NBHAP's 50 Best Albums Of 2020

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.”

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.”

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

After 2015’s openly autobiographical *Carrie & Lowell*, Sufjan Stevens makes a dramatic musical left turn from intimate, acoustic-based songs to textural electronic music on his 8th solo LP. Stevens, who\'s no stranger to taking on large-scale projects, builds on the synth-heavy soundscapes of his instrumental album with stepfather Lowell Brams, *Aporia*, while channeling the eccentric energy of his more experimental works *The Age of Adz* and *Enjoy Your Rabbit*. But *The Ascension* is its own powerful statement—throughout this 15-track, 80-minute spiritual odyssey, he uses faith as a foundation to articulate his worries about blind idolatry and toxic ideology. From soaring new age (“Tell Me You Love Me”) and warped lullabies (“Landslide”) to twitchy sound collages (“Ativan”), *The Ascension* is mercurial in mood but also aesthetically consistent. Stevens surrenders to heavenly bliss on “Gilgamesh,” singing in a choir-like voice as he dreams about a serene Garden of Eden before jarring, high-pitched bleeps bring him back to reality. On the post-apocalyptic “Death Star,” he pieces together kinetic dance grooves and industrial beats inspired by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis’ production work with Janet Jackson—which is no coincidence given that Stevens shared a photograph of his cassette copy of Jackson’s *Rhythm Nation 1814* on his blog. Stevens ultimately wishes to drown out all the outside noise on \"Ursa Major,\" echoing a sentiment that resonates regardless of what you believe: “Lord, I ask for patience now/Call off all of your invasion.”

On April 6, 2020, Charli XCX announced through a Zoom call with fans that work would imminently begin on her fourth album. Thirty-nine days later, *how i’m feeling now* arrived. “I haven’t really caught up with my feelings yet because it just happened so fast,” she tells Apple Music on the eve of the project’s release. “I’ve never opened up to this extent. There’s usually a period where you sit with an album and live with it a bit. Not here.” The album is no lockdown curiosity. Energized by open collaboration with fans and quarantine arrangements at home in Los Angeles, Charli has fast-tracked her most complete body of work. The untamed pop blowouts are present and correct—all jacked up with relatable pent-up ferocity—but it’s the vulnerability that really shows off a pop star weaponizing her full talent. “It’s important for me to write about whatever situation I’m in and what I know,” she says. “Before quarantine, my boyfriend and I were in a different place—physically we were distant because he lived in New York while I was in Los Angeles. But emotionally, we were different, too. There was a point before quarantine where we wondered, would this be the end? And then in this sudden change of world events we were thrown together—he moved into my place. It’s the longest time we’ve spent together in seven years of being in a relationship, and it’s allowed us to blossom. It’s been really interesting recording songs that are so obviously about a person—and that person be literally sat in the next room. It’s quite full-on, let’s say.” Here, Charli talks us through the most intense and unique project of her life, track by track. **pink diamond** “Dua Lipa asked me to do an Apple Music interview for the At Home With series with her, Zane \[Lowe, Rebecca Judd\], and Jennifer Lopez. Which is, of course, truly a quarantine situation. When am I going to ever be on a FaceTime with J. Lo? Anyway, on the call, J. Lo was telling this story about meeting Barbra Streisand, and Barbra talking to her about diamonds. At that time, J. Lo had just been given that iconic pink diamond by Ben Affleck. I instantly thought, ‘Pink Diamond is a very cute name for a song,’ and wrote it down on my phone. I immediately texted Dua afterwards and said, ‘Oh my god, she mentioned the pink diamond!’ A few days later, \[LA-based R&B artist and producer\] Dijon sent me this really hard, aggressive, and quite demonic demo called ‘Makeup On,’ and I felt the two titles had some kind of connection. I always like pairing really silly, sugary imagery with things that sound quite evil. It then became a song about video chatting—this idea that you’re wanting to go out and party and be sexy, but you’re stuck at home on video chat. I wanted it as the first track because I’m into the idea that some people will love it and some people will hate it. I think it’s nice to be antagonistic on track one of an album and really frustrate certain people, but make others really obsessive about what might come next.” **forever** “I’m really, really lucky that I get to create and be in a space where I can do what I love—and times like the coronavirus crisis really show you how fortunate you are. They also band people together and encourage us to help those less fortunate. I was incredibly conscious of this throughout the album process. So it was important for me to give back, whether that be through charity initiatives with all the merch or supporting other creatives who are less able to continue with their normal process, or simply trying to make this album as inclusive as possible so that everybody at home, if they wish, could contribute or feel part of it. So, for example, for this song—having thousands of people send in personal clips so we could make the video is something that makes me feel incredibly emotional. This is actually one of the very few songs where the idea was conceived pre-quarantine. It came from perhaps my third-ever session with \[North Carolina producer and songwriter\] BJ Burton. The song is obviously about my relationship, but it’s about the moments before lockdown. It asks, ‘What if we don’t make it,’ but reinforces that I will always love him—even if we don’t make it.” **claws** “My romantic life has had a full rebirth. As soon as I heard the track—which is by \[St. Louis artist, songwriter, and producer\] Dylan Brady—I knew it needed to be this joyous, carefree honeymoon-period song. When you’re just so fascinated and adoring of someone, everything feels like this huge rush of emotion—almost like you’re in a movie. I think it’s been nice for my boyfriend to see that I can write positive and happy songs about us. Because the majority of the songs in the past have been sad, heartbreaking ones. It’s also really made him understand my level of work addiction and the stress I can put myself under.” **7 years** “This song is just about our journey as a couple, and the turbulence we’ve incurred along the way. It’s also about how I feel so peaceful to be in this space with him now. Quarantine has been the first time that I’ve tried to remain still, physically and mentally. It’s a very new feeling for me. This is also the first song that I’ve recorded at home since I was probably 15 years old, living with my parents. So it feels very nostalgic as it takes back to a process I hadn’t been through in over a decade.” **detonate** “So this was originally a track by \[producer and head of record label PC Music\] A. G. Cook. A couple of weeks before quarantine happened in the US, A. G. and BJ \[Burton\] met for the first and only time and worked on this song. It was originally sped up, and they slowed it down. Three or four days after that session, A. G. drove to Montana to be with his girlfriend and her family. So it’s quite interesting that the three of us have been in constant contact over the five weeks we made this album, and they’ve only met once. I wrote the lyrics on a day where I was experiencing a little bit of confusion and frustration about my situation. I maybe wanted some space. It’s actually quite hard for me to listen to this song because I feel like the rest of the album is so joyous and positive and loving. But it encapsulated how I was feeling, and it’s not uncommon in relationships sometimes.” **enemy** \"A song based around the phrase ‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.’ I kept thinking about how if you can have someone so close to you, does that mean that one day they could become your biggest enemy? They’d have the most ammunition. I don’t actually think my boyfriend is someone who would turn on me if anything went wrong, but I was playing off that idea a little bit. As the song is quite fantasy-based, I thought that the voice memo was something that grounded the song. I had just got off the phone to my therapist—and therapy is still a very new thing for me. I only started a couple of weeks before quarantine, which feels like it has something to do with fate, perhaps. I’ve been recording myself after each session, and it just felt right to include it as some kind of real moment where you have a moment of self-doubt.” **i finally understand** “This one includes the line ‘My therapist said I hate myself real bad.’ She’s getting a lot of shout-outs on this album, isn’t she? I like that this song feels very different from anything I’ve ever explored. I’d always wanted to work with Palmistry \[South London producer and artist Benjy Keating\]—we have loads of mutual friends and collaborators—and I was so excited when my manager got an email from his team with some beats for me. This is a true quarantine collaboration in the sense that we’ve still never met and it purely came into being from him responding to things I’d posted online about this album.” **c2.0** “A. G. sent me this beat at the end of last year called ‘Click 2.0’—which was an updated version of my song ‘Click’ from the *Charli* album. He had put it together for a performance he was doing with \[US artist and former Chairlift member\] Caroline Polachek. I heard the performance online and loved it, and found myself listening to it on repeat while—and I’m sorry, I know this is so cheesy—driving around Indonesia watching all these colors and trees and rainbows go by. It just felt euphoric and beautiful. Towards the end of this recording process, I wanted to do a few more songs and A. G. reminded me of this track. The original ‘Click’ features Tommy Cash and Kim Petras and is a very braggy song about our community of artists. It’s talking about how we’re the shit, basically. But through this, it’s been transformed into this celebratory song about friendship and missing the people that you hang out with the most and the world that existed before.” **party 4 u** “This is the oldest song on the album. For myself and A. G., this song has so much life and story—we had played it live in Tokyo and somehow it got out and became this fan favorite. Every time we get together to make an album or a mixtape, it’s always considered, but it had never felt right before now. As small and silly as it sounds, it’s the time to give something back. Lyrically, it also makes some sense now as it’s about throwing a party for someone who doesn’t come—the yearning to see someone but they’re not there. The song has literally grown—we recorded the first part in maybe 2017, there are crowd samples now in the song from the end of my Brixton Academy show in 2019, and now there are recordings of me at home during this period. It’s gone on a journey. It kept on being requested and requested, which made me hesitant to put it out because I like the mythology around certain songs. It’s fun. It gives these songs more life—maybe even more than if I’d actually released them officially. It continues to build this nonexistent hype, which is quite funny and also definitely part of my narrative as an artist. I’ve suffered a lot of leaks and hacks, so I like playing with that narrative a little bit.” **anthems** “Well, this song is just about wanting to get fucked up, essentially. I had a moment one night during lockdown where I was like, ‘I *just* want to go out.’ I mean, it feels so stupid and dumb to say, and it’s obviously not a priority in the world, but sometimes I just feel like I want to go out, blow off some steam, get fucked up, do a lot of bad things, and wake up feeling terrible. This song is about missing those nights. When I first heard the track—which was produced by Dylan and \[London producer\] Danny L Harle—it immediately made me want to watch \[2012 film\] *Project X*, as that movie is the closest I’m going to feel to having the night that I want to have. So I wrote the song, and co-wrote the second verse with my fans on Instagram—which was very cool and actually quite a quick experience. After finishing it, I really felt like it definitely belongs on the *Project X* soundtrack. I think it captures the hectic energy of a once-in-a-lifetime night out that you’ll never forget.” **visions** “I feel like anything that sounds like it should close an album probably shouldn’t. So initially we were talking about ‘party 4 u’ being the final track, but it felt too traditional with the crowd noises at the end—like an emotional goodbye. So it’s way more fun to me to slam that in the middle of the album and have the rave moment at the end. But in some ways, it feels a little traditional, too, because this is the message I want to leave you with. The song feels like this big lucid dream: It’s about seeing visions of my boyfriend and I together, and it being right and final. But then it spirals off into this very weird world that feels euphoric, but also intense and unknown. And I think that’s a quite a nice note to end this particular album on. The whole situation we’ve found ourselves in is unknown. I personally don’t know what I’m going to do next, but I know this final statement feels right for who I am and the direction I’m going in.”

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.\'\"

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.

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.”

A general observation: You don’t go see Rick Rubin at Shangri-La if you’re just going to fuck around. For their sixth LP, The Strokes turn to the Mage of Malibu to produce their most focused collection of songs since 2003’s *Room on Fire*—the very beginning of a period marked by discord, disinterest, and addiction. Only their fourth record since, *The New Abnormal* finds the fivesome sounding fully engaged and totally revitalized, offering glimpses of themselves as we first came to know them at the turn of the millennium—young saviors of rock, if not its last true stars—while also providing the sort of perspective and even grace that comes with age. “Bad Decisions” is at turns riffy and elegiac, Julian Casablancas’ corkscrewing chorus melody a close enough relative to 1981’s “Dancing With Myself” that Billy Idol and Tony James are credited as songwriters. Though not as immediate, “Not the Same Anymore” is equally toothsome, a heart-stopping soul number that manages to capture feelings of both triumph and deep regret, with Casablancas opening himself up and delivering what might be his finest vocal performance to date. “I was afraid,” he sings, amid a weave of cresting guitars. “I fucked up/I couldn’t change/It’s too late.” For a band that forged an entire mythology around appearing as though they couldn’t be bothered, this is an exciting development. It’s cool to care, too.

“You say you can\'t hold anything back/It\'s a habit,” Helena Deland sings on the aptly titled “Truth Nugget”—which her first full-length album is full of. The Montreal art-pop experimentalist revels in uncomfortable conversations about relationship dynamics and gender norms, often positioning herself in the crosshairs. On “Dog,” she’s an obedient partner submitting herself to the patriarchy (“I hate to be your dog/But I got everything to gain from your hand on my head/Like I’m about to be trained”), while on “Pale,” she toes the line between ennui and self-loathing, staring at the mirror to declare, “Spending this much time in my naked body is not making it familiar to me.” But on *Someone New*, it’s not just the cutting words that throw you off balance: Deland’s deconstructed dream pop presents a shape-shifting bricolage of bedroom-indie confessionals, jarring drones, and mutant drum-machine beats that vividly reflect the unsettled mindset of someone barely holding it all together.

HAIM only had one rule when they started working on their third album: There would be no rules. “We were just experimenting,” lead singer and middle sibling Danielle Haim tells Apple Music. “We didn’t care about genre or sticking to any sort of script. We have the most fun when nothing is off limits.” As a result, *Women in Music Pt. III* sees the Los Angeles sisters embrace everything from thrillingly heavy guitar to country anthems and self-deprecating R&B. Amid it all, gorgeous saxophone solos waft across the album, transporting you straight to the streets of their hometown on a sunny day. In short, it’s a fittingly diverse effort for a band that\'s always refused, in the words of Este Haim, to be “put in a box.” “I just hope people can hear how much fun we had making it,” adds Danielle, who produced the album alongside Rostam Batmanglij and Ariel Rechtshaid—a trio Alana Haim describes as “the Holy Trinity.” “We wanted it to sound fun. Everything about the album was just spontaneous and about not taking ourselves too seriously.” Yet, as fun-filled as they might be, the tracks on *Women in Music Pt. III* are also laced with melancholy, documenting the collective rock bottom the Haim sisters hit in the years leading up to the album’s creation. These songs are about depression, seeking help, grief, failing relationships, and health issues (Este has type 1 diabetes). “A big theme in this album is recognizing your sadness and expelling it with a lot of aggression,” says Danielle, who wanted the album to sound as raw and up close as the subjects it dissects. “It feels good to scream it in song form—to me that’s the most therapeutic thing I can do.” Elsewhere, the band also comes to terms with another hurdle: being consistently underestimated as female musicians. (The album’s title, they say, is a playful “invite” to stop asking them about being women in music.) The album proved to be the release they needed from all of those experiences—and a chance to celebrate the unshakable sibling support system they share. “This is the most personal record we’ve ever put out,” adds Alana. “When we wrote this album, it really did feel like collective therapy. We held up a mirror and took a good look at ourselves. It’s allowed us to move on.” Let HAIM guide you through *Women in Music Pt. III*, one song at a time. **Los Angeles** Danielle Haim: “This was one of the first songs we wrote for the album. It came out of this feeling when we were growing up that Los Angeles had a bad rep. It was always like, ‘Ew, Los Angeles!’ or ‘Fuck LA!’ Especially in 2001 or so, when all the music was coming out of New York and all of our friends ended up going there for college. And if LA is an eyeroll, the Valley—where we come from—is a constant punchline. But I always had such pride for this city. And then when our first album came out, all of a sudden, the opinion of LA started to change and everyone wanted to move here. It felt a little strange, and it was like, ‘Maybe I don’t want to live here anymore?’ I’m waiting for the next mass exodus out of the city and people being like, ‘This place sucks.’ Anyone can move here, but you’ve got to have LA pride from the jump.” **The Steps** Danielle: “With this album, we were reckoning with a lot of the emotions we were feeling within the business. This album was kind of meant to expel all of that energy and almost be like ‘Fuck it.’ This song kind of encapsulates the whole mood of the record. The album and this song are really guitar-driven \[because\] we just really wanted to drive that home. Unfortunately, I can already hear some macho dude being like, ‘That lick is so easy or simple.’ Sadly, that’s shit we’ve had to deal with. But I think this is the most fun song we’ve ever written. It’s such a live, organic-sounding song. Just playing it feels empowering.” Este Haim: “People have always tried to put us in a box, and they just don’t understand what we do. People are like, ‘You dance and don’t play instruments in your videos, how are you a band?’ It’s very frustrating.” **I Know Alone** Danielle: “We wrote this one around the same time that we wrote ‘Los Angeles,’ just in a room on GarageBand. Este came up with just that simple bassline. And we kind of wrote the melody around that bassline, and then added those 808 drums in the chorus. It’s about coming out of a dark place and feeling like you don\'t really want to deal with the outside world. Sometimes for me, being at home alone is the most comforting. We shout out Joni Mitchell in this song; our mom was such a huge fan of hers and she kind of introduced us to her music when we were really little. I\'d always go into my room and just blast Joni Mitchell super loud. And I kept finding albums of hers as we\'ve gotten older and need it now. I find myself screaming to slow Joni Mitchell songs in my car. This song is very nostalgic for her.” **Up From a Dream** Danielle: “This song literally took five minutes to write, and it was written with Rostam. It’s about waking up to a reality that you just don’t want to face. In a way, I don’t really want to explain it: It can mean so many different things to different people. This is the heaviest song we’ve ever had. It’s really cool, and I think this one will be really fun to play live. The guitar solo alone is really fun.” **Gasoline** Danielle: “This was another really quick one that we wrote with Rostam. The song was a lot slower originally, and then we put that breakbeat-y drumbeat on it and all of a sudden it turned into a funky sort of thing, and it really brought the song to life. I love the way that the drums sound. I feel like we really got that right. I was like literally in a cave of blankets, a fort we created with a really old Camco drum set from the ’70s, to make sure we got that dry, tight drum sound. That slowed-down ending is due to Ariel. He had this crazy EDM filter he stuck on the guitar, and I was like, ‘Yes, that’s fucking perfect.’” Alana Haim: “I think there were parts of that song where we were feeling sexy. I remember I had gone to go get food, and when I came back Danielle had written the bridge. She was like, ‘Look what I wrote!’ And I was like, ‘Oh! Okay!’” **3 AM** Alana: “It’s pretty self-explanatory—it’s about a booty call. There have been around 10 versions of this song. Someone was having a booty call. It was probably me, to be honest. We started out with this beat, and then we wrote the chorus super quickly. But then we couldn’t figure out what to do in the verses. We’d almost given up on it and then we were like, ‘Let’s just try one last time and see if we can get there.’ I think it was close to 3 am when we figured out the verse and we had this idea of having it introduced by a phone call. Because it *is* about a booty call. And we had to audition a bunch of dudes. We basically got all of our friends that were guys to be like, ‘Hey, this is so crazy, but can you just pretend to be calling a girl at 3 am?’ We got five or six of our friends to do it, and they were so nervous and sheepish. They were the worst! I was like, ‘Do you guys even talk to girls?’ I think you can hear the amount of joy and laughs we had making this song.” **Don’t Wanna** Alana: “I think this is classic HAIM. It was one of the earlier songs which we wrote around the same time as ‘Now I’m in It.’ We always really, really loved this song, and it always kind of stuck its head out like, ‘Hey, remember me?’ It just sounded so good being simple. We can tinker around with a song for years, and with this one, every time we added something or changed it, it lost the feeling. And every time we played it, it just kind of felt good. It felt like a warm sweater.” **Another Try** Alana: “I\'ve always wanted to write a song like this, and this is my favorite on the record. The day that we started it, I was thinking that I was going to get back together with the love of my life. I mean, now that I say that, I want to barf, because we\'re not in a good place now, but at that point we were. We had been on and off for almost 10 years and I thought we were going to give it another try. And it turns out, the week after we finished the song, he had gotten engaged. So the song took on a whole new meaning very quickly. It’s really about the fact I’ve always been on and off with the same person, and have only really had one love of my life. It’s kind of dedicated to him. I think Ariel had a lot of fun producing this song. As for the person it’s about? He doesn’t know about it, but I think he can connect the dots. I don’t think it’s going to be very hard to figure out. The end of the song is supposed to feel like a celebration. We wanted it to feel like a dance party. Because even though it has such a weird meaning now, the song has a hopeful message. Who knows? Maybe one day we’ll figure it out. I am still hopeful.” **Leaning on You** Alana: “This is really a song about finding someone that accepts your flaws. That’s such a rare thing in this world—to find someone you love that accepts you as who you are and doesn\'t want to change you. As sisters, we are the CEOs of our company: We have super strong personalities and really strong opinions. And finding someone that\'s okay with that, you would think would be celebrated, but it\'s actually not. It\'s really hard to find someone that accepts you and accepts what you do as a job and accepts everything about you. And I think ‘Leaning on You’ is about when you find that person that really uplifts you and finds everything that you do to be incredible and interesting and supports you. It’s a beautiful thing.” Danielle: “We wrote this song just us sitting around a guitar. And we just wanted to keep it like that, so we played acoustic guitar straight into the computer for a very dry, unique sound that I love.” **I’ve Been Down** Danielle: “This is the last one we wrote on the album. This was super quick with stream-of-consciousness lyrics. I wanted it to sound like you were in the room, like you were right next to me. That chorus—‘I’ve been down, I’ve been down’—feels good to sing. It\'s very therapeutic to just kind of scream it in song form. To me, it’s the most therapeutic thing I can do. The backing vocals on this are like the other side of your brain.” **Man From the Magazine** Este: \"When we were first coming out, I guess it was perplexing for some people that I would make faces when I played, even though men have been doing it for years. When they see men do it, they are just, to quote HAIM, ‘in it.’ But of course, when a woman does it, it\'s unsettling and off-putting and could be misconstrued as something else. We got asked questions about it early on, and there was this one interviewer who asked if I made the faces I made onstage in bed. Obviously he wasn’t asking about when I’m in bed yawning. My defense mechanism when stuff like that happens is just to try to make a joke out of it. So I kind of just threw it back at him and said, ‘Well, there\'s only one way to find out.’ And of course, there was a chuckle and then we moved on. Now, had someone said that to me, I probably would\'ve punched them in the face. But as women, we\'re taught kind of just to always be pleasant and be polite. And I think that was my way of being polite and nice. Thank god things are changing a bit. We\'ve been talking about shit like this forever, but I think now, finally, people are able to listen more intently.” Danielle: “We recorded this song in one take. We got the feeling we wanted in the first take. The first verse is Este\'s super specific story, and then, on the second verse, it feels very universal to any woman who plays music about going into a guitar store or a music shop and immediately either being asked, ‘Oh, do you want to start to play guitar?’ or ‘Are you looking for a guitar for your boyfriend?’ And you\'re like, ‘What the fuck?’ It\'s the worst feeling. And I\'ve talked to so many other women about the same experience. Everyone\'s like, ‘Yeah, it\'s the worst. I hate going in the guitar stores.’ It sucks.” **All That Ever Mattered** Alana: “This is one of the more experimental songs on the record. Whatever felt good on this track, we just put it in. And there’s a million ways you could take this song—it takes on a life of its own and it’s kind of chaotic. The production is bananas and bonkers, but it did really feel good.” Danielle: “It’s definitely a different palette. But to us it was exciting to have that crazy guitar solo and those drums. It also has a really fun scream on it, which I always like—it’s a nice release.” **FUBT** Alana: “This song was one of the ones that was really hard to write. It’s about being in an emotionally abusive relationship, which all three of us have been in. It’s really hard to see when you\'re in something like that. And the song basically explains what it feels like and just not knowing how to get out of it. You\'re just kind of drowning in this relationship, because the highs are high and the lows are extremely low. You’re blind to all these insane red flags because you’re so immersed in this love. And knowing that you\'re so hard on yourself about the littlest things. But your partner can do no wrong. When we wrote this song, we didn’t really know where to put it. But it felt like the end to the chapter of the record—a good break before the next songs, which everyone knew.” **Now I’m in It** Danielle: “This song is about feeling like you\'re in something and almost feeling okay to sit in it, but also just recognizing that you\'re in a dark place. I was definitely in a dark place, and it was just like I had to look at myself in the mirror and be like, ‘Yeah, this is fucked up. And you need to get your shit together and you need to look it in the face and know that you\'re here and work on yourself.’ After writing this song I got a therapist, which really helped me.” **Hallelujah** Alana: “This song really did just come from wanting to express how important it is to have the love of your family. We\'re very lucky that we each have two sisters as backup always. We wrote this with our friend Tobias Jesso Jr., and we all just decided to write verses separately, which is rare for us. I think we each wanted to have our own take on the lyric ‘Why me, how\'d I get this hallelujah’ and what it meant to each of us. I wrote about losing a really close friend of mine at such a young age and going through a tragedy that was unexplainable. I still grapple with the meaning of that whole thing. It was one of the hardest times in my life, and it still is, but I was really lucky that I had two siblings that were really supportive during that time and really helped me get through it. If you talk to anybody that loses someone unexpectedly, you really do become a different person. I feel like I\'ve had two chapters of my life at this point: before it happened and after it happened. And I’ve always wanted to thank my sisters at the same time because they were so integral in my healing process going through something so tragic.” **Summer Girl** Alana: This song is collectively like our baby. Putting it out was really fun, but it was also really scary, because we were coming back and we didn’t know how people were going to receive it. We’d played it to people and a lot of them didn’t really like it. But we loved everything about it. You can lose your confidence really quickly, but thankfully, people really liked it. Putting out this song really did give us back our confidence.” Danielle: “I\'ve talked about it a lot, but this song is about my boyfriend getting cancer a couple of years ago, and it was truly the scariest thing that I have ever been through. I just couldn\'t stop thinking about how he was feeling. I get spooked really easily, but I felt like I had to buck the fuck up and be this kind of strong figure for him. I had to be this kind of sunshine, which was hard for me, but I feel like it really helped him. And that’s kind of where this song came from. Being the summer when he was just in this dark, dark place.”

On December 26th, 2018, Emily Cross received an excited email from a friend: Brian Eno was talking about her band on BBC radio. “At first I didn’t think it was real,” she admits. But then she heard a recording: Eno was praising “Black Willow” from Loma’s self-titled debut, a song whose minimal groove and hypnotic refrain seem as much farewell as a manifesto: I make my bed beside the road / I carry a diamond blade / I will not serve you. He said he’d had it on repeat. At the time, a second Loma album seemed unlikely. The band began as a serendipitous collaboration between Cross, the multi-talented musician and recording engineer Dan Duszynski, and Shearwater frontman Jonathan Meiburg, who wanted to play a supporting role after years at the microphone. They’d capped a grueling tour with a standout performance on a packed beach at Sub Pop’s SPF 30 festival, in which Cross leapt into the crowd, and then into the sea, while the band carried on from the stage—an emotional peak that also felt like a natural ending. “It was the biggest audience we’d ever had,” she says. “We thought, why not stop here?” Following the tour, Cross went to rural Mexico to work on visual art and a solo record, while Meiburg began a new Shearwater effort. But after a few months apart (and Eno’s encouraging words), the trio changed their minds and reconvened at Duszynski’s home in rural Texas, where they began to develop songs that would become Don’t Shy Away. Loma writes by consensus, and though Cross is always the singer, she, Duszynski and Meiburg often trade instruments. Meiburg compares their process to using a ouija board, and says the songs revealed themselves slowly, over many months. “Each of us is a very strong flavor,” he says, “but in Loma, nobody wears the crown, so we have to trust each other—and we end up in places none of us would have gone on our own. I think we all wanted to experience that again.” The album that emerged is gently spectacular—a vivid work whose light touch belies its timely themes of solitude, impermanence, and finding light in deep darkness. Stuck / beneath / a rock, Cross begins, as if noticing her predicament for the first time. Then she adds: I begin to see / the beauty in it. It’s a couplet that evokes the album in miniature. Don’t Shy Away is shot through with revelations, both joyful (“Given a Sign”) and sober (the clear-eyed title track), and winds from moment to moment with confidence and humor. Like Loma’s first effort, there’s a tangible and sensuous feeling of place; insects sing in the trees, an ill-fitting door creaks in the wind. But there’s also a daring and hard-won wisdom, underlined by Cross’s benevolent clarinet, which often sounds like an extension of her singing voice. “Ocotillo”’s desert landscape unreels into a blazing sun; “Elliptical Days” seems to ascend endlessly like Escher’s circling monks; the jubilant “Breaking Waves Like a Stone” appears out of a haze of synthesizers that pulse like fireflies. A series of guests wander through these absorbing soundscapes, including touring members Emily Lee (piano, violin) and Matt Schuessler (bass), Flock of Dimes/Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner, and a surprisingly bass-heavy horn section. And then there’s Brian Eno. Loma invited him to participate in the mantra-like “Homing,” which concludes the album, and sent him stems to interact with in any way he liked. He never spoke directly with the band, but his completed mix arrived via e-mail late one night, without warning, and they gathered to listen in the converted bedroom Duszynski uses as a control room. “I was a little worried,” says Cross. “What if we didn’t like it?” But it was all they’d hoped for: minimal but enveloping, friendly but enigmatic, as much Loma as Eno—a perfect ending to an album about finding a new home inside an old one. I am somewhere that you know, Cross sings, above a chorus of her bandmates’ blended voices. I am right behind your eyes.

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

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

Over the last decade, Khruangbin (pronounced “krung-bin”) has mastered the art of setting a mood, of creating atmosphere. But on *Mordechai*, follow-up to their 2018 breakthrough *Con Todo El Mundo*, the Houston trio makes space in their globe-spinning psych-funk for something that’s been largely missing until now: vocals. The result is their most direct work to date. From the playground disco of “Time (You and I)” to the Latin rhythms of “Pelota”—inspired by a Japanese film, but sung in Spanish—to the balmy reassurances of “If There Is No Question,” much of *Mordechai* has the immediacy of an especially adventurous pop record. Even moments of hallucinogenic expanse (“One to Remember”) or haze (“First Class”) benefit from the added presence of a human voice. “Never enough paper, never enough letters,” they sing from inside a shower of West African guitar notes on “So We Won’t Forget,” the album’s high point. “You don’t have to be silent.”

Throughout the late ’90s and 2000s, Destroyer was essentially a guitar band. Whether principal singer-songwriter (and erstwhile New Pornographer) Dan Bejar was exploring glam rock’s velvety contours (2001’s *Streethawk: A Seduction*), experimenting with drum- and bass-less baroque pop (2004’s *Your Blues*), or orchestrating a grand rock opus (2006’s *Destroyer’s Rubies*), six strings generally provided his songs their backbone. That changed with 2011’s *Kaputt*. “I cast down the guitar in disgust,” the Vancouver-based Bejar tells Apple Music, partly kidding, but mostly serious. *Kaputt*’s focus on atmosphere and mood (its soft-rock synths, fretless bass, ’80s jazz-pop saxophones) signaled a major shift in not only how Bejar would write songs (“I like to avoid writing on an instrument at all,” he says), but also how each of his subsequent albums would sound. The experiments with chamber strings and horns on 2015’s *Poison Season* and the apocalyptic New Wave of 2017’s *ken* were essentially a lead-up to the band’s 12th album, *Have We Met*, Bejar’s most self-aware, confident, and abstract work to date. It’s also his darkest, filled with scenes of violence, isolation, and existential dread, most of which Bejar wrote and sang into his laptop at his kitchen table at night. (He then sent those files to bandmates John Collins and Nicolas Bragg, who added everything from bass, drums, keys, and guitar to the glitchy bee-swarm textures that close out the LP.) But for all its excursions into the unknown, *Have We Met* is still very much a Destroyer album—those hyper-literate, self-referential lyrical flourishes and melodic arrangements that have become Bejar’s signature still fully intact. No matter how different things might feel this time around, \"You can see a Destroyer song coming a mile away,” Bejar says. Here, he deciphers his 10 latest. **Crimson Tide** \"It\'s composed of the style of writing which I usually call like \'old Destroyer.’ I don\'t see that kind of lyrical attack too much in any song I\'ve written since \[the 2009 EP\] *Bay of Pigs*. I had it in my special ‘this is for something else\' book, and finally wrote the song from disparate chunks of writing that struck me as kind of musical. But it was really all over the place, and I needed to tie it in together somehow. And for some reason I thought a good way to do that would be to constantly say \'crimson tide\' at the end of every stanza. It has specific connotations in America—like a college football team or a submarine movie, which are really dumb. And so I think that\'s important to point out, when there\'s dumb American things that take over language. It has an end-of-the-world ring to it, as like blood on the horizon, or some kind of apocalypse incoming. It was a loaded two words, and it felt good to sing it at the end of each verse and just see what the song ended up meaning.\" **Kinda Dark** \"As opposed to \'Crimson Tide,’ \'Kinda Dark\' I felt was some other kind of writing that I didn\'t really know—a kind of music, especially in the last half of the song, that I felt was a bit more violent-sounding than the band usually is. It\'s supposed to be the three stanzas, with the last one being particularly gnarly. The first one is kind of a cruising imagery, leading up to sitting on a park bench next to the Boston Strangler. The second one is more slightly eerie sci-fi. And the last one is just a dystopic kind of dogfight or something like that. Like a torture chamber with an audience.\" **It Just Doesn\'t Happen** \"That song was kind of different from the rest. I wrote it on the guitar, for one. And I sat down, and I just wrote it. When I do that, the songs always have kind of a ditty quality—a happy-go-lucky quality—as opposed to the song that comes before it, which has none of those qualities. I thought that the song titles themselves \[the lyrics name-check Primal Scream’s “You\'re Just Too Dark to Care,” Charlie Patton’s “High Water Everywhere,” and The Platters’ “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”\] somehow reflect the vibe of being alone at night in a strange place. Which is something that happens to me a lot. And then wondering if that feeling of isolation is really so special or so specific to you, or is it maybe something that every single person is feeling on and off.\" **The Television Music Supervisor** \"For such specific subject matter, it came to me as if in a dream. It just came to me with the melody in this kind of lilting way. And it was just supposed to be this sad moment in someone\'s life, looking back on their life. It\'s either with perhaps some sense of regret or some sense of amazement. It really depends on what you get out of the words \'I can\'t believe what I\'ve done.\' I also thought the title was maybe such a specific phrase to the early 21st century, just because it\'s possible that in 20 years, no one will actually know what that means—the job that most specifically sums up our day and age. It really rolled off the tongue, too—for such a weird thing, it really feels so musical and melodious to sing it. I think that\'s why I wanted the music to be dreamlike and collapsing, like a fog that I sing through. John \[Collins, producer\] really nailed that one.\" **The Raven** \"I like art that talks about what it\'s going to do when it makes art—and then at the end, that\'s the piece of art. The art that\'s just like, ‘Here\'s my plan, it\'s going to be great,\' and then in the description of the plan, you get the plan, you don\'t get the thing. And that\'s kind of what \'The Raven\' is. The last line that repeats itself kind of alludes to that: \'That\'s what I\'ll write about when I write about The Raven.\' I think it\'s me—or it\'s the singer, because that\'s not me necessarily—talking about... In some ways it\'s kind of like \'When I Paint My Masterpiece,’ the Bob Dylan song. You know, when I get around to writing about the serious topics, this is what it\'s going to be.\" **Cue Synthesizer** \"I like that song a lot, for very different reasons. Part of it is that the production is just way more maniacal than I\'m used to, and extreme in its rhythm. It\'s kind of obliterated by guitar playing that\'s used as samples. I find it very groovy and also ominous at the same time, which is a combo that I like. I also really love stage direction as literature. It\'s maybe my favorite form of literature—the stuff in parentheses before there\'s any action in the play. Like, ‘Cue this, exit that.’ It\'s all a lead-up to the last verse, which is just unbridled dread. I don\'t normally let it loose like that. And when it\'s a song that\'s leading up to a portrait of a doomed world, it\'s interesting to me to see how musical words can be painted or darkened or made evil-sounding when you know what the last verse is. Or I guess before you even know, maybe the point *is* to make them sound terrible—to make the word ‘synthesizer\' or ‘guitar\' or ‘drum\' or \'fake drum\' sound like weapons.\" **University Hill** \"That\'s maybe my favorite song on the record. University Hill is a school in Vancouver in what is now a really nice part of town. When I was a kid, it was kind of a small school where fuck-ups would go. But the main thing that University Hill is is a description of some kind of force that comes and kills and puts people in camps. I mean, that\'s literally what the words describe. So there\'s very little room for interpretation, aside from the very end of the song that has this \'Come on, University Hill!’—like a school rallying cry. What I really needed, though—this will give you deep insights into how I work—the last verse goes, ‘Used to be so nice, used to be such a thrill.’ I needed something that rhymed with \'thrill.’ And I knew deep down it was going to be some kind of hill. And I was like, what hills have I known in my life? And out of nowhere, I was like, oh, there\'s University Hill, and that\'s kind of a big part of my childhood. It comes loaded with real imagery for me.\" **Have We Met** \"The original idea was for the record to be an attack on melody, to completely clamp down on that. But in the end, that\'s not what me and John like. I knew that Nick had been making these guitar pieces over the last couple of years, and I just wanted that one. There was a claustrophobic kind of Max Headroom vibe to the album, which was purposeful. But a moment of sighing, a moment of respite, would be really nice. I also just think it\'s kind of a really beautiful track. I wanted there to be a title track—and it made the most sense for that to be it. I knew the record would be called *Have We Met*. And I wanted that expression to be as open-ended or endless as it could possibly be. As far as the title, I realize I\'ve never heard that said in my entire life, even though I\'ve always heard it said in movies. So it automatically seemed strange to me, and it seemed really deceptively simple. I purposefully left the question mark out, so there could just be words. And there\'s something vaguely noir-ish to it, which I love in all things.\" **The Man in Black\'s Blues** \"I think that song was initially called ‘Death\' or \'Death Blues.’ It\'s just a song about death. One thing that I always seem to write about these days is the world disappearing or erasing itself. And I think that song is supposed to be on the more personal side of that, and it\'s just about what it looks like to be faced with utter loss. But also, it\'s supposed to be kind of like a balm. It\'s not like a dirge. And it\'s not wailing. I feel like it’s kind of a stroll through grief. The original demo was a lot like what you hear at an Italian ice cream parlor maybe, in the late \'80s. It had this kind of weird fairground midtempo disco. More than any other song on the record, I feel like there\'s a real disconnect between what I\'m singing and how I\'m singing it and the music around it, but I didn\'t want it to be a depressing song. I wanted it to be kind of danceable—a moment of levity—especially at the end, where it\'s pretty goofy, and it\'s like, \'Knock knock/Did you say who you come for?\' It\'s literally supposed to be the Grim Reaper at the door, but I kind of sing it in this British funk kind of way.\" **Foolssong** \"I wrote it around the same time that I wrote the *Kaputt* songs, but it didn\'t fit on that record, because there were no 6/8 or waltz-time songs allowed; if you didn\'t have a steady beat to it, then you got kicked off that album. But it was definitely written as a kind of lullaby. A lullaby\'s a vulnerable song, just purely because you sing it to a baby or a small child, which is a vulnerable headspace to be in. I feel like it\'s not a song I could write now. Maybe it\'s the only instance where I\'ve ever thought, like, I\'m serenading myself. And, you know, the lines are not comforting at all. The end refrain, \'Its figures all lit up/Nagasaki at night/At war with the devil\'—I guess maybe lullabies have a history of containing terrifying imagery. But maybe it\'s not so strange. I think there\'s a tradition of gothic horror in lullabies. This makes total sense.\"

“More often than not, my songs draw from things that remind me of home and things that remind me of peace,” Sophie Allison tells Apple Music. The Nashville guitarist and songwriter’s *color theory* is steeped in feelings of alienation, depression, loneliness, and anxiety, all presented with a confidence belying her 22 years. The album is organized into three sections, with the first, blue, symbolizing depression and sadness. The second, yellow, hones in on physical and mental sickness, centering around Allison’s mother’s battle with a terminal illness. Lastly, the gray section represents darkness, emptiness, and a fear of death. It’s a perfect middle ground between her earlier work and a studio-oriented sound, retaining a lo-fi ethos while sanding down the pointy edges. Here she breaks down the stories behind each song on *color theory*. **bloodstream** “‘bloodstream’ was one of the first ones I wrote. It took a while to finish it because I had to craft it a little bit more rather than just let all this stuff out. I felt I needed to piece together a lot of themes and ideas that I wanted in there, because it’s a song about being in a dark and empty place. I wanted to try to remember a time when it wasn’t that way. I also wanted it to have this contrast of beauty, and use images of flowers and summer. I wanted this natural beauty to be in there mixed with violence―these images of blood, wounds, and visceral stuff.” **circle the drain** “When I started ‘bloodstream,’ I also started ‘circle the drain.’ I was writing both of them on the same tour, and ‘circle the drain’ came together a lot faster, even though it is still a song that\'s pieced together. I just wanted to grab that wallowing feeling. In the song it feels like I\'m drowning a little bit. I wanted it to be a track that felt really bright and hopeful on the outside, even though the lyrics themselves are about someone literally falling apart, and wallowing in the sadness.” **royal screw up** “I wrote this one in about 15 minutes. The lyrics here are me just ragging and telling on myself for all these things that I do. It sucks, but if I\'m being honest, this is the level that it\'s at. It\'s about coming to terms with and being honest about your own flaws and your own reoccurring behavior that may be a little bit self-destructive.” **night swimming** “‘night swimming’ is one I wrote at home. I wrote it pretty early on and when I hadn\'t written a lot of songs. I wasn\'t sure how it was going to fit in, because it felt very different―softer and more gentle than a lot of the stuff I was writing. But as I started to write more songs, it emerged as the end of what is now the blue section. The themes that are in this song are very similar to things that are going on throughout the album. I think at the core of it, this song is about loneliness and about feeling like there\'s always a distance between you and other people.” **crawling in my skin** “This is a big shift out of the blue section. This one is really about hallucinating, having sleep paralysis, and paranoia, of just feeling like there\'s something watching me and there\'s something following me. It’s about the feeling that you\'re constantly running from something. Obviously, it\'s a huge shift in the record, and it comes in with a bang. It\'s immediately more upbeat and the pace of the album starts to pick up. I think about it like getting your heart racing. During the time I wrote it, I was having a lot of trouble with not sleeping very much and just having this constant paranoia of auditory hallucinations. I had the feeling of being completely on edge for a while and feeling like even when it\'s not there, the moment things get quiet, it\'s going to be back. The moment that you\'re at home and people are asleep, it\'s going to be back, it’s going to creep back in.” **yellow is the color of her eyes** “I really like this one. It\'s about sickness and the toll that that can take. It’s about being faced with something that is a little bit visceral even for a short, short time. Anything can happen at any second. You\'re not immortal, your people die, and people get ill. At any time, things can change. Anything can change.” **up the walls** “I wrote this on tour when I was opening for Liz Phair. I wrote it in my hotel room, because I was flying to every show and I was alone because I was playing solo. This one is all about anxiety and paranoia, but also just feeling tired of having to be a certain person, especially for someone you love when you’re in a relationship. It’s about wishing you could just take it easy. It’s about trying to be a calmer person and not falling into that anxiety when it comes to new relationships. I guess it\'s really just about feeling like you wish you could be perfect for someone.” **lucy** “‘lucy’ represents another shift in the album, both literally and sonically. It has an evil overtone, even just in the chords. I use this idea of the devil seducing you to talk about morality, struggling with that and things in the world that seduce you in ways you wish they wouldn\'t. It has this minor overtone all of a sudden, even though it\'s upbeat, catchy, and fun. This is when the album turns into the gray section. I begin to talk more about darkness and evil and things that tear you apart a little bit.” **stain** “I wrote this in my parents’ house. I got this new amp and I was just playing around with it and I ended up writing this song. It still makes me uncomfortable to talk about, just because it\'s about facing a power struggle with someone, and feeling like you lost, and wishing you could redo it over and over again. But it’s also about knowing that you can\'t, and just being unable to take that as the final answer even though it is. It’s a difficult thing to feel like you\'re stained with that interaction, and losing control over a part of your life.” **gray light** “This song reflects on everything I\'ve been talking about the entire album and brings in this new element of darkness, mortality, and fear. It also touches on longing for an end to some of your suffering and some of the things that will never be okay. It’s about being tired of struggling with things. It has this anxiety and it also has this kind of sadness that draws you to wanting to end some of your pain. But it also talks about how it’s important to recognize these feelings and acknowledge them.”

Confronting the ongoing mental health and familial trials that have plagued Allison since pre-pubescence, color theory explores three central themes: blue, representing sadness and depression; yellow, symbolizing physical and emotional illness; and, finally, gray, representing darkness, emptiness and loss. Written mostly while on tour and recorded in Allison’s hometown of Nashville at Alex The Great, color theory was produced by Gabe Wax (who also produced Clean), mixed by Lars Stalfors (Mars Volta, HEALTH, St. Vincent), and features the live Soccer Mommy band on studio recording for the first time, with a live take at the foundation of almost every track. The resulting album is a masterpiece that paints an uncompromisingly honest self-portrait of an artist who, according to 100+ publications, already released one of the Best Albums of 2018 and the 2010s, and is about to release an early favorite of 2020.

“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.

They began by just playing the hits. In 2017, nearly eight years after Doves had last picked up their instruments together, drummer Andy Williams and his twin brother, guitarist Jez, gave bassist/singer Jimi Goodwin a call. Come over to Andy’s studio, they said, and let’s see if we can remember how to play “Black and White Town” and “There Goes the Fear”—just for fun. “It came back really quickly,” Andy tells Apple Music. “We were all laughing and having fun. As a drummer, hearing that bass—*his* bass—instantly felt very familiar, in a good sense. Pretty soon, there was a real enthusiasm and hunger from us to work together.” When they went on hiatus after 2009’s excellent *Kingdom of Rust* album, Doves were fatigued. They’d been together for a quarter of a century, serving up four albums as one of Britain’s best and more adventurous indie-rock trios—plus one before that as house specialists Sub Sub. They were never meant to disappear for a decade, but when you’ve got families and side projects (the Williams brothers as Black Rivers, Goodwin with his 2014 solo album *Odludek*), life gets in the way. “I don’t want to sound boastful, but I think there’s a chemistry between us three that you don’t run into every day,” Andy says. “That time away from each other has helped us appreciate that.” Fizzing with that chemistry, *The Universal Want* sounds like a Doves album precisely because it doesn’t sound like any other Doves album. The exquisitely measured mix of euphoria and sorrow is familiar, but by experimenting with Afrobeat, dub, and keyboards foraged from behind the Iron Curtain, the trio continues to expand their horizons on every song. “We didn’t attempt to resurrect another ‘The Cedar Room’ or ‘There Goes the Fear,’ because it’s a recipe for disaster when you chase your own tail,” says Andy. “It’s really important for us three to be excited and feel like we’re moving forward.” Let him guide you through that evolution, track by track. **Carousels** “Originally, it started life as Black Rivers and we couldn’t get it to work. We put it down for a while, then Jez had a look at it again. He’d bought a Tony Allen breakbeat album and just sampled some breaks. It just clicked—the song came alive. We felt it was a bit of a progression for us, so it felt like a good song to introduce ourselves back to people again. Lyrically, it’s a bit of a nostalgia thing. We all used to go out to funfairs as kids up here in the North West, and every summer we’d go to a place called Harlech in North Wales and there’d be a funfair near there. It’s a nostalgic look back at that era when you used to hear music for the first time, loud, on loudspeakers, and that excitement at the fair—trying to recapture that feeling. The music’s trying to push it forward, but lyrically, it’s looking back, so there’s that juxtaposition.” **I Will Not Hide** “Really fun memories of making this. Jimi loves his sampling, so when he played it to us, it was like, ‘Wow! What’s going on there?’ I couldn’t really fathom out the lyrics. I mean, I put a couple of lines in there myself, but I still don’t fully understand what it’s about. I don’t think Jimi does. But we quite like that place sometimes, where it’s almost a train of thought. Jimi’s demo stopped, I think, at chorus two. We just looked at the chords, me and Jez, and tacked the guitar section onto the end. That’s the nice thing about Doves—when people present ideas to the band, it goes through the filter of all three of us and it can change. That’s when it’s working well between us three, when someone has an initial idea and then the other two run with it.” **Broken Eyes** “Early doors, we found an old hard drive with loads of material on, stuff we hadn’t actually ever managed to finish, and this was one \[from the *Kingdom of Rust* sessions\]. We were like, ‘Oh, that’s got real heart and soul. Let’s tackle that again.’ Last time, we were maybe overcomplicating it, so we stripped it away and kept it simple. It always had a different lyric, right up until the 11th hour, actually. It had a very different vibe. Jimi sounds brilliant on this. When he did the vocal, it was hairs-on-the-back-of-the-neck stuff. That’s when you know you’re on the right path. You just hit a brick wall sometimes with songs. I read a Leonard Cohen book and I think he was talking about ‘Tower of Song,’ that it took him 20 years to finish. Started it, put it down, picked it up again, kept going back to it. If a song’s got strength in it, it will keep knocking on your door. We’ve got other songs which I’m hoping we can look at again at some point. There’s a couple of things where I’ve gone, ‘Do you remember this one?’ And it was, ‘Oh no, I can’t.’ Because we’d absolutely hammered it at the time and not made it work, and no one’s ready to go back to that place.” **For Tomorrow** “Again, we had those chords for the chorus kicking round for a while but we never really had a song. The high string in the verses, we were like, ‘Oh god, look, it’s got that kind of Isaac Hayes classic soul thing we were going for.’ I know it didn’t necessarily end up that way, but that’s what we were going for in our heads. We did it live in the room, and I remember going back in the control room and going, ‘Ah, it’s just coming together.’ I’ve got really fond memories, a couple of moments of like, ‘Yeah.’ It’s a really fun one to play on the drums.” **Cathedrals of the Mind** “Initially it was from a Black Rivers session—another song that, down the line, Jimi heard and really loved and worked on with us. We were booked to go to Anglesey, me and Jez, in 2016. We were due to set off at nine in the morning, but at six o’clock, my wife wakes me up and says, ‘Bowie’s passed.’ I couldn’t take it in—like the whole world, I guess. I remember driving to Anglesey with 6 Music on, they cleared their schedule and were just talking about Bowie. We got to Anglesey and it was like, ‘Fucking hell.’ I’m not saying we wrote this song for him, but I think it was an unconscious thing. Jez had some chords and I tried a couple of different grooves. It didn’t work, and I tried that sort of dub groove, and that was the start of the song. The lyrics, as well—‘In the back room/In the ballroom/I hear them calling your name…/Everywhere I see those eyes.’ I think we were referencing the passing of such a musical icon. He was such a towering figure, cultural figure. Him passing felt like your own mortality, essentially.” **Prisoners** “It’s the love affair with northern soul that we’ve had for years. Very English lyrics. The Jam was one reference when we were doing the lyrics, ‘Town Called Malice.’ It was written way before the situation we’re in \[2020’s lockdown\], but it’s got some sort of resonance. We’ve all been stuck in our houses and we’re only just starting to come out. But it’s also got a sense of hope. The chorus is ‘We’re just prisoners of these times/Although it won’t be for long.’ So there is a sense of hope with that. We let everybody know our struggles, I guess, but it’s good to have a sense of hope in there.” **Cycle of Hurt** “Jez came with that \[robotic voice\] sample and those chords. They’re probably the most direct lyrics \[on the album\]. It’s referencing a relationship really, and just trying to get out of a cycle of hurt—a cycle of thought that you’re trapped in. They’re quite collaborative, these lyrics. A lot of them that are \[about being\] just locked in a cycle of your own thought, really, and trying to break free from that. There’s definite references to trying to keep your own mental health on track. Looking back on it, that’s a subject we’ve definitely returned to on this record. We felt this \[track\] was really good for the album because there weren’t really deep strings on the rest of the record, and it just brings a new sound for your ears to keep your interest up.” **Mother Silverlake** “The end result doesn’t bear any relation to an Afrobeat song, but that’s what we had in our heads—something that felt new to us, we’ve never really attempted that. Jez and Jimi combined \[on the\] vocal—that was really nice to hear those two singing together in the studio, the mix of their two voices. Martin Rebelski’s pianos really uplift the chorus. It’s a feel-good track, but the lyrics are slightly melancholic, almost referencing our mum, who’s still around, thank god. We always try and make music as uplifting as possible, or as joyous as possible. It might be offset with more melancholic lyrics, but overall we always want it to be an uplifting experience.” **Universal Want** “I started it in my studio as a ballad. I never intended it to be like a house workout at the end. I was thinking of just a two-and-a-half-minute song about the universal want—this question of always chasing something, be it consumerism or some aspect of your life where you think you’re going to be happy. But Jez took it away and he obviously saw something else for the end section and thought of welding this house section onto the end. I couldn’t believe it when I heard it, it was just so unpredictable, and I hope that unpredictability carries through to the listener. I guess it’s kind of a reference to our past, our Sub Sub days—a cheeky doff of the cap to that era. It was a very formative era for all of us.” **Forest House** “Again, this had been knocking around for a while and we were never able to master it, didn’t ever find the key to unlock it. It just felt like it was a really intimate way to finish the record—a small way to wind the album down. A simple song, but with Jez’s Russian keyboard in there—this old Russian ’60s monster of an analog keyboard. It’s almost got a dystopian sound. Once that got brought into the song, it was like, ‘Yeah.’”

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.

“Don’t stop me now, I’m tired of sitting on this fence,” Raphaelle Standell-Preston declares midway through Braids’ fourth album. It’s a line that speaks to the Montreal trio’s dramatic evolution over their first decade. Once the most enigmatic and mercurial band in Canadian indie rock, Braids emerged as fearless art-pop provocateurs on 2015’s Juno Award-winning *Deep in the Iris*, a record that embraced the melodic pleasures of modern R&B while addressing deep-seated traumas in its brutally frank lyrics. On *Shadow Offering*, Standell-Preston’s writing is even more brave and blunt as she wades into deeply uncomfortable conversations about messy breakups, dating younger guys on the rebound, PTSD, and her own white privilege. The visceral sting of those words is intensified by the album’s crisp, lustrous arrangements, as Braids double down on their growing affinity for pop songcraft over textural experimentation with help from producer Chris Walla (ex-Death Cab for Cutie). “In the past, we would usually go with the first 10 songs that we\'d write and then that would be the record,” Standell-Preston says. “And with this one, we wanted to really workshop our skills as songwriters, and really challenge ourselves to write more concise, more potent songs.” Here, Standell-Preston and guitarist Taylor Smith provide a track-by-track survey of the results. **Here 4 U** Raphaelle Standell-Preston: “With us having been away for so long, this song is us saying, ‘Hey, we\'re still here for you,’ and ‘This is going to be a journey.’ Like our past records, we go very deep, and we just wanted to offer a hand to the listener at the beginning of the record and be like, \'Okay, we\'re going to go somewhere together.\' The song deals with the ending of a relationship and wanting to be there for that person—even if they don\'t really want you to be, or they\'re being stubborn about it—and understanding that the context has changed, but that you can still have a meaningful relationship with them in a different context that\'s no longer sexual or romantic.” **Young Buck** RS-P: “I can take myself way too seriously, so it was really nice to be able to laugh at myself with this song—how you go on Tinder and have really, really weird experiences, and try to find the humor in all the mistakes that you\'ve made, sexually. I feel like we started exploring that cheeky side more on \[2018 singles\] \'Collarbones\' and \'Burdock & Dandelion,\' and with \'Young Buck,\' we just wanted to have fun and have a giggle at how ridiculous life can be sometimes. Taylor calls this one our confetti moment.” Taylor Smith: “We\'ve drifted towards something like this over the years, and it was a bit of a revelation to work with Chris and see how much work goes into creating a song like this, and how deliberate and explicit you have to be with each little earworm element, and really pack everything into a neat little box.” **Eclipse (Ashley)** RS-P: “Ashley is my best friend, one of the most important people in my life. This song talks about the day we went to the quarry to experience the eclipse. She\'s always very profound, but just does it in the most casual way. And she was like, \'With this eclipse, I think we need to ask ourselves what eclipses us in our lives.\' So we all went to the quarry with that in mind, and I was thinking about how I usually stand in the way of trying to actualize my highest potential—I\'ve struggled a lot with pretty serious depression and anxiety, and my mind can be a very dark hole sometimes. But I wanted this song to be as lush as Ashley, as lush as the grass by the quarry, and Chris just hit it out of the park in terms of pushing us to make the guitars sound absolutely huge. This was actually one of the first songs that we mixed, where we realized the potential for the rest of the record and how big and beautiful it could sound. We were like, \'This is what we\'re striving for.\'” **Just Let Me** TS: “For me, the reference for this one was always Air. I wanted to do something that\'s a little bit more stripped back and then very deliberately create the big balloon in the middle of the song. This was the song that got us on board with Chris—we invited him into the studio to just listen to what we were doing for fun, and this was the one where you could see the look on his face about halfway through, where it was like, ‘Wow, okay—there\'s like something in here,’ and we hooked him. For probably half of the writing process, this song was double-timed with skittery drums—like Radiohead\'s ‘Weird Fishes / Arpeggi’—and very much got into big crunchy territory. But at some point, we realized the emotion that’s trying to come across lyrically and melodically just speaks so much better if we can all just take a chill pill and give it some space.” **Upheaval II** TS: “This one was definitely a journey. It started as a very different song—very, very synth-focused. We took it on tour for a little bit and it always kind of slipped through the fingers and never quite felt right. And we kind of unlocked something by stripping it back to just Raph and I playing guitars and \[drummer\] Austin \[Tufts\] on piano. We set out to write better songs, and be more deliberate with our songwriting process as opposed to extracting songs from production experiments, and this was the first time that we really unlocked the idea of \'Oh, we can just sit down at our instruments and play this one through together, and it works,\' as opposed to needing all the equipment and the sonics and the textures and everything that\'s been our world for so long. It was a really big moment for us, but every time we shared a demo with anyone, nobody got it. So it was kind of late in the game of recording that we were just jamming around and realized, ‘Oh shit, if we just turn the guitar amp up really fucking loud and make the bass really crazy, this song\'s really fun! We can blow the barn doors off with it!’ So we chased that.” **Fear of Men** RS-P: \"This is song is drawing upon \'Miniskirt\' \[from *Deep in the Iris*\] and my experience of sexual abuse and molestation as a child, and just doing years and years of therapy, and having PTSD from it and having a fear of men sometimes, and recognizing that with that kind of trauma, one tends to have repeated behaviors that are not very healthy for themselves. It\'s very heart-on-sleeve, telling it like it is—not exactly poetic. \'Miniskirt\' was my first foray into working through that—that song was more like, \'I need to get really angry,\' and this one is more like, \'Okay, I\'m starting to heal and make sense of it a little bit more.\' I didn\'t feel particularly like, ‘Oh my god, I absolutely have to have this song on the record.\' This was one of the songs we considered not putting on the record, actually. But it was important for me to write about this next chapter that I\'m going through with regards to healing.” **Snow Angel** RS-P: \"This was written around the time Trump was inaugurated, and it was so intense—it felt like the whole energy shifted in the world. And I was just thinking, \'What is this world going to look like in three or four years under the rule of this person?\' And so there\'s this big vomit of feelings halfway through the song where it all just came out and it needed to come out, and I\'m happy it came out. A lot of people, particularly in our generation, are really, really confused—like we don\'t totally know how to help, we don\'t know what to do. Power is in the hands of people who don\'t have the same agenda as our generation, and who aren\'t going to have to live with the effects of climate change and the policies the Trump administration has put into play, so I was just reflecting on that.\" **Ocean** RS-P: \"After ‘Snow Angel,’ with this one, we were like, ‘Okay, we really need to take people off the cliff and bring them back to land for a little bit!’ ‘Ocean’ is about someone that I loved for a very long time and continue to love. It\'s complicated, and we\'ve gone through many different iterations of our relationship, but the love stays very strong and very consistent and it takes a lot of different shapes. It\'s difficult to move on from this person, and \'Ocean\' is very much proclaiming that. I love this song. I think I\'m crying in the take.” **Note to Self** TS: “Our past records exist very much fully in the midst of difficult emotions and feelings, and don\'t necessarily offer that there is light at the end of the tunnel. And with this one, Raphaelle made a very deliberate choice that this record does *not* leave the listener feeling that way. It comes back to a place of assuredness and hope and grounding. We all sort of loosely knew this was going to close the body of work, and for a really long time, this song was just the lyrics and the absolute quietest piano you could possibly play. But over time, it became evident that we could really lean in emotionally. With some songs, you throw in the big sounds and the heavy drums, and it feels gratuitous or it feels facile. But this one, because of how it all framed poetically, it felt like everything we put in came back at us tenfold, so we really just threw it all at the wall here. I really like the idea that with this song, we create the biggest contrast that we can on a record—it starts as intimate as you can get and ends as heavy as we can lean into the tape.”

Braids have been taking the time and space necessary for little miracles to occur. Burrowed in their Montreal studio, the band has spent the better part of three years crafting Shadow Offering, their 4th album, due out in June 2020 via their new label home, Secret City. Unlike previous albums, Braids decided to stay close to home for the recording of Shadow Offering. Taking over a spacious sound recording studio tucked in an old warehouse, the band were able to slow down and creatively rediscover themselves. “With this album, we wanted to give ourselves time to achieve a higher caliber of artistry and collaboration,” Tufts says. No longer riding the novelty of youth, the band deliberately took time to recommit to themselves and their craft, and channel new energy into their music. They wrote 40 songs. They went through their Saturn Returns. They learnt how to support one another better. They drank a lot of La Croix. The band sketched and re-sketched new material for eighteen months before lucky circumstance found Chris Walla (Death Cab For Cutie) renting out space in their studio. The four began wandering into each others’ rooms, curious about each others’ projects. Typically opting for a private and insular creation process, the friendship between the four saw the band sharing their songs with Walla, and naturally resulted in Walla co-producing and engineering Shadow Offering. Pushing the band out of their comfort zone, he at once broke and unified the band’s dynamic, unearthing individual creative energy long buried over the years. With a new sense of confidence, listeners will find Braids at their most personal, unabashedly flexing through their new music. A luscious and expansive release, Shadow Offering leads us through a sonic tapestry of narrative. With heart-breaking honesty and precision, listeners traverse a nuanced and complicated world: one full of beautiful contradiction. Although the album directs itself at the failures of people to love and be loved, it also seeks to restore justice and attain blissful union. Its arc crests through the dark towards the light and learns how to dance with the dizzying rhythms of the heart. The songs bubble, sustain, dissolve, expand, retract. The creative process saw Tufts exploring groovier and more supportive rhythms, while Standell-Preston and Smith picked up their guitars in a serious way, something they hadn’t done since Native Speaker. ‘Young Buck’, Shadow Offering’s lead single, sees Braids at their most playful and confident. An effervescent ode to impossible love, it exudes an undeniable magnetism reminiscent of the band’s breakthrough works ‘Lemonade’ and ‘Plath Heart’. With Shadow Offering, Standell-Preston’s voice is visceral as always, conveying a new confidence and rawness we’ve yet to hear from her. Fans of commanding 90’s songwriters like Fiona Apple and Alanis Morissette will relish in her voice’s strength and lyrical aptitude. ‘Snow Angel’, an unhinged performance from Standell-Preston, has her leaning passionately into her anger. “You’re allowed to be angry, don’t shy away from it because you feel you have to,’” Standell-Preston recalls Walla saying. Validated and encouraged, Braids’ frontwoman dove deeper into her frustrations and anxieties about her internal and external worlds. ‘Snow Angel’, in effect, is the album’s core. Across its sweeping 9-minutes is a diary entry literally exploding beyond the boundaries of the page. Standell-Preston desperately seeks a mere inch of belonging “Amongst all the madness, the chaos / The need to march in the streets / Fake news and indoctrination / Closed borders and deportation”. Surrounded by klangy guitars and unrelenting rhythm, she plunges, and deliberately feels it all at once; when a dying house plant, the climate crisis, another cracked iPhone screen, and the endless barrage of both content and destruction all carry equal weight in driving oneself to scream in madness over what it means to be alive in the modern world. Falling from the song’s zenith, she is left aching for peace within the chaos distinctive to her Millennial generation: “Can I get off of this ride / I’m feeling dizzy / It’s moving way too fast / And I wanna come down”. Although the album recounts pain, heartbreak, anger, it also lifts the heart towards hope. “There’s more hopefulness in this record than anything else I’ve written. I think the songs are more human, more tangible, more honest,” Standell-Preston says, referencing therapy and her transcendental meditation practice as helping her through the rhythms of her life. “I showed up for my heart on this record. I really showed up. From the start to the finish.” No better is this reflected than in ‘Eclipse’, an album standout. Dedicated to the singer’s best friend Ashley, it’s a song that sinks deep into a feeling of reverie for nature, the love found in friendship, and the vital nature of personal reflection: At my core I feel good My essence is assured But there’s so many layers to get there So much build up So many left their mark on me …What eclipses me in my life?” “Parts of us get eclipsed by certain experiences and behavioural tendencies, trauma and societal programming,” Standell-Preston says. To take those parts and create a beautiful arrangement for listeners to feel solace and pleasure in, that is Braids’ offering. “This is what we offer back, this thing we have created. It was fueled into existence via the magnitude of our life experiences. We’re offering the abstraction of it back. This is the shadow it casts,” Smith says. The definition of an eclipse is “the total or partial obscuring of one celestial body by another.” In many ways, Braids have crafted a balm with Shadow Offering to combat the dark forces that cross us. To overcome the fears that plague us, the planets eclipsing our planetary bodies, the patterns that bind us, the anxiety that grips us, the heartbreak that breaks us. The balm is the perfect antidote to such darkness and chaos: that of hope, pleasure and, above all, always love. There is no reason Just breath And a beating of the heart One foot in front of the other Then the other That’s all [Note to Self] Braids, comprised of Raphaelle Standell-Preston, Austin Tufts and Taylor Smith, are a Montreal-based three-piece. Formed in 2007 in Alberta, they have solidified a decade-long reputation for their musical ingenuity and established themselves as one of Canada’s most acclaimed art rock bands. Their albums include Native Speaker (2011), Flourish // Perish (2013) and Deep In the Iris (2015). Shadow Offering is out June 19th 2020, via Secret City Records.

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

The debut full-length from Hamilton, Ontario’s Linnea Siggelkow, aka Ellis, amplifies the qualities that endeared many to her self-released 2018 EP *The Fuzz*: namely, her talent for seeding intimate confessionals inside luminous, jangly dream pop. On *Born Again*, that sound has turned more lustrous as her writing has become even more brutally honest. While some of these songs were inspired by her romantic partnership with husband Brandon Williams (of the Whitby, Ontario, punkgaze outfit Chastity), *Born Again* is less a portrait of domestic bliss than a chronicle of the anxieties and insecurities that arise in any budding relationship, and a purging of the past traumas that fuel them. “I\'m in this very transitional time right now,” Siggelkow tells Apple Music. “I just turned 30, and I\'m reflecting even more on where I\'m at, and all the places I\'ve been—literally and figuratively—that have brought me to this place. So I\'m opening up the space to move forward into the next chapter of my life.” Siggelkow explains how she got there with this track-by-track guide to the album. **Pringle Creek** “Pringle Creek runs through Whitby, and there\'s a trail that runs alongside it, near Brandon\'s childhood home. We would go for walks there when we needed to maybe have more difficult conversations. And I was thinking of how we buy flowers, knowing that they won\'t last and that we\'ll eventually throw them in the garbage. So I was wondering if everything that has a beginning also has an end. That\'s a question that comes up often in relationships, and Pringle Creek is a significant place where I\'ve battled that question, and come out the other side.” **Born Again** “I grew up really religious, up until my late teens. It had been such a huge part of my identity that when I stepped away from it, it shook up my whole sense of self and I had to figure out where I stood without it. The term \'born again\' obviously has this really evangelical connotation, but I\'m trying to reclaim it in a non-religious way—I feel like I have been sort of born again, where I had to reinvent myself and go through these other really significant transformative experiences that have shaped my identity and the way I look at the world. I was sort of devastated by the loss of this old identity, but also excited at the prospect of this newfound freedom, and trying to find my way in this whole new world I had never navigated, and then ended up doing things I said I would never do and wound up feeling a bit more isolated than I had ever before. It’s about my attempts at finding my path, but it\'s been a winding road.” **Shame** and **Embarrassing** “I was thinking a lot about this pendulum swing in my life, going from feeling ashamed of everything to feeling ashamed of nothing, and trying to figure out the balance of that. \'Shame\' is about when I felt shame about something that I shouldn\'t have, because it was out of my control and wasn\'t my fault. And \'Embarrassing\' is a song where I’m calling myself out for not feeling embarrassed enough about things that I ought to, and holding myself accountable for ways that I did act wrong and not being too proud to admit that. I actually considered calling the song \'Shame II.\'” **March 13** “Piano is my first instrument, and I wrote this song fully on piano. And then when we went to record it, I wanted to keep it that way—this stripped-down, really raw little waltz. I don\'t often write in that time signature, so this song sort of exists in its own little world, but I felt like it was a nice intermission for the record. And it follows \'Embarrassing\' thematically in a way—it\'s a reflection of a time that I embarrassed myself and put someone in an uncomfortable situation, but didn\'t want to face it.” **Fall Apart** “This is about having to share your vulnerability and your anxiety with somebody close to you, and them seeing you in those situations and wanting them there, but also not wanting them there. There are all these complexities that come with being really close to somebody while you\'re not feeling your healthiest.” **Happy** “I read this article last year about suicidal ideation and it talked about it so plainly as a thing that people experience. That was really validating—it doesn\'t make you a terrible person to think about those things. I\'ve always felt guilty when my mind has wandered there, because I am so privileged in so many ways and so lucky to have the support of family and friends. But I think this is just an acknowledgment that those things can\'t always be rationalized and to just be gentle with yourself. The human experience is kind of messy, and we\'re all just trying our best.” **Into the Trees** “This is about feeling far away from someone when you\'re spending a lot of time apart, and trying to learn how to be okay on my own and deal with that sadness in healthier ways. But there have been times where I felt like I\'m not enough, or I\'m too much, and I don\'t know how to handle being apart, and I’m left wondering if I\'m cut out for it. This is maybe the oldest song on the record, lyrics-wise—I revisited it when I was in a darker place. I think I\'m a lot better at this now, but that feeling still creeps up sometimes.” **Saturn Return** “I love astrology, and I learned about the \'Saturn return\' concept sort of recently, when Saturn returns to the same place in its orbit that it was the moment you were born. Its orbit is about 29 and a half years, but they say the last few years of your twenties are when you\'re in this period of Saturn return and it\'s just supposed to be this really transformative time where you’re making amends and letting go of the past and making room to move forward into the next chapter of your life. And obviously it seemed really relevant to me right now, where everything has changed for me personally and creatively.” **Zhuangzi’s Dream** “Zhuangzi is an ancient Chinese philosopher who wrote what’s known as the Butterfly Dream parable, a famous Daoist allegory about spiritual transformation. He had a dream that he was a butterfly, and when he woke, he wondered how he could tell if he was a man that dreamt he\'s a butterfly or if he\'s really a butterfly that\'s dreaming he\'s a man. I learned about it in high school philosophy class, and I remember being like, \'This is so stupid.\' But recently, I thought about it a lot and found it really beautiful and meaningful. And it kind of snowballed into me thinking of all the ways I\'ve grown since then and things I thought I knew for certain but came to learn I was wrong about. I\'ve been getting better at admitting defeat and allowing opportunities to revisit things that maybe I thought were ridiculous in the past, and that\'s a big signifier of growing up. Also, I just love the metaphor of a butterfly—I felt like it was really symbolic of this album as a whole.”

Much of Grimes’ fifth LP is rooted in darkness, a visceral response to the state of the world and the death of her friend and manager Lauren Valencia. “It’s like someone who\'s very core to the project just disappearing,” she tells Apple Music of the loss. “I\'ve known a lot of people who\'ve died, but cancer just feels so demonic. It’s like someone who wants to live, who\'s a good person, and their life is just being taken away by this thing that can\'t be explained. I don\'t know, it just felt like a literal demon.” *Miss Anthropocene* deals heavily in theological ideas, each song meant to represent a new god in what Grimes loosely envisioned as “a super contemporary pantheon”—“Violence,” for example, is the god of video games, “My Name Is Dark (Art Mix)” the god of political apathy, and “Delete Forever” the god of suicide. The album’s title is that of the most “urgent” and potentially destructive of gods: climate change. “It’s about modernity and technology through a spiritual lens,” she says of the album, itself an iridescent display of her ability as a producer, vocalist, and genre-defying experimentalist. “I’ve also just been feeling so much pressure. Everyone\'s like, ‘You gotta be a good role model,’ and I was kind of thinking like, ‘Man, sometimes you just want to actually give in to your worst impulses.’ A lot of the record is just me actually giving in to those negative feelings, which feels irresponsible as a writer sometimes, but it\'s also just so cathartic.” Here she talks through each of the album\'s tracks. **So Heavy I Fell Through the Earth (Art Mix)** “I think I wanted to make a sort of hard Enya song. I had a vision, a weird dream where I was just sort of falling to the earth, like fighting a Balrog. I woke up and said, ‘I need to make a video for this, or I need to make a song for this.’ It\'s sort of embarrassing, but lyrically, the song is kind of about when you decide to get pregnant or agree to get pregnant. It’s this weird loss of self, or loss of power or something. Because it\'s sort of like a future life in subservience to this new life. It’s about the intense experience deciding to do that, and it\'s a bit of an ego death associated with making that decision.” **Darkseid** “I forget how I met \[Lil\] Uzi \[Vert\]. He probably DMed me or something, just like, ‘Wanna collaborate and hang out and stuff?’ We ended up playing laser tag and I just did terribly. But instrumentally, going into it I was thinking, ‘How do I make like a super kind of goth banger for Uzi?’ When that didn\'t really work out, I hit up my friend Aristophanes, or Pan. Just because I think she\'s fucking great, and I think she\'s a great lyricist and I just love her vocal style, and she kind of sounds good on everything, and it\'s especially dark stuff. Like she would make this song super savage and intense. I should let Pan explain it, but her translation of the lyrics is about a friend of hers who committed suicide.” **Delete Forever** “A lot of people very close to me have been super affected by the opioid crisis, or just addiction to opiates and heroin—it\'s been very present in my life, always. When Lil Peep died, I just got super triggered and just wanted to go make something. It seemed to make sense to keep it super clean sonically and to keep it kind of naked. so it\'s a pretty simple production for me. Normally I just go way harder. The banjo at the end is comped together and Auto-Tuned, but that is my banjo playing. I really felt like Lil Peep was about to make his great work. It\'s hard to see anyone die young, but especially from this, ’cause it hit so close to home.” **Violence** “This sounds sort of bad: In a way it feels like you\'re giving up when you sing on someone else\'s beats. I literally just want to produce a track. But it was sort of nice—there was just so much less pain in that song than I think there usually is. There\'s this freedom to singing on something I\'ve never heard before. I just put the song on for the first time, the demo that \[producer/DJ\] i\_o sent me, and just sang over it. I was like, \'Oh!\' It was just so freeing—I never ever get to do that. Everyone\'s like, ‘What\'s the meaning? What\'s the vibe?’ And honestly, it was just really fucking fun to make. I know that\'s not good, that everyone wants deeper meanings and emotions and things, but sometimes just the joy of music is itself a really beautiful thing.” **4ÆM** “I got really obsessed with this Bollywood movie called *Bajirao Mastani*—it’s about forbidden love. I was like, ‘Man, I feel like the sci-fi version of this movie would just be incredible.’ So I was just sort of making fan art, and I then I really wanted to get kind of crazy and futuristic-sounding. It’s actually the first song I made on the record—I was kind of blocked and not sure of the sonic direction, and then when I made this I was like, ‘Oh, wow, this doesn\'t sound like anything—this will be a cool thing to pursue.’ It gave me a bunch of ideas of how I could make things sound super future. That was how it started.” **New Gods** “I really wish I started the record with this song. I just wanted to write the thesis down: It\'s about how the old gods sucked—well, I don\'t want to say they sucked, but how the old gods have definitely let people down a bit. If you look at old polytheistic religions, they\'re sort of pre-technology. I figured it would be a good creative exercise to try to think like, ‘If we were making these gods now, what would they be like?’ So it\'s sort of about the desire for new gods. And with this one, I was trying to give it a movie soundtrack energy.” **My Name Is Dark (Art Mix)** “It\'s sort of written in character, but I was just in a really cranky mood. Like it\'s just sort of me being a whiny little brat in a lot of ways. But it\'s about political apathy—it’s so easy to be like, ‘Everything sucks. I don\'t care.’ But I think that\'s a very dangerous attitude, a very contagious one. You know, democracy is a gift, and it\'s a thing not many people have. It\'s quite a luxury. It seems like such a modern affliction to take that luxury for granted.” **You’ll miss me when I’m not around** “I got this weird bass that was signed by Derek Jeter in a used music place. I don\'t know why—I was just trying to practice the bass and trying to play more instruments. This one feels sort of basic for me, but I just really fell in love with the lyrics. It’s more like ‘Delete Forever,’ where it feels like it\'s almost too simple for Grimes. But it felt really good—I just liked putting it on. Again, you gotta follow the vibe, and it had a good vibe. Ultimately it\'s sort of about an angel who kills herself and then she wakes up and she still made it to heaven. And she\'s like, \'What the fuck? I thought I could kill myself and get out of heaven.’ It\'s sort of about when you\'re just pissed and everyone\'s being a jerk to you.” **Before the Fever** “I wanted this song to represent literal death. Fevers are just kind of scary, but a fever is also sort of poetically imbued with the idea of passion and stuff too. It\'s like it\'s a weirdly loaded word—scary but compelling and beautiful. I wanted this song to represent this trajectory where like it starts sort of threatening but calm, and then it slowly gets sort of more pleading and like emotional and desperate as it goes along. The actual experience of death is so scary that it\'s kind of hard to keep that aloofness or whatever. I wanted it to sort of be like following someone\'s psychological trajectory if they die. Specifically a kind of villain. I was just thinking of the Joffrey death scene in *Game of Thrones*. And it\'s like, he\'s so shitty and such a prick, but then, when he dies, like, you feel bad for him. I kind of just wanted to express that feeling in the song.” **IDORU** “The bird sounds are from the Squamish birdwatching society—their website has lots of bird sounds. But I think this song is sort of like a pure love song. And it just feels sort of heavenly—I feel very enveloped in it, it kind of has this medieval/futurist thing going on. It\'s like if ‘Before the Fever’ is like the climax of the movie, then ‘IDORU’ is the end title. It\'s such a negative energy to put in the world, but it\'s good to finish with something hopeful so it’s not just like this mean album that doesn\'t offer you anything.”

Two years in the making, Future Ruins, TOM And His Computer’s debut album, will be released on Trentemøller’s In My Room label on October 16th. As a 20 year veteran of the Copenhagen music scene, Thomas Bertelsen has been releasing music under the sobriquet of TOM And His Computer for five years, merging the newest technologies with the old, while squeezing fresh sounds out of equipment that’s not only obsolete, sometimes it’s barely functioning at all. “I switch back and forth between the digital and the analog worlds. I’ll utilize old guitar pedals as well as the newest software,” says Thomas Bertelsen, producer behind TOM And His Computer. “It’s never about the gear, though, but rather finding that one little sound that can trigger an idea for an entire track.” As a teenager he explored the limits of cassette tape machines, eventually assembling a small arsenal of classic noisemakers, ultimately releasing records from the music lab of his dreams. Better yet, he has been able to perform it live, headlining, as well as supporting Massive Attack, and Trentemøller on his European and North American tours. Future Ruins was also co-produced and mixed by Trentemøller. While previous offerings have taken listeners to the outer boundaries of what can be considered “electronic music,” including nods to dark wave, dream pop, krautrock and modern psych rock, Future Ruins presents those influences in a new way and represents a great leap forward for the Copenhagen based producer. As with the Playing In The Night EP, Future Ruins once again features vocalist Roxy Jules, this time showcasing the more complex aspects of her talents on four tracks. “It’s the third time Roxy Jules and I have worked together. This time I tried to bring forward the more vulnerable and fragile textures in her voice. It has that dark, northern, Scandinavian coolness to it, combined with a little optimism, and even a hidden smile comes through. I also explored alternative ways of arranging the songs. I was less worried about finding the obvious chorus and focused more on experimenting with structure.” The result is a genre-less collection of songs showcasing TOM’s obsession with propelling sounds of the past into the present, and future, combining noise and edginess with his “commitment to fresh ideas with a clear sense of melodies,” according to Clash Magazine. “My tastes are eclectic and I like to flirt with many different sub genres,” says TOM. “The aim was to combine various styles while trying to maintain a common denominator,” which committing to a full-length offered as an opportunity. Soundtracks have been a major source of inspiration. “I also use photos, or even the first chapter in a book to generate ideas. They can trigger certain emotions, and bring different feelings to the surface. The challenge is translating that into a recording on a computer workstation, but they offer a great starting point. For this album I’ve used anything from pictures of Ethiopian elephants in the desert, to ancient Mayan statues, or ‘80s Serbian brutalist architecture to get me going.” As a result, Future Ruins displays many treasures and traits along its arc when listened to in its entirety, either on vinyl, download, or stream, starting October 16th, 2020.

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.

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

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).

Alright, let’s just get this part out of the way: Muzz is a new band comprised of three gentlemen you probably know from other bands. Paul Banks is the singer in Interpol, has a project with The RZA called Banks + Steelz, and has released records as a solo artist. Matt Barrick played drums for Jonathan Fire*Eater and The Walkmen, and you’ve likely seen him on tour with Fleet Foxes. Josh Kaufman is a third of the folk group Bonny Light Horseman and has his producer mitts all over esteemed recordings by The National, Bob Weir, The Hold Steady, The War on Drugs, and many more. Paul + Matt + Josh = Muzz. OK, phew. So how did we get here? Why, casually, of course. Banks and Kaufman have been friends since their formative teen years, having attended high school together overseas before separately moving to New York City for further study. There, they independently crossed paths with Barrick while running in similar music circles and shapeshifting scenes. Some years on, they each remained in touch: Barrick drummed in Banks + Steelz and on some of Kaufman’s production sessions; Kaufman helped on Banks’s early Julian Plenti solo endeavor; various demos were collaborated on; a studio in Philadelphia was co-bought; “what if”s and “we should”s were tossed about. By some accounts, Muzz recordings date back to 2015; cosmically speaking, though, the seeds were planted long ago. Either way, when the opportunity to make music as a trio presented itself, the gentlemen pounced. “We found a spot that represents what the three of us love, so it was a collaborative production,” Kaufman says. “Finding a place where we met aesthetically was really cool, especially at this point in our lives. I’m not surprised that Paul and I are in a band together after all these years; what I am surprised by is that my favorite drummer is the guy who brought us back together to make music. He’s this rare rock drummer who came out of the D.C. hardcore/ska scene and swings like a jazz drummer. Matt was the magnet.” Banks elaborates: “I love The Walkmen and every band Matt’s been a part of; he does things on the drums that are so subtle and tasteful it gives me the warm fuzzies. And since we were kids, Josh has been a real inspiration to me, a talent on some other plane. As a producer he creates an environment where other musicians can shine. There’s a creative overlap we share that revolves around Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, The Stones, and Dylan that I haven’t really had an outlet for all these years, so this is us exploring that.” “Josh has more training as a theory musician while Paul comes from a different perspective,” Barrick says. “You never know how Paul’s gonna approach a song, lyrically and melodically, so it’s always unusual and exciting. Everyone is open to everyone else’s ideas. I think three is a great number of people for a band. We all had a big hand in everything.” With that level of creative chemistry in the lab, the only foreseen hold-up would be one of timing. Due to the sheer weight of the trio’s independent obligations, the Muzz project took shape at a simmer. Multiple sessions were held over the years at various practice spaces and studios like Barrick and Banks’ Silent Partner in Philadelphia and Kaufman’s preferred Isokon in Woodstock, New York, with his regular engineer Dan Goodwin filling in as co-producer on the album. A typical session incorporated demos that Banks or Kaufman brought to the table with room in place for any member to build upon an idea as he felt, or with a new skeleton composed during a jam in the live room. Barrick and Kaufman tended to work on music in the early parts of the days, and Banks would join them to add lyrics and melodies on top or in tandem. In a first for Banks, the lyrics were not entirely his domain, as Barrick and especially Kaufman contributed words to certain songs and helped shape things vocally. The band always recorded as they rehearsed, lending a freshness to the material that also benefitted the patchwork schedule. “It’s genuinely collaborative, a three-headed monster,” Banks says. “We generate music together, and songs come from all directions. No one person is calling the shots, it’s equal-everything.” Sonically, the band aimed for a timeless tone, one that would make the music hard to place when viewed from some distance. In fact, the band’s name holds a meaning that serves to describe that very feeling. “We didn’t want the record’s era to be overly identifiable, so we used traditional recording methods with a live, analog feeling,” Banks says. “It’s a little more naked and open at times. Josh uses the word ‘muzz’ to describe a texture of sound he likes in certain older recordings, so it’s his attempt to put a term to a subtle analog quality. It became very married to our sound.” “The music has this weird, super removed vibe but is also personal and emotional at the same time,” Kaufman says. “Whether it’s Paul speaking in character or it’s the backdrop to a movie that’s not really there, that’s something we were going for. If something felt natural in a simple way, we left it. I’d never heard Paul’s voice framed like that—a string section, horns, guitars—we know none of that is visionary but it felt classic and kind of classy.” The resulting songs are dark and gorgeous, expansive and sparse, like Cormac McCarthy prose stretched across a cowboy painting of a sunset. “Bad Feeling” chimes and slinks with a touch of Bryan Ferry panache as Barrick’s kick drum pushes the tune along and Kaufman’s Rhodes fills the space. “Evergreen” features Banks’s vocal doubling down on Kaufman’s gorgeous slide guitar melody, and “Patchouli” and “Summer Love” burrow and twinkle psychedelically. There are upstart rockers like “Red Western Sky” and “Knuckleduster” and jazz-beat drum showcases like “How Many Days” and “All Is Dead To Me,” but no matter the sonic direction Muzz go, they go there as if effortlessly and with maximum emotional, cosmic charge. “I don’t ever write with the intention of giving records an overarching theme, as that feels very limiting,” Banks says. “But looking back, I think the through line for me is meditations on mental health, and the quest for happiness and the way in which the mind can play tricks on us. But, ultimately, the music speaks for itself. We have a genuine, organic artistic chemistry together. It’s partly a shared musical taste from youth, as with me and Josh, but then it’s also the souls of my friends that resonate with me when expressed through music. I think it’s cosmic.”

“I was going through a time of great change in my life,” Gordi—Sophie Payten—tells Apple Music of the period that led her to begin writing *Our Two Skins* in 2017. “I\'d finished university, I\'d come out of a long-term relationship and entered a new one. I was 25 and for the first time in my life contemplating questions of my sexuality and how that affects your identity.” The singer-songwriter felt the added turmoil of dealing with personal revelations—and the loss of her grandmother—at a time when Australia’s same-sex marriage plebiscite was occurring alongside the country’s wider conversation about LGBTQ+ rights and identity. “I’d upended my life, we were suddenly in a relationship, and then the country\'s voting on whether I have the right to get married,” she says. “And you\'re watching politicians onscreen saying things like we shouldn\'t teach about bisexuality in schools because it encourages abnormal behavior.” Her second album, which was recorded with Bon Iver producers Chris Messina and Zach Hanson in her remote hometown of Canowindra, speaks as much to the issues in the world surrounding Gordi’s own life as they do her personal journey. “When I was writing the record I thought, ‘Oh my god, how am I going to ever talk about this?’ but I kept thinking back to watching those politicians. I was thinking, ‘Imagine if I was 10 or 11 or 12 and coming to terms with sexuality and watching that.’ It was enough for me to be like, ‘You know what? This is an important story to tell, and it\'s one more story in the tapestry of the queer community that leads to more visibility for those young queer kids.’” Here, Payten delves into the stories behind each track on *Our Two Skins*. **Goodwin’s (Intro)** “We made the album in this little cottage on my parents\' farm. It was built in about the 1860s, and my family have lived on that farm for over 100 years. This family called the Goodwins used to live there, and the little farm track that runs up the side is called Goodwin\'s Way, so we\'ve always just referred to the cottage as Goodwin\'s. There\'s a very distinct sound of walking into the cottage and the old, rusty door that has a fly screen on it. So, that\'s basically the beginning. It\'s at the end of the record, too, the sound of that door shutting—it would signal another day in the studio.” **Aeroplane Bathroom** “I got on the plane to fly to Europe for two months to tour and I just started a new relationship. I’d been running away from all of that stuff and I was faced with a lot of those questions as I was sitting on this flight for 24 hours. I was incredibly emotional, so I got my notebook out. I escaped over the people sitting next to me to go to the bathroom, thinking I could take some deep breaths and splash some water on my face. Then you close the door, the lights automatically come on, and they just make you look like 100 years old. I felt like absolute shit. And that was the start of that song, like, ‘Do you see yourself?’ Because I\'m looking at myself thinking, ‘I feel like I\'m just spiraling out of control.’ I went back to my seat and basically just turned all those words into a poem, which turned into ‘Aeroplane Bathroom.’” **Unready** “I actually wrote this song at the end of making my first record. So it was before this whole experience in my life happened. I wrote it about this sensation I was feeling, like my life\'s about to start. But I didn\'t really know what it was going to look like. I felt like I was about to go through a period of great change, but I had no idea just how much change. It sits a bit separately from the record, both musically and lyrically, but I grew to love it. I\'m glad it\'s on there.” **Sandwiches** “I\'d written this about my grandmother passing away. We were extremely close; she was like another parent to me when I was a kid because we lived next door to each other. She was 95 when she died. I’d been overseas so much and by total coincidence came home after this period that the record describes. I had a conversation with my grandmother about all the things that had been happening, and she was so full of acceptance and love, which was pretty impressive given she was a Catholic woman born in 1923. And by coincidence, the last six weeks of her life were those six weeks I could be in Canowindra. I was at the hospital with my mum and dad and all of his siblings. My mum and I realized no one had really eaten all morning, so we ducked down the street, got some supplies, came back, and started making sandwiches. There was like 15 people there, and in the moment that we stepped away and had a break and had something to eat was the moment that she passed on.” **Volcanic** “‘Volcanic’ was a real study of that feeling of a panic attack. I wrote the verses in really quick succession. I was in Berlin at this music festival which was run by Bon Iver and The National; the idea was that 70 to 100 musicians collaborate there for a week. I found this little piano in the back of the hotel behind the kitchen and started playing this piano solo—I wanted to make an effort to make the music really echo what the lyrical content was, which was about the sensation of totally spiraling out of control.” **Radiator** “I think of ‘Radiator’ and ‘Volcanic’ as a little duo, because I wrote them in the same day, at that piano in Berlin. I just started playing this little riff on the piano; it reminded me of an Irish church or something. I grew up singing in the Catholic Church most Sundays, and there’s something so familiar about that music. It basically describes the night that I realized I was totally in love with my partner and that sensation like your skin is on fire.” **Extraordinary Life** “I like the idea that the ultimate expression of love is that you want to make someone feel exceptional and make them feel like their life is going to be special and extraordinary and above average. I started writing this song at the end of 2017. We played in Belgium and stayed in this miserable hostel in Ghent. I was buzzing after finishing the show, so I couldn\'t really sleep. I went and had a really long, hot shower and started to hum. It was reverberating around the bathroom, and I took an iPhone note down and gradually built the song on top of that.” **Hate the World** “I wrote this song after watching Hannah Gadsby\'s *Nanette* in New York. It was probably six months after ’Aeroplane Bathroom’ and that acute period of change, and Donald Trump was the president, and I had a real sense of this deep and ever-deepening divide of the world. But it did have a new meaning to me, listening to Hannah talk about growing up gay in Tasmania, where it was illegal. I came out of that with this kind of naive response, like, ‘How is there so much hate? How do you grow up just hating groups of people? And how do you then have a kid and raise them to hate those groups of people as well?’ I felt really mad about it, and even though same-sex marriage got through, there was such a large percentage of people that voted no, which was just really heartbreaking. So I think this song was a polite ‘fuck you’ to all those people who voted no and who perpetuate all the prejudices that Hannah Gadsby was talking about.” **Look Like You** “I think of ‘Hate the World’ and ‘Look Like You’ as a bit of a pair as well—‘Hate the World’ is looking outwards, criticizing people who have the point of view. ‘Look Like You’ is the effect that those views have on me. The shame that comes with whatever you want to call it—coming out, a realization, coming to terms with the spectrum of sexuality. I had no one close to me who was going to have a problem with it. And I\'m very lucky in that sense, but you still feel like you\'re totally drenched in the shame and embarrassment that comes from people looking at others who are different to them, being like, ‘You don\'t look like me, so there\'s something wrong with you.’” **Limits** “There’s always one song on an album that breaks your balls a little bit. It had lots of different forms, though the words stayed the same. It describes the night that I met the person that would become my partner and wanting to accelerate through that initial phase and wanting to jump straight to the really intimate parts, living together and having that person know you really deeply.” **Free Association** “Every day \[in the studio\] we\'d walk in and be like, ‘What song are we going to do today?’ We’d light some incense, listen to some different stuff, and work out what mood we were in. I felt like playing the harmonium, and as I was playing it, Chris and Zach were setting up a microphone, started running it through some pedals and amps, mic’d it up, and then I hit record. In parallel to all the bigger issues \[on the album\], like the queerness and the same-sex marriage and the rest, this was probably, more than any other song, about just falling in love and being like, ‘Oh, man, I\'m no longer in control of my feelings and if you hurt me, you\'ll really fuck me up.’”

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.

In the FBI file on the American rock ‘n’ roll band Algiers—which given their prior penchant for repping the Black Panthers, Malcolm X, Angela Davis, and Afeni Shakur, among others, surely exists—under the subheading for their third album, There is No Year, the intelligence should soon read: all prior analytics appear outdated… this undoes everything we thought we knew about their intentions…what hides inside them… as if they are mutating live on camera, between frames… Indeed, even those aware of the ideals of this outspoken four-piece will find their latest direction traversing unprecedented ground. Coming off two years of nonstop world-touring for their critically acclaimed second album, The Underside of Power—including Central and Eastern Europe, the Baltic States and the Balkans, where they have established a rabid following; an extended stint opening for Depeche Mode in huge stadiums such as the 75,000-capacity Olympiastadion in Berlin; as well as Glastonbury 2019—There is No Year solidifies and expands upon the doom-laden soul of their foundation, toward an even more epic, genre-reformatting sound, one somehow suspended in the amber of “a different era,” as described by guitarist Lee Tesche. From the instant synth-pulse of the opening seconds of There is No Year, it’s clear that Algiers have set out to stake new ground, internally as much as sonically. At the forefront of this evolution is the centrality of power housed in Algiers’ multi-instrumentalist lead vocalist, Franklin James Fisher, whose voice and words provide the backbone of the album, his lyrics sourced entirely from an epic poem, “Misophonia,” composed during his search for meaning amidst a protracted personal period of anxiety and lack. “What I wanted to do is create a negative space wherein I can exist and engage but at the same time not be so exposed,” Fisher explains. He speaks of the record’s perspective as not only a political apparatus, but an intimate, responsive evocation of his understanding that “nothing is ever what you expect”, that what might seem for now to be well known or assured is not always so, that there is no safety net. The effect, as felt on the record, is undeniable: Fisher sounds like he is singing for his life—for all our lives, really—baring his soul while the walls disintegrate around us. The pool that he draws on is at once penetrating and exhilarating, wielding its anguish like a mirror at Medusa, full of hell. Whether he is lilting over post-Lynchian synth-whorl like a spot-lit bandleader, as on “Unoccupied,” or reincarnating the spirit of thrumming 80s R&B into a proto-no wave dancefloor classic straight from 2046, as on “Chaka,” there is a tangible emotional electricity to Fisher’s delivery, a personal valence that makes you want, more than anything, to believe, even while not quite knowing where we’re headed. No less next-level in Algiers’ conception is the ambition of the aural architecture they manage to summon. Under the direction of producers Randall Dunn [Sunn O))), Earth] and Ben Greenberg [Zs, Uniform (as featured on Twin Peaks season 3)], the same exciting duo who first teamed up on Jóhann Jóhannsson’s Mandy soundtrack in 2018, the clearly studied composition of this new horizon finds an outlet for turmoil via a fascinating synthesis of styles— There Is No Year encompasses future-minded post-punk R&B from the trapped heart of ATL, where they began; to industrial soundscapes à la 4AD-era Scott Walker or Iggy & Bowie’s Berlin period; to something like the synthetic son of Marvin Gaye and Fever Ray. The whip-tight rhythm section of Ryan Mahan and Matt Tong (ex-Bloc Party) moves back and forth from infectious menace to sci-fi soundtrack to big band fever dream, seamlessly syncing fresh continuity. Mahan’s beat programming and synth constructions fill out the fibrous threshold, while Tesche’s sound-sleeves and aural-layering shapeshift into a richly polished means of exploration, revealing more and more the deeper you delve. “This is the sowing / Of the whirlwind,” Fisher sings on “Repeating Night.” “Don’t forget it’s us against them.” There’s something more behind the curtain of our daily-headlined pain, the album’s title seems to suggest—something even larger at stake than rage, or even revolution; which is exactly what Algiers’ music appears to have resolved itself to channel, and to wield. Their essence on There is No Year is a statement of their defiance, their desire to feel and be human even beyond the necessary fight back, sprawling head-on into the burning wind of doubt and fear and all it’s claimed, arriving on the far side of calamity more alive than ever. - Blake Butler

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

In her fourth album under her Half Waif moniker, Nandi Rose envisioned a fictional groundskeeper struggling to maintain the estate to which she’s been entrusted. But *The Caretaker* is less a concept album than it is a clear-eyed stock-taking of the songwriter and former Pinegrove member’s own life at the end of her twenties, recorded from her front porch in New York’s Hudson Valley: “Sitting in the dark, dreaming up a song, crying in my coffee, doing it all wrong,” she sings on “Ordinary Talk.” It’s deceptively straightforward chamber pop with quietly experimental production flairs, with Rose on a journey to the center of the self. As she puts it on “Blinking Light”: “If this doesn’t change me, nothing will.”

It’s about self love, acceptance, living my most authentic life. It’s about the entire rainbow of emotions. And not wanting to be just one thing but finding beauty in all complexities of life. I wanted the record to feel intimate and sexy and deep under the skin. My favorite songs are songs i can listen to in bed.. waking up or falling asleep.. drowsy, in between 2 worlds. In between dreams and consciousness.. In between purpose and letting go. It’s about wanting to break the cycle of dysfunctional relationships and hope for a better future. But maybe it’s about much more !

In 2017, Kevin Morby moved home to Kansas. “I ended up sort of liking it, if for nothing more than having space and time to work on things,” he tells Apple Music. “But with that definitely came a bunch of uneasy feelings, having to interact with a bunch of ghosts from my past and just being back where I grew up. I really had to push through some initial emotions, but once I got past those, I was able to see the Midwest for the first time in a way that I never had before. That’s the seed of this record.” Having found inspiration in New York (2013’s *Harlem River*) and LA (2016’s *Singing Saw*), *Sundowner* finds Morby paying tribute to Midwestern twilight and Midwestern expanse with a set of panoramic folk that’s flush with fresh perspective. “When I was living on the coasts, so much of my life happened at night,” he says. “I wasn\'t really measuring the days in the way that I do now. In coming home, I just found that I\'m like looking at the sun going down and it\'s making me face myself.” Here, Morby walks us through the entire album track by track. **Valley** “Not only is it the first song on the record, but it\'s also the first song that I wrote for the record. Kansas doesn\'t really have any valleys, it\'s famous for being flat. But when I was living in Los Angeles, I was living in Mount Washington; my album *Singing Saw*, the cover was taken there. I would do this walk every day to the top of Mount Washington and this valley would be in my wake. That neighborhood just meant a lot to me, and it was really hard for me to have to leave it—I really didn\'t want to in a lot of ways, but I knew that I sort of had to. So that is kind of like my exit song to LA, the song that I feel like I was singing to myself as I left one part of my life and went into the next.” **Brother, Sister** “Coming back here and sort of looking at other people that I admire and what they were kind of doing around 30, it wasn\'t lost on me that a lot of my heroes and songwriting influences were doing similar things—like growing beards and moving to the country. One of those artists is Bruce Springsteen. I love his album *Nebraska*, and I\'ve always loved the story behind it. When I moved back to Kansas City, there was this killer on the loose—he had killed a few people, and then he got caught. And he explained to the press that he was doing it sort of as revenge for his brother who had been killed. I never learned too much about his brother, but my imagination just sort of ran with that, the idea of someone killing for someone sort of speaking to them beyond the grave.” **Sundowner** “It was a fear of the night coming on, just in the sense that I was living two lifestyles. One is my life of being a musician, out on the road and living in these exotic places and having this very social, active nightlife. And then my other life was coming back here and really being faced with myself once the sun went down, sort of left to my own devices and not really being able to run away from any sort of collection of thoughts that I may be thinking at the time. I just really have to sit with those, and I do a lot of processing and just getting to know myself really. The night represented that.” **Campfire** “I was watching a lot of Westerns, and I think of songs very cinematically. This is the first song that I recorded into my four-track where it felt like I had something really real. And I wanted it to feel like someone was walking, singing this song, and in the middle of this, they encountered someone, a stranger, who was sort of singing their own song, and they have some overlap at a fire. I was reading a book called *Lonesome Dove*, and there\'s this Latin phrase in that book that translates to ‘A grape ripens when it sees another grape.’ I\'m singing this song and I\'m going to come across another person, and they\'re singing a song, and then it changes the song that I\'m singing. That\'s what I\'m doing sonically, and the subject matter is paying homage to friends that have passed away and heroes that have passed away.” **Wander** “When I sent the demos to \[producer\] Brad Cook, I kind of put that one on there by mistake, or I didn\'t think there was too much to that song; I didn\'t know where to take it. And Brad seemed really excited about it in this way that got me excited about it. So it\'s a song meant to speed up and sort of get your blood pumping and then just abruptly stop. That central lyric—‘I wonder as I wander, why was I born in a wild wonder?’—is just something that\'s been in my brain for a long time. It\'s a sentiment that I’ve said to myself, kind of a fun tongue twister that sums up some outlook I have of the world.” **Don’t Underestimate Midwest American Sun** “The Midwest is largely looked over as flyover states, and most people who haven\'t been here think that it would be boring or just don\'t have much of an opinion on it. It was wanting to put the name front and center and have a song revolve around that and then have the sonic space to really represent or display what the openness of the Plains and the openness of the Midwest feels like. The lyrics are speaking to that, but also with this sort of depiction of a relationship in its earliest form when you kind of aren\'t clear what exactly is happening yet. You know you like it, but you\'re afraid that at any moment it could dissolve.” **A Night at the Little Los Angeles** “A friend of mine had commented, when I moved out to my house, that I was decorating it to look like Los Angeles and not like a typical house in Kansas. And I just liked the imagery of that a lot, of the idea of someone who is sort of longing for an exotic place like Los Angeles, but has to live in rural Kansas, and how they sort of decorate their place to mimic the other. My imagination just sort of ran with that idea and came up with this idea of a rural hotel that you could sort of step inside of, and there would be this sort of magical but kind of left-of-center idea of what Los Angeles is. I spent a lot of time in hotels around the world, and it\'s different things that I\'ve sort of encountered or heard coming through the walls. It’s really my take on fiction, for the record.” **Jamie** “Jamie was my best friend who passed away when I was 20. And at the time that I wrote the song, I had just turned 30. Jamie was a huge influence. He was kind of like an older brother to me, and we would spend every day together up until his passing. And he\'s been sort of my muse, but also this person that I felt that I worked really hard to sort of carry some sort of torch for. He’s made his way into a lot of my work over the years. But something about it being 10 years, I just felt I wanted to write a song to honor him that just sort of explicitly named him and put him front and center.” **Velvet Highway** “My girlfriend and I, when we first started dating, we went to Marfa, Texas, which is very close actually to where I ended up recording the album, outside of El Paso. To get to Marfa, we had to fly to El Paso and then drive three hours down this long, desolate highway. You really feel like you could just sort of disappear out there—it’s the open West Texas desert, and there\'s no one around. It was really late when we were driving, and there were jackrabbits all over the road, and they kept running in front of the car, and we kept hitting some, but we also just noticed there\'s a ton of these dead rabbits all over the road. When we got to Marfa, we asked someone about it and they said, ‘Oh, yeah, you came in on Delta Highway.’ And I just liked the idea of the imagery of this highway with a bunch of dead rabbit fur all over it. But I also like the idea of this magical kind of Yellow Brick Road, the imagery of a highway with a sort of velvet carpet. So I wrote that piece, and it just seemed like something that I would like to soundtrack that sort of drive.” **Provisions** “I was going through a lot of different things at the time. I left Los Angeles because of a breakup, and I was beginning something new romantically, and I was living back in my hometown. It just felt like my life was very much in flux. And ‘Provisions’ to me was a reminder of all these things changing. Sometimes it gets worse before it gets better, and sometimes it stays bad for a long time, and sometimes it stays good for a long time, but no matter what, you need to take care of yourself. You need to grab provisions, because you don\'t know when the next stop is going to be. You don\'t know when the next sign of relief or joy or respite is going to be, so you just need to be thinking ahead. It’s a song that really felt appropriate given where everyone\'s at right now, in quarantine and with the pandemic.”

“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.