, Steve Arrington, BADBADNOTGOOD, Louis Cole and Zack Fox. “It Is What It Is” has been nominated for a GRAMMY in the Best Progressive R&B Category and with Flying Lotus also receiving a nomination in the Producer of the Year (Non-Classical). “It Is What It Is” follows his game-changing third album “Drunk” (2017). That record completed his transition from virtuoso bassist to bonafide star and cemented his reputation as a unique voice that transcends genre. “This album is about love, loss, life and the ups and downs that come with that,” Bruner says about “It Is What It Is”. “It’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, but at different points in life you come across places that you don’t necessarily understand… some things just aren’t meant to be understood.” The tragic passing of his friend Mac Miller in September 2018 had a profound effect on Thundercat and the making of “It Is What It Is”. “Losing Mac was extremely difficult,” he explains. “I had to take that pain in and learn from it and grow from it. It sobered me up… it shook the ground for all of us in the artist community.” The unruly bounce of new single ‘Black Qualls’ is classic Thundercat, teaming up with Steve Lacy (The Internet) and Funk icon Steve Arrington (Slave). It’s another example of Stephen Lee Bruner’s desire to highlight the lineage of his music and pay his respects to the musicians who inspired him. Discovering Arrington’s output in his late teens, Bruner says he fell in love with his music immediately: “The tone of the bass, the way his stuff feels and moves, it resonated through my whole body.” ‘Black Qualls’ emerged from writing sessions with Lacy, whom Thundercat describes as “the physical incarnate of the Ohio Players in one person - he genuinely is a funky ass dude”. It references what it means to be a black American with a young mindset: “What it feels like to be in this position right now… the weird ins and outs, we’re talking about those feelings…” Thundercat revisits established partnerships with Kamasi Washington, Louis Cole, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Ronald Bruner Jr and Dennis Hamm on “It Is What Is Is” but there are new faces too: Childish Gambino, Steve Lacy, Steve Arrington, plus Ty Dolla $ign and Lil B on ‘Fair Chance’ - a song explicitly about his friend Mac Miller’s passing. The aptly titled ‘I Love Louis Cole’ is another standout - “Louis Cole is a brush of genius. He creates so purely,” says Thundercat. “He makes challenging music: harmony-wise, melody-wise and tempo-wise but still finds a way for it to be beautiful and palatable.” Elsewhere on the album, ‘Dragonball Durag’ exemplifies both Thundercat’s love of humour in music and indeed his passion for the cult Japanese animé. “I have a Dragon Ball tattoo… it runs everything. There is a saying that Dragon Ball runs life,” he explains. “The durag is a superpower, to turn your swag on. It does something… it changes you,” he says smiling. Thundercat’s music starts on his couch at home: “It’s just me, the bass and the computer”. Nevertheless, referring to the spiritual connection that he shares with his longtime writing and production partner Flying Lotus, Bruner describes his friend as “the other half of my brain”. “I wouldn’t be the artist I am if Lotus wasn’t there,” he says. “He taught me… he saw me as an artist and he encouraged it. No matter the life changes, that’s my partner. We are always thinking of pushing in different ways.” Comedy is an integral part of Thundercat’s personality. “If you can’t laugh at this stuff you might as well not be here,” he muses. He seems to be magnetically drawn to comedians from Zack Fox (with whom he collaborates regularly) to Dave Chappelle, Eric Andre and Hannibal Buress whom he counts as friends. “Every comedian wants to be a musician and every musician wants to be a comedian,” he says. “And every good musician is really funny, for the most part.” It’s the juxtaposition, or the meeting point, between the laughter and the pain that is striking listening to “It Is What It Is”: it really is all-encompassing. “The thing that really becomes a bit transcendent in the laugh is when it goes in between how you really feel,” Bruner says. “You’re hoping people understand it, but you don’t even understand how it’s so funny ‘cos it hurts sometimes.” Thundercat forms a cornerstone of the Brainfeeder label; he released “The Golden Age of Apocalypse” (2011), “Apocalypse” (2013), followed by EP “The Beyond / Where The Giants Roam” featuring the modern classic ‘Them Changes’. He was later “at the creative epicenter” (per Rolling Stone) of the 21st century’s most influential hip-hop album Kendrick Lamar’s “To Pimp A Butterfly”, where he won a Grammy for his collaboration on the track ‘These Walls’ before releasing his third album “Drunk” in 2017. In 2018 Thundercat and Flying Lotus composed an original score for an episode of Golden Globe and Emmy award winning TV series “Atlanta” (created and written by Donald Glover).

Fun City is a love letter to the LGBTQ+ community, celebrating its history and present. The album looks at how LGBTQ+ stay strong, focused and creative through times of social and political hardships, and is inspired by the legacy of artists from Sylvester, Erasure, Scissor Sisters and Hercules And Love Affair who have been bold, visible and pioneering through the years to give LGBTQ+ people shining beacons of hope. It features some of my favourite artists in the LGBTQ+ community across the world.

Drew Daniel’s solo alias The Soft Pink Truth was originally fueled by a distinctly madcap energy. Without the elaborate conceptual frameworks of his duo Matmos, Baltimore-based Daniel was free to let his imagination run wild. His 2003 debut, *Do You Party?*, braided politics with pleasure in gonzo glitch techno; with *Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want the Soft Pink Truth?* and then *Why Do the Heathen Rage?*, he turned his idiosyncratic IDM to covers of punk rock and black metal. But *Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase?* steps away from those audacious hijinks. Composed with a rich array of electronic and acoustic tones, and suffused in vintage Roland Space Echo, the album strikes a balance between ambient and classical minimalism; created in response to politically motivated feelings of sadness and anger, it is also a meditation on community and interdependency. Guest vocalists Colin Self, Angel Deradoorian, and Jana Hunter make up the album’s choral core; percussionist Sarah Hennies lays down flickering bell-tone rhythms, while John Berndt and Horse Lords’ Andrew Bernstein weave sinewy saxophone into the mix, and Daniel’s partner, M.C. Schmidt, lends spare, contemplative piano melodies. The result is a nine-part suite as affecting as it is ambitious, where devotional vocal harmonies spill into softly pulsing house rhythms, and shimmering abstractions alternate with songs as gentle as lullabies.

The Soft Pink Truth is Drew Daniel, one half of acclaimed electronic duo Matmos, Shakespearean scholar and a celebrated producer and sound artist. Daniel started the project as an outlet to explore visceral and sublime sounds that fall outside of Matmos’ purview, drawing on his vast knowledge of rave, black metal and crust punk obscurities while subverting and critiquing established genre expectations. On the new album Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase? Daniel takes a bold and surprising new direction, exploring a hypnagogic and ecstatic space somewhere between deep dance music and classical minimalism as a means of psychic healing. Shall We Go On Sinning… began life as an emotional response to the creeping rise of fascism around the globe, creativity as a form of self-care, resulting in an album of music that expressed joy and gratitude. Daniel explains: “The election of Donald Trump made me feel very angry and sad, but I didn’t want to make “angry white guy” music in a purely reactive mode. I felt that I needed to make music through a different process, and to a different emotional outcome, to get past a private feeling of powerlessness by making musical connections with friends and people I admire, to make something that felt socially extended and affirming.” What began with Daniel quickly evolved into a promiscuous and communal undertaking. Vocals provided by the chorus of Colin Self, Angel Deradoorian and Jana Hunter form the foundation of most of the tracks, sometimes left naked and unchanged as with the ethereal opening line (“Shall”) or the sensuous R&B refrains on “We”, at other times shrouded in effects and morphed into new forms. Stately piano melodies written by Daniel’s partner M.C. Schmidt as well as Koye Berry alongside entrancing vibraphone and percussion patterns from Sarah Hennies push tracks toward ecstatic and melodic peaks, while rich saxophone textures played by Andrew Bernstein (Horse Lords) and John Berndt are used to add color and texture throughout. The album’s overall sound was in part shaped by Daniel hosting Mitchell Brown of GASP during Maryland Deathfest. Daniel borrowed Brown’s Roland Space Echo tape unit which he then used extensively throughout to give the album a flickering, ethereal quality. By moving beyond simple plunderphonic sampling and opening up a genuine dialogue with other musicians, Daniel left room in his compositions for moments of genuine surprise, capturing the freeform, communal energy of a DJ set or live improvisation session more than a recording project. Shall We Go On Sinning, a biblical quote from Paul the Apostle, was chosen by Daniel because it describes a question that he was applying both to his creative practice and how one should live in the world. The melodies, jubilance, and meditative nature of album provides a much-needed escape from the contemporary hell-scape. The process of creating Shall We Go On Sinning, in and of itself, is the Soft Pink Truth’s way of championing creativity and community over rage and nihilism.

“Life seems to provide no end of things to explore without too much investigation,” Laura Marling tells Apple Music. The London singer-songwriter is discussing how, after six albums (three of which were Mercury Prize-nominated), she found the inspiration needed for her seventh, *Song For Our Daughter*. One thing which proved fruitful was turning 30. In an evolution of 2017’s exquisite rumination on womanhood *Semper Femina*, growing, as she says, “a bit older” prompted Marling to consider how she might equip her her own figurative daughter to navigate life’s complexities. “In light of the cultural shift, you go back and think, ‘That wasn’t how it should have happened. I should have had the confidence and the know-how to deal with that situation in a way that I didn’t have to come out the victim,’” says Marling of the album’s central message. “You can’t do anything about it, obviously, so you can only prepare the next generation with the tools and the confidence \[to ensure\] they \[too\] won’t be victims.” This feeling reaches a crescendo on the title track, which sees Marling consider “our daughter growing old/All of the bullshit that she might be told” amid strings that permeate the entire record. While *Song for Our Daughter* is undoubtedly a love letter to women, it is also a deeply personal album where whimsical melodies (“Strange Girl”) collide with Marling at her melancholic best (the gorgeously sparse “Blow by Blow”—a surprisingly honest chronicle of heartbreak—or the exceptional, haunting “Hope We Meet Again”). And its roaming nature is exactly how Marling wanted to soundtrack the years since *Semper Femina*. “There is no cohesive narrative,” she admits. “I wrote this album over three years, and so much had changed. Of course, no one knows the details of my personal life—nor should they. But this album is like putting together a very fragmented story that makes sense to me.” Let Marling guide you through that story, track by track. **Alexandra** “Women are so at the forefront of my mind. With ‘Alexandra,’ I was thinking a lot about the women who survive the projected passion of so-called ‘great men.’ ‘Alexandra’ is a response to Leonard Cohen’s ‘Alexandra Leaving,’ but it’s also the idea that for so long women have had to suffer the very powerful projections that people have put on them. It’s actually quite a traumatizing experience, I think, to only be seen through the eyes of a man’s passion; just as a facade. And I think it happens to women quite often, so in a couple of instances on this album I wanted to give voice to the women underneath all of that. The song has something of Crosby, Stills & Nash about it—it’s a chugging, guitar-riffy job.” **Held Down** “Somebody said to me a couple of years ago that the reason why people find it hard to attach to me \[musically\] is that it\'s not always that fun to hear sad songs. And I was like, ‘Oh, well, I\'m in trouble, because that\'s all I\'ve got!’ So this song has a lightness to it and is very light on sentiment. It’s just about two people trying to figure out how to not let themselves get in the way of each other, and about that constant vulnerability at the beginning of a relationship. The song is almost quite shoegazey and is very simple to play on the guitar.” **Strange Girl** “The girl in this song is an amalgamation of all my friends and I, and of all the things we\'ve done. There’s something sweet about watching someone you know very well make the same mistakes over and over again. You can\'t tell them what they need to know; they have to know it themselves. That\'s true of everyone, including myself. As for the lyrics about the angry, brave girl? Well, aren’t we all like that? The fullness and roundness of my experience of women—the nuance and all the best and worst things about being a complicated little girl—is not always portrayed in the way that I would portray it, and I think women will recognize something in this song. My least favorite style of music is Americana, so I was conscious to avoid that sound here. But it’s a lovely song; again, it has chords which are very Crosby, Stills & Nash-esque.” **Only the Strong** “I wanted the central bit of the album to be a little vulnerable tremble, having started it out quite boldly. This song has a four-beat click in it, which was completely by accident—it was coming through my headphones in the studio, so it was just a happy accident. The strings on this were all done by my bass player Nick \[Pini\] and they are all bow double-bass strings. They\'re close to the human voice, so I think they have a specific, resonant effect on people. I also went all out on the backing vocals. I wanted it to be my own chorus, like my own subconscious backing me up. The lyric ‘Love is a sickness cured by time\' is actually from a play by \[London theater director\] Robert Icke, though I did ask his permission to use it. I just thought that was the most incredible ointment to the madness of infatuation.” **Blow by Blow** “I wrote this song on the piano, but it’s not me playing here—I can\'t play the piano anywhere near as well as my friend Anna here. This song is really straightforward, and I kind of surprised myself by that. I don\'t like to be explicit. I like to be a little bit opaque, I guess, in the songwriting business. So this is an experiment, and I still haven’t quite made my mind up on how I feel about it. Both can exist, but I think what I want from my music or art or film is an uncanny familiarity. This song is a different thing for me, for sure—it speaks for itself. I’d be rendering it completely naked if I said any more.” **Song for Our Daughter** “This song is kind of the main event, in my mind. I actually wrote it around the time of the Trayvon Martin \[shooting in 2012\]. All these young kids being unarmed and shot in America. And obviously that\'s nothing to do with my daughter, or the figurative daughter here, but I \[was thinking about the\] institutional injustice. And what their mothers must be feeling. How helpless, how devastated and completely unable to have changed the course of history, because nothing could have helped them. I was also thinking about a story in Roman mythology about the Rape of Lucretia. She was the daughter of a nobleman and was raped—no one believed her and, in that time, they believed that if you had been ‘spoilt’ by something like that, then your blood would turn black. And so she rode into court one day and stabbed herself in the heart, and bled and died. It’s not the cheeriest of analogies, but I found that this story that existed thousands of years ago was still so contemporary. The strings were arranged by \[US instrumentalist, arranger, and producer\] Rob Moose, and when he sent them to me he said, ‘I don\'t know if this is what you wanted, but I wanted to personify the character of the daughter in the strings, and help her kind of rise up above everything.’ And I was like, ‘That\'s amazing! What an incredible, incredible leap to make.’ And that\'s how they ended up on the record.” **Fortune** “Whenever I get stuck in a rut or feel uninspired on the guitar, I go and play with my dad, who taught me. He was playing with this little \[melody\]—it\'s just an E chord going up the neck—so I stole it and then turned it into this song. I’m very close with my sisters, and at the time we were talking and reminiscing about the fact that my mother had a ‘running-away fund.’ She kept two-pence pieces in a pot above the laundry machine when we were growing up. She had recently cashed it in to see how much money she had, and she had built up something like £75 over the course of a lifetime. That was her running-away fund, and I just thought that was so wonderfully tragic. She said she did it because her mother did it. It was hereditary. We are living in a completely different time, and are much closer to equality, so I found the idea of that fund quite funny.” **The End of the Affair** “This song is loosely based on *The End of the Affair* by Graham Greene. The female character, \[Sarah\], is elusive; she has a very secret role that no one can be part of, and the protagonist of the book, the detective \[Maurice Bendrix\], finds it so unbearably erotic. He finds her secretness—the fact that he can\'t have her completely—very alluring. And in a similar way to ‘Alexandra Leaving,’ it’s about how this facade in culture has appeared over women. I was also drawing on my own experience of great passions that have to die very quietly. What a tragedy that is, in some ways, to have to bear that alone. No one else is obviously ever part of your passions.” **Hope We Meet Again** “This was actually the first song we recorded on the album, so it was like a tester session. There’s a lot of fingerpicking on this, so I really had to concentrate, and it has pedal steel, which I’m not usually a fan of because it’s very evocative of Americana. I originally wrote this for a play, *Mary Stuart* by Robert Icke, who I’ve worked with a lot over the last couple of years, and adapted the song to turn it back into a song that\'s more mine, rather than for the play. But originally it was supposed to highlight the loneliness of responsibility of making your own decisions in life, and of choosing your own direction. And what the repercussions of that can sometimes be. It\'s all of those kind of crossroads where deciding to go one way might be a step away from someone else.” **For You** “In all honesty, I think I’m getting a bit soft as I get older. And I’ve listened to a lot of Paul McCartney and it’s starting to affect me in a lot of ways. I did this song at home in my little bunker—this is the demo, and we just kept it exactly as it was. It was never supposed to be a proper song, but it was so sweet, and everyone I played it to liked it so much that we just stuck it on the end. The male vocals are my boyfriend George, who is also a musician. There’s also my terrible guitar solo, but I left it in there because it was so funny—I thought it sounded like a five-year-old picking up a guitar for the first time.”

Laura Marling’s exquisite seventh album Song For Our Daughter arrives almost without pre-amble or warning in the midst of uncharted global chaos, and yet instantly and tenderly offers a sense of purpose, clarity and calm. As a balm for the soul, this full-blooded new collection could be posited as Laura’s richest to date, but in truth it’s another incredibly fine record by a British artist who rarely strays from delivering incredibly fine records. Taking much of the production reins herself, alongside long-time collaborators Ethan Johns and Dom Monks, Laura has layered up lush string arrangements and a broad sense of scale to these songs without losing any of the intimacy or reverence we’ve come to anticipate and almost take for granted from her throughout the past decade.

Having uprooted herself from her NYC home after 16 years, ambient composer Julianna Barwick relocated to Los Angeles in search of a fresh start and a new creative path for her first album in four years. She made some changes to her usual recording setup, working for the first time with a pair of studio monitors gifted by Sigur Rós frontman Jónsi to work alongside her vocal looping technique. On “Oh, Memory,” she offsets strikingly beautiful soundscapes and the plucking strings of classical harpist Mary Lattimore. Barwick and Jónsi trade harmonies on “In Light,” letting their beatific vocals drift over pounding drum machines and sweeping synths. The guest features are new for Barwick, but her approach is just as minimal and never feels slight, applying a curative touch with her gentle, meditative songs that explore—as the title suggests—both emotional and physical healing.

Four years on from the release of her last, critically acclaimed LP, Julianna Barwick returns with “Healing Is A Miracle”, to be released on July 10th on new home, Ninja Tune. A distinctive meditation on sound, reverb and the voice, “Healing Is A Miracle” is a record built on improvisation and a close affinity to a couple of trusted items of gear, from which she spins engrossing, expansive universes. Additionally, Barwick draws on the input of three collaborators with whom she has nurtured deep friendships with over the years: Jónsi (Sigur Rós), Nosaj Thing and Mary Lattimore; who each gently nudge out at the edges of her organically-evolved sound. Recorded in the wake of a seismic shift in her life following a move from New York—where she had lived for 16 years—to Los Angeles where she is now based, the title of the record came to her after thinking about how the human body heals itself, of the miraculous processes we pay little attention to: “You cut your hand, it looks pretty bad, and two weeks later it looks like it never happened… That’s kind of amazing, you know?” It’s a sentiment that feels particularly apt for the moment. From there, she conceived of the record’s simple statement title, ran it past a couple of friends, and it was settled. Like with the record itself, and all of her work, it’s about following her gut, and seeing where it takes her. “Healing Is A Miracle” began life in spring of last year, when Barwick sat down with her vocal looping set-up and began sketching out some ideas for new solo material. “It had been so long since I had done that,” she recalls, “making something for myself, just for the love of it… it was emotional, because I was recording music that was just from the heart, that wasn't for an 'assignment' or project… it brought me to tears a little”. Part of the joy also came from a small but significant switch up to her recording process: the addition of some studio monitors—a birthday gift from Jónsi and Alex (Somers)—having previously recorded all of her music on headphones. “The first song I remember making with those was the first song on the album, Inspirit.” she explains, “When I added the bass I really felt it in my body, you know, in a way you just wouldn’t with headphones… it was kind of euphoric and fun. I got really excited about making the record in that moment, and I think that really had an impact on the sounds I ended up making.” Excitement too came from the chance to work with three dream collaborators. Her connection to Jónsi began via producer Alex Somers, when Barwick flew to Reykjavík to record some sessions with him for her 2013 record “Nepenthe”, a trip which would begin a long-standing affinity with Iceland and the people she connected with there. “I think he has the best voice in the world,” she says, “and hearing my voice with Jonsi's is one of the joys of my life.” Nosaj Thing—the highly respected electronic producer and stalwart of the LA scene who has worked with the likes of Kendric Lamar—had gotten in touch to express his affection for her 2011 album “The Magic Place”, and they’d since been trying to find a way to work together. Barwick and Lattimore had struck up a friendship over many years performing live together, and had moved to LA around the same time. Finding herself in the same city as all three for the first time, it felt natural to include them in her process, and added to the feeling of newness, support and friendship she had while producing the record. Beyond her records, Barwick’s impressive live shows have gained incredible praise over the years from the likes of The Guardian—who described her performance as “exquisite in its eloquence, reflection and compassion” in their 5* review—The New York Times, NPR, and more. She has also supported and performed with an amazing array of artists including Bon Iver, Grouper, Explosions in the Sky, Sigur Rós, Sharon Van Etten, Angel Olsen, Perfume Genius, Mas Ysa, and Nat Baldwin. Barwick has additionally been involved in some head-turning collaborations over the years. In 2015 she took part in The Flaming Lips’s Carnegie Hall show, performing music from their reimagining of “Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band”, alongside Phillip Glass, Debbie Harry, Laurie Anderson and Pattie Smith. That same year she was invited to play two shows with Yoko Ono, one at MoMA (“my favorite thing ever”) and one in Central Park. In 2012 she released a collaborative album with Helado Negro as OMBRE, and has also released a collaborative single with Rafael Anton Isarri, on the super-limited Thesis label, and most recently, the “Command Synthesis” EP, on RVNG Intl. sub-label Commend There, which employed AI to build five tracks that responded to the airborne environment outside a hotel room. In 2019 she teamed up with Doug Aitken on his nomadic art project, and created stunning performances in the Massachusett wilderness. The album’s artwork was shot in Iceland by Joel Kazuo Knoernschild and is taken from a series of aerial films shot by drone above the country’s breathtaking coastline, which also make up the video for ‘Inspirit’.

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

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

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

Matmos’ practice of creative constraint has made them one of the most consistently exciting acts in electronic music. The duo of M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel are well known for their long-standing practice of sampling unusual sound sources and experimenting with conceptual restrictions. As a couple in life and music for more than 25 years, Schmidt and Daniel have a particularly democratic approach to music making, each taking it in turns to come up with the framework or starting point for an album. The Consuming Flame: Open Exercises In Group Form was conceived by M.C. Schmidt, who made the decision to orient the record around a deceptively simple commitment. 99 different musicians were asked to contribute to the recording with only one instruction: they could play anything that they wanted, but the tempo of any rhythmic material had to be set at 99 beats per minute. The resulting album is a three-hour long assemblage that travels across a shifting kaleidoscope of genre, mood and density, all synchronized to a constant underlying tempo. The Consuming Flame was composed through the social act of invitation, and the album’s 99 participants are, even for Matmos, wildly eclectic. Some are collaborators that have worked with Matmos for many years (J. Lesser, Jon “Wobbly” Leidecker, Mark Lightcap, Josh Quillen of So Percussion, Vicki Bennett) and some are near total strangers found through open calls on internet forums for contributions at 99 beats per minute. There are players from the conservatory-trained world of “new music” (Kate Soper, Bonnie Lander, Ashot Sarkissjan, Jennifer Walshe) and figures from the extreme music underground (Blake Harrison of Pig Destroyer, Kevin Gan Yuen of Sutekh Hexen, Terence Hannum of Locrian), as well as auteurs from the world of “noise” music (Twig Harper, Moth Cock, Bromp Treb, Id M Theft Able) as well as writers (Douglas Rushkoff, Colin Dickey) and conceptual artists (Heather Kapplow). There are distinguished alumni and contemporary luminaries of electronic music (Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma of Mouse on Mars, Daniel Lopatin, DeForrest Brown Jr., J. G. Thirlwell, Matthew Herbert, Rabit, Robin Stewart and Harry Wright of Giant Swan) and artists associated with indie rock and folk traditions (Ira Kaplan, Georgia Hubley and James McNew of Yo La Tengo, Marisa Anderson). There are undergraduates who took M.C. Schmidt’s “Sound As Music” course during the final year of The San Francisco Art Institute’s existence. In honor of its fiercely independent tradition of outsider creativity, the album is dedicated to the memory of the now closed art school. Submissions from artists were subsequently layered onto each other, prompting later recording sessions which then built upon the first wave of contributions. These discrete zones were then collaged into larger and larger units and more contributors were invited to join until, gradually, the “group form” of three distinct hour-long movements emerged. Part exquisite-corpse and part virtual festival, the results retain Matmos’ distinct and unique voice despite the promiscuously open nature of these collaborations. The Consuming Flame is intended to be heard as one continuous experience, but has been divided into three discs, each of which has digital index points for the convenience of the listener, offering handholds and rest-stops along the journey. The length is not meant to be exhausting or pompous, but instead to shift the listener’s attention repeatedly along a path, and to deliberately refuse to hold in one place, style, mood, genre or level of density for too long, in order to induce a sensation of drift within forward movement. The album moves beyond the confines of established longform genres like drone and ambient as well as traditional song structures. Rather, The Consuming Flame is comparable to a train journey; as Schmidt puts it: “The album is very much like a train ride at an amusement park: the tempo is the train that pulls you through a lot of different fantastic scenes and locations. Sometimes you listen to the sound of the train tracks and sometimes you are immersed in a space.” To assist the listener in crediting individual contributors and in seeing the work as three large-scale movements, the album comes with a fold-out poster that in the manner of an architectural drawing schematically displays the timeline of the full work and the specific locations of all 99 guest musicians. In keeping with this panoramic ambition, the album’s three hour long movements surge and flow across musical terrain, sometimes reaching into entirely new areas, and sometimes gesturing backwards to Matmos’ past recorded output and key influences: passages of banjo and mouth harp evoke the country and folk maneuvers of “The West”, motorik drumming and electric guitar condense into chugging Krautrock riffs, nostalgic pastoral synthesis suggests a slight return to “Supreme Balloon”, while the overall sound-collage-as-composition stratagem recalls Faust circa “The Faust Tapes”, Teo Macero’s collages of electric Miles, and classic Nurse With Wound. There are noisy and disorienting sections and oases of calm; at various points the mix drifts into field recordings gathered across the globe (children playing in a village in the Philippines, a bathroom in Uzbekistan, the drip of rainwater in Belarus, insects in Tokyo, a buzzing street light in Baltimore) as sound insistently relocates the listener’s frame of reference. Though the album was mastered and finalized a few months before the coming of COVID, social distancing and quarantine, in certain odd respects its formal gambit of the remote assemblage of contributions from across distance offers a curiously fitting soundtrack for the “group forms” we now assemble together across platforms and media. Tender, funny, strange and ultimately oddly moving, The Consuming Flame: Open Exercises in Group Form shows Matmos bringing diverse people together around a steady pulse. It’s a relay race across the gaps in genre and experience that divide us.

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“It was a really good tour to be on because it wasn\'t me in charge,” Kate Stables tells Apple Music about writing most of the songs on her fifth studio album as This Is the Kit while supporting The National as a guest vocalist on their *I Am Easy to Find* 2019 world tour. “I had a lot of time on my own to think and just mull things over. I think mixing that solitude while meeting new people, having these new experiences, and seeing far off lands I\'ve never been to before influenced the writing in quite a big way.” After taking some time to soak up that experience, the Paris-based singer-songwriter got together with her bandmates in early 2020 for a week-long residency in the middle of the Welsh mountains to flesh out her acoustic-based songs. With the help of longtime collaborator Jesse Vernon, who added horn parts and delicately arranged orchestration to her sparse, understated folk, Stables got in touch with producer and multi-instrumentalist Josh Kaufman (Bonny Light Horseman, Muzz) to add a whole new layer to the album. “I feel like a lot of that richness is thanks to Josh and the extra little touches he adds,” she says. “With the last album \[2017\'s *Moonshine Freeze*\], it was much more like what we sound like when each of us play our instruments during a gig. This album has more instruments that we don\'t play live. I feel really lucky that I can be in a band and that the songs are given a new kind of dimension.” Here, Stables shares some insights into the album, track by track. **Found Out** “This was one of the earlier ones I had written for the album. And for me, it was going to have to be the first song on the album, because it\'s quite representative of the time we spent in the studio together. It\'s the energy and the joy of playing together. And also, just the relationships between people and the kind of bonds that get mysteriously formed. Over time, you might not see someone for 10 years, but then you\'ll see them again and you\'re still kind of as joined as you were before.” **Started Again** “I think sometimes it\'s easy to resist starting from scratch again. But I think it\'s part of what life does, and it makes you stronger and wiser. And we should embrace it, I think. Human beings are kind of like ants, carrying things from A to B and then back again. And we don\'t always stop to check in with what we\'re doing and why we\'re doing it. Sometimes it\'s a physical baggage we\'re carrying, and sometimes it\'s the emotional bits and bobs that we hold on to that we could just decide not to carry around with us anymore. We could just decide not to hold that grudge or think about this one thing over and over again.” **This Is What You Did** “This song is about how sometimes it\'s hard to know whether the voices in our heads are actually the voices in our heads or the voices of other people. It\'s a dangerous game, assuming what other people are thinking about you. It\'s not that it\'s a waste of time worrying about it, but it\'s still something that we worry about anyway. It\'s about trying to get out of bad mental habits when you think negative thoughts, and instead make an effort to get outside and go for a walk or a run and get out of your head and a bit more into your limbs.” **No Such Thing** “I have a strange relationship with calling it this title. It was named after a demo that I sent to the band. There was two versions: one where I\'d strummed it and the one where I picked it. I asked the band which direction we should go in, and they all said \'picky.\' This song was me a little bit thinking about what would happen if we let go our identity and didn\'t rely on it as much, and also not making so many assumptions about other people\'s identity, too.” **Slider** “One way of putting it is not wanting to get out of bed, or not wanting to face up to things that you\'re feeling daunted by and thinking about how much we allow ourselves to cancel things or to back out of things, or to go through with them or to make ourselves do it.” **Coming to Get You Nowhere** “I was sharing a friend\'s little practice space to go and work and write, and I just needed a bit of a break. I decided to play whatever chords came out and made up words; it was an exercise in making up lyrics as I went along rather than a plan to write a song. Eventually, it kind of took shape as a song, but I still wasn\'t sure that it was going to be on the album until right at the end.” **Carry Us Please** “I was thinking about our relationship with leadership, and with representation and responsibility. Do we need someone to follow or can we as individuals come together and sort stuff out? There’s this tendency these days to slag things off on the internet just to be mean rather than to make any physical change in our own communities and neighborhoods. We\'re not as involved as we used to be. We want role models to carry us, and it\'s kind of reasonable, but at the same time, it\'s not reasonable. We have to be the change we want to see as individuals.” **Off Off On** “This song grew out of this experiment trying to find the melody. I was enjoying singing a note on the offbeat, and then again on the offbeat, and then singing it on the beat. And so the first idea of this phrase was me just singing \'off off on\' because that\'s where the note was going in relation to the beat.” **Shinbone Soap** “I love bars of soap. I just find them to be such pleasing objects to hold and smell. And that\'s the same with bones; I quite often find myself wanting to hold a bone in between my teeth. That sounds really stupid, but I\'m often quite jealous of dogs when I see them biting on a bone. Which is ridiculous, because I\'m also a vegetarian. I guess it\'s linked to my relationship with words and how they sound in your mouth and the sensation of that. I guess I\'m quite an oral person. Maybe I\'m still a one-year-old at heart that wants to put everything in my mouth.” **Was Magician** “It’s inspired by a set of books by Ursula K. Le Guin. In part, I\'m talking about the characters in these books that have these powers. I\'m also talking about these really young people I have met who to me seem to have this willfulness or determination—like when you meet a child who\'s incredibly stubborn or really articulate. It was also me thinking about the youth movements that are kind of getting engaged at the moment and sticking up for the planet, whether it\'s lobbying and protesting and communicating. It\'s their futures that are going to be hugely changed by the disaster that we\'re already in in terms of the environment on this planet.” **Keep Going** “This song imposes itself in subtle ways that were unforeseen by me and other people. I wanted to end the album on a positive note. Although you may interpret the sound as mellow or sad, maybe, it’s very positive in terms of its message of hope, perseverance, and faith in the future. Sometimes the subject matter of my songs doesn’t always match in the way that you’d expect with the vibe and energy. It eases us out of the album before we even realize what’s happened.”

Kate Stables’ group This Is The Kit have created a name for themselves with songs that untangle emotional knots and weave remarkable stories. Their second album for Rough Trade Records, Off Off On, (October 23, 2020) is a beautifully clear distillation of Stables’ songwriting gifts. Recorded just before the pandemic forced the world to hit the pause button, the songs are exquisitely astute, the album title suggesting life’s glitchy rhythms – “two steps backwards, one step forwards… Swinging between good places and bad places inside and out.” Off Off On is about “events catching up with you and how you catch up with events,” explains Stables, “not so much mood swings as brain swings, the here and there that your brain tugs you on.” Stables’ words – lyrical but always lucid – chime with a world tilted on its axis, from the flickering ‘This Is What You Did’, a testament to what Stables calls the “night-time mind race and morning day dread”, to the uninvited vampires hovering on the threshold in ‘Shinbone Soap’. The title track is about “a friend who got very ill and then didn’t make it. But I remember visiting him in hospital and seeing everything differently there. The people working there, the other visitors, the buildings, the grounds.” By the end of 2018, This Is The Kit had finished touring their last album, Moonshine Freeze, and begun to write Off Off On when Stables was invited to join The National on the road for multiple tours and TV appearances – a continuation of her contributions on their album I Am Easy To Find. “I think it did me loads of good,” laughs Stables. “It was so brilliant when I was writing to be away from my songs and the responsibility of being in charge of a band or a project - just to forget about that for a while and be a minion in someone else’s band was brilliant, I loved it. I think it really helped my writing and my getting through whatever I needed to get through.” As the songs coalesced, she decided to work on the new record with producer Josh Kaufman, a New York-based musician, Hold Steady collaborator and member of Bonny Light Horseman and Muzz. Stables first met him when working with Anais Mitchell on a cover of an Osibisa song, their paths crossing again at Bon Iver and Aaron Dessner’s PEOPLE residencies in Berlin and Brooklyn. “We were on the same page about a lot of musical ideas, as well as doing things I definitely wouldn’t do musically,” Stables says. “It was a lovely mixture of wow, you’re exactly in my brain and exactly at the opposite end of my brain.” After the band – completed by Rozi Plain (bass/vocals), Neil Smith (guitar), Jesse D Vernon (??), and Jamie Whitby-Coles (drums), – rehearsed the songs at an isolated cottage in Wales, they headed to Wiltshire’s Real World Studios in the UK, finishing just in time for everyone to get home for lockdown. The result of their work together is Off Off On. Richly illuminating and acutely sensitive to the pulses and currents of life, the album shows This Is The Kit overflowing with ideas, energy and power.

Berlin based composer and producer Ben Lukas Boysen returns with his most progressive and shape-shifting work to date, the long awaited Mirage, on 1 May 2020 with Erased Tapes. The third album to be penned under his own name proceeding his Hecq moniker, Mirage follows 2013’s Gravity and the acclaimed 2016 full length Spells, a record as much admired by his peers as it was loved by fans that not only yielded remixes from Max Cooper and Tim Hecker, but also opened Jon Hopkins’ Late Night Tales compilation. Since the release of Spells, Ben continued to be in demand for his scoring abilities, collaborating with cellist and composer Sebastian Plano on the music for David OReilly’s landmark innovative video game Everything. It was added to the long list for the Best Animated Short at the 90th Academy Awards, making it the first video game to qualify for an Oscar. In 2019 Ben contributed to the Brainwaves project alongside fellow Erased Tapes artists Michael Price and Högni Egilsson in collaboration with a team of scientists at Goldsmiths University, London — linking states of consciousness and music. He also scored the soundtrack to the DAFF award-winning German TV show Beat, the feature film The Collini Case, and co-composed the music for the short film Manifesto with Nils Frahm, starring Cate Blanchett. As with Gravity and Spells, Ben has an array of musical guests adorning Mirage, including long time collaborator, Berlin based cellist and composer Anne Müller as well as Australian saxophonist and composer Daniel Thorne — for whom Ben wrote parts specifically, having heard his 2019 solo debut Lines of Sight. Lead track Medela features both and takes the listener on a kaleidoscopic journey that slides with ease across sonic terrains. By the end it’s difficult to tell what exactly was heard; “I wanted to experiment with blending these recordings with 100% artificial elements, often to points where an instrument becomes an abstraction of what it was and the musicians’ presence in the song is much more of an important DNA string in the song rather than an obvious layer.” Mirage, like its title suggests, feels like a sonic optical illusion — each piece containing sounds and techniques bent and processed to make them seem overexposed; the overly felt-y piano on Clarion, Daniel Thorne’s saxophone on Medela, the single note voice of Lisa Morgenstern splitting into different chords on Empyrean. It is detectable but also easily missed, like the double piano on Kenotaph that could be perceived as one, but is actually two pianos in two different rooms, separate countries even — one is digital while the other is acoustic. While on Spells Ben made programmed pieces sound indistinguishable from human playing, with Mirage he set out to do the opposite and make the human touch unrecognisable, creating something of a mystery or a mirage. “A lot of the elements and instruments you hear on the album are either not what you think they are, or exactly what you think they are but behave differently or they’re elements you definitely know but they are hidden, processed, or morphed into something else. With Spells and Gravity I was trying to hide the machines. On Mirage, I’m trying to hide the human” — Ben Lukas Boysen

1. Noup Head (feat. Kathryn Joseph, Kevin Cormack, John Burnside & Alex Kozobolis) 2. Rousay 3. Peedie Breaks (feat. Benge) 4. Skreevar (feat. Marta Salogni) 5. Long Hope (feat. Kathryn Joseph, John Burnside, Hiroshi Ebina & Hinako Omori) 6. Linga Holm 7. Hidaland 8. Hether Blether (feat. Astra Forward, Hinako Omori) 9. Hamnavoe 10. Where I Am Is Here

When Toronto hardcore heroes Fucked Up released their 2011 rock opera *David Comes to Life*, it was accompanied by *David’s Town*, a faux compilation of fictional punk bands that purportedly existed within the double album’s early-’80s narrative setting. But in the wake of 2018’s thematic sequel *Dose Your Dreams*, guitarist Mike Haliechuk and drummer Jonah Falco took a different approach to extending David’s universe. Instead of coming up with another batch of make-believe groups, they formed a real one. If the resulting project, Jade Hairpins, takes its conceptual cues from Fucked Up, musically, its heart belongs less to the circle pit than the festival dance tent. As Falco tells Apple Music, “The biggest connection between Jade Hairpins to Fucked Up is that a lot of the names in these songs were generated by the story of *Dose Your Dreams*. My job initially was to take these people and make a narrative about them. But when this became a real band, I had to take that narrative and make it into something more universal.” The title of Jade Hairpins’ debut, *Harmony Avenue*, is a sly nod to The Beatles’ *Abbey Road* in that “it’s this collection of vignettes that goes over the place stylistically,” says Falco. Navigating the record is not unlike drifting through a multilevel nightclub with different themes on each floor, spanning ’60s psych, ’70s glam and punk, ‘80s electro and Afropop, and ’90s acid house. But amid all this promiscuous genre-hopping, Falco—promoted here from drummer to singer/guitarist—establishes a consistent melodic through line with his playfully flamboyant vocals. “Originally, Jade Hairpins was going to be the Tom Tom Club to Fucked Up\'s Talking Heads,” he explains. “It was supposed to be this musical-umbrella omnicorp sort of thing, but it just so happened that my voice wound up on the majority of the songs—I became the singer and this became a band.” Here’s Falco\'s song-by-song roadmap through *Harmony Avenue*’s zigzagging course. **J Terrapin** “That\'s a play on words: Jade Hairpin/J Terrapin. It could also be a shout-out to the Grateful Dead, depending on how connected you\'re feeling to *Terrapin Station*. It\'s weird that this is the lead-off track—it\'s the last song I did vocals for, and it was back when I still thought it didn\'t really matter what I sung about because this was just going to be the origin story of a person called Jade Hairpin. So the lyrics are purposely absurd. The first line in the song is: \'I was born in the seconds of an hour’s last breath\'—like I did my homework right before school. We were trying to sound like Buzzcocks and Television Personalities. We can\'t shake those influences, ever.” **(Don’t Break My) Devotion** “This one was supposed to be M\'s \'Pop Muzik\' and Bocca Juniors\' \'Raise (63 Steps to Heaven)\'—a bit acid house, a bit like Stone Roses, but with this undeniably nerdy and absurd performative idea. The vocals are trying to be like smarmy \'70s Bryan Ferry and \'80s Ian Astbury. And believe it or not, this was one of the more genuine vocal takes that I did. There are unreleased takes where I read off the Wikipedia entry for DNA in the style of Shaun Ryder. But these first two songs set up the goalposts for the rest of the record: This is strange and this is melodic and this is small and precariously ambitious, and a bit funkier than we usually like to get.” **Father Coin** “Musically, this was supposed to be more like Happy Mondays, but it ended up sort of like Robyn Hitchcock/Soft Boys, and the harmonies in the middle are supposed to be like \[The Who\'s\] \'Boris the Spider.\' The lyrics for this one were written by Jeremy \[Gaudet\] from Kiwi jr. Capitalism and consumerism are a bit of a running theme throughout the record, and there\'s a continuing character of greed and money that has manifested itself as this person, Father Coin. He’s that person that\'s present in your life and drives you to eviscerate yourself, and takes things when you least expect them. You work so hard, and then at the end of the day, you open your wallet and there\'s this little card in there that says, \'Father Coin was here.\' It\'s pretty on the nose.” **Yesterdang** “\'Yesterdang\' is about a confused journey where a person is so full of self-doubt that they fold back in on themselves—they regret what they\'ve done, but they remember what they did as though it\'s something to be nostalgic for. It\'s sort of about the hyper-reproduction of your personal image and legacy. The things you write are permanently published all of a sudden, even if you had this off-the-cuff thought—including this conversation! So you develop this rose-colored memory for yourself, when you might have not liked who you were when you said that. Everybody\'s wrapped in this infinity loop of difficult reflection.” **Post No Bill** “This song is actually a bigger collaboration. We wrote it with Moshe \[Rozenberg\] from Absolutely Free and Trevor \[Blumas\] from Doomsquad, and \[Fucked Up guitarist\] Ben \[Cook\] was in the studio as well—he’s the grittier voice in the chorus. The main vocal is me trying to do George Michael, Bernard from New Order, and perhaps the impersation that Ferris Bueller does when he makes the prank call in to Principal Rooney. And the pitched-down vocals are Mike literally doing Yello. Musically, it\'s picking up on this electric Tony Allen/\'80s calypso/Talking Heads/Huey Lewis parking-lot-banger vibe. Post No Bill is a character who becomes a victim of Father Coin. He’s a kind of nonentity that successfully broke away from all the trappings and displeasure of greed, but he’s still being visited by the specter of that kind of lasting greed, and he’s so naive and humble that he invites it out for coffee and tries to have a calm conversation with it.” **Broadstairs Beach** “Broadstairs Beach is a seaside town in the southeast of England, where people go on vacation. Our guitar player Jack Goldstein moved down to Margate \[nearby\] a few years ago from London, and I went out to visit him and we had this magical day that ended at Broadstairs Beach eating the best chips I\'ve ever had with some really cold beer and ice cream. So I decided to write a song about that night, and it\'s a sort of troubadoury thing. But the implication—and it\'s pretty vague, I must admit—is I wanted to take a place that people consider a tacky holiday destination and give it that magic that I experienced. And in some ways, I\'m suggesting a vague idea of \'no one is illegal\' or \'there\'s no place where you will not be welcome\'—I don\'t have as difficult a time as the person who\'s migrated to another country, and I wanted to calmly and respectfully acknowledge that, and in a way, I\'ve done that hidden away in a song about a night of eating potatoes and ice cream.” **Dolly Dream** “\'Dolly Dream\' is the song that\'s the most tethered to the Fucked Up story. Dolly Dream is a sort of muse for the David character that somehow activates his understanding of love, this perfect person to attain and become whole with. The lyrics were written by Ben and he did the first pass of this song, and I resung it on the record. It\'s about a journey, this sort of longing emotion to get somewhere and find something, and you can find that either in solitude or you can find it with your friends, and it\'s important to remember that you create that journey and those meanings for yourself. One of the lines in the song is \'free to dream of Dolly,\' and to me that is about creating a space for you to make a destination for yourself. There are a lot of preconceived destinations for people, whether it\'s status, wealth, body image, control, aggression, whatever it is. But you\'re free to dream. So this is about the journey to find meaning with yourself.” **Mary Magazine** “I don\'t know anything about the character of Mary Magazine, other than that she is an arch capitalist. So this is that money theme again. I\'m a professional musician, which, in my father\'s words, means I\'ve taken the vow of poverty. I have a totally funny relationship with money in the sense that I am very poor at maintaining it, I\'m not sure how to manage it, I often covet it, but have no idea what to do with it, and I\'m perfectly happy to let myself get to the point where I might have absolutely nothing. Money is a complicated thing, and I\'ve used this Mary Magazine idea as a conduit for that. The first line of the song is \'murderess wonderful and terrific,\' and that basically sums it up.” **Truth Like a Mirage** “Well, as you can imagine, after singing eight songs about characters from a story that I didn\'t write and trying to impart as much of my personal feeling and as much of my genuine emotion, and also taking new chances on being an actual singer in an actual band that isn\'t just screaming at somebody, I may have been suffering from a bit of impostor syndrome. So this song is very personal. It\'s about that exact moment of self-reflection where you think, ‘Up to this point in my life, I presume that I haven\'t done anything wrong—I haven\'t gotten in trouble, nobody\'s died on my watch, and there are more people that tolerate me than hate me.’ But I just wanted to express that I\'m not perfect. Even at this point in my life where I feel like I\'ve done a lot, I\'ve still got a lot to learn and a long way to go.” **Motherman** “Mike wrote the lyrics and sings the choruses on this one. This was the first Jade Hairpins song. It\'s got the Roland 303 acid-house bass, it\'s got the Peter Hook acoustic bass, it\'s got this sort of Leamington Spa, DX7 strings, it\'s got the This Heat-style jangly guitar, and then it\'s got this low-end vocal and this really heartfelt vocal happening. Motherman is this genderless time-traveling benevolent figure from Planet Dose Your Dreams. The lyrics are about gay rights, and not having to layer mask upon mask and meaning upon meaning to be able to just exist as you are. There\'s something very uplifting and positive in this song, in that it\'s about just being without all those dividing lines and things like that. It\'s about gender, it\'s about sex, and hopefully it\'s about lightness and light.”

“This music actually healed me.” That’s the hopeful message Lady Gaga brings with her as she emerges from something of a career detour—having mostly abandoned dance pop in favor of her 2016 album *Joanne*’s more stripped-back sound and the intimate singer-songwriter fare of 2018’s *A Star Is Born*. She returns with *Chromatica*, a concept album about an Oz-like virtual world of colors—produced by BloodPop®, who also worked on *Joanne*—and it’s a return to form for the disco diva. “I’m making a dance record again,” Gaga tells Apple Music, “and this dance floor, it’s mine, and I earned it.” As with many artists, music is a form of therapy for Gaga, helping her exorcise the demons of past family traumas. But it wasn’t until she could embrace her own struggles—with mental health, addiction and recovery, the trauma of sexual assault—that she felt free enough to start dancing again. “All that stuff that I went through, I don’t have to feel pain about it anymore. It can just be a part of me, and I can keep going.” And that’s the freedom she wants her fans to experience—even if it will be a while before most of them can enjoy the new album in a club setting. “I can’t wait to dance with people to this music,” says Gaga. But until then, she hopes they’ll find a little therapy in the music, like she did. “It turns out if you believe in yourself, sometimes you’re good enough. I would love for people that listen to this record to feel and hear that.” Below, Lady Gaga walks us through some of the key tracks on *Chromatica* and explains the stories behind them. **Chromatica I** “The beginning of the album symbolizes for me the beginning of my journey to healing. It goes right into this grave string arrangement, where you feel this pending doom that is what happens if I face all the things that scare me. That string arrangement is setting the stage for a more cinematic experience with this world that is how I make sense of things.” **Alice** “I had some dark conversations with BloodPop® about how I felt about life. ‘I’m in the hole, I’m falling down/So down, down/My name isn’t Alice, but I’ll keep looking for Wonderland.’ So it’s this weird experience where I’m going, ‘I’m not sure I’m going to make it, but I’m going to try.’ And that’s where the album really begins.” **Stupid Love** “In the ‘Stupid Love’ video, red and blue are fighting. It could decidedly be a political commentary. And it’s very divisive. The way that I see the world is that we are divided, and that it creates a tense environment that is very extremist. And it’s part of my vision of Chromatica, which is to say that this is not dystopian, and it’s not utopian. This is just how I make sense of things. And I wish that to be a message that I can translate to other people.” **Rain on Me (With Ariana Grande)** “When we were vocally producing her, I was sitting at the console and I said to her, ‘Everything that you care about while you sing, I want you to forget it and just sing. And by the way, while you’re doing that, I’m going to dance in front of you,’ because we had this huge, big window. And she was like, ‘Oh my god, I can’t. I don’t know.’ And then she started to do things with her voice that were different. And it was the joy of two artists going, ‘I see you.’ Humans do this. We all do things to make ourselves feel safe, and I always challenge artists when I work with them, I go, ‘Make it super fucking unsafe and then do it again.’” **Free Woman** “I was sexually assaulted by a music producer. It’s compounded all of my feelings about life, feelings about the world, feelings about the industry, what I had to compromise and go through to get to where I am. And I had to put it there. And when I was able to finally celebrate it, I said, ‘You know what? I’m not nothing without a steady hand. I’m not nothing unless I know I can. I’m still something if I don’t got a man, I’m a free woman.’ It’s me going, ‘I no longer am going to define myself as a survivor, or a victim of sexual assault. I just am a person that is free, who went through some fucked-up shit.’” **911** “It’s about an antipsychotic that I take. And it’s because I can’t always control things that my brain does. I know that. And I have to take medication to stop the process that occurs. ‘Keep my dolls inside diamond boxes/Save it till I know I’m going to drop this front I’ve built around me/Oasis, paradise is in my hands/Holding on so tight to this status/It’s not real, but I’ll try to grab it/Keep myself in beautiful places, paradise is in my hands.’” **Sine From Above (With Elton John)** “S-I-N-E, because it’s a sound wave. That sound, sine, from above is what healed me to be able to dance my way out of this album. ‘I heard one sine from above/I heard one sine from above/Then the signal split into the sound created stars like me and you/Before there was love, there was silence/I heard one sine and it healed my heart, heard a sine.’ That was later in the recording process that I actually was like, ‘And now let me pay tribute to the very thing that has revived me, and that is music.’”

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.’”

“For me, the sweet spot in music is when happy and sad come together,” Archie Fairhurst—aka Romare—tells Apple Music. “When they meet in the middle, that’s what I’m trying to create.” Four years on from the experimental psych-disco of *Love Songs: Pt. Two*, Fairhurst has shape-shifted to meet this ambition. His third Romare album quests into American gospel and traditional Irish folk via country, hymns, and classical to explore spiritualty, identity, and belonging. It’s cerebral dance music that sits comfortably on dance floors and more reflective solo environments. Here’s Fairhurst to take you through the superb *Home*, track by track. **Gone** “I feel like this song is about getting lost and then finding a way out. There is a key change which lends to this theme. At times the mood can be dark and at other points it can be light. I remember having the levels up very high in the studio while making the bassline.” **Dreams** “This song underwent a lot of changes before the final version. It contains a gospel sample, but there is more of a focus on instrument composition in this song. A lot of the inspiration came from a newly acquired Casio CZ-1000 synthesizer and from the song ‘Stop’ by B.W.H.” **Sunshine** “I named this song ‘Sunshine’ because of the lyric ‘Through the sunshine’ in its second half. It started off as a melody line over some chords in the key of A minor, which eventually became the breakdown section in the middle of the song. Other melody and basslines were developed from this breakdown section, and then drum patterns and percussion were added from an MFB-522 analog drum machine and my brother’s old Casio keyboard to form the verses.” **The River** “This song probably has the most samples. I came across a nice drum break on a record and then fitted an instrumental loop from another record on top. I distorted a kick drum for the bottom end, which glued these parts together and formed the basis of the song. Like ‘Gone,’ ‘The River’ is a bit of a journey but with more building and release of tension.” **Deliverance** “It’s a simple song but one that I continued to enjoy while working on the album. It’s quite peaceful, and the alternating bassline just about makes up for the sparseness and simplicity of the arrangement and instrumentation. The hiss in the classical music sample also fills in this gap a little.” **High** “This song started off through playing around with a Korg EMX. I liked the sound of the kick drum underneath this snarling synth line which I modulated to pan quickly from left to right. I also enjoyed experimenting with a more acid bassline on this one.” **You See** “I wanted to go deeper on this song. I feel like it is one of the better-produced songs on the record. My favorite section occurs between 3:52 and 3:55. I also like the way there is a pause before the final section, which is another favorite part because it reminds me of dancing around the living room to Enya with my mother as a little boy.” **Heaven** “I’m pretty sure this started as a riff I whistled or hummed one morning. I remember the song began much slower but I felt an urge to increase the tempo, so I did and that informed the style of the song. I was inspired to develop this into one of the longest songs I’ve written after playing a live version at Printworks in London at the end of 2018. The performance gave me the confidence to extend the song and turn it into more of a rollercoaster, with more ups and downs.” **Home** “I was experimenting with my mother’s accordion during a recording and played a few accidental chords at the end while putting the instrument down. Listening back to the recording, I thought there was something nice about this final section, so I looped it and built the song around that. I like the way my father’s 12-string guitar and my mother’s accordion feature in the same song.”

“I was fresh from a war but it was internal/Every day I encounter another hurdle,” J Hus spits as he closes *Big Conspiracy* on the piano-led “Deeper Than Rap”. That war, and the highs and lows of Momodou Jallow’s life, make for a mesmerising second album. Lyrics address his incarceration, street life, God, violence, his African roots and colonialism. From others those themes would feel heavy, but delivered in J Hus’ effortless voice, with a flow that switches frequently, they stun. The references are playful, too—Mick Jagger and Woody Woodpecker are mentioned on “Fortune Teller” and Destiny’s Child get a recurrent role in the standout “Fight for Your Right”. Hus is backed by inventive instrumentation encompassing delicate strings, Afrobeats, reggae and hip-hop and nods to garage and Dr. Dre’s work with 50 Cent, while Koffee and Burna Boy contribute to the celebratory feel on “Repeat” and “Play Play”. This is a record as diverse, smart and vibrant as anything coming from the UK right now.

Adopted by the United Nations in 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaims the sanctity of human dignities, freedoms, and well-being. If, today, it remains a far-off destination, its values continue to guide and inspire. Max Richter’s *Voices* is a beautiful sonic journey through the Declaration’s principal ideas, combining resonating soundscapes with passages from the document. These appear first in a recording by one of its authors, Eleanor Roosevelt, and are then narrated by actor Kiki Layne, with fragments echoed in more than 70 different languages—each voice crowdsourced via social media. The whole project was 10 years in the making. “The original impetus for *Voices* was the events around Guantanamo, when the revelations came out about the way people had been treated there,” Richter tells Apple Music. “I felt in that moment that the world had gone wrong in a new way, and I wanted to make a piece of music to reflect on it—almost to process it.” There’s a structure and repetition to the Declaration that appeals to Richter, providing a framework for the album. “The way the word *everyone* comes back all the time is very clever,” he says. “It’s got a ritualistic quality—it’s very powerful.” At the core of *Voices* lies a string orchestra that’s “upside down” in terms of its proportions. “It’s all basses and cellos—dark-sounding instruments,” says Richter. “But what I wanted to do is make music which had a sense of hopefulness, luminosity. So I set myself a challenge to make bright music from dark materials. It’s like alchemy—trying to make gold out of base metal.” A “Voiceless Mix” of each piece means listeners will also be able to hear Richter’s score without narration. “It’ll be a chance to think about it all,” he says, “like revisiting a landscape but arriving from another direction.” Here, he guides us through *Voices*, piece by piece. **All Human Beings** “*All Human Beings* sets everything up. It starts with a choral drone, which makes you listen—we have to pay attention to the texts, and I don’t want the music to get in the way of them. So the sound is very reduced and drone-like while we hear readings by Eleanor Roosevelt and Kiki Layne. Then it slowly grows in density and complexity. Once the readings are over, the music blossoms to become something in itself, rather than an accompaniment. I’ve worked a lot with this choir, Tenebrae. They specialize in Renaissance music, and I love that clean sound.” **Origins** “A big part of this project is the idea of a piece of music as a place to think about the world we’ve made and the world we want to make. So the first part of *Origins* is really just that—a chance to reflect on what we’ve just heard, the spoken texts, and the things we’ve just felt. *Origins* starts very simply as a solo piano piece and, with a solo cello, becomes more melodic as it progresses.” **Journey Piece** “*Journey Piece* is mostly choral—it’s quite a short piece. But it speaks to the concept of displacement. In our comfortable Western lives, we think of travel as being something you do for work or pleasure. But a lot of people travel very much against their will. The texts here reflect on these things, and *Journey Piece* is a place to think about them.” **Chorale** “*Chorale* is scored for the orchestra with soprano and violin solos. The title comes from the cyclical nature of the material, echoing the verse structure of J.S. Bach’s chorales. Over its span, the music and the soprano line rise continuously, so the intention is that the music gets brighter the longer it plays.” **Hypocognition** “*Hypocognition* means not being able to express something because you don’t have a name for it. I thought that was an interesting idea. And I think it points to the inability to be in someone else’s shoes, to see someone else’s point of view. The piece is largely electronic and has a conversational relationship with the text. The text is, in a way, the data or frontal-lobe information. And the music evokes the feelings. So, you’re given some information and then given a space to think about it.” **Prelude 6** “‘A little piano piece which seems simple but isn’t. And I think that’s a metaphor for our situation. We all know what the problems are, but it’s not easy to fix them. The piece is in two overlapping time signatures, so it has a slightly unsettled quality.” **Murmuration** “*Murmuration* explores again the idea of migration, of movement against your will, and it occupies a hybrid space between acoustic and electronic music. The sounds are mostly choral, which evoke a sense of ritual, but there is a lot of synthesis and computing going on, which provides a kind of amniotic fluid for the music to inhabit. It just floats in this space.” **Cartography** “*Cartography* is the art of mapmaking, the study of places, so the piece has similar preoccupations to *Murmuration*. It’s a very solitary kind of piece, though, and it sits within a deep silence. Again, it’s a piece that’s not as simple as it sounds—it’s irregular and repetitive and is very much in the style of a lot of my piano music.” **Little Requiems** “The text here is all about motherhood and children, and the need to afford them protection. The less able somebody is, the less they’re able to look after themselves. And, of course, children are disproportionately the victims of everything that’s going on, whether it’s migration or the situation in Syria, for example. It affects the powerless disproportionately. The music here features the string orchestra underneath a rising soprano solo, which allows you the mental space to think about that and the sampled texts.” **Mercy** “*Mercy* is scored for violin solo and piano, and was the first piece I wrote for the album. The title comes from Portia’s speech in Shakespeare’s *The Merchant of Venice*: ‘The quality of mercy is not strained.’ It’s a wonderful speech, all about forgiveness. But it’s about rights, too—if you cut me, do I not bleed? The message is that all people are the same. All through *Voices*, you’ll hear little clues of *Mercy*, so the whole album ends up being a sort of theme-and-variations in reverse.”

In the months leading up to his first tour date supporting 2019’s *Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest*, Bill Callahan was struck by what he describes to Apple Music as “the perfect inspiration for the perfect goal”: Before he left home, he’d try to write and record another album. “I\'m the type of person that can only do one thing at a time,” he says. “I just knew that if I didn\'t finish it before the tour, then it would be a year before I could even think about working on these songs. And I knew that if I did finish it, I would feel like a million bucks.” So Callahan drew up some deadlines for himself and began finishing and fleshing out songs he had lying around, work he hadn’t been able to find a home for previously. *Gold Record* is the short story collection to his other LPs\' novels—a set of self-contained worlds and character studies every bit as detailed and disarming as anything the 54-year-old singer-songwriter has released to date. It also includes an update to 1999’s “Let’s Move to the Country,” a song (originally under his Smog pseudonym) that was calling out for some added perspective. “I have a natural inclination to try to make a narrative out of a whole record,” he says. “But this time, it’s really just a bunch of songs that stand on their own, not really connected to the others. That\'s why I called it *Gold Record*—it’s kind of like a greatest hits record, though singles record is maybe more accurate.” Here, he takes us inside every song on the album. **Pigeons** “I noticed when I got married that I finally understood this word ‘community.’ I was always hearing it, but it never really meant anything to me. But then when I got married—and especially when I had a kid—that word became my favorite word. It meant so much. This song is just about the feeling of marriage, how it connects you to life processes, to birth and death and your neighbors. I think if you have a partner, you can\'t be the selfish person you used to be, because there\'s actually someone listening to you when you\'re being that way, so it kind of steers you into being more considerate and a more generous person. Because when someone is hearing what you\'re saying, then you are hearing what you\'re saying for the first time. That leads to being married to the world, I think.” **Another Song** “I actually wrote that song for a producer who contacted me. They were making a covers record with Emmylou Harris, and so I wrote that for her. The record never happened, so I just used it for myself. I think that one has a different feel because I got \[guitarist\] Matt Kinsey to play bass on that one song, and he has a pretty distinct and melodic kind of up-front way of playing bass.” **35** “It\'s definitely an experience that I had, where I felt like I’d read all the great books and would just be disappointed or feel alienated from any new authors that I would try to read. In your late teens and early twenties is when you read great books and you kind of take them on as if they are books about you, or books that reflect your inner world perfectly. But whenever I try to go back to those, I\'m just not interested. I look at it as a good thing: You are kind of unformed in your twenties, and then hopefully, by the time you hit 30, you are somewhat formed. I think that it\'s like you\'re getting your wings to fly. When you\'re unformed, when you\'re a fledgling person, you can\'t really express a lot. I think it\'s a good thing to have that feeling of not connecting necessarily with art, because it prompts you to work on your own.” **Protest Song** “That song is probably the oldest new song on the record. I started it ten years ago, got the idea and just never finished it. But I considered putting it on *Shepherd*, just as I considered putting it on \[2013’s\] *Dream River*. It didn\'t seem to fit either of those. It was kind of a revenge song. At the time I used to watch a lot of late-night shows, just because I was curious about what kind of music gets on there. At least at the time, it was almost invariably the worst people out there, in my opinion. So it was just kind of like a revenge fantasy, on the musicians that are performing. That accent I use is just a film noir that lives inside me.” **The Mackenzies** “When I bought my first car 30 years ago, the couple who was selling it invited me into their house and made me a cocktail. I just kind of hung out with them for a while, which was just a very pleasant and unusual thing. It was a used Dodge minivan, and he was a Dodge mechanic. I figured it was probably the safest person to buy a car from, a mechanic. They were maternal and paternal, to a complete stranger, me just coming out to their house. They also had one of those very homey houses that some people have. Some people master the art of comfort—they have the best couches and chairs and shag carpet and stuff. That\'s what stuck with me—their warmth, their instant warmth. But maybe that\'s because I was giving them a check for five grand. The song is fairly new, but those people had been in my head for a long time. I guess I always believe that if it\'s something you always think about, then that means it\'s very important—it\'s a good way to find out about what you should be writing about, if you have recurring thoughts.” **Let’s Move to the Country** “I always like playing it live, but I kind of stopped and then resurrected it a couple of years ago on tour. It seemed like there was something missing, and because of developments in my personal life, it just seemed like I should write a new chapter to the song. The original is from the perspective of someone who can\'t even say the words ‘baby’ or ‘family.’ The updated version is someone that can. It\'s sort of a mystery, and deciding if you\'re going to have a second one or not is kind of almost as big a decision as having one kid, because it could be looked at as whether or not you\'re happy having kids. I\'m totally not saying that people that only have one kid aren\'t happy having kids, but by having this second kid, you\'re definitely making some kind of deeper commitment, I think. You\'re saying, ‘Okay, I\'m willing to get deeper into this.’” **Breakfast** “I think it just started from an image I had of a woman making breakfast for her man—doing that kind of affectionate thing, but not having affection for the person. What are the dynamics of that? What\'s going on in that type of relationship? Why is she still feeding him and feeding the relationship when she\'s not happy? I was trying to explore that kind of dynamic that relationships can get into sometimes. I also find it interesting with couples: who gets up first and the way that changes sometimes, depending on what\'s going on. Who\'s getting out of bed first, and who\'s laying in bed longer?” **Cowboy** “It’s kind of nostalgic for the way TV used to be. There would be a later movie, and then later there was a late, late movie. If you were staying up to watch that, it would usually be after *The Tonight Show*. That meant something. It meant you\'re up pretty late, for whatever reason. You might be being irresponsible, or you might just be indulging yourself. Now that TV is on demand, I don\'t think anyone really watches late-night shows at night anymore—they just watch the highlights the next day. So on one level, it\'s about that loss of sense of place that TV used to give you, because it was a much more fixed thing. And that kind of correlates to watching a Western, because that\'s about a time that is also gone. I was just thinking about that, the time of your life when you can just watch a movie at two in the morning.” **Ry Cooder** “He\'s someone that I\'ve been familiar with maybe since his \[1984\] *Paris, Texas* soundtrack, but I hadn\'t really explored his records very much. Maybe three or four years ago I started digging into all of them and was really being blown away by how great so many of his records are and how different each one is and how he really uplifts and kind of puts a spotlight on international musicians. Unlike \[1986’s\] *Graceland*—where people think that Paul Simon kind of was just using those people—Ry Cooder really seems to want people to know about all this other kind of music. If you watch or read an interview with him from now, he\'s totally stoked about music and not at all jaded or bored or anything. I just thought that he deserved a ballad, a tribute. Because I think he\'s great.” **As I Wander** “I tried to make it a song about everything that I possibly could. I was trying to sum up human existence and sum up the record, even though it wasn\'t written with that intent necessarily. All the perspectives on the record are very distinct, and limited to just that narrative. But with ‘As I Wander,’ I tried to hold all narratives at the same time. Just like a great big spaghetti junction where all the highways meet up and swirl around.”

The idea for Daniel Lopatin’s ninth Oneohtrix Point Never LP came as he began revisiting old radio mixtapes he’d made as a teenager just outside of Boston. “Unlike a mixtape that you make for somebody else, they\'re non-sequential,” he tells Apple Music. “You’re reacting to something that you may have not even heard before, that you\'re just titillated by for the first few seconds. It’s like a map of your unconscious in a way.” Meant to simulate the experience of listening to FM radio for an entire day, *Magic Oneohtrix Point Never*—a nod to Boston soft rock station Magic 106, and the name to which Lopatin’s 2007 debut *Betrayed in the Octagon* was originally attributed—had to have “an eclecticism” that made you feel like you were spinning the dial. So in addition to collages of hallucinogenic DJ chatter, there are also mutant pop ballads (“No Nightmares,” which features friend and co-executive producer The Weeknd), warped alt-rock anthems (“I Don’t Love Me Anymore”), New Age satires (“The Whether Channel”), and sculptures wrought from sound that most people would dismiss as garbage or background noise. All of it speaks to a career defined by liquid sensibilities and an open mind. “I wanted to make a cohesive, punchy, 50-minute record that was very personal, but pulled from FM palettes that I was personally interested in,” Lopatin says. “I think it works really well as a metaphor for how I\'ve changed. The things that I try to understand about my own life and being an avid musical listener and how much that\'s influenced me as a musician is kind of apparent on this record. That metaphor of transformation is something that I came to by thinking about the radio.” Here, Lopatin walks us through the day, from sunup to midnight. **Cross Talk I** “You’re in alarm clock territory. You’re waking up kind of inside the fucking radio, not listening to it. I really want the setting of the album to be almost within a kind of psychic environment—Magic Oneohtrix Point Never as a radio station. So you’re waking up. Time to get on with the day.” **Auto & Allo** “It\'s really a track of two parts. The first half is really abstract, and in the second half it comes together. I called it \'Auto & Allo,\' which means self and other. So it’s like you\'re orienting and you\'re moving towards something. The album is becoming, earning its subjectivity out of this haze.” **Long Road Home** “I imagined it as the beginning of the album’s journey. It\'s setting the thesis of the whole record up, which is sort of embracing transformation, even if it\'s kind of disturbing and the future is vast and unfortunately filled with question marks. But that\'s it. That\'s the game. That\'s where we are. That\'s who we are. And so, how to live alongside your incompleteness, instead of fight against it or to think that you can overcome it. There\'s no home you come to. There\'s just this kind of road, and the road is the thing. That\'s what that song is for me.” **Cross Talk II** “You\'re in the Midday Suite. The collaged-together narrative there is the DJ saying, ‘Somehow our childhood fantasies don\'t relate to our adult realities.’ And from there, the record gets a little bit more dense. I like to think of midday as active and energetic. There\'s a lot of optimism, weirdly.” **I Don’t Love Me Anymore** “Basically it’s Frankensteined together—partially a bratty pop-punk song, partially motorik, like psych rock that\'s drum-machine-driven. There\'s a lot of weird over-sampled guitars on it, like the kinds that you might hear in a Sega Genesis video game.” **Bow Ecco** “A lot of the more ambient moments on the record are references to weather. The liminal space of a weather report is always, I\'ve found, really calming, but it’s scary because you\'re essentially just somebody sitting there talking about unpredictable dynamic systems and trying to figure them out and conquer them. A bow echo is a weather pattern that\'s shaped like an archer\'s bow, this thing that could be like a tornado. This song is calm and there’s a lot of repetition. Then I\'m trying to characterize a moment of weather where it flares up like a cyclone, a music-as-sculpture moment where I try to characterize this thing that was like something you\'d see on a Weather Channel broadcast.” **The Whether Channel** “It\'s like ‘Bow Ecco’ is the actual weather outside, happening somewhere in the lower atmosphere. And ‘Whether Channel’ is like a station, a place where something\'s commenting on it, dealing with it, or trying to track it. And so it flows out of that. \[Rapper\] Nolan \[berollin\] did that part off the cuff, and it\'s really interesting because he\'s talking almost in this pseudo-motivational-speaker way, which I thought was really funny. That fit so perfectly and wonderfully into this whole New Age thing that I\'m interested in anyway. I was like, ‘Oh. Let\'s do this kind of Law of Attraction satire where, by the end of his verse, his voice is totally transformed into this super-saturated bit-crushed thing and it sounds like weird baby voices are being pulled apart from each other.” **No Nightmares** “It kind of has this 10cc/Godley & Creme/‘Take My Breath Away’ kind of vibe to it that could be like a late-night thing because it\'s slow. But I felt that it was so sweet and kind of pretty. It also has a kind of blue-sky quality to it even if it\'s kind of slow and romantic. It’s as poppy as the record gets. I mean, this is not a pop record. It references popular music a lot, but it\'s not sequenced or created to be a series of singles in that way. It\'s very much a record that is meant to be listened to almost like how you watch a film, so this really needed to be there in a way for me. It just made sense as the moment on the record—if there is one—that’s going to have this big, brash FM radio moment, right there in the middle.” **Cross Talk III** “It’s sundown now, the sun is setting. This one is pretty lighthearted. I think it was a commercial for a candy bar and I just did a kind of Negativland-style collage where I made the woman in the advertisement talk about styles of music—about background music and elevator music—as if it was something she was tasting.” **Tales From the Trash Stratum** “The trash stratum is a reference to \[author\] Philip K. Dick. Here’s the quote: ‘Elements of the divine trash stratum,’ he says. ‘The clue lies there. Symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum.’ It’s a very spiritual way of thinking about trash: If everything, if all material, is kind of equally alive in a sense, because we\'re here to witness it and observe it, then everything is kind of special. Trash is a discarded thing, but for a lot of artists—me included—there\'s always been an interest in the abject or in the trash and the discarded stuff. That’s been such a big part of my music and my philosophy in thinking about musical tastes—like trashy tastes or dustbin stuff or throwaway New Age records that really meant a lot to me.” **Answering Machine** “Really, the record to me is about listening—and all these sort of overlapping modes of listening. We have voicemails now, but I remember the eeriness of an answering machine, and having to come home and press a button. There\'s this weird beep and you could hear the sort of mechanism itself, the thing—there’s a tape in it and it looks all weird. I wanted to make an interlude that had an homage to this other thing that I would imagine I\'d be listening to while I was listening to the radio. It\'s as simple as that.” **Imago** “In nature, an imago is the fully realized final stage of an insect when it becomes its final form—so a butterfly when it\'s fully winged. I wrote the piece first and then named it that because it seemed to have that kind of narrative to it—it sounds like pieces in between that are almost barely there, like something\'s happening. Beautiful music was a style of music on the radio that was essentially background music, and to me this sounded like a really doomed piece of beautiful music that you\'d never hear. As the song progresses, it both decays and becomes more itself at the same time. By the time the strings come in and there\'s this really crazy kind of symphonic string arrangement that hugs the decaying loop, it occurred to me that that was kind of like an imago, a butterfly abandoning its exoskeleton and becoming this new thing.” **Cross Talk IV / Radio Lonelys** “The beginning of the overnight, and that’s when things get a little darker, seedier, and, in a way, more fun and cynical. Things open up. To me, the overnight programming on freeform radio was either generically stuck in there and wasn\'t actually what the station was doing all the rest of the time, or it was this inverse—a more freeform chunk where it was more libidinous and weird. I mean, it\'s overnight, so who the fuck is up listening?” **Lost But Never Alone** “It\'s like ‘Lost But Never Alone’ and ‘No Nightmares’ are two sides of the same coin. I just love a triumphant power ballad, and I love Def Leppard. To me, this is like a Def Leppard song but it\'s hybridized with other things that are a little bit more like 1980s synth-pop but on the gothier side of it, so like Depeche Mode’s *Violator* and stuff like that. That was always alchemically interesting to me, because you were either hair metal or you were goth—but if you were both, you were schizophrenic, basically.” **Shifting** “Arca and I really connect on this idea that we\'re both interested in transformation as a powerful formal device in music. Because you can do stuff with sound design and production in a way that can really encapsulate all these other ways of thinking about transformation, whether it\'s bodily transformation or evolving your ideas or devolving your ideas. The whole thing is sort of reinforcing that theme of liquid ideas as liquid sounds, and I really wanted Arca to be on the record somewhere because I think she\'s doing it and has been doing that so well for so long. I always felt such a kinship with her that way.” **Wave Idea** “Much like ‘Shifting’—which I think of as a weird spooky theremin, kind of an Ed Wood vibe but turned into something really futuristic—‘Wave Idea’ is like, what if you could animate this sort of stuff between the dials and sculpt it into something that had a body, that had its own sort of psychic importance and its own physical kind of manifestation? So it\'s like a creature, my hallucination, how I sculpt something that becomes much more interesting than just noise or trash.” **Nothing’s Special** “There\'s a kind of thesis in it. It was a really rough fucking year and it\'s been hard for everybody. Something that\'s always given me a lot of solace when I\'m in a funk is that I notice that I\'ve become disenchanted. The thing that can kind of re-enchant me very quickly when I get there is to remember that—like the Philip K. Dick quote said—everything is kind of divine, and everything is interesting, including the stuff between the dials. The noise. I wanted to end the album on a high note, so it crescendos towards the lyric that says no matter how bleak things get, I\'m still fundamentally fascinated that I can find such enchantment in such random, small things.”

”My personal life is a disaster,” Halsey tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, reflecting on the consequence of her meteoric rise from indie outsider to pop superstar. Many of the songs on the 25-year-old’s emotional third album *Manic* were written from the eye of the storm. “I’m impulsive, uncensored, leading with emotion rather than logic, zipping all over the place like, ‘What if this song sounded like The Beach Boys? What if six of them don\'t have any drums?’” The result is a poetic and courageous work that traces heartbreak, health, and personal growth. “This whole album isn’t about Gerald,” she says, anticipating that the public’s attention will inevitably zero in on her breakup with rapper G-Eazy. \"A lot of it is a reconnaissance of things I never got to work through because I was 19 and I was Halsey. I didn\'t have time for self-care because I had to be composed. And I got too composed —that was part of the problem.” Below, she shares the inside story behind some of the album’s most personal songs. **Ashley** “Starting the album with my real name is a comfortable entry point for people, like saying, \'Hey, I\'m still here, but I\'m going to take you down on a different journey right now.\' A lot of this album was written as I became more aware of my mortality. Sometimes I\'m on top of the world and I\'ve never felt better in my life. Other days I\'m like, \'If I keep doing this, I\'m going to die.’ This song is an introduction and a warning: It’s saying, ‘Here\'s this album that I had to cut myself open to make, and will continue to cut myself open to tour, promote, and explain, but I don\'t know how many more of these you\'re going to get.\'” **Forever ... (is a long time)** \"Every album of mine has what we call a trio: three songs smack in the middle that serve as a transition and are meant to be listened to in succession. On *Manic*, it’s \'Forever ... (is a long time),\' \'Dominic\'s Interlude,\' and \'I HATE EVERYBODY.’ On this song, I\'m falling in love. The instrumental is major, all these beautiful twinkling tones, and birds are singing, everything’s sweet, it\'s Cinderella. And then I start getting in my own head. The piano comes in and it\'s this stream-of-consciousness train of thought that modulates from major to minor to show my mood shifting from optimistic to anxious. And now I\'m sabotaging this relationship and feeling paranoid, this is going to be bad. And then \[singer-songwriter\] Dominic \[Fike, on \"Dominic\'s Interlude\"\] tells me I’d better go tell my man he’s got bad news coming.” **I HATE EVERYBODY** “At some point I kind of put my foot down and was like, ‘Here\'s what we\'re not going to do is make all my music about whoever I\'m dating. This album is about me. I should matter enough on my own. I shouldn\'t be desirable because some rock star you think is cool thinks I’m desirable. That\'s not what this is anymore, and it never should have been.\' But when you\'re young, your insecurities get the best of you sometimes, and \'I HATE EVERYBODY’ is about that. It’s thinking, ‘Well, they respect his opinion, so if he likes me, they will too.\' Whoa. Wrong. No-no-no. This should be about me.” **Finally** “I was like, ‘I need a wedding song. I need a first dance song.’ I wrote it at home in my living room at two in the morning when I was dating Dom \[YUNGBLUD\]. I’d been thinking about the night we met—I had told the story so many times and every time it got more romantic—and realized I’d never written a love song before, not one without a punchline. And it’s just a very nice, sweet song. At first, I was kind of like, eh… It wasn’t crazy enough. But I sent it to a couple friends, who said it was the best song I’d ever written. I was like, ‘What? It’s just me and a guitar.’ And they were like, ‘Yeah, that’s the point.’” **Alanis’ Interlude** “A big flex. The biggest flex. I wrote her a letter and she was nine months pregnant, maybe a little less, and I tried to tell her what an irrevocable impact she’d had on my life. I told her I would never have been brave enough to say the things I’ve said if she hadn’t said them first, and that I was making a record about all the important parts of me and I couldn’t imagine making it without her. And she said yes. The interludes represent different relationships in my life: Dom represents brotherly love and Alanis represents sexual and professional empowerment.” **killing boys** “It’s about being so enraged that you’re like, I\'m going to break into his house, go in his room, sit him down, and be like, \'Listen, motherfucker, you\'re going to talk to me right now.\' Like, I\'m going to wear a black hoodie. My friend\'s going to drive. It\'s pseudo based on a real story of when I actually did bust into somebody\'s house looking for answers about something. It was back in a time when I was really manic and would be like, \'No, my only option is to go over there and cause a scene.\' It goes: \'I climb up to the window and I break in the glass/But I stop \'cause I don\'t want to Uma Thurman your ass.\' It’s satirical, but I’m mad.” **More** \"I\'ve been really open about my struggles with reproductive health, about wanting to freeze my eggs and having endometriosis and things like that. For a long time, I didn\'t think that having a family was something I was going to be able to do, and it’s very, very important to me. Then one day my OB-GYN tells me it\'s looking like I maybe can, and I was so moved. It felt like this ascension into a different kind of womanhood. All of a sudden, everything is different. I\'m not going to go tour myself to death because I have nothing else to do and I\'m overcompensating for not being able to have this other thing that I really want. Now, I have a choice. I\'ve never had a choice before. Lido \[the producer Peder Losnegård\] and I built the fading instrumental at the end of the song to sound like a sonogram, like you were hearing the sounds from inside a womb. It\'s one of the most special songs I\'ve ever made.”

Anyone worried that the raw guitar power of 2018 EP *What Did You Think When You Made Me This Way?* signaled a narrowing of Nothing But Thieves’ sonic vision will be reassured by *Moral Panic*. The Southend-on-Sea five-piece’s third album emboldens the genre-spanning blueprint they laid out on earlier releases, stretching from the synapse-crackling meld of drum ’n’ bass and heavy rock on opener “Unperson” to “There Was Sun,” a beatific drift towards Balearic dance pop. “When we first started, we were just trying to figure out who we were as writers and musicians,” guitarist Joe Langridge-Brown tells Apple Music. “It’s been quite serendipitous for us that we’ve had this breadth of sound from the beginning. You see bands that get to their third album and they’ve painted themselves into a corner and really struggle to get out of it.” Within the shape-shifting mix of sounds lie lyrics that deal with the rapidly deteriorating state of the world in 2020—delivered, as ever, via frontman Conor Mason’s vocal acrobatics. “The song ‘Moral Panic’ came after Joe lost his mind on Twitter,” says Mason. “Seeing the world crumble, essentially. We felt strongly that that was what we wanted to write about on this record. To be a part of the conversation.” Here Mason, Langridge-Brown, and guitarist and keyboardist Dominic Craik talk us through their journey, track by track. **Unperson** Dominic Craik: “This was the last song we wrote for the album. It was the missing piece of the puzzle. I locked myself in the dressing room and was experimenting with some new glitchy software. It was only a 30-second loop, but it formed the basis of ‘Unperson.’ We were listening to breakbeat stuff, The Prodigy and all that sort of aggressive, hardcore electronic-rock crossover and we thought, ‘What’s our version of doing that?’” **Is Everybody Going Crazy?** Conor Mason: “The three of us have such eclectic music tastes that we create something odd each time. This song was the epitome of our melting pot. When it started, it had this T. Rex influence to it. Then we thought, ‘How do we take it as far away as possible from that?’ So you add this R&B thing into the pre-chorus, which just slips on its head, then do a pop-based chorus. We were very conscious of each section of the song having its own identity—they all have their own world.” Joe Langridge-Brown: “The boundaries between the genres are probably the most exciting bits. We want to head for the boundary in between these things.” **Moral Panic** JL-B: “This is a song about climate change; it was written at the time Extinction Rebellion was happening. I found the fact that it came from youth really interesting. The term ‘moral panic’ related to a lot of other stuff, but this song in particular was more about that.” CM: “It sounds to me like a pessimistic Hall & Oates song. If someone said to you, ‘Do you want to hear a pessimistic Hall & Oates song?’ you’re going to say yes.” **Real Love Song** DC: “We were in Malaysia, and in that part of the world the radio’s filled with love songs and ballads. This interviewer was saying to us, ‘You don’t have that many love songs as a band…’ I was like, ‘Well, we have a *few*…but yeah, you’re right.’ I always thought I’d stay away from writing too many because there are so many of them. I was like, ‘OK, this is real love, away from the Hollywood type of love song…’ But it’s also a song within a song; it’s about the irony of all these songs written about something that isn’t really what it is.’” **Phobia** JL-B: “I’m wondering how people are going to take this song, because it’s about a very flawed individual. It lays it all out on the line. A lot of the time we have such an ideal that we’ve got to live up to that writing songs about someone who’s troubled is quite interesting.” CM: “At the time we were heavily influenced by hip-hop and R&B and that breathy, intimate vocal was something we’d wanted to try for a while. It felt fitting with the music and the lyric. Reading that verse, it’s so dark—it’s like your inner demons coming out and you’re talking about them. You’re not going to shout at them, you’re going to creep them out.” **This Feels Like the End** DC: “The War on Drugs were an influence here, but with the chorus we leaned on how we sound as a band when we’re just crashing around playing songs like \[2017 single\] ‘Amsterdam’—Nothing But Thieves in a room.” JL-B: “I had that chorus in my head for weeks but I didn’t know where it was going, so I was just waiting to get back in the room with the rest of the boys to work on it. We had the middle eight with just a riff underneath it for ages, and I had that idea to have a speech over it. I wrote the speech and we auditioned people in LA to record it. The guy Sandy who did it nailed it.” **Free If We Want It** JL-B: “I’ll be honest, ‘Free If We Want It’ is my favorite Nothing But Thieves song ever. I’m a massive Tom Petty fan, and it’s kind of got that whole driving feel to it. All the sections flow into each other so seamlessly, and we don’t always do that—especially when we’re experimenting with different things. It’s important with a record that’s quite dark lyrically to have a bit of light in there.” CM: “I put every ounce of myself into that performance.” **Impossible** JL-B: “Dom saved this song. For ages, we tried to write this together, banging our heads against the wall trying to figure out what the song was and where it was meant to go. Dom took it away and worked on completely separate chords from what we were playing for the chorus. We were like, ‘Oh, *that’s* the song!’ I think we were pretty close to scrapping that one.” **There Was Sun** CM: “This was our last port of call to record; we wanted to get everything else in place before we did this. We’re really proud of how it came out, because we were unsure how it would. We loved the melody and the lyric and we thought, ‘There’s a song in here somewhere, but we just don’t know how to wrap it up.’” DC: “‘Psychedelic’ was the word of the day when we were recording that song. Not literally— f\*\*k, we can barely function when we’re sober. The demo had this ABBA thing to it, so we took that and it became this sort of Daft Punk-psychedelic-ABBA song.” **Can You Afford to Be an Individual?** DC: “\[The transition\] from ‘There Was Sun’ into ‘Individual’ is my favorite moment on the record. As soon as we wrote this, we were like, ‘OK, that’s a very good one.’ We’d written the riff on tour in Portland and then we were chopping up Conor’s vocals with this new software.” CM: “I think that’s where the lyrics actually came from, from chopping up the words. There’s a reason that I hide away in the booth when I’m recording—because I just lose my s\*\*t in the recording. That song was where I could just go mad in there.” **Before We Drift Away** CM: “This could be a set ender. We saw Blur in 2015 and they ended on ‘Tender’ and it’s got that similar feel. As soon as we finished it, we were like, ‘Well, that’s the ending of whatever this is...’” JL-B: “To end an album called *Moral Panic*, where it’s about being quite damaged by your outside experience, and then it being really reflective with this and the line ‘I don’t want to grow old,’ and that being the last thing you hear, I thought it was very poignant.”

If 2014’s *Singles* was Future Islands’ unexpected breakthrough, its follow-up, 2017’s *The Far Field*, was a reminder to slow down. “We’d played 800 shows and then we did *Letterman*, and all of a sudden, our star was on the rise for the first time ever,” frontman Samuel T. Herring tells Apple Music. “At 30 years old, we were in the spotlight, which is kind of weird. Things just got bigger than we could control, and we essentially gave a lot of decision-making away, to make our lives easier. What we\'re trying to do now is put the load back on our own shoulders.” While *The Far Field* was made quickly in an effort to capitalize on the momentum that *Singles* had generated, the Baltimore outfit spent an entire year recording and rerecording, reworking and rewriting all of *As Long As You Are* until it felt finished. The result finds Herring, newly in love, singing about pressing political issues (a first) just as soulfully as he would matters of the heart. “It\'s funny, because I told my partner, when we first started dating, that I would never write a song about her,” he says. “I didn\'t want to screw it up, like I did all the other people that I wrote songs about. But then you find yourself in those moments: You write about your life, and what you feel. Just having that person in my life—someone who really trusted me, someone who I trusted—gave me more space and confidence to write about things that I was afraid of.” Here, he walks us through every song on the record. **Glada** “A *glada* is a type of bird in Sweden, a bird of prey with a large V-shaped tail. That song was written in the countryside in Southern Sweden, the Skåne region. A big part of Swedish life is spending time in nature—in the summertime, you\'re basically not allowed to go inside your house until it\'s time to go to sleep. The song is about the rebirth of spring, and the rebirth of feeling love again, with Julia in the countryside. And I think the bigger question in the song is the question of feeling deserving of love. When we met, I\'d given up on the idea that I\'d ever find that kind of love, the kind that makes you feel giddy—like a young love. We deserve the good feelings, and the bird is just evocative of that.” **For Sure** “I feel like our music has always been imbued with certain amounts of hope, within the darkness. It\'s the idealism of a song like ‘Light House’—which is a song about suicide—and hoping that someone will save you from yourself. People find hope in that song because it’s there. This song in particular is filled with those understandings of love and trust, and feeling free to be oneself. And being given the courage to do the things that we want to do in this world, because someone else gives us that courage.” **Born in a War** “I work completely off feeling and vibe. I don\'t really have an agenda—the world is an inspiration, especially right now. To me, gun violence in America is a huge issue. And growing up—where me and \[keyboardist\] Gerrit \[Welmers\] and \[bassist\] William \[Cashion\] grew up—everybody has guns and everybody goes hunting. And then they go to church. It\'s just a way of life. The second verse of this song is about being a man, and being told to man up, saying, ‘Why don\'t you have a gun? What\'s wrong with you?’ One of my favorite lines of this album is ‘Raised up in a town that\'s 80 proof/Shotgun shells under every roof, every jail.’ We are in that mind state, a mental jail of our own making.” **I Knew You** “This whole song is a true story. It’s one of those things written about a person that I said I would never write another song about, as an agreement—someone that\'s canon in Future Islands\' work. They pulled some crazy shit one night. And I have to write this down. I have to tell this story. ‘This has lived on record and I\'m going to end it on record,’ is how I felt. I was told that I was poison to this person, and that I ruined their life. I say it in the song: I was happy to hear these things. This person left with no closure. They left in radio silence. So this was me finally getting closure.” **City’s Face** “‘City’s Face’ was inspired by a relationship that I was in, my only relationship that I had in Baltimore. It\'s the relationship that ‘Seasons’ is about, and it\'s about somebody that really hurt me. They cheated on me a bunch and made me feel paranoid in my own city. I didn\'t deserve to be treated that way. She didn\'t deserve to be treated that way. I think I was allowing myself to be a victim, and not owning up to my own bullshit. Hating a place just because of a person is kind of crazy.” **Waking** “This one I fought with a bit. Sometimes the guys write a song that\'s so good and catchy that I don\'t think that I can do anything with it. We\'re at a point culturally, in our society, where we can\'t just sit back and not say something, or not do something. It’s as simple as helping your neighbors. That does mean something. It does mean something to say hello. It means something to reach out to people within our communities. That song is about those self-defeating feelings, and trying to get over them. And knowing how the hardest thing sometimes is just starting something, within our daily lives, to better ourselves.” **The Painter** “To me, ‘The Painter’ is about race in America, and the way that we see things and we paint things. We\'re art school kids, but I always thought that to be able to make a painting that everyone saw the same exact way was the greatest possible thing that you could do. It\'s like, ‘Why can\'t we see it the same way?’ And understanding that we fight these ideological battles, but this isn\'t something that we can debate over, when it\'s people\'s lives that we\'re talking about. So ‘The Painter’ is about red and blue, and it\'s about black and white. And it\'s about red, white, and blue, and what the hell that means. I think it\'s about people that paint it the way they want to see it, and say that they don\'t see color, but that\'s all they see. It\'s a charged song, and it\'s begging of those people to open your eyes. Because this isn\'t a painting, this is life.” **Plastic Beach** “I have had issues with my body since I was cognizant of what that meant. This song is about those struggles with self. I spent a lifetime in the mirror trying to change myself. And all those ideas of the way you love your family and who they are, and then you look at your own face. How can you hate it, when it has those bits and pieces of your own family in it? I think a lot of things were heightened through our visibility, through *Letterman* and things like that, where you can become a meme or a joke online. It\'s easy for people not to see how that might affect us. ‘Plastic Beach’ is a song that\'s a thank-you to the people who see us for who we are, who see people for who they are. And thanking the people around you, for loving you for those reasons. I\'m getting a little emotional talking about it.” **Moonlight** “It\'s very much a love song. It\'s also a love song about depression. And another song about acceptance. The line ‘So we just laid in bed all day/I couldn\'t see/I had a cloud in my arms’ is to say, ‘I was carrying a rain cloud.’ This gray thing—it’s my depression. ‘But if I asked you/Would you say it\'s only rain?’ Which is to say, it doesn\'t matter how you feel, I still love you. You don\'t have to apologize for those feelings, I still love you.” **Thrill** “The setting of this song is Greenville, North Carolina, where some of us went to college. And it\'s about feeling completely alone in Greenville. It\'s about drug addiction. It\'s about alcohol abuse. It’s about being drunk at the bar, being refused drinks with no friends around. It\'s about being drunk on the way to the bar. It\'s about being drunk on the way home from the bar. And it\'s about that isolation, and that anger, and that fear of feeling different in this place. Greenville is a quintessential college town, and in a big way, it\'s a quintessential Southern town. There\'s definitely issues of race there. On the north side of town, there’s the Tar River, which is famous for flooding. This song is about this diluted, dirty river that\'s been used for hundreds of years by Americans. It’s about all of that stuff spilling over into the river, spilling over into us, our American experience, and that question of how will we feel when this water rushes over us—will we sink or swim in it?” **Hit the Coast** “I had this old tabletop desk recorder that we used to record jam sessions and pratice tapes on, back in 2009 or 2011. It’s the actual deck that we sampled here. I played a loop through the vocal mic, recorded that, and then we laced it in. If you listen back, right when I say that line, ‘Pressing play on this old tape was a bad move/Reduced to hiss/Some record I love/Some record I\'ve missed,’ you\'ll hear it. And then the song ends with me pushing stop on the tape—just that big *p’chunk*. Sometimes I think a record label will usually tell you to start big, go with your hit, go with your single for the first song, and end things more somber. And we just wanted to flip it on its head. It made sense to end on this kind of triumphant note.”

HOW BEAUTY HOLDS THE HAND OF SORROW’s finds Brun returning to her early work’s intimate poignancy, its nine tracks opening with the piano-led ‘Last Breath’ and concluding with a piano-only interpretation of After The Great Storm’s ‘Don’t Run And Hide’, while ‘Lose My Way’ finds her joined by Oscar-nominated, Emmy Award-winning composer Dustin O’Halloran (also of A Winged Victory For The Sullen) and ‘Closer’ occupies territory somewhere between Joni Mitchell and Kate Bush. She picks up her acoustic guitar for ‘Meet You At The Delta’ and ‘Breaking The Surface’, and ‘Song For Thrill And Tom’’s luminous buoyancy is meanwhile boosted by angelic backing vocals from Jennie Abrahamson, Linnea Olsson, Therese Börjesson and Carolina Wallin Perez. Nestling at the album’s heart, furthermore, lies the simply magical ‘Trust’. “Both albums deal with the bigger questions in life,” says Brun, “but in 2020 these questions have become even bigger. Even though I wrote most of them before this whole pandemic started, I feel they all have a message that fits the situation we’re in…” HOW BEAUTY HOLDS THE HAND OF SORROW is Brun’s ninth album, mostly written in the Norwegian mountains during summer 2019. It was largely recorded at Stockholm’s Atlantis Studios and Studio Bruket, home to Tonbruket and the studio where musician and co-producer Martin Hederos – who also co-wrote a number of songs – and Studio Bruket’s own house sound technician Anton Sundell reside. The album was produced by Brun, Hederos and Sundell.

When it came time for Baauer to write his sophomore album *PLANET’S MAD*, the Brooklyn DJ/producer immediately turned to cinema. “Movies were my biggest inspiration,” he tells Apple Music. “Sci-fi films like *The Fifth Element* that transported me to another world.” Taking cues from Porter Robinson’s conceptual *Virtual Self* project, the “Harlem Shake” hitmaker became fixated on the idea of building his own alternate universe. “I thought, ‘How fun would it be to create a world that listeners could immerse themselves in?’” With help from the Portuguese producer Holly, he sketched an exhilarating sonic landscape that calls to mind late-’90s dance titans like Fatboy Slim, The Chemical Brothers, and Daft Punk, who made sample-based takes on trance and electro feel catchy and fun. “Those guys didn’t use a ton of features and they didn’t stick to one genre,” Baauer says. “It was more about building an environment—and an energy.” Here, he talks us through the album track by track. **PLANCK** “I’m a sucker for a big, dramatic intro, and this feels like a grand opening. I wanted it to feel cinematic, so I made it with a program that’s designed for scoring movies. I had my friend Eli \[Teplin\], who is an amazing piano player, write a big, orchestral, epic piece, and then I built on that.” **PLANET’S MAD** “This was a demo I made in LA when I was just messing around in the studio. I put on Instagram live to try to get a little kick in the butt, which works sometimes. If there\'s an audience, and they’re giving feedback, it’s an extra boost. Conceptually, I’d been thinking about this idea, like what if the world had a mind of its own? I’d just seen that movie *Solaris* and thought it was so cool how the planet was an intelligent being. Eventually, it became the title for the whole project because I liked that it carried a lot of different meanings. It could be environmental, or mad like insane. I wanted to stir up a few different emotions and let you follow them.” **MAGIC** “After I made this demo, I sent it to Cid Rim, who is this amazing jazz drummer also on LuckyMe. He sent back that plucky violin sound, and it sounded so cool. I thought it sounded like a perfect fantasy planet—surreal and psychedelic. I don’t know if you’ve ever read *Dinotopia*, that kids’ picture book about a society in which humans and dinosaurs live together in harmony, but it’s tight.” **YEHOO** “I was working on this track in LA, tinkering away on my laptop, and I got a FedEx package. When I opened the door, the delivery guy saw that I had \[the music software program\] Ableton open and told me he was in a band. He was like, ‘Check us out! We’re Zap Mama.’ So I did, and they were awesome. It was this African-inspired multi-piece band, and I loved it so much that I took one of the tracks and sort of folded it into what I was working on. I love it.” **PIZZAWALA** “My biggest influence ever is Timbaland. He is the guy whose sound I want to emulate the most, and this song is a little tip of the hat to him. The vocals are from this songwriter Ink who I worked with in LA, and the droning and humming is from an old trance CD. It’s percussive. It’s energetic. It felt like a great scene-setter for this world. Gradually, each song started to represent a different environment. This one sounded like antelope rushing through a field or something. Well, not an antelope, but like an alien antelope.” **REACHUPDONTSTOP** “My friend Andrew is a huge record collector, and this sample came from digging through his collection. The a cappella totally jumped out at me—it was so energetic and fun. The demo ended up being a Jersey club-ish beat, and I sent it to Holly, who put a whole other dimension to it. He wrote these beautiful builds—they sound like trancecore. They reminded me of listening to progressive trance when I was still discovering electronic music as a teenager and loving it so much.” **HOT 44** “This one started off with Larry King interviewing Tina Turner. She\'s talking about doing meditation and saying, ‘When you get into the rhythm, the sound…’ and talking about her mantra. And I was like, ‘Oh god, that\'s so good.’ Her voice sounded so cool. So I ripped it off YouTube to make a little demo, and started playing with this percussive sound I got off Splice. Then Dom, who is the head of LuckyMe, told me to check out a track by Randomer. The drums were just insane. It had the exactly the same feeling as what I was working on, but better. I tried to remake them and couldn’t. They were too good. Thankfully, we got in touch with him and he was like, ‘Yeah, cool, man, all good.’ But Tina Turner’s camp was not so cool. I had to get her vocal remade, which was a bummer. It’s missing her texture. But that’s how it goes sometimes.” **AETHER** “I had this great melody from a vocal I’d pitched around, but couldn’t figure out what to do with it. The beat was so basic. Months later, I decided to pick it back up and make it more exciting, more special. So I put a little drum ’n’ bass break thing onto it. It reminded me of Prodigy, who is another huge influence of world-building electronic music that I love so much. I sent it to Holly, the wizard, and he took it to the next level. He made it 3D. Of all the tracks on the album, this is the banger that I’d play on a big stage.” **COOL ONE SEVEN ONE** “This is my classic naming style. I try to name all of my tracks like this, but the label won’t let me. This is another one that reminded me of nature—like birds of paradise doing their mating dance. This was my version of that scene.” **REMINA** “This was a necessary track to take you into the final act of the project. Holly found this ambient sample and we simply reversed it to make it feel like we were floating.” **HOME (feat. Bipolar Sunshine)** “Eli, the piano player, was tinkering around one day and I recorded him. I kept listening to it on a loop and knew I had something. It just made me feel so good. I wanted someone to sing on it but had a tough time finding the right person. When I finally recorded Bipolar Sunshine, it increased the feels tenfold. Then, at the last minute, we passed it to Hudson Mohawke—who has been an inspiration of mine from day one—and he helped with the finishing touches. It’s kind of funny that this soft chill-out ballad is the track I finally worked with him on. Like, it doesn’t even have drums. But it was great.” **GROUP** “To me, ‘GROUP’ combines all the atmospheres I wanted to achieve on the album: beautiful, soft soundscapes; aggressive, exciting drums; each distorted and stretched to feel a little unfamiliar. It has this growling dubstep drop that I like because it feels like a different interpretation of that sound. It almost feels sad, which was why I wanted to make it the last track. In my head, the storyline follows an emotional arc: This planet shows up from deep space and causes all this fear and commotion, but over time everyone falls in love with it. This song is about that planet finally floating away and how we say goodbye. I think there’s a lot there.”

THIS SUMMER IS GONNA BE A LITTLE DIFFERENT Baauer returns for his sophomore album on LuckyMe. Conceived within a movie-like plot of a new world appearing above Earth, a vision executed in the new video, Planet’s Mad takes us through countless micro-genres where we’re exposed to the sound of alien creatures, children, news forecasts, burps and cosmic atmospherics - all whipped up into this uniquely maximalist dance record. 2021 GRAMMY NOMINATION Cover Design by Chloe Scheffe

“A disco ball allows you to see light in the darkness,” Kylie Minogue tells Apple Music, neatly encapsulating why her 15th album *DISCO* is a welcome bright spot in a distinctly dingy year. “I’ve turned off the dirt road and onto the supersonic highway—straight to the galactic disco.” Indeed, *DISCO* is a marked departure from 2018\'s country-tinged *Golden*, transporting its listeners straight to the kind of packed dance floor they could only dream of amid 2020’s global lockdown. And yet *DISCO* was recorded during isolation in a makeshift home studio made up of clothes rails, curtains, and blankets—all of which earned Minogue her first engineering credit (“I went to recording kindergarten and had to learn to use GarageBand,” she says). Minogue, of course, isn’t the only artist turning to disco as a radical form of escapism in 2020, a year that’s also seen Lady Gaga, Dua Lipa, Jessie Ware, and Róisín Murphy experiment with the genre. “At its inception, disco was a way of allowing people to dance through their struggle and pain,” says Minogue of why rolling back the years has proven such a tonic. “Some of the best disco songs are mission statements of strength. Even though I started recording before the dramas of 2020, there is a correlation.” Read on as a music legend takes us inside the thrilling *DISCO*, one track at a time. **Magic** “‘Magic’ is a kind of hors d’oeuvre for the album. The main course will be coming in a while—and leave space because there is going to be tiramisu. It feels classic, grown-up, and polished, but there\'s still an element of surprise with the falsetto notes.” **Miss a Thing** “I first heard the demo for this in February and loved it. It fitted the brief: There was enough disco in there, but it also felt like a fresh interpretation. I was due to fly to LA in March and work on it with one of the key writers, \[Finnish songwriter\] Teemu Brunila. Then of course lockdown happened so we ended up working remotely. I had a meltdown one day with him. I was trying to do this vocal and I was so exhausted, and stressed, I couldn’t. I felt like I was failing him and me. I didn’t go to the full cry, but I came close. All this, and yet we’ve never met. I can\'t wait to give him a hug when we finally can.” **Real Groove** “Because I was recording my own vocals at home, I found myself doing a lot more takes than I usually would, to the point where I literally had to back away from my laptop. ‘Real Groove’ was one of the songs where I did the most takes. I wanted to take the melody down half a tone. We experimented with doing it lower, but ultimately the higher notes were the sweet spot. You don’t know what’s coming, and then the song ends up really pumping. It was worth the effort.” **Monday Blues** “I almost gave up on this track. It initially had a different chorus, so it took some juggling. We had to dig deep and nail it with a proper chorus. I became quite insular in lockdown and didn’t really go out much, but I listened to a version of this during a rare walk and it started to make sense. It was so uplifting and cool. It’s so different listening to music away from the environment in which you’re making it. Hearing it on a sunny day, taking a stroll, I really felt: ‘This is going on the album.’” **Supernova** “There’s a vocoder voice at the start of the song. In my mind, it’s the voice of a little space creature who’s my friend in the song. I’m always drawn to celestial words and imagery, so this was a fun chance to play with all of those elements. I think making it slightly spacey was a way to do disco without being trapped in the 1970s. \[Songwriter\] Skylar Adams, who also co-wrote and produced on this, has a baby boy called Jupiter, so we wanted to work his name into the lyrics too. If you weren’t awake before ‘Supernova,’ you’re awake by the time it starts.” **Say Something** “You need a rest after ‘Supernova,’ and ‘Say Something’ is a chance to calm down and reflect a little. It’s one of those songs that just dropped from the sky. I recorded it in my first session, before I even had a timeline or an album planned. I was working with \[writer and producer\] Biff Stannard and \[British songwriter\] Ash Howes, who I’ve worked with a lot, and \[producer\] Jon Green, who I worked with on *Golden*. I knew that the three of us would do something different, but I didn\'t know it would be this. It started as a beat, and we were all just singing into a microphone to capture everything. The ‘love is love’ part is almost like a different song, but somehow it lives with the rest of it. The song literally spilled out of us that day.” **Last Chance** “‘Last Chance’ is very inspired by ABBA and the Bee Gees. I was obsessed with ABBA as an eight- or nine-year-old. They’re pure perfection. I can\'t compare with these all-time epic, amazing songs. So what I tried to do was absorb them, try to understand them and then just stay on my own path. This was one of the last songs that came about, just as the doors were about to shut. It just goes to show you\'ve really got to keep going until it’s closing time.” **I Love It** “This was another one that I started working on with Biff, a day or two before lockdown. Again, it had a slightly different chorus, which just wasn’t hitting it. We didn’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so when I was making changes at home I chipped away at it and added the line ‘So come on, let the music play, we’re gonna take it all the way,’ which was inspired by Lionel Richie. That little restructure lifted it to where it needed to go, and it found its place on the album.” **Where Does the DJ Go?** “I wrote this with songwriters Skylar Adams and Daniel Shah, and Kiris Houston, who’s a wonderful instrumentalist and very hands-on. It was in the period just before lockdown, so we were acutely aware that something was happening. The lyric ‘The world’s trying to break me, I need you to save me’ echoes how we were feeling, and the ‘Singing I will survive’ line was inspired by the Gloria Gaynor song. It was our way of saying, ‘Please pull me out of this situation!’” **Dance Floor Darling** “There are songs on the album that have another meaning to them, or a slight melancholy. ‘Dance Floor Darling’ doesn’t have any real depth to it, but I think it feels like a hug. It feels like a wedding reception where everyone’s eaten sufficiently, had a few drinks, all the official stuff’s out of the way, and—especially once the track speeds up in the middle eight—Gramps is on the dance floor. It makes me picture David Brent busting out his dad moves. We wanted escapism, and we committed to it.” **Unstoppable** “Earlier I was describing ‘Magic’ as an hors d’oeuvre. Well, ‘Unstoppable’ is a refreshing sorbet, a palate cleanser. I worked on it with \[songwriter, producer, and instrumentalist\] Troy Miller, who is another writer I only know from the waist up on Zoom. The vocals are quite different, and I wasn’t sure if he was pleased with what I was doing when we were recording because he really didn’t say much. But it turned out he just wanted to go with the vibe and let me go for it!” **Celebrate You** “I’ve never written a song in the third person before. The character of Mary was born out of mumble-singing melodies. Mary is anyone and everyone who needs reassurance that we are enough and we\'re loved. The last part of the album has a pretty high BPM, so ‘Celebrate You’ is the wind-down. It’s last orders at the pub—all of the family’s there, and Auntie Mary’s had a few too many. I’ve introduced you to this stellar landscape, we’ve gone to supernova, but we’ve come back down to Earth. This is about heart and connection.”

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