NME's Best Albums of 2023

You’ll be hard-pressed to find a description of boygenius that doesn’t contain the word “supergroup,” but it somehow doesn’t quite sit right. Blame decades of hoary prog-rock baggage, blame the misbegotten notion that bigger and more must be better, blame a culture that is rightfully circumspect about anything that feels like overpromising, blame Chickenfoot and Audioslave. But the sentiment certainly fits: Teaming three generational talents at the height of their powers on a project that is somehow more than the sum of its considerable parts sounds like it was dreamed up in a boardroom, but would never work if it had been. In fall 2018, Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker released a self-titled six-song EP as boygenius that felt a bit like a lark—three of indie’s brightest, most charismatic artists at their loosest. Since then, each has released a career-peak album (*Punisher*, *Home Video*, and *Little Oblivions*, respectively) that transcended whatever indie means now and placed them in the pantheon of American songwriters, full stop. These parallel concurrent experiences raise the stakes of a kinship and a friendship; only the other two could truly understand what each was going through, only the other two could mount any true creative challenge or inspiration. Stepping away from their ascendant solo paths to commit to this so fully is as much a musical statement as it is one about how they want to use this lightning-in-a-bottle moment. If *boygenius* was a lark, *the record* is a flex. Opening track “Without You Without Them” features all three voices harmonizing a cappella and feels like a statement of intent. While Bridgers’ profile may be demonstrably higher than Dacus’ or Baker’s, no one is out in front here or taking up extra oxygen; this is a proper three-headed hydra. It doesn’t sound like any of their own albums but does sound like an album only the three of them could make. Hallmarks of each’s songwriting style abound: There’s the slow-building climactic refrain of “Not Strong Enough” (“Always an angel, never a god”) which recalls the high drama of Baker’s “Sour Breath” and “Turn Out the Lights.” On “Emily I’m Sorry,” “Revolution 0,” and “Letter to an Old Poet,” Bridgers delivers characteristically devastating lines in a hushed voice that belies its venom. Dacus draws “Leonard Cohen” so dense with detail in less than two minutes that you feel like you’re on the road trip with her and her closest friends, so lost in one another that you don’t mind missing your exit. As with the EP, most songs feature one of the three taking the lead, but *the record* is at its most fully realized when they play off each other, trading verses and ideas within the same song. The subdued, acoustic “Cool About It” offers three different takes on having to see an ex; “Not Strong Enough” is breezy power-pop that serves as a repudiation of Sheryl Crow’s confidence (“I’m not strong enough to be your man”). “Satanist” is the heaviest song on the album, sonically, if not emotionally; over a riff with solid Toadies “Possum Kingdom” vibes, Baker, Bridgers, and Dacus take turns singing the praises of satanism, anarchy, and nihilism, and it’s just fun. Despite a long tradition of high-wattage full-length star team-ups in pop history, there’s no real analogue for what boygenius pulls off here. The closest might be Crosby, Stills & Nash—the EP’s couchbound cover photo is a wink to their 1969 debut—but that name doesn’t exactly evoke feelings of friendship and fellowship more than 50 years later. (It does, however, evoke that time Bridgers called David Crosby a “little bitch” on Twitter after he chastised her for smashing her guitar on *SNL*.) Their genuine closeness is deeply relatable, but their chemistry and talent simply aren’t. It’s nearly impossible for a collaboration like this to not feel cynical or calculated or tossed off for laughs. If three established artists excelling at what they are great at, together, without sacrificing a single bit of themselves, were so easy to do, more would try.

As Olivia Rodrigo set out to write her second album, she froze. “I couldn\'t sit at the piano without thinking about what other people were going to think about what I was playing,” she tells Apple Music. “I would sing anything and I\'d just be like, ‘Oh, but will people say this and that, will people speculate about whatever?’” Given the outsized reception to 2021’s *SOUR*—which rightly earned her three Grammys and three Apple Music Awards that year, including Top Album and Breakthrough Artist—and the chatter that followed its devastating, extremely viral first single, “drivers license,” you can understand her anxiety. She’d written much of that record in her bedroom, free of expectation, having never played a show. The week before it was finally released, the then-18-year-old singer-songwriter would get to perform for the first time, only to televised audiences in the millions, at the BRIT Awards in London and on *SNL* in New York. Some artists debut—Rodrigo *arrived*. But looking past the hype and the hoo-ha and the pressures of a famously sold-out first tour (during a pandemic, no less), trying to write as anticipated a follow-up album as there’s been in a very long time, she had a realization: “All I have to do is make music that I would like to hear on the radio, that I would add to my playlist,” she says. “That\'s my sole job as an artist making music; everything else is out of my control. Once I started really believing that, things became a lot easier.” Written alongside trusted producer Dan Nigro, *GUTS* is both natural progression and highly confident next step. Boasting bigger and sleeker arrangements, the high-stakes piano ballads here feel high-stakes-ier (“vampire”), and the pop-punk even punkier (“all-american bitch,” which somehow splits the difference between Hole and Cat Stevens’ “Here Comes My Baby”). If *SOUR* was, in part, the sound of Rodrigo picking up the pieces post-heartbreak, *GUTS* finds her fully healed and wholly liberated—laughing at herself (“love is embarrassing”), playing chicken with disaster (the Go-Go’s-y “bad idea right?”), not so much seeking vengeance as delighting in it (“get him back!”). This is Anthem Country, joyride music, a set of smart and immediately satisfying pop songs informed by time spent onstage, figuring out what translates when you’re face-to-face with a crowd. “Something that can resonate on a recording maybe doesn\'t always resonate in a room full of people,” she says. “I think I wrote this album with the tour in mind.” And yet there are still moments of real vulnerability, the sort of intimate and sharply rendered emotional terrain that made Rodrigo so relatable from the start. She’s straining to keep it together on “making the bed,” bereft of good answers on “logical,” in search of hope and herself on gargantuan closer “teenage dream.” Alone at a piano again, she tries to make sense of a betrayal on “the grudge,” gathering speed and altitude as she goes, each note heavier than the last, “drivers license”-style. But then she offers an admission that doesn’t come easy if you’re sweating a reaction: “It takes strength to forgive, but I don’t feel strong.” In hindsight, she says, this album is “about the confusion that comes with becoming a young adult and figuring out your place in this world and figuring out who you want to be. I think that that\'s probably an experience that everyone has had in their life before, just rising from that disillusionment.” Read on as Rodrigo takes us inside a few songs from *GUTS*. **“all-american bitch”** “It\'s one of my favorite songs I\'ve ever written. I really love the lyrics of it and I think it expresses something that I\'ve been trying to express since I was 15 years old—this repressed anger and feeling of confusion, or trying to be put into a box as a girl.” **“vampire”** “I wrote the song on the piano, super chill, in December of \[2022\]. And Dan and I finished writing it in January. I\'ve just always been really obsessed with songs that are very dynamic. My favorite songs are high and low, and reel you in and spit you back out. And so we wanted to do a song where it just crescendoed the entire time and it reflects the pent-up anger that you have for a situation.” **“get him back!”** “Dan and I were at Electric Lady Studios in New York and we were writing all day. We wrote a song that I didn\'t like and I had a total breakdown. I was like, ‘God, I can\'t write songs. I\'m so bad at this. I don\'t want to.’ Being really negative. Then we took a break and we came back and we wrote ‘get him back!’ Just goes to show you: Never give up.” **“teenage dream”** “Ironically, that\'s actually the first song we wrote for the record. The last line is a line that I really love and it ends the album on a question mark: ‘They all say that it gets better/It gets better the more you grow/They all say that it gets better/What if I don\'t?’ I like that it’s like an ending, but it\'s also a question mark and it\'s leaving it up in the air what this next chapter is going to be. It\'s still confused, but it feels like a final note to that confusion, a final question.”

Young Fathers occupy a unique place in British music. The Mercury Prize-winning trio are as adept at envelope-pushing sonic experimentalism and opaque lyrical impressionism as they are at soulful pop hooks and festival-primed choruses—frequently, in the space of the same song. Coming off the back of an extended hiatus following 2018’s acclaimed *Cocoa Sugar*, the Edinburgh threesome entered their basement studio with no grand plan for their fourth studio album other than to reconnect to the creative process, and each other. Little was explicitly discussed. Instead, Alloysious Massaquoi, Kayus Bankole, and Graham “G” Hastings—all friends since their school days—intuitively reacted to a lyric, a piece of music, or a beat that one of them had conceived to create multifaceted pieces of work that, for all their complexities and contradictions, hit home with soul-lifting, often spiritual, directness. Through the joyous clatter of opener “Rice,” the electro-glam battle cry “I Saw,” the epic “Tell Somebody,” and the shape-shifting sonic explosion of closer “Be Your Lady,” Young Fathers express every peak and trough of the human condition within often-dense tapestries of sounds and words. “Each song serves an integral purpose to create something that feels cohesive,” says Bankole. “You can find joy in silence, you can find happiness in pain. You can find all these intricate feelings and diverse feelings that reflect reality in the best possible way within these songs.” Across 10 dazzling tracks, *Heavy Heavy* has all that and more, making it the band’s most fully realized and affecting work to date. Let Massaquoi and Bankole guide you through it, track by track. **“Rice”** Alloysious Massaquoi: “What we’re great at doing is attaching ourselves to what the feeling of the track is and then building from that, so the lyrics start to come from that point of view. \[On ‘Rice’\] that feeling of it being joyous was what we were connecting to. It was the feeling of fresh morning air. You’re on a journey, you’re moving towards something, it feels like you’re coming home to find it again. For me, it was finding that feeling of, ‘OK, I love music again,’ because during COVID it felt redundant to me. What mattered to me was looking after my family.” **“I Saw”** AM: “We’d been talking about Brexit, colonialism, about forgetting the contributions of other countries and nations so that was in the air. And when we attached ourselves to the feeling of the song, it had that call-to-arms feeling to it, it’s like a march.” Kayus Bankole: “It touches on Brexit, but it also touches on how effective turning a blind eye can be, that idea that there’s nothing really you can do. It’s a call to arms, but there’s also this massive question mark. I get super-buzzed by leaving question marks so you can engage in some form of conversation afterwards.” **“Drum”** AM: “It’s got that sort of gospel spiritual aspect to it. There’s an intensity in that. It’s almost like a sermon is happening.” KB: “The intensity of it is like a possession. A good, spiritual thing. For me, speaking in my native tongue \[Yoruba\] is like channeling a part of me that the Western world can’t express. I sometimes feel like the English language fails me, and in the Western world not a lot of people speak my language or understand what I’m saying, so it’s connecting to my true self and expressing myself in a true way.” **“Tell Somebody”** AM: “It was so big, so epic that we just needed to be direct. The lyrics had to be relatable. It’s about having that balance. You have to really boil it down and think, ‘What is it I’m trying to say here?’ You have 20 lines and you cut it down to just five and that’s what makes it powerful. I think it might mean something different to everyone in the group, but I know what it means to me, through my experiences, and that’s what I was channeling. The more you lean into yourself, the more relatable it is.” **“Geronimo”** AM: “It’s talking about relationships: ‘Being a son, brother, uncle, father figure/I gotta survive and provide/My mama said, “You’ll never ever please your woman/But you’ll have a good time trying.”’ It’s relatable again, but then you have this nihilistic cynicism from Graham: ‘Nobody goes anywhere really/Dressed up just to go in the dirt.’ It’s a bit nihilistic, but given the reality of the world and how things are, I think you need the balance of those things. Jump on, jump off. It’s like: *decide*. You’re either hot or you’re cold. Don’t be lukewarm. You either go for it or you don’t. Then encapsulating all that within Geronimo, this Native American hero.” **“Shoot Me Down”** AM: “‘Shoot Me Down’ is definitely steeped in humanity. You’ve got everything in there. You’ve got the insecurities, the cynicism, you’ve got the joy, the pain, the indifference. You’ve got all those things churning around in this cauldron. There’s a level of regret in there as well. Again, when you lean into yourself, it becomes more relatable to everybody else.” **“Ululation”** KB: “It’s the first time we’ve ever used anyone else on a track. A really close friend of mine, who I call a sister, called me while we were making ‘Uluation’: ‘I need a place to stay, I’m having a difficult time with my husband, I’m really angry at him…’ I said if you need a place to chill just come down to the studio and listen to us while we work but you mustn’t say a word because we’re working. We’re working on the track and she started humming in the background. Alloy picked up on it and was like, ‘Give her a mic!’ She’s singing about gratitude. In the midst of feeling very angry, feeling like shit and that life’s not fair, she still had that emotion that she can practice gratitude. I think that’s a beautiful contrast of emotions.” **“Sink Or Swim”** AM: “It says a similar thing to what we’re saying on ‘Geronimo’ but with more panache. The music has that feeling of a carousel, you’re jumping on and jumping off. If you watch Steve McQueen’s Small Axe \[film anthology\], in *Lovers Rock*, when they’re in the house party before the fire starts—this fits perfectly to that. It’s that intensity, the sweat and the smoke, but with these direct lines thrown in: ‘Oh baby, won’t you let me in?’ and ‘Don’t always have to be so deep.’ Sometimes you need a bit of directness, you need to call a spade a spade.” **“Holy Moly”** AM: “It’s a contrast between light and dark. You’re forcing two things that don’t make sense together. You have a pop song and some weird beat, and you’re forcing them to have this conversation, to do something, and then ‘Holy Moly’ comes out of that. It’s two different worlds coming together and what cements it is the lyrics.” **“Be Your Lady”** KB: “It’s the perfect loop back to the first track so you could stay in the loop of the album for decades, centuries, and millenniums and just bask in these intricate parts. ‘Be Your Lady’ is a nice wave goodbye, but it’s also radical as fuck. That last line ‘Can I take 10 pounds’ worth of loving out of the bank please?’ I’m repeating it and I’m switching the accents of it as well because I switch accents in conversation. I sometimes speak like someone who’s from Washington, D.C. \[where Bankole has previously lived\], or someone who’s lived in the Southside of Edinburgh, and I sometimes speak like someone who’s from Lagos in Nigeria.” AM: “I wasn’t convinced about that track initially. I was like, ‘What the fuck is this?’” KB: “That’s good, though. That’s the feeling that you want. That’s why I feel it’s radical. It’s something that only we can do, it comes together and it feels right.”

WIN ACCESS TO A SOUNDCHECK AND TICKETS TO A UK HEADLINE SHOW OF YOUR CHOOSING BY PRE-ORDERING* ANY ALBUM FORMAT OF 'HEAVY HEAVY' BY 6PM GMT ON TUESDAY 31ST JANUARY. PREVIOUS ORDERS WILL BE COUNTED AS ENTRIES. OPEN TO UK PURCHASES ONLY. FAQ young-fathers.com/comp/faq Young Fathers - Alloysious Massaquoi, Kayus Bankole and G. Hastings - announce details of their brand new album Heavy Heavy. Set for release on February 3rd 2023 via Ninja Tune, it’s the group’s fourth album and their first since 2018’s album Cocoa Sugar. The 10-track project signals a renewed back-to-basics approach, just the three of them in their basement studio, some equipment and microphones: everything always plugged in, everything always in reach. Alongside the announcement ‘Heavy Heavy’, Young Fathers will make their much anticipated return to stages across the UK and Europe beginning February 2023 - known for their electrifying performances, their shows are a blur of ritualistic frenzy, marking them as one of the most must-see acts operating today. The tour will include shows at the Roundhouse in London, Elysee Montmartre in Paris, Paradiso in Amsterdam, O2 Academy in Leeds and Glasgow, Olympia in Dublin, Astra in Berlin, Albert Hall in Manchester, Trix in Antwerp, Mojo Club in Hamburg and more (full dates below) To mark news of the album and the tour, Young Fathers today release a brand new single, “I Saw”. It’s the second track to be released from the album (following standalone single “Geronimo” in July) and brims with everything fans have come to love from a group known for their multi-genre versatility - kinetic rhythms, controlled chaos and unbridled soul. Accompanied by a video created by 23 year old Austrian-Nigerian artist and filmmaker David Uzochukwu, the track demonstrates the ambitious ideas that lay at the heart of this highly-anticipated record. Speaking about the title, the band write that Heavy Heavy could be a mood, or it could describe the smoothed granite of bass that supports the sound… or it could be a nod to the natural progression of boys to grown men and the inevitable toll of living, a joyous burden, relationships, family, the natural momentum of a group that has been around long enough to witness massive changes. “You let the demons out and deal with it,” reckons Kayus of the album. “Make sense of it after.” For Young Fathers, there’s no dress code required. Dancing, not moshing. Hips jerking, feet slipping, brain firing in Catherine Wheel sparks of joy and empathy. Underground but never dark. Still young, after some years, even as the heavy, heavy weight of the world seems to grow day by day.

“I don\'t really want to tell people stories,” Troye Sivan tells Apple Music. “I want to show them. I want them to feel.” At 28, the Australian artist has more than a few stories to pick from. In the years between 2018’s *Bloom* and this, his third full-length, he’s appeared in several films and series; collaborated with artists like Charli XCX, Lauv, Jónsi, and Tate McRae; and launched a luxury lifestyle brand. But beneath those headline-makers, he simply lived his life and experienced the experiences that laid the foundations for *Something to Give Each Other*. “There’s 10 stories, 10 moments,” he says of the album, which took around two and a half years to complete. Between COVID and filming the TV series *The Idol*, he was granted a “luxury of time” he’d never had before. “It ended up serving the album really well because it gave me time to see which songs stuck around.” “I\'ve felt very hopeful and joyous and connected, but there’s a lot of vulnerability as well,” Sivan says. There’s love, sex, and heartbreak, the thrill of reemerging feelings, fleeting yet vital moments of intimacy and communication. There’s a sweaty club moment (“Rush”), balmy dance pop (“Got Me Started”—which samples Bag Raiders’ definitive 2008 hit “Shooting Stars”), gentle confessionals (“Can’t Go Back, Baby”) and sensual house (“Silly”). And it’s all told through the lens of welcome self-discovery and unapologetic, undiluted queerness. Here, he talks through the stories of each song on *Something to Give Each Other*. **“Rush”** “In the moments between Melbourne lockdowns when we were able to go out, I had these nights that were so fun, they were almost emotional. There was this overwhelming joy and euphoria. I was sober and sweating and just so grateful to be with people. And grateful for music, for life, for youth and sex and connection. So I wanted to write that moment.” **“What\'s the Time Where You Are?”** “I felt pretty emotionally dead for a while after my last relationship, and my feelings didn\'t all come back in one go. There were these little sparks I started to feel, and I was so excited when I did. I was talking to this one guy and I had a little crush for the first time in ages. At one point he messaged me saying, ‘What\'s the time where you are?’ Maybe I over-romanticized, but it was so sweet. Because he could definitely google that. But I saw it for what it was, I think: It was an effort at connection and keeping the conversation going. It sparked this idea of two people separated by a great distance, both out there living their lives, having a great time, but looking for each other in music or nights out or little texts like that.” **“One of Your Girls”** “I think this is my favorite song I\'ve ever worked on. This thing kept happening where I was being approached by guys who’d previously or historically identified as straight. They were flirting with me, saying there was something in me that they were interested in. I just felt all these different things. Firstly, I was placing them on such a pedestal. I was like, why is this so hot? And also questioning myself because I’d always end up heartbroken. I think I knew I wasn’t treating myself with the respect I deserved by being the secret or the experiment. We wrote three different choruses and ended up coming to this sad robot thing, inspired by a movie I’d seen. Even that spoke to the way I’d felt: like I was expected to be there when they wanted me, then disappear when they freaked out, then be there again when they wanted. Like this emotionless object. And yet there I was time and time again. You don\'t want to rush them through the process of figuring shit out. This isn’t me making any sort of statement—I have patience for that experience. I’m just musing to myself about it.” **“In My Room” (feat. Guitarricadelafuente)** “I met Guitarricadelafuente \[Álvaro Lafuente Calvo\] and his boyfriend in Paris at a dinner, and they were so sweet. When I got back to the hotel, I started listening to his music and I was just really, really inspired. So I messaged him that we should write sometime. We wrote the song in one day. It\'s the only collaboration on the album, and I love that it\'s with a queer artist. In my head, I\'m lying on my bed, kicking my legs, daydreaming about someone like I’m a teenager. It was a really nice way to write rather than trying to make narrative: We were both just communicating our feelings.” **“Still Got It”** “It’s about a moment where I bumped into my ex-boyfriend and realized he still had all the things that made me fall in love with him in the first place. One of my favorite lyrics on the album is ‘Said hello like an old colleague.’ It was just that weird thing where you\'re like, wow, I lived with this person, I shared so much of my life with this person, and here we are greeting each other like old colleagues. It was a moment of reflection. I love collaboration and writing with people, but sometimes it\'s really nice to just do it by yourself, say exactly what you feel and worry less about the stuff I normally love worrying about, like, ‘How many syllables is it? Does it work from a pop point of view?’” **“Can’t Go Back, Baby”** “I was pretty angry, and I\'ve never really written from an angry place. I was hurt and felt betrayed. It’s a real journey throughout the song and by the end it\'s like, ‘In the morning, I wake up with the sun across my face/In the evening, there I lay with so much love to take your place.’ That\'s not love from other people, it\'s love I have for myself, being able to show up for yourself. But sonically there’s a softness, because I still have so much care for that person, that relationship. I knew I wanted this on the album, but I was dreading writing it. When I eventually did, I was like, ‘Let\'s just record this today and then I don\'t want to look at it.’” **“Got Me Started”** “It’s the first song we wrote for the album. It was one of those moments of a spark, where someone unlocks that side of you again and you\'re like, ‘Oh, I can feel.’ I love the lyric ‘Boy, can I be honest? Kinda miss using my body/Fuck it up just like this party did tonight.’ To me, it\'s just this house party: You\'ve met someone and for whatever reason you just can’t keep your hands off each other—and how exciting it is when that happens.” **“Silly”** “We had sexiness on the album in a few different ways, but one thing we didn\'t have was *icy, cool* sexy—something that just really simmers. I was surprised by the lyrics that came. It ended up being about how someone can get you back into your feelings for them in two seconds. It almost touches on the story of ‘Still Got It.’ I\'ve sung in falsetto as a layer a lot throughout my music, but never as a lead vocal. Here, we started off with that falsetto as a layer, and I was going to track under it, but we left it alone up there. So I essentially got to duet with myself, which was so cool.” **“Honey”** “‘Honey’ started in Melbourne with \[producer\] Styalz Fuego and the Serenity Prayer. My dad taught it to me when I was a kid. One of the lines is something like ‘Give me the courage to accept things I cannot change.’ I love the idea of having these really strong feelings for someone and not knowing how to express them, and almost saying a prayer—even though I\'m very irreligious. ‘Give me the courage to say all these things I feel about you.’ It just felt very joyous, like the confetti moment at the show.” **“How to Stay With You”** “It’s really cruisy and mellow, it’s got saxophone on it. It’s about someone I met who ended up leaving, and I was a bit lost on how to stay with them, because I wanted to, but it didn’t seem possible. There was something interesting to me about putting it at the end. Throughout all the experiences and people on the album, I still have this longing and desire to find a long-term relationship. When it fades out in the outro, the last lyrics on the album are these little background vocals: ‘Starting again when I got all I wanted/Starting to feel a little bit despondent.’ I still haven\'t found the thing I\'m looking for. It doesn\'t negate these prior experiences and how beautiful they are, but I\'m still looking. I thought it was a very real way to end it. I\'m on this journey, I’m really happy and I\'m enjoying every second of it, I\'m so grateful for all the connections, and I\'m curious to see what happens next. But I don’t know what that is yet.”

Few rock bands this side of Y2K have committed themselves to forward motion quite like Paramore. But in order to summon the aggression of their sixth full-length, the Tennessee outfit needed to look back—to draw on some of the same urgency that defined them early on, when they were teenaged upstarts slinging pop punk on the Warped Tour. “I think that\'s why this was a hard record to make,” Hayley Williams tells Apple Music of *This Is Why*. “Because how do you do that without putting the car in reverse completely?” In the neon wake of 2017’s *After Laughter*—an unabashed pop record—guitarist Taylor York says he found himself “really craving rock.” Add to that a combination of global pandemic, social unrest, apocalyptic weather, and war, and you have what feels like a suitable backdrop (if not cause) for music with edges. “I think figuring out a smarter way to make something aggressive isn\'t just turning up the distortion,” York says. “That’s where there was a lot of tension, us trying to collectively figure out what that looks like and can all three of us really get behind it and feel represented. It was really difficult sometimes, but when we listened back at the end, we were like, ‘Sick.’” What that looks like is a set of spiky but highly listenable (and often danceable) post-punk that draws influence from early-2000s revivalists like Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Bloc Party, The Rapture, Franz Ferdinand, and Hot Hot Heat. Throughout, Williams offers relatable glimpses of what it’s been like to live through the last few years, whether it’s feelings of anxiety (the title cut), outrage (“The News”), or atrophy (“C’est Comme Ça”). “I got to yell a lot on this record, and I was afraid of that, because I’ve been treating my voice so kindly and now I’m fucking smashing it to bits,” she says. “We finished the first day in the studio and listened back to the music and we were like, ‘Who is this?’ It simultaneously sounds like everything we\'ve ever loved and nothing that we\'ve ever done before ourselves. To me, that\'s always a great sign, because there\'s not many posts along the way that tell you where to go. You\'re just raw-dogging it. Into the abyss.”

“You can feel a lot of motion and energy,” Caroline Polachek tells Apple Music of her second solo studio album. “And chaos. I definitely leaned into that chaos.” Written and recorded during a pandemic and in stolen moments while Polachek toured with Dua Lipa in 2022, *Desire, I Want to Turn Into You* is Polachek’s self-described “maximalist” album, and it weaponizes everything in her kaleidoscopic arsenal. “I set out with an interest in making a more uptempo record,” she says. “Songs like ‘Bunny Is a Rider,’ ‘Welcome to My Island,’ and ‘Smoke’ came onto the plate first and felt more hot-blooded and urgent than anything I’d done before. But of course, life happened, the pandemic happened, I evolved as a person, and I can’t really deny that a lunar, wistful side of my writing can never be kept out of the house. So it ended up being quite a wide constellation of songs.” Polachek cites artists including Massive Attack, SOPHIE, Donna Lewis, Enya, Madonna, The Beach Boys, Timbaland, Suzanne Vega, Ennio Morricone, and Matia Bazar as inspirations, but this broad church only really hints at *Desire…*’s palette. Across its 12 songs we get trip-hop, bagpipes, Spanish guitars, psychedelic folk, ’60s reverb, spoken word, breakbeats, a children’s choir, and actual Dido—all anchored by Polachek’s unteachable way around a hook and disregard for low-hanging pop hits. This is imperial-era Caroline Polachek. “The album’s medium is feeling,” she says. “It’s about character and movement and dynamics, while dealing with catharsis and vitality. It refuses literal interpretation on purpose.” Read on for Polachek’s track-by-track guide. **“Welcome to My Island”** “‘Welcome to My Island’ was the first song written on this album. And it definitely sets the tone. The opening, which is this minute-long non-lyrical wail, came out of a feeling of a frustration with the tidiness of lyrics and wanting to just express something kind of more primal and urgent. The song is also very funny. We snap right down from that Tarzan moment down to this bitchy, bratty spoken verse that really becomes the main personality of this song. It’s really about ego at its core—about being trapped in your own head and forcing everyone else in there with you, rather than capitulating or compromising. In that sense, it\'s both commanding and totally pathetic. The bridge addresses my father \[James Polachek died in 2020 from COVID-19\], who never really approved of my music. He wanted me to be making stuff that was more political, intellectual, and radical. But also, at the same time, he wasn’t good at living his own life. The song establishes that there is a recognition of my own stupidity and flaws on this album, that it’s funny and also that we\'re not holding back at all—we’re going in at a hundred percent.” **“Pretty in Possible”** “If ‘Welcome to My Island’ is the insane overture, ‘Pretty in Possible’ finds me at street level, just daydreaming. I wanted to do something with as little structure as possible where you just enter a song vocally and just flow and there\'s no discernible verses or choruses. It’s actually a surprisingly difficult memo to stick to because it\'s so easy to get into these little patterns and want to bring them back. I managed to refuse the repetition of stuff—except for, of course, the opening vocals, which are a nod to Suzanne Vega, definitely. It’s my favorite song on the album, mostly because I got to be so free inside of it. It’s a very simple song, outside a beautiful string section inspired by Massive Attack’s ‘Unfinished Sympathy.’ Those dark, dense strings give this song a sadness and depth that come out of nowhere. These orchestral swells at the end of songs became a compositional motif on the album.” **“Bunny Is a Rider”** “A spicy little summer song about being unavailable, which includes my favorite bassline of the album—this quite minimal funk bassline. Structurally on this one, I really wanted it to flow without people having a sense of the traditional dynamics between verses and choruses. Timbaland was a massive influence on that song—especially around how the beat essentially doesn\'t change the whole song. You just enter it and flow. ‘Bunny Is a Rider’ was a set of words that just flowed out without me thinking too much about it. And the next thing I know, we made ‘Bunny Is a Rider’ thongs. I love getting occasional Instagram tags of people in their ‘Bunny Is a Rider’ thongs. An endless source of happiness for me.” **“Sunset”** “This was a song I began writing with Sega Bodega in 2020. It sounded completely nothing like the others. It had a folk feel, it was gypsy Spanish, Italian, Greek feel to it. It completely made me look at the album differently—and start to see a visual world for them that was a bit more folk, but living very much in the swirl of city life, having this connection to a secret, underground level of antiquity and the universalities of art. It was written right around a month or two after Ennio Morricone passed away, so I\'d been thinking a lot about this epic tone of his work, and about how sunsets are the biggest film clichés in spaghetti westerns. We were laughing about how it felt really flamenco and Spanish—not knowing that a few months later, I was going to find myself kicked out of the UK because I\'d overstayed my visa without realizing it, and so I moved my sessions with Sega to Barcelona. It felt like the song had been a bit of a premonition that that chapter-writing was going to happen. We ended up getting this incredible Spanish guitarist, Marc Lopez, to play the part.” **“Crude Drawing of an Angel”** “‘Crude Drawing of an Angel’ was born, in some ways, out of me thinking about jokingly having invented the word ‘scorny’—which is scary and horny at the same time. I have a playlist of scorny music that I\'m still working on and I realized that it was a tone that I\'d never actually explored. I was also reading John Berger\'s book on drawing \[2005’s *Berger on Drawing*\] and thinking about trace-leaving as a form of drawing, and as an extremely beautiful way of looking at sensuality. This song is set in a hotel room in which the word ‘drawing’ takes on six different meanings. It imagines watching someone wake up, not realizing they\'re being observed, whilst drawing them, knowing that\'s probably the last time you\'re going to see them.” **“I Believe”** “‘I Believe’ is a real dedication to a tone. I was in Italy midway through the pandemic and heard this song called ‘Ti Sento’ by Matia Bazar at a house party that blew my mind. It was the way she was singing that blew me away—that she was pushing her voice absolutely to the limit, and underneath were these incredible key changes where every chorus would completely catch you off guard. But she would kind of propel herself right through the center of it. And it got me thinking about the archetype of the diva vocally—about how really it\'s very womanly that it’s a woman\'s voice and not a girl\'s voice. That there’s a sense of authority and a sense of passion and also an acknowledgment of either your power to heal or your power to destroy. At the same time, I was processing the loss of my friend SOPHIE and was thinking about her actually as a form of diva archetype; a lot of our shared taste in music, especially ’80s music, kind of lined up with a lot of those attitudes. So I wanted to dedicate these lyrics to her.” **“Fly to You” (feat. Grimes and Dido)** “A very simple song at its core. It\'s about this sense of resolution that can come with finally seeing someone after being separated from them for a while. And when a lot of misunderstanding and distrust can seep in with that distance, the kind of miraculous feeling of clearing that murk to find that sort of miraculous resolution and clarity. And so in this song, Grimes, Dido, and I kind of find our different version of that. But more so than anything literal, this song is really about beauty, I think, about all of us just leaning into this kind of euphoric, forward-flowing movement in our singing and flying over these crystalline tiny drum and bass breaks that are accompanied by these big Ibiza guitar solos and kind of Nintendo flutes, and finding this place where very detailed electronic music and very pure singing can meet in the middle. And I think it\'s something that, it\'s a kind of feeling that all of us have done different versions of in our music and now we get to together.” **“Blood and Butter”** “This was written as a bit of a challenge between me and Danny L Harle where we tried to contain an entire song to two chords, which of course we do fail at, but only just. It’s a pastoral, it\'s a psychedelic folk song. It imagines itself set in England in the summer, in June. It\'s also a love letter to a lot of the music I listened to growing up—these very trance-like, mantra-like songs, like Donna Lewis’ ‘I Love You Always Forever,’ a lot of Madonna’s *Ray of Light* album, Savage Garden—that really pulsing, tantric electronic music that has a quite sweet and folksy edge to it. The solo is played by a hugely talented and brilliant bagpipe player named Brighde Chaimbeul, whose album *The Reeling* I\'d found in 2022 and became quite obsessed with.” **“Hopedrunk Everasking”** “I couldn\'t really decide if this song needed to be about death or about being deeply, deeply in love. I then had this revelation around the idea of tunneling, this idea of retreating into the tunnel, which I think I feel sometimes when I\'m very deeply in love. The feeling of wanting to retreat from the rest of the world and block the whole rest of the world out just to be around someone and go into this place that only they and I know. And then simultaneously in my very few relationships with losing someone, I did feel some this sense of retreat, of someone going into their own body and away from the world. And the song feels so deeply primal to me. The melody and chords of it were written with Danny L Harle, ironically during the Dua Lipa tour—when I had never been in more of a pop atmosphere in my entire life.” **“Butterfly Net”** “‘Butterfly Net’ is maybe the most narrative storyteller moment on the whole album. And also, palette-wise, deviates from the more hybrid electronic palette that we\'ve been in to go fully into this 1960s drum reverb band atmosphere. I\'m playing an organ solo. I was listening to a lot of ’60s Italian music, and the way they use reverbs as a holder of the voice and space and very minimal arrangements to such incredible effect. It\'s set in three parts, which was somewhat inspired by this triptych of songs called ‘Chansons de Bilitis’ by Claude Debussy that I had learned to sing with my opera teacher. I really liked that structure of the finding someone falling in love, the deepening of it, and then the tragedy at the end. It uses the metaphor of the butterfly net to speak about the inability to keep memories, to keep love, to keep the feeling of someone\'s presence. The children\'s choir \[London\'s Trinity Choir\] we hear on ‘Billions’ comes in again—they get their beautiful feature at the end where their voices actually become the stand-in for the light of the world being onto me.” **“Smoke”** “It was, most importantly, the first song for the album written with a breakbeat, which inspired me to carry on down that path. It’s about catharsis. The opening line is about pretending that something isn\'t catastrophic when it obviously is. It\'s about denial. It\'s about pretending that the situation or your feelings for someone aren\'t tectonic, but of course they are. And then, of course, in the chorus, everything pours right out. But tonally it feels like I\'m at home base with ‘Smoke.’ It has links to songs like \[2019’s\] ‘Pang,’ which, for me, have this windswept feeling of being quite out of control, but are also very soulful and carried by the music. We\'re getting a much more nocturnal, clattery, chaotic picture.” **“Billions”** “‘Billions’ is last for all the same reasons that \'Welcome to My Island’ is first. It dissolves into total selflessness, whereas the album opens with total selfishness. The Beach Boys’ ‘Surf’s Up’ is one of my favorite songs of all time. I cannot listen to it without sobbing. But the nonlinear, spiritual, tumbling, open quality of that song was something that I wanted to bring into the song. But \'Billions\' is really about pure sensuality, about all agenda falling away and just the gorgeous sensuality of existing in this world that\'s so full of abundance, and so full of contradictions, humor, and eroticism. It’s a cheeky sailboat trip through all these feelings. You know that feeling of when you\'re driving a car to the beach, that first moment when you turn the corner and see the ocean spreading out in front of you? That\'s what I wanted the ending of this album to feel like: The song goes very quiet all of a sudden, and then you see the water and the children\'s choir comes in.”

Conforming to the expected has never been Amaarae’s strong suit. And it should come as no surprise that the Ghanaian American artist would create a sonic otherworld where the trappings of R&B, hip-hop, Afropop, punk, and alternative rock mesh with globe-trotting instrumentation and exist harmoniously without question on her album *Fountain Baby*. The result? A culmination of what a transnational pop star is in 2023—boundless. *Fountain Baby* lends its credence to Amaarae’s continued quest for growth and mastery, but not in a contrived way. There are pockets of carefully crafted yet carefree melodies like the dreamy “Angels in Tibet” and sultry “Reckless & Sweet.” On “Counterfeit,” the singer-songwriter swiftly glides with confidence on production by KZ Didit that’s reminiscent of an early-2000s movie soundtrack. “Wasted Eyes” opens with a quick koto solo and progresses as Amaarae soliloquizes about a wounded romance. The 14-track solo project pushes the ante of its 2020 predecessor, *The Angel You Don’t Know*, towards newer heights.

“As I got older I learned I’m a drinker/Sometimes a drink feels like family,” Mitski confides with disarming honesty on “Bug Like an Angel,” the strummy, slow-build opening salvo from her seventh studio album that also serves as its lead single. Moments later, the song breaks open into its expansive chorus: a convergence of cooed harmonies and acoustic guitar. There’s more cracked-heart vulnerability and sonic contradiction where that came from—no surprise considering that Mitski has become one of the finest practitioners of confessional, deeply textured indie rock. Recorded between studios in Los Angeles and her recently adopted home city of Nashville, *The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We* mostly leaves behind the giddy synth-pop experiments of her last release, 2022’s *Laurel Hell*, for something more intimate and dreamlike: “Buffalo Replaced” dabbles in a domestic poetry of mosquitoes, moonlight, and “fireflies zooming through the yard like highway cars”; the swooning lullaby “Heaven,” drenched in fluttering strings and slide guitar, revels in the heady pleasures of new love. The similarly swaying “I Don’t Like My Mind” pithily explores the daily anxiety of being alive (sometimes you have to eat a whole cake just to get by). The pretty syncopations of “The Deal” build to a thrilling clatter of drums and vocals, while “When Memories Snow” ropes an entire cacophonous orchestra—French horn, woodwinds, cello—into its vivid winter metaphors, and the languid balladry of “My Love Mine All Mine” makes romantic possessiveness sound like a gift. The album’s fuzzed-up closer, “I Love Me After You,” paints a different kind of picture, either postcoital or defiantly post-relationship: “Stride through the house naked/Don’t even care that the curtains are open/Let the darkness see me… How I love me after you.” Mitski has seen the darkness, and on *The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We*, she stares right back into the void.

Blur’s first record since 2015’s *The Magic Whip* arrived in the afterglow of triumph, two weeks after a pair of joyful reunion shows at Wembley Stadium. However, celebration isn’t a dominant flavor of *The Ballad of Darren*. Instead, the album asks questions that tend to nag at you more firmly in middle age: Where are we now? What’s left? Who have I become? The result is a record marked by loss and heartbreak. “I’m sad,” Damon Albarn tells Apple Music’s Matt Wilkinson. “I’m officially a sad 55-year-old. It’s OK being sad. It’s almost impossible not to have some sadness in your life by the age of 55. If you’ve managed to get to 55—I can only speak because that’s as far as I’ve managed to get—and not had any sadness in your life, you’ve had a blessed, charmed life.” The songs were initially conceived by Albarn as he toured with Gorillaz during the autumn of 2022, before Blur brought them to life at Albarn’s studios in London and Devon in early 2023. Guitarist Graham Coxon, bassist Alex James, and drummer Dave Rowntree add to the visceral tug of Albarn’s words and music with invention and nuance. On “St. Charles Square,” where the singer sits alone in a basement flat, suffering consequences and spooked by regrets, temptations, and ghosts from his past, Coxon’s guitar gasps with anguish and shivers with anxiety. “That became our working relationship,” says Coxon. “I had to glean from whatever lyrics might be there, or just the melody, or just the chord sequences, what this is going to be—to try to focus that emotional drive, try and do it with guitars.” To hear Coxon, James, and Rowntree join Albarn, one by one, in the relatively optimistic rhythms of closer “The Heights” is to sense a band rejuvenated by each other’s presence. “It was potentially quite daunting making another record at this stage of your career,” says James. “But, actually, from the very first morning, it was just effortless, joyous, weightless. The very first time we ever worked together, the four of us in a room, we wrote a song that we still play today \[‘She’s So High’\]. It was there instantly. And then we spent years doing it for hours every day. Like, 15 years doing nothing else, and we’ve continued to dip back in and out of it. That’s an incredibly precious thing we’ve got.” Blur’s own bond may be healthy but *The Ballad of Darren* carries a heavy sense of dropped connections. On the sleepy, piano-led “Russian Strings,” Albarn’s in Belgrade asking, “Where are you now?/Are you coming back to us?/Are you online?/Are you contactable again?” before wondering, “Why don’t you talk to me anymore?” against the electro pulses and lopsided waltz of “Goodbye Albert.” The heartbreak is most plain on “Barbaric,” where the shock and uncertainty of separation pierces Coxon’s pretty jangle: “We have lost the feeling that we thought we’d never lose/It is barbaric, darling.” As intimate as that feels, there’s usually enough ambiguity to Albarn’s reflections to encourage your own interpretations. “That’s why I kind of enjoy writing lyrics,” he says. “It’s to sort of give them enough space to mean different things to people.” On “The Heights,” there’s a sense that some connections can be reestablished, perhaps in another time, place, or dimension. Here, at the end, Albarn sings, “I’ll see you in the heights one day/I’ll get there too/I’ll be standing in the front row/Next to you”—placing us at a gig, just as opener “The Ballad” did with the Coxon’s line “I met you at an early show.” The song reaches a discordant finale of strobing guitars that stops sharply after a few seconds, leaving you in silence. It’s a feeling of being ejected from something compelling and intense. “I think these songs, they start with almost an innocence,” says Coxon. “There’s sort of an obliteration of these characters that I liken to writers like Paul Auster, where these characters are put through life, like we all are put through life, and are sort of spat out. So the difference between the gig at the beginning and that front row at the end is very different—the taste and the feeling of where that character is is so different. It’s almost like spirit, it’s not like an innocent young person anymore. And that’s something about the journey of the album.”

For the last two decades, Sufjan Stevens’ music has taken on two distinct forms. On one end, you have the ornate, orchestral, and positively stuffed style that he’s excelled at since the conceptual fantasias of 2003’s star-making *Michigan*. On the other, there’s the sparse and close-to-the-bone narrative folk-pop songwriting that’s marked some of his most well-known singles and albums, first fully realized on the stark and revelatory *Seven Swans* from 2004. His 10th studio full-length, *Javelin*, represents the fullest and richest merging of those two approaches that Stevens has achieved to date. Even as it’s been billed as his first proper “songwriter’s album” since 2015’s autobiographical and devastating *Carrie & Lowell*, *Javelin* is a kaleidoscopic distillation of everything Stevens has achieved in his career so far, resulting in some of the most emotionally affecting and grandiose-sounding music he’s ever made. *Javelin* is Stevens’ first solo record of vocal-based music since 2020’s *The Ascension*, and it’s relatively straightforward compared to its predecessor’s complexity. Featuring contributions from vocalists and frequent collaborators like Nedelle Torrisi, adrienne maree brown, Hannah Cohen, and The National’s Bryce Dessner (who adds his guitar skills to the heart-bursting epic “Shit Talk”), the record certainly sounds like a full-group effort in opposition to the angsty isolation that streaked *The Ascension*. But at the heart of *Javelin* is Stevens’ vocals, the intimacy of which makes listeners feel as if they’re mere feet away from him. There’s callbacks to Stevens’ discography throughout, from the *Age of Adz*-esque digital dissolve that closes out “Genuflecting Ghost” to the rustic Flannery O’Connor evocations of “Everything That Rises,” recalling *Seven Swans*’ inspirational cues from the late fiction writer. Ultimately, though, *Javelin* finds Stevens emerging from the depressive cloud of *The Ascension* armed with pleas for peace and a distinct yearning to belong and be embraced—powerful messages delivered on high, from one of the 21st century’s most empathetic songwriters.

The deskbound among us might first interpret the title of Queens of the Stone Age’s eighth album as a reference to the font, but a few minutes with the music and you’ll realize that what Josh Homme refers to is a sense of decadence so total it ends with the city on fire. They remain, as ever, the hardest hard-rock band for listeners who don’t necessarily subscribe to the culture or traditions of hard rock, channeling Bowie (“Emotion Sickness”), cabaret (“Made to Parade”), and the collars-up slickness of British synth-pop (“Time & Place”) alongside the motorcycle-ready stuff you might you might expect—which they still do with more style than most (“Obscenery”). And like ZZ Top, they can rip and wink at the same time. But *In Times New Roman...* plumbs deeper personal territory than prior records. Homme has weathered the deaths of friends, the dissolution of his marriage, and other painful developments since the release of 2017’s Villains, and the album touches on all that—but he also wants to be clear about assumptions listeners could make from his lyrics. “I would never say anything about the mother of my kids or anything like that,” he tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “But also, by the same token, you must write about your life, and I think I\'m soundtracking my life. These songs and the words that go with them are an emotional snapshot where you stop the film, you pull out one frame. One song it\'s like, \'I\'m lost.\' And another one, \'I\'m angry.\' They need to be these distilled versions of that, because one drop of true reality is enough flavor. I think the hatred and adoration of strangers is like the flip side of a coin. But when you\'re not doing it for the money, that currency is worthless. I can\'t get involved in what the people say. In a way, it\'s none of my fucking business.” For Homme, the breakthrough of *In Times New Roman...* came *because* he was unflinchingly honest with himself while he was writing through some of his darkest moments. “At the end of the day, the record is completely about acceptance,” Homme says. “That\'s the key. My friends have passed. Relationships have ended. Difficult situations have arisen. I\'ve had my own physical and health things go on and things like that, but I\'m okay now. I\'m 100 percent responsible for 50 percent of what\'s going on, you know what I mean? But in the last seven years, I\'ve been through a lot of situations where it doesn\'t matter if you like it or not, it\'s happening to you. And so I\'ve been forced to say, yeah, I don\'t like this, I need to figure out where I\'m at fault here or I\'m responsible here or accountable here. And also, I need to also accept it for what it is. This is the reality. Even if I don\'t like it, it would be a shame to hold on too tight to something that\'s slipping through your hands and not just accept it for what it is.”

As much as Romy Madley Croft’s debut solo album is an absorbingly personal record, its roots lie in music intended for other people. In 2019, The xx singer/guitarist met—and immediately gelled with—Fred again.. during a period of creative exploration that lead her to Los Angeles to try writing chart-topping pop songs for other artists. “I ended up writing some quite honest songs about myself, thinking someone else was going to sing them, and realizing, ‘Actually, maybe these are my songs…’” Romy tells Apple Music. Arriving in 2020, airy, anthemic debut solo single “Lifetime” was written to uplift herself during the pandemic. In stark contrast to the hush and restraint of The xx, the song leaned into the rapturous dance music influences of Romy’s youth, and it’s a direction continued on *Mid Air*. “At the time \[that The xx emerged\], I was genuinely just suited to feeling more shy and being more guarded,” she says. “It was nice to share a different side, and it definitely opened up a lot more doors in terms of the way people see me. I wanted to find a way to balance melodic, storytelling pop writing with club-referenced music, and Robyn was a big reference. She makes very emotional songs within a dance/electronic sphere. Robyn is someone that I really admire. I’ve met her a few times and I’ve sort of mentioned to her that I’m on this journey with it and she’s been really encouraging and supportive.” Co-produced with Fred again.., bandmate Jamie xx and veteran hitmaker Stuart Price, *Mid Air* succeeds in building a dance floor on which Romy can shake out her feelings. The joy and freedom of the shiny synths and skyscraping melodies serve as a misdirect to the lyrical themes of grief and heartbreak, rooted in the loss of both her parents at a young age and, recently, another very close family member. “I wrote \[lead single\] ‘Strong’ and ‘Enjoy Your Life’ as part of an ongoing ambition to remember to check in and talk to people and let things out,” she says. “I’ve had to talk about grief and my parents way more than I would if the whole album was just love songs. I’m ready to talk about it more. It’s been amazing having conversations with people that I wouldn’t normally have, and hearing and learning and connecting. People come up to me in a club to talk to me about grief and I’m like, ‘Wow, actually, this is very special.’ The fact that people feel like they can talk to me means a lot.” Let Romy guide you through *Mid Air* track by track. **“Loveher”** “This is the first song that I made with Fred after writing these songs for other people, the first track that I wrote thinking, ‘This actually is my song to sing.’ Very much the first tentative steps into this project. It opens the album because I can hear that slight nervousness in it and I shed that as the tracks go on. I had done a songwriting session with King Princess and she was like, ‘This is who I love, I’m writing a song about a girl, there’s no question.’ I was really inspired by the way that she was very comfortable with that. I thought about myself at that similar age and I didn’t feel that way. I didn’t feel comfortable or reassured that it would be chill for me to say that. Maybe it would’ve been fine, but in my head I was worried about it. The more young, queer artists I hear talking about their exact experiences and being really amazing, visible, inspiring people, the more I’m inspired to do my own thing and talk about my actual experiences in a clear way.” **“Weightless”** “This song is about realizing, ‘Wow, I’m really feeling all these things and that’s OK,’ and really embracing that. It still feels like it’s from the earlier, tentative time, lyrically. It was originally written as an acoustic ballad, and I wanted it to become more than that, so I went on a journey to take it into an electronic space. It was a challenge I set myself—I still wanted it to work when you take it off the track and take it back to the guitar. That’s something I admire about a well-written song.” **“The Sea”** “The lyrics for ‘The Sea’ are inspired by a trip to Ibiza. Or my vision of what it would have been like in the early 2000s—the dream of Ibiza. I went for the first time for Oliver’s \[Sim, The xx bandmate\] 30th birthday. We went out clubbing and we went on a boat and it was exactly what I had hoped it was. I’ve been back since, for my honeymoon. I also got to play Pacha in 2022, which was really amazing. But that first time, I was listening to the instrumental while I was driving around and I was thinking, ‘I want this song to feel connected to this place. I want it to feel like a home in a summer situation.’ So that’s how I framed it, lyrically.” **“One Last Time”** “I wrote this thinking it was for someone else—I didn’t have anyone specifically in mind, but just as a fan, if I had to pick someone, Beyoncé is my number-one person. Thinking it wasn’t going to be me singing pushed me to try out something new, vocally. Just pushing my voice. It was fun to come back to it and sing it in my own way. It’s one of my favorites to sing.” **“DMC”** “I love an interlude. I feel like that’s quite a pop-album thing. My friend always says that she loves a DMC corner in the club—I don’t know if everyone knows DMC is a deep, meaningful conversation, but that’s what it means to me. Those moments where you have a kind of emotional exchange somewhere that ends up being the right place, even though it’s not typically the place you have those chats. This is just a little moment of stepping outside of where we’ve been, like we’re outside the club. You have a little reset and you carry on.” **“Strong”** “I wrote this one for myself, using songwriting as a way of processing grief and my relationship to it and putting it out there. I internalized a lot of things for a long time and thought I’d put it out of sight, out of mind. I think having time off tour and being in a good place in a relationship was when it all started to come up and I had to face those things. ‘Strong’ was me just reflecting on that at that point, and just feeling it out, and trying to write around that. It was great to put it in a song that is quite uplifting and high tempo. It keeps giving different meanings to me in different contexts.” **“Twice”** “I worked on this with an amazing songwriter called Ilsey, who co-wrote ‘Nothing Breaks Like a Heart’ \[by Mark Ronson and Miley Cyrus\]. I’d been writing for other people for a while and finding it hard to make connections. I wanted something a bit more real. Ilsey has got quite a country style, so when I got paired up with her, I opened up and said, ‘This is what I’m going through,’ and she helped me write this very storytelling-like song. I’d never had a songwriter help me lyrically before, but it was really cool. It’s another one that started as a guitar ballad, but I didn’t want it to stay that way. Stuart worked on it and it evolved into what it is now—echoes of a club and then building into being a big club-experience track.” **“Did I”** “This was sonically created around the same time as ‘Strong.’ I’ve written a lot of acoustic music and I wanted to put it into a different frame, so I was playing a lot of early-2000s trance to Fred. There’s already a blueprint embedded in trance—a haunting vocal and huge chords and builds and euphoria. It’s one of my favorites, so I’ve been playing it out in clubs recently. Lyrically it reflects a part of my relationship \[with my wife\], from back when we were younger and we broke up.” **“Mid Air” (feat. Beverly Glenn-Copeland)** “I consider this to be a transitional moment on the album. The fact that Fred and I made this piece of music together is a reflection of a weird moment we were both in—it’s more winding and introspective than everything else we did together. Although there’s a lot of euphoric sounds on the album, I’m not always super upbeat, there’s times when I have a bit of a weird time mentally. It’s kind of the aftermath of the night out: ‘Twice’ and ‘Did I’ connect as a mix and ‘Mid Air’ is the musical comedown. \[American singer and composer\] Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s voice comes in as a reminder, a self check-in. Then you come back into ‘Enjoy Your Life’ as a reaction to that.” **“Enjoy Your Life”** “This was probably the most challenging song to make because it contains a lot of different elements. I’m trying to say quite a lot in it and make it danceable and contain lots of samples. Finding the balance took quite a long time. When I heard \[Beverly Glenn-Copeland\] say, ‘My mother says to me/Enjoy your life,’ I thought it was such a beautifully simple disarming sentence, but I didn’t want to just say, ‘Yeah, life’s amazing.’ I wanted there to be a journey in the song. In the verses, I’m processing some stuff, I’m having a bit of a weird time, but I’m reminding myself: Life is short, enjoy your life. I wanted there to be enough of a narrative to give that context. Just to acknowledge and then also celebrate.” **“She’s on My Mind”** “I wanted to end the album with this because it feels like the end of the night when you’re at a party and someone puts a disco song on and everyone just has their hands in their air. It’s a fun one to end on. Just embracing and accepting how you feel. From the way that I start the album—the more tentative way of singing—to the end where the last thing I sing is, ‘I don’t care anymore,’ it’s a bit of a release of pressure.”

The music of Dylan Brady and Laura Les is what you might get if you took the trashiest tropes of early-2000s pop and slurred them together so violently it sounded almost avant-garde. It’s not that they treat their rap metal (“Dumbest Girl Alive,” “Billy Knows Jamie”), mall-punk (“Hollywood Baby”), and movie-trailer ska (“Frog on the Floor,” “I Got My Tooth Removed”) as means to a grander artistic end—if anything, *10,000 gecs* puts you in the mind of kids so excited to share their excitement that they spit out five ideas at once. And while modern listeners will be reminded of our perpetually scatterbrained digital lives, the music also calls back to the sense of novelty and goofiness that have propelled pop music since the chipmunk squeals of doo-wop and beyond. Sing it with them now: “Put emojis on my grave/I’m the dumbest girl alive.”

Part of what makes Danny Brown and JPEGMAFIA such a natural pair is that they stick out in similar ways. They’re too weird for the mainstream but too confrontational for the subtle or self-consciously progressive set. And while neither of them would be mistaken for traditionalists, the sample-scrambling chaos of tracks like “Burfict!” and “Shut Yo Bitch Ass Up/Muddy Waters” situate them in a lineage of Black music that runs through the comedic ultraviolence of the Wu-Tang Clan back through the Bomb Squad to Funkadelic, who proved just because you were trippy didn’t mean you couldn’t be militant, too.

No band could ever prepare for what the Foo Fighters went through after the death of longtime drummer Taylor Hawkins in March 2022, but in a way, it’s hard to imagine a band that could handle it better. From the beginning, their music captured a sense of perseverance that felt superheroic without losing the workaday quality that made them so approachable and appealing. These were guys you could imagine clocking into the studio with lunchpails and thermoses in hand—a post-grunge AC/DC who grew into rock-pantheon standard-bearers, treating their art not as rarified personal expression but the potential for a universal good time. The mere existence of *But Here We Are*, arriving with relatively little fanfare a mere 15 months after Hawkins’ death, tells you what you need to know: Foo Fighters are a rock band, rock bands make records. That’s just what rock bands do. And while this steadiness has been key to Dave Grohl’s identity and longevity, there is a fire beneath it here that he surely would have preferred to find some other way. Grief presents here in every form—the shock of opening track “Rescued” (“Is this happening now?!”), the melancholy of “Show Me How” (on which Grohl duets with his daughter Violet), the anger of 10-minute centerpiece “The Teacher,” and the fragile acceptance of the almost slowcore finale “Rest.” “Under You” processes all the stages in defiantly jubilant style. And after more than 20 years as one of the most polished arena-rock bands in the world, they play with a rawness that borders on ugly. Just listen to the discord of “The Teacher” or the frayed vocals of the title track or the sweet-and-sour chorus of “Nothing at All,” which sound more like Hüsker Dü or Fugazi than “Learn to Fly.” The temptation is to suggest that trauma forced them back to basics. The reality is that they sound like a band with a lot of life behind them trying to pave the road ahead.

Like all great stylists, the artist born Sean Bowie has a gift for presenting sounds we know in ways we don’t. So, while the surfaces of *Praise a Lord…*, Yves Tumor’s fifth LP, might remind you of late-’90s and early-2000s electro-rock, the album’s twisting song structures and restless detail (the background panting of “God Is a Circle,” the industrial hip-hop of “Purified by the Fire,” and the houselike tilt of “Echolalia”) offer almost perpetual novelty all while staying comfortably inside the constraints of three-minute pop. Were the music more challenging, you’d call it subversive, and in the context of Bowie as a gender-nonconforming Black artist playing with white, glam-rock tropes, it is. But the real subversion is that they deliver you their weird art and it feels like pleasure.

“I wrote it as a story,” Genesis Owusu tells Apple Music about *STRUGGLER*. “The album is pretty much what would this story sound like.” You can tell. The Ghanaian Australian artist born Kofi Owusu-Ansah’s second album is a surreal concept album about a protagonist—the Roach—fighting for his life in a kind of post-apocalyptic world overrun with constant physical and metaphysical threats. The antagonist, God, stops at nothing to try and bring the Roach down, to destroy him both inside and out. “The Roach character is a metaphor for we as humans,” he says, “and the God character is a metaphor for all these huge uncontrollable forces around us, natural and man-made, these systems we\'ve built around us that were supposed to make our lives better. But at some point, we started feeling like we\'ve been caged by them and they’ve slipped out of our control.” Owusu-Ansah’s story lays out three philosophical concepts that the Roach journeys through: nihilism, existentialism, and, ultimately, absurdism, the latter of which was inspired in part by the Samuel Beckett play *Waiting for Godot* and Franz Kafka’s *Metamorphosis*. The title and its character were inspired by *Berserk*, a legendary manga series by Kentaro Miura which features a character who “just gets dealt the worst hand in life”, he explains. “He has to fight through these forces so unimaginably larger than himself, to the point where it can\'t even be called a fight. The other characters call him a struggler.” Owusu-Ansah’s debut, *Smiling With No Teeth*, was a concept album as well, albeit a more personal one that explored his journey with two “black dogs”—personifications of racism and depression. “I’d poured so much of my life experience into it,” he says. “When it was time to make album two, I had to reconfigure which well to draw from and how to be inspired again.” It was that search itself—an existential hunt for purpose in a world that feels (and is) absurd—that led to the story of *STRUGGLER*. Like his debut, it’s still personal, but in a universal way; it’s a journey that Owusu-Ansah feels humanity as a whole experiences in its search for meaning, sense, and the will to live. It’s a particularly prevalent experience in 2023, while the world is reeling from a pandemic, successive environmental disasters, and a growing financial crisis. The music, recorded with a range of producers in Australia and the US, reflects those feelings: frantic and punky at times, slinky and languid at others—and the tracks with the darkest themes often have the smoothest, loftiest melodies. Read on to explore the story and concepts within this thought-provoking record. **“Leaving the Light”** “I just wanted to jump straight into it. I wanted it to be the tone-setter for the album. When I think of the story setting, it\'s almost post-apocalyptic, barren. When we started making this song, we wanted it to feel like the world was ending. There’s a huge wall of fire and debris and wind, and somehow you are trying to outrun that. That’s the pace of the opening chapter for the album.” **“The Roach”** “‘The Roach’ and ‘The Old Man’ are where I introduce and give context to the two main characters. ‘The Roach’ is the story of this flawed antihero character that\'s just trying to move through life at this pace, but starting to question what the point is. We get a sense of their mentality and why they\'re doing what they\'re doing. Some lines in the second verse: ‘Feeling like Gregor Samsa, a bug in the cog of a gray-walled cancer/I’m trying to break free with a penciled stanza/So are we human, or are we dancer?/I\'ma waste a life trying to chase an answer.’ It’s like they\'re moving through life at a survivor\'s pace because they have to or they\'ll get crushed. But in their mind, they\'re starting to question the point. It\'s indicative of how we can feel at our lowest. There\'s this absurd whirlwind of chaos around you, but you just got to keep stepping and get to the next day.” **“The Old Man”** “I think the verses of ‘The Old Man’ also give more context to the Roach character, but then the choruses talk about this looming figure up in the sky that\'s dealing the bad hands, trying to mess up your life. The passages at the end are where we get the context to what the God character actually is. ‘Your master is a system. Your master is a suit, a dollar. Your master is a planet. Your master is chaos itself. Your master is absurdity itself.’” **“See Ya There”** “You have your ups and your downs, your peaks and your valleys. This is the abyss. This is the character at their low point. They\'ve been struggling, running through and fighting to figure it all out, and it\'s like, ‘What is the point of all of this turmoil and struggle that I\'ve been going through?’ Throughout the album, the three main philosophies it touches on are nihilism, existentialism, and absurdism. This is definitely the point of nihilism. It\'s the scary and depressing realization, but the abyss inevitably comes before the transformation.” **“Freak Boy”** “This is stepping out of the existential crisis for a bit. This is the point where the character acknowledges they don\'t have the answers, they keep moving. Even if they don\'t have the answers, they don\'t want to fall into this pit of despair. The chorus goes, ‘Don\'t wanna turn out just like you, hating everything that you do/I hope I figure out a thing or two.’ On we forge. It’s almost a rejection of the abyss and all of that. It would be easy to want to close your eyes to everything that\'s going on around you and just live an ‘ignorance is bliss’ mentality, but maybe that\'s not the healthiest way to go. You gotta figure out how to do this right.” **“Tied Up!”** “I feel like it\'s easy to identify qualities when you put it into a character or a piece of fiction, but in reality, it’s all drawn from how I\'m seeing human beings. It\'s all of these qualities I see in everyday people that we don\'t acknowledge in ourselves every day. We don\'t give ourselves enough credit for it. ‘Tied Up!’ is a continuation of that. I feel like there\'s a point in giving up the need to feel in control of external circumstances and focusing more inward. Maybe, if I can\'t control the things around me, I can control my perspective of how those things look and how those things are. Maybe that will help me in my journey. Maybe there is some light somewhere, but maybe that comes from me first, not outside.” **“That\'s Life (A Swamp)”** “This one\'s kind of a journey. It\'s the two-part banger. I feel like it’s almost a step back into reality. With ‘Freak Boy’ and ‘Tied Up!’ you don\'t really get any conclusive answers; you never really will. I feel like it\'s the character trying different things to make their experience easier. ‘Tied Up!’ ended with the character being like, ‘Maybe if I can change my perspective on things, things will be easier.’ But that\'s a process that I feel puts a lot of onus and responsibility on you, and when the world is falling apart, I don\'t think you can really do that. That’s where the chorus comes from: ‘I said, baby, it’s not about me,’ and then in the second part, ‘My arms are tired from carrying the weight of your shit.’ It\'s a step back into the reality of the situation.” **“Balthazar”** “If ‘See Ya There’ was nihilism, then ‘Balthazar’ is existentialism. So ‘See Ya There’ was like, ‘There’s no meaning—oh *fuck*.’ Here, it’s like, ‘There’s no meaning. *Fuck yeah*, this is amazing.’ Maybe there’s no inherent meaning, but maybe all that means is we\'re not shackled by this predetermined thing we\'re supposed to do. Maybe that means we can make our own meaning. One of the first lines is about taking the power back into your own hands, and the second verse turns it into a battle against time. Maybe we can have control over ourselves and our destinies, but we gotta do it before time runs out. The second verse is almost paraphrasing a monologue from *Waiting for Godot*: ‘In one day we go blind… In one day we go deaf… We can fly, fall in love, waste aside, be the one.’ We can achieve or complete all of this in one day, and yet we choose to wait. Why? It opens up this idea where you can take control and do it now. Stop waiting. The time is now.” **“Stay Blessed”** “‘Stay Blessed’ is keeping on with this newfound empowerment through the realization that all of these things might have a negative side, but there\'s also a side of immense possibility, a ‘we\'re all in this together’ vibe. The Roach is everyone, and there are a million roaches out there because that\'s all of us. And that goes back to that line, ‘If you kill me now, you\'re gonna deal with roach number two.’ It\'s like, we can\'t be stopped. The song starts delving into that third and last philosophy of absurdism. Maybe there\'s no inherent meaning, and maybe we don\'t need to make our own meaning at all. We\'ve come this far in the journey, and we\'ve grown so much that maybe that\'s the gift itself. Maybe the fact that the sun rises and falls every day, and we get to see that from this magical distance where it\'s this giant ball of fire. It\'s far away enough where we get to feel its warmth, but it doesn\'t burn us to death. And we get to hug our friends every day, see cute little birds flying through the sky. It’s such a one-in-a-billion chance that this has all happened and we get to experience it. That’s absurdism to me. We exist in this world, and we can\'t buy or earn our way out of absurdity.” **“What Comes Will Come”** “It\'s a solidification of the journey so far. We go through these hardships and trials and tribulations, and maybe it\'s because of Hollywood media or just a naive sense of whatever, we expect the outcomes to be based on how good we are or how well we did. But we just live in this absurd reality. What comes will come, and that\'s not a bad thing. It\'s not a good thing, either. It\'s just a thing. Rollercoasters need their ups and their downs to make the full experience fun and exciting.” **“Stuck to the Fan”** “It’s not a happy ending. It\'s not a sad ending. It\'s not really even an ending. It\'s the point of acceptance. The Hollywood story arc is like, you climb the big mountain, and then there\'s a field of flowers for you to frolic in after your hard journey. In reality, you climb the mountain, and then there\'s another huge mountain waiting to be climbed. But the good thing about that is after you climb a new mountain, you become a better climber to get ready for the next big challenge and the next big hurdle. And I think that\'s just kind of indicative of life, which I wanted this story to be. I just wanted it to be an honest portrayal. Shit has hit the fan for so long that it\'s stuck there, and that\'s just the way it goes.”

The third album from the masked, anonymous Brits of Sleep Token is also the third in a conceptual trilogy that began with their 2019 debut, *Sundowning*. Introduced with the stirring and dramatic leadoff single “Chokehold,” *Take Me Back to Eden* is another genre-defying exploration of music’s outer limits, incorporating elements of techno and tech-metal alongside R&B, post-rock, and pop—often in the same song. “Vore” spins out in Meshuggah djent-isms before swelling with the kind of strings that recall a battle scene from *Game of Thrones*. “Ascensionism” is an inventive and often bizarre mix of piano ballad, gospel, and ultra-modern metal. Closer “Euclid” sounds like a Lana Del Rey tune performed by an R&B singer and a chorus of aliens. Along the way, there are love songs (“The Apparition”), suicide ballads (“Are You Really Okay?”), and songs about loss (the title track). As always, mastermind Vessel’s vocals soar over the proceedings, offering lyrical mysteries in service to the nocturnal muse he calls Sleep. It’s as bewildering as it is impressive.

Lana Del Rey has mastered the art of carefully constructed, high-concept alt-pop records that bask in—and steadily amplify—her own mythology; with each album we become more enamored by, and yet less sure of, who she is. This is, of course, part of her magic and the source of much of her artistic power. Her records bid you to worry less about parsing fact from fiction and, instead, free-fall into her theatrical aesthetic—a mix of gloomy Americana, Laurel Canyon nostalgia, and Hollywood noir that was once dismissed as calculation and is now revered as performance art. Up until now, these slippery, surrealist albums have made it difficult to separate artist from art. But on her introspective ninth album, something seems to shift: She appears to let us in a little. She appears to let down her guard. The opening track is called “The Grants”—a nod to her actual family name. Through unusually revealing, stream-of-conscious songs that feel like the most poetic voice notes you’ve ever heard, she chastises her siblings, wonders about marriage, and imagines what might come with motherhood and midlife. “Do you want children?/Do you wanna marry me?” she sings on “Sweet.” “Do you wanna run marathons in Long Beach by the sea?” This is relatively new lyrical territory for Del Rey, who has generally tended to steer around personal details, and the songs themselves feel looser and more off-the-cuff (they were mostly produced with longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff). It could be that Lana has finally decided to start peeling back a few layers, but for an artist whose entire catalog is rooted in clever imagery, it’s best to leave room for imagination. The only clue might be in the album’s single piece of promo, a now-infamous billboard in Tulsa, Oklahoma, her ex-boyfriend’s hometown. She settled the point fairly quickly on Instagram. “It’s personal,” she wrote.

With A Hammer is the debut studio album by New York singer-songwriter Yaeji. “With A Hammer” was composed across a two-year period in New York, Seoul, and London, begun shortly after the release of “What We Drew” and during the lockdowns of the Coronavirus pandemic. It is a diaristic ode to self-exploration; the feeling of confronting one’s own emotions, and the transformation that is possible when we’re brave enough to do so. In this case, Yaeji examines her relationship to anger. It is a departure from her previous work, blending elements of trip-hop and rock with her familiar house-influenced style, and dealing with darker, more self-reflective lyrical themes, both in English and Korean. Yaeji also utilizes live instrumentation for the first time on this album—weaving in a patchwork ensemble of live musicians, and incorporating her own guitar playing. “With A Hammer” features electronic producers and close collaborators K Wata and Enayet, and guest vocals from London’s Loraine James and Baltimore’s Nourished by Time.

The lead track on Loraine James’ *Gentle Confrontation* opens with a brooding wash of strings fit for an art-house drama, then explodes into thrashing, distorted drum programming. In that contrast lies the essence of the London electronic musician’s fourth official album, which follows both 2021’s *Reflection* and the 2022 eponymous debut of her ambient side project Whatever the Weather. Much as its title suggests, *Gentle Confrontation* thrives on clashing energies. In many ways, it is James’ most richly nuanced album yet, suffused in hazy clouds of synthesizer, electric piano, and vaporized samples, yet her glitched-out drums have never sounded more desperate. In “Déjà Vu,” her beats tangle and contort beneath RiTchie’s deeply soulful vocal harmonies; in “I DM U,” her cut-up breaks approximate the drill ’n’ bass of vintage Squarepusher, yet her synths have rarely sounded more ethereal. In many songs, she makes the most of her guests’ distinctive voices: Set against the chaotic syncopations of “While They Were Singing,” Catalan singer-songwriter Marina Herlop’s crystalline vocal harmonies sound even eerier than usual. But James herself frequently provides the emotional center in her half-murmured, half-rapped delivery—even when her verses are only half intelligible. “We like to think on and think on it,” she muses in “Tired of Me,” and then, in “Disjointed (Feeling Like a Kid Again),” she picks up the theme: “Lately I’ve been thinking about it,” she begins, before looping back in a halting voice: “Lately I should stop/And just think…” Songs like this make *Gentle Confrontation* feel like a self-portrait of a searching, doubtful mind.

The question of whether you want an MC like Earl Sweatshirt and a producer like The Alchemist to test each other’s limits is on some level an existential one: Like, isn’t the fact that the dreamlike flights of *VOIR DIRE* feel like comfort food a testament to how much they’ve already stretched our conception of hip-hop? Ten years out from his first “real” album (2013’s *Doris*), Earl sounds grateful, fulfilled, and yet no less enigmatic than when he was a kid, holding space for a history of Black diasporic art from Martinican poet Aimé Césaire to the Swazi-Xhosa South African pop legend Miriam Makeba without sacrificing the hermetic quality that made him so appealing in the first place. In Vince Staples, he continues to find the straight-talking foil he needs (“The Caliphate,” “Mancala”), and in Al a producer who can nudge him just a little closer to the hallelujahs he’s either too cool or evasive to embrace (“Mancala”). And at 26 minutes, the whole thing easily asks to be played again.

“I needed my audience to see that Killer Mike is something that this nine-year-old kid created to be fierce and badass and protect him from any ill,” the artist born Michael Render tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “This is my come-home moment musically. It is gospel, it is soul, it is funk, it is hip-hop. And from a moral standpoint, I was taught morality through the Black Southern Christian church, which gave us the civil rights movement, the abolitionist movement, which gave us some of the most beautiful music ever. And I feel like I\'m honoring that and I finally figured out my place.” Released 10 years after Run The Jewels transformed Killer Mike from a workaday regional rapper to the kind of guy holding public court with national politicians, *MICHAEL* is, on some level, a celebration of just how far he has come. But it’s also an exploration of the complex personality that got him there: the son of a drug dealer who needs to mourn his childhood but struggles to let his guard down (“MOTHERLESS”), the community leader trying to elevate youth while snapping back at the perceived narrowness of their politics (“TALK’N THAT SHIT!”), the middle-aged man finally reckoning with the collateral PTSD of Black life in America (“RUN”). “My mother and grandmother left me,” he says. “‘MOTHERLESS’ is about that and about the emptiness you feel, and as a human I feel like I\'ve lost something. But if all the electricity left tomorrow, there\'d still be trees moving, there\'d still be wind grooving, and that\'s all we return to. When you close your eyes, you listen to this record, this device ain\'t how you are hearing this song. These vibrations are how you\'re hearing this song.” There’s also “SCIENTISTS & ENGINEERS,” which features fellow Atlanta legends Future and André 3000. “Artists love and respect one another,” he says. “The what, who\'s done what, it\'s literally the style. You just waiting to hear your partner\'s next style.” And on a production level, the sustained mix of slow-and-steady trap beats with gospel choirs and soaking-wet organs evokes both the humidity of his Atlanta summers and the blend of sacred and profane that has characterized Black pop from Sam Cooke to Kanye West. If he weren’t so smart and soulful, you might call him a crank. But he’s both.

PinkPantheress’ debut album, *Heaven knows*, opens with the sound of a scaling church organ and heavy rainfall. It’s a grand entrance that’s as fitting for this album’s title as it is perhaps surprising for the artist behind it. But if PinkPantheress broke out thanks to the propulsive, UKG- and D’n’B-shaped pop she’d crafted in her bedroom (and her songs’ wild social-media success), the beginnings of *Heaven knows* feel like an acknowledgment—or a declaration—that she’s outgrown its four walls. Sometimes, that feels literal: “True romance” finds her amid the screaming crowds and clicking cameras of a show as she heralds her love for someone much more famous than her. It’s either a sign of the company she keeps these days (“Every song is about you/And everybody’s shouting out your name”) or a play on the darker side of fan obsession (“I know you’re older/But I really know I’m sure/Held my ticket since they landed at my door/I’ve been a fan of you since 2004/You know you got me”). But this album is also a broadening of her musical world, the songs here—made with collaborators including Greg Kurstin (Adele, Gorillaz, Foo Fighters), Mura Masa, Cash Cobain, Danny L Harle (Caroline Polachek) and Oscar Scheller (Ashnikko, Charli XCX, Rina Sawayama)—are noticeably more expansive than those on 2021’s star-confirming mixtape *To hell with it*. You can expect all the nostalgic sounds and breakbeats that defined that release and made the Kent-raised singer-songwriter/producer famous. But also disco (on the excellent “The aisle”), ’90s R&B (“Mosquito” and “Feel complete,” which sounds like it could have been written for a girl group), rock wig-outs (“Capable of love”), and flourishes of strings, church bells and even birdsong en route. (There are also songs that pass the three-minute mark.) Plus, plenty of collaborations, as Pink recruits a crop of culture-shaping artists to appear alongside her: Rema, Kelela, Central Cee, and, of course, Ice Spice, with whom she reached global domination in summer 2023 with “Boy’s a liar, Pt. 2.” All of which is united by the story of a troubled relationship, the album’s emo-shaped lyricism frequently blurring the lines between heartbreak and death and love and obsession (“You’re not quite stuck with me, but one day you’ll be,” she sings on “The aisle”). It could feel sinister, if her voice—and increasingly boundless, future-facing hyperpop—weren’t quite so sweet. By the time *Heaven knows* closes out with “Boy’s a liar, Pt. 2,” it’s a reminder of the astronomical heights PinkPantheress reached before even announcing her debut. But right in the middle of it, she hints that—despite her social-media beginnings—she can be anything she wants to be. “I am not your internet baby,” she repeats insistently on “Internet baby (interlude).” “I am not your internet baby.”

Hip-hop free spirits Aminé and KAYTRANADA broke through around the same time, their respective mid-2010s album debuts having dropped within roughly a year of one another. As such, few should be all that surprised to see their amalgamated KAYTRAMINÉ come to fruition. The sweet soul sensations and razor-sharpened verbiage of initial singles “Rebuke” and the Pharrell-assisted “4EVA” accurately previewed their full-length’s scenic purview, a POV of a righteous escapade through the post-Neptunes/post-Timbaland lineage. Hyper sexual exploits, luxury smackdowns, and much more await listeners on “letstalkaboutit” and “Ugh Ugh,” as well as the aggressively funky cuts “STFU3” and “Who He Iz.” Formidable rapper guests Big Sean and Freddie Gibbs raise the pressure considerably, while Snoop Dogg himself brings his experience in similar sonic spaces to the sparse and synthy “Eye.”

One of Icelandic singer-songwriter-pianist Laufey’s primary concerns beyond just making her style of vocal jazz is to bring jazz, in general, to a younger audience. Hosting live sessions on TikTok and Instagram and getting co-signs from Billie Eilish and WILLOW are a couple ways she’s managed to connect to her peers, but it is the music—and, more specifically, the lyrics—that really does the heavy lifting. Laufey (pronounced *LAY-vay*) is a traditionalist at heart, and her influences (think Billie Holiday and Chet Baker) shine through in the melancholic torch songs that make up her second album. (She also regularly covers the standards, and includes a version of Erroll Garner and Johnny Burke’s “Misty” here.) But it’s in the decidedly modern words she sings where she makes new breakthroughs. A tune like “While You Were Sleeping” could be a lost Songbook addition, but its lyrics—“I\'m dancing down streets/Smiling to strangers/Idiotic things/I trace it all back/3:30 am”—draw a solid line between today and the past. Yet still, her voice’s richness and her phrasing are as spellbinding as those of many of her icons. Her songs can be inventive and playful, forlorn and wrenching, and she sings of love and lack thereof with a depth beyond her 24 years. But it’s in those unexpected, fanciful twists where Laufey really impresses. In “Letter to My 13 Year Old Self,” she sings about the awkwardness of teenage years with a sensitivity and frankness that’s very much a product of the present day.

A Wednesday song is a quilt. A short story collection, a half-memory, a patchwork of portraits of the American south, disparate moments that somehow make sense as a whole. Karly Hartzman, the songwriter/vocalist/guitarist at the helm of the project, is a story collector as much as she is a storyteller: a scholar of people and one-liners. Rat Saw God, the Asheville quintet’s new and best record, is ekphrastic but autobiographical and above all, deeply empathetic. Across the album’s ten tracks Hartzman, guitarist MJ Lenderman, bassist Margo Shultz, drummer Alan Miller, and lap/pedal steel player Xandy Chelmis build a shrine to minutiae. Half-funny, half-tragic dispatches from North Carolina unfurling somewhere between the wailing skuzz of Nineties shoegaze and classic country twang, that distorted lap steel and Hartzman’s voice slicing through the din. Rat Saw God is an album about riding a bike down a suburban stretch in Greensboro while listening to My Bloody Valentine for the first time on an iPod Nano, past a creek that runs through the neighborhood riddled with broken glass bottles and condoms, a front yard filled with broken and rusted car parts, a lonely and dilapidated house reclaimed by kudzu. Four Lokos and rodeo clowns and a kid who burns down a corn field. Roadside monuments, church marquees, poppers and vodka in a plastic water bottle, the shit you get away with at Jewish summer camp, strange sentimental family heirlooms at the thrift stores. The way the South hums alive all night in the summers and into fall, the sound of high school football games, the halo effect from the lights polluting the darkness. It’s not really bright enough to see in front of you, but in that stretch of inky void – somehow – you see everything. Rat Saw God was written in the months immediately following Twin Plagues’ completion, and recorded in a week at Asheville’s Drop of Sun studio. While Twin Plagues was a breakthrough release critically for Wednesday, it was also a creative and personal breakthrough for Hartzman. The lauded record charts feeling really fucked up, trauma, dropping acid. It had Hartzman thinking about the listener, about her mom hearing those songs, about how it feels to really spill your guts. And in the end, it felt okay. “I really jumped that hurdle with Twin Plagues where I was not worrying at all really about being vulnerable – I was finally comfortable with it, and I really wanna stay in that zone.” The album opener, “Hot Rotten Grass Smell,” happens in a flash: an explosive and wailing wall-of-sound dissonance that’d sound at home on any ‘90s shoegaze album, then peters out into a chirping chorus of peepers, a nighttime sound. And then into the previously-released eight-and-half-minute sprawling, heavy single, “Bull Believer.” Other tracks, like the creeping “What’s So Funny” or “Turkey Vultures,” interrogate Hartzman’s interiority - intimate portraits of coping, of helplessness. “Chosen to Deserve” is a true-blue love song complete with ripping guitar riffs, skewing classic country. “Bath County” recounts a trip Hartzman and her partner took to Dollywood, and time spent in the actual Bath County, Virginia, where she wrote the song while visiting, sitting on a front porch. And Rat Saw God closer “TV in the Gas Pump” is a proper traveling road song, written from one long ongoing iPhone note Hartzman kept while in the van, its final moments of audio a wink toward Twin Plagues. The reference-heavy stand-out “Quarry” is maybe the most obvious example of the way Hartzman seamlessly weaves together all these throughlines. It draws from imagery in Lynda Barry’s Cruddy; a collection of stories from Hartzman’s family (her dad burned down that cornfield); her current neighbors; and the West Virginia street from where her grandma lived, right next to a rock quarry, where the explosions would occasionally rock the neighborhood and everyone would just go on as normal. The songs on Rat Saw God don’t recount epics, just the everyday. They’re true, they’re real life, blurry and chaotic and strange – which is in-line with Hartzman’s own ethos: “Everyone’s story is worthy,” she says, plainly. “Literally every life story is worth writing down, because people are so fascinating.” But the thing about Rat Saw God - and about any Wednesday song, really - is you don’t necessarily even need all the references to get it, the weirdly specific elation of a song that really hits. Yeah, it’s all in the details – how fucked up you got or get, how you break a heart, how you fall in love, how you make yourself and others feel seen – but it’s mostly the way those tiny moments add up into a song or album or a person.

SUGA, the prolific songwriter, MC and producer who cut his teeth in the Korean rap underground before joining BTS, brings his hip-hop acumen to a debut solo album under the moniker Agust D. Following up on mixtapes *Agust D* (2016) and *D-2* (2020), *D-DAY* concludes a self-reflective trilogy with a potent statement of liberation from societal pressures, past regrets and future fears. With commanding yet intimate songcraft, he reimagines tradition (“Haegeum”) and pairs boom-bap with honeyed R&B and a killer hook from IU (“People Pt.2”)—among other highlights including a collab with the late, lauded polymath Ryuichi Sakamoto (“Snooze”).

Rooms feature everywhere on Holly Humberstone’s debut album—including in its title, *Paint My Bedroom Black*. That wasn’t a conscious move, says the British singer-songwriter, but it’s reflective of when the record was made, on tour in 2022. “I’d say I spent 90 percent of the year on the road, which I loved,” she tells Apple Music. “My favorite times were last year. But it’s also such an emotional roller coaster: traveling, being in different cities. I started to feel like I was living this weird double life and was struggling to connect with the people back home. I lost sense of who I was a little bit.” *Paint My Bedroom Black*—written in “grounding” sessions between tour dates—captures Humberstone’s yearning for those people back home and her guilt at not being around enough (see the self-castigating “Antichrist”), but also tentative new love (album standout “Kissing in Swimming Pools”), the simple joy of reuniting with someone you’ve missed (“Room Service,” which recalls José González’s “Heartbeats”), and realizing you see the same sky as the people you’re miles away from (the d4vd-featuring “Superbloodmoon”). And here, Humberstone embraces the brooding alt-pop that earmarked her as one of the UK’s most promising young singer-songwriters, but expands it too, with touches of country and Americana (she credits her love of Kacey Musgraves and Springsteen for this), skittering electro-pop (“Flatlining”), plenty of vocoder, and even ’90s breakbeats (“Lauren”). All of which, to Humberstone, feels like “chaos.” “There’s so much going on, every track is a different story and something new that I’m trying to figure out,” she says. But when the album was finished, she realized it also captured two distinct parts of herself. “I didn’t do it on purpose, but to me, the album is split in two. There’s one side that’s my extrovert self, reclaiming my love for everybody back home and reaching out,” she says. “And then the other side, which is just wanting to shut everything out.” Read on as Humberstone lets us in on her debut record—and both of those sides—one track at a time. **“Paint My Bedroom Black”** “This was such a release to write. I had a couple of days off and my producer Rob \[Milton\] flew over to join me in New York. We got a little studio and it was the biggest relief after such a long time. To me this feels like a really intimate track—like I’m wanting to shut everything out. I didn’t write it about anybody. It just came from things that I was feeling about myself and about the world that I was finding myself in. It was just reclaiming myself a little bit. But there’s something positive about it, it feels like the start of something.” **“Into Your Room”** “I didn’t realize until I finished the record, but rooms come up in nearly every song. This time we were in LA and Rob flew over again and we went in with Ethan Gruska \[boygenius, Phoebe Bridgers, Ryan Beatty\]. A theme of this album is feeling like I was neglecting people at home and not being there for the people I wanted to be there for—and I wanted to turn those things into something that felt positive. It’s a love song about wanting to be close to someone. We were trying to get across an embrace of somebody after not having seen them for such a long time—\[I was\] proclaiming my love for people back home. The production is really upbeat and sparkly and shiny.” **“Cocoon”** “I got off tour and was trying to navigate picking things up at home after being away for so long. It’s really hard getting back home and being jet-lagged, and then that rolling into not wanting to get out of bed \[or\] face the fact that I’ve returned to normal life. Mental health and feeling depressed isn’t an easy thing to write about but it felt really important to do that. An angsty, guitar-heavy song was fun and really healing to write.” **“Kissing in Swimming Pools”** “We wrote and recorded it in a day and didn’t change much. It’s about the start of a relationship. I’d gotten home and been able to see this person a little bit more, and it was just a really positive thing that was going on in my life alongside the stresses of trying to write an album, being on tour, and being away. I just wanted to write a love song for this person, that was all there was to it. Everything felt live and washy and reverbing, because that’s how those feelings are.” **“Ghost Me”** “One of my strengths and downfalls is that I form really strong attachments to people and then become dependent on them—I cling onto people a lot. When everything else is changing, I find it really comforting to know that the people back home are still there and that they’re kind of a constant. I think that this song especially is me wanting to literally clutch on for dear life to these people. The voice note at the end is my friend Lauren. She had sent it to me earlier that day and I just thought it was hilarious. We put it in, thinking that it was a joke and that we were probably going to take it out at a later date. But it just never ended up coming out.” **“Superbloodmoon” (feat. d4vd)** “I’d been a fan of d4vd’s for a while and knew he was in London, so reached out. I’d had the title ‘Superbloodmoon’ in my notes and something like ‘The Superbloodmoon, can you see it from where you are?’ He was able to relate to me quite a lot with the touring and being away from home and wanting that one thing that would connect you back to the people you were longing to see. I’m so grateful to d4vd for being so down to be part of it.” **“Antichrist”** “This is about the end of my first proper relationship where I just couldn’t be enough for them. And just feeling like a bit of a letdown, I guess. Obviously I’m over-exaggerating \[in the song\]—I’m not actually a terrible person! I feel like you hear a lot of breakup songs and being brokenhearted and somebody hurting you, but I’d never really heard many songs about being on the other side of it and how that can also break your heart a little bit, about who you thought you were. It’s kind of an apology song.” **“Lauren”** “This was another with Rob and Ethan. We’d been in a new space in London for a good few days and I’d not been able to make any progress with writing. The studio had this old-fashioned drum machine and it was about building something that felt cool from that to try and spark some sort of inspiration. Ethan built this weird drum loop and then I jumped on the Wurlitzer and started playing some kind of darker chords underneath. And that’s where the song came from.” **“Baby Blues”** “There’s the voice note from Lauren and there’s the song ‘Lauren’ about her obviously. I wrote quite a lot of songs about her. I wrote this about her coming to visit—she’d come to visit me and then she’d left. I wanted to write about seeing her getting off the train and being across the zebra crossing from me and just getting to see somebody that I loved again. It was so simple. I got addicted to the demo—I thought it was perfect, this little snippet. A little breath.” **“Flatlining”** “The person I wrote ‘Antichrist’ about moved literally down the road from me, with a friend. When you have the same friends, your lives are kind of intwined and at some point you’re going to run into each other. It’s that fear of being ambushed by old feelings that I really just want to bury and not think about. But it ended up being totally fine and, after I wrote this, I felt like we were friends again, which is weird because the chorus is, ‘We just can’t be friends anymore.’ But I think I have a tendency to blow things out of proportion! We introduced the little heart monitor sounds and I think you can hear the anxiety in the percussion—the feeling of not knowing where your head is at or how things are going to play out. It’s an anxiety-inducing song, for sure.” **“Elvis Impersonators”** “I wanted to write about my sister being away—she lives in Tokyo and she must have such a different life that I have nothing to do with, which is really hard to grasp. I really don’t know the person that she is over there. We’d been to visit her before the pandemic and we had this really hilarious night out where there were all of these Michael Jackson and Elvis impersonators. It was just really bizarre but funny, and I wanted to put it into a song. But this is really about missing a sister.” **“Girl”** “It’s yearning for a deeper connection. I think when you’re away, you meet so many people and so many things that seem superficial and surface level. I think the yearning in my voice in this song represents what it’s about.” **“Room Service”** “I’m sure a lot of people are a lot busier than me and have a lot more on their plate than me and have to travel a lot more than I do. But for me, I’m still learning to navigate this side of my life and being away from home more than I’m used to. This song was about wanting to go somewhere really cool and then just shut ourselves in our room, order room service, and catch up: This is the only place that I want to be, the only thing that really matters. Which is how I feel about my friends and everybody I wrote this album about. It felt like the closing track because it sums everything up to me in a really nice way. It feels like the closing of the chapter.”

For James Blake, making his sixth album felt like going home. Since emerging as a post-dubstep trailblazer in 2010, the electronic producer from the outskirts of London has explored a realm of different sounds including minimalist pop, trap beats, stark ballads, sparse chamber music, digitalized experimentation, and more, all while becoming a go-to collaborator for a wave of game-changing artists (Kendrick Lamar, Frank Ocean, Beyoncé, and Dave among them). On *Playing Robots Into Heaven*, though, he reconnects with the club sounds that fueled his early work—and a side of himself he felt compelled to tap back into. “It felt like, ‘Oh, I’m going to do the thing that I do really easily,’” Blake tells Apple Music. “Writing songs is definitely something I love doing, but it doesn’t come naturally to me. It’s really rewarding and challenging, but not my most natural thing. I think probably my most natural thing is collaging shit together.” That’s the approach Blake employs on *Playing Robots Into Heaven*, a captivating record where twisted loops and warped samples intertwine with the melancholic warmth of Blake’s trademark piano chords, hypnotic hooks, and heavily treated vocals. Following a loose narrative arc of a night out raving—taking in the euphoric thrills, spills, ups, downs, and return to reality—it’s a heady trip. Creating it, Blake realized that putting yourself through the wringer to make a record doesn’t have to be the mark of a serious artist. “What I learned was that the feeling of ‘Is this too easy?’ is actually a good feeling,” he says. “It means you’re onto something, it means you are doing something right.” Blake is in his element on *Playing Robots Into Heaven*—and here, he guides us through it, track by track. **“Asking to Break”** “I made this with \[Mount Kimbie’s\] Dom Maker. He started it off with a loop of me playing piano and singing, which is the first thing you hear. The refrain and the song came from that. It happened pretty naturally, pretty quickly. I’m not sure what word it is that the chord sequence evokes, but it evokes something. It doesn’t really happen on the rest of the songs. It’s unique to the album. I like this song as an opener just because it’s not exactly rave-y, but it’s sort of giving you a little nudge in that direction.” **“Loading”** “The whole album is the arc of a rave, basically, or the arc of maybe some kind of drug experience that includes a high and a comedown. ‘Asking to Break’ sets that up and then ‘Loading’ starts to bring you up into more of that place, \[with\] a little bit more euphoria. That’s why I liked it as a second tune. It’s not crazy hyped, but it’s suggesting it and you get that big release at the end. Again, I collaborated with Dom on this one. He made the loop that you hear at the beginning and then we bounce off each other really well.” **“Tell Me”** “‘Tell Me’ started on the tour bus. Me and Rob \[McAndrews, co-producer and Blake’s live guitarist\] were messing about with modular stuff and we ended up with a thing we really liked. There’s actually a video of us playing an early version of it, just bobbing our heads on the tour bus. We’ve got nothing else to do, we’re just eating peanut butter and drinking shit coffee and making stuff on this thing. I knew this had that transcendent wave vibe about it and it felt like a perfect one for the record.” **“Fall Back”** “I had a little modular jam I was working on. Yaw Evans is a producer from South London and I discovered him because he was remixing old grime a cappellas but using old hardware, and it was kind of unusual. I messaged him like, ‘Hey, I love what you do and it’s inspiring to me because I’m doing something a bit similar. Do you want to send me any ideas because I’d love to incorporate what you do into a song?’ Two of them ended up being on the record. One was the drums on ‘Fall Back,’ which I then manipulated a bit to bring it into that world. It’s got echoes of Burial but also maybe more traditional garage stuff. The way he programmed was different and maybe better than something I could do so I was just like, ‘Well, let’s use that.’ It could have been a case of like, ‘Oh, these drums are cool, I’ll do something like them,’ but I don’t really do that. I like to get it from the source.” **“He’s Been Wonderful”** “I actually remember playing an early version of this on Radio 1 about seven years ago. I ended up playing it out a lot at my 1-800 Dinosaur \[club nights\] back in the day but also the CMYK nights that I’ve been putting on—I’d be playing it every set. This song doesn’t feature my voice. I think the thing that some people might find odd about this record is that there are a couple of tracks where I’m not singing and it’s a sample of someone else. But there was a bonus on *Overgrown* that had Big Boi samples on it, ‘Every Day I Ran,’ so I’ve done it before.” **“Big Hammer”** “When I put this out as the first single, I was like, ‘This is the only way to make it clear that this record’s going to be different.’ Some of the other songs might have just been seen as slightly different James Blake tracks but this one was like, ‘OK, people aren’t really going to know what’s going to happen next,’ and that’s what I wanted. I sampled \[Hackney’s proto-jungle adventurers\] The Ragga Twins, who were a huge voice for me growing up. They’d either be at the things I was going to, or they’d be in the tracks of the DJs I was listening to. They were a big influence and when I sampled them, the tune just felt like, ‘Now I’ve got it, now it’s done.’ They brought the energy that the tune had without actually even being there.” **“I Want You to Know”** “This again is something that started with Yaw Evans’ drums. I was in a studio in Los Angeles and I was playing chords over it, just seeing what I could find. I ended up writing a little bit over it and then there was a moment where the only melody I could hear over this song was the Pharrell line from the end of Snoop Dogg’s ‘Beautiful.’ I was listening to it in the control room and once I’d sung it out loud, I was like, ‘Oh no, there is no better melody than that, that’s the only thing.’ It was like, ‘All right, let’s hope they clear it.’” **“Night Sky”** “This is now the arc downwards. We’re starting to really wind down. It’s a pretty odd piece of music. I really love the strange Gregorian-sounding shit at the end where you don’t really know what it is, whether it’s a voice or whatever, but it sounds haunting. I made it with Rob again. We started it together at my house with modular stuff. Those weird voices at the beginning, that’s all me put through some technology. I thought it created the perfect ladder down back to Earth.” **“Fire the Editor”** “The editor in this case is yourself and your self-censorship, and when you’re not truly saying what it is you want to say, or you are saying a version of it but not the whole thing. It’s a tough place to be. It’s a rallying cry to a freedom of thought and personal freedom. There’s a lyric in this song I really love: ‘If I see him again, we’ll be having words.’ There’s something a little bit confrontational about it, but the idea is that it’s setting you free at this moment in the album.” **“If You Can Hear Me”** “This is a letting go sort of song, too—a letting go of the constant pursuit of something, the pursuit of success or the pursuit of music, or the pursuit of whatever it is in your own life. It was actually written at the time of the movie *Ad Astra*, because I was writing something for it which ended up not being used. It was written to the scene where he finally communicates with his father who’s out in space and who might never come back. I think that in some way it’s a nice metaphor for how we go on our own path compared to our parents or maybe our father, in this case. We are trying to go as far as we can in a certain direction without getting lost and hopefully not repeating the same mistakes they did, but also learning from what they got right.” **“Playing Robots Into Heaven”** “The title *Playing Robots Into Heaven* came from an Instagram post where I’d made this jam on a modular synth. For some reason the phrase ‘The organist that plays robots into heaven’ is what came to mind because that’s just what it sounded like for me. This is the track that I posted on my Instagram during the pandemic and it’s on the album in full without any modification, exactly the piece that started the album off. Again, it’s bringing you all the way down back to Earth.”

Near the end of The Rolling Stones’ first album of original material in 18 years, Keith Richards takes the microphone to ask a series of emotional questions, pleading for honesty about what might lie ahead for him: “Is the future all in the past? Just tell me straight,” he asks. The answer is, remarkably, no: *Hackney Diamonds* is the band’s most energetic, effortless, and tightest record since 1981’s *Tattoo You*. Just play “Bite My Head Off,” a rowdy kiss-off where Mick Jagger tells off a bitter lover, complete with a fuzz-bass breakdown by...Paul McCartney. “At the end of it, I just said, ‘Well, that\'s just like the old days,’” Richards tells Apple Music of that recording session. *Hackney Diamonds* was indeed made like the old days—live, with no click tracks or glossy production tricks—yet still manages to sound fresh. After years of stalled sessions, and the death of their legendary drummer Charlie Watts in 2021, Jagger and Richards decided on a fresh start, traveling to Jamaica (the same place they wrote “Angie” in 1973) for a series of writing sessions. Based on a recommendation from McCartney, Jagger hired producer Andrew Watt, who’d also worked with Miley Cyrus, Dua Lipa, Ozzy Osbourne, Post Malone, and more, to help them finish the tracks. “He kicked us up the ass,” Jagger tells Apple Music. With Steve Jordan on drums, Watt kept it simple, bringing in vintage microphones and highlighting the interwoven guitars of Richards and Ronnie Wood. “The whole point is the band being very close, eyeball to eyeball, and looking at each other and feeding off of each other,” says Richards. In the spirit of 1978’s genre-spanning *Some Girls*, the album comprises sweeping riff-heavy anthems (“Angry,” “Driving Me Too Hard”), tortured relationship ballads (“Depending on You”), country-tinged stompers (“Dreamy Skies”), and even dance-floor grooves (“Mess it Up,” featuring a classic Jagger falsetto). The capstone of the album is “Sweet Sounds of Heaven,” a stirring seven-minute gospel epic featuring Lady Gaga. Halfway through, the song goes quiet, Gaga laughs, and Stevie Wonder starts playing the Rhodes keyboard, and then Gaga and Jagger start improvising vocals together; it’s a spontaneous moment that’s perfectly imperfect, reminiscent of the loose *Exile on Main St.* sessions. “Playing with Stevie is always mind-blowing, and I thought that Lady Gaga did an incredible job, man,” says Richards. “She snaked her way in there and took it over and gave as good as she got with Mick, and it was great fun.” Richards didn’t expect to make an album this good as he approaches his 80th birthday. But he’s using it as a moment to take stock of his career with the greatest rock ’n’ roll band in the world. “The fact that our music has managed to become part of the fabric of life everywhere, I feel pretty proud about that, more than any one particular thing or one particular song,” he says. “It is nice to be accepted into this legendary piece of bullshit.”

Irish singer-songwriter CMAT had a very clear idea of what her second record was going to be about when she started making it, but somewhere along the line, it morphed into something else. “It’s about the breakup and the fallout of a breakup,” Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson tells Apple Music. “I was in a relationship with someone who’s much older than me, and it was about trying to look at that as objectively as possible, and give time and space to my feelings about it.” CMAT set out to write what she describes as “a record of forgiveness,” but as she put that into practice, she discovered it wasn’t the album she needed to make. “As I was making the record, I realized I’m actually just still really fucking angry about everything that happened, and I became more \[so\] as I went on and went through it. So it’s not really an album about forgiveness, it’s an album about the fact that shit happens, these things happen, and it doesn’t make any sense and there’s no point to it.” The end result is *Crazymad, for Me*, a second record that builds on the country-pop sway of her debut with lush strings, ’70s grooves, melodious hooks, uplifting harmonies (a glorious duet with John Grant on “Where Are Your Kids Tonight?” will have you shimmying your way to the dance floor), and an Americana twang. Somewhere inside these songs of anger, sadness, and contemplation, CMAT started to make sense of everything. “Nothing good comes from suffering,” she says. “But it has to happen and you just have to learn how to move on with it.” These things happen, but at least they’ve got a great soundtrack. Read on as CMAT guides us through *Crazymad, for Me*, track by track. **“California”** “Every time I started on the topic and every time I started writing about it, I had this voice in the back of my head that was like, ‘Everybody that was there is going to know that you’re exaggerating and everybody is going to think you’re so sad. Him, and all of his friends, and everyone that knows you is going to think you’re such a pathetic loser for even talking about this in the first place.’ I probably should have made this album before my first record. I’ve wanted to make this record for six or seven years, but it really took a lot of pep-talking—and this song is me going through all of that and trying to be like, ‘I need to do it anyway.’” **“Phone Me”** “This is about the paranoia of feeling like you’re being cheated on, but the other person isn’t admitting to it. I was making up really weird images in my head, like, ‘What lengths would I have gone to to figure out if this person’s cheating on me?’ One of them was raising a Greek goddess from the dead, Cassandra, the goddess of prophecy. Her curse was that she was always going to tell the truth and know the truth and know what was coming before it happened, but nobody was ever going to believe her. I also make reference to the Rebekah Vardy incident, where Coleen Rooney had to remove everyone off her \[Instagram\] stories except for Rebekah Vardy, and plant fake stories to figure out if she was the person leaking her stories. I liked taking those two things and matching them together. In my head, there is a conference of girls all standing around trying to figure out the truth about something, and it’s me, Coleen Rooney, and Cassandra, the Greek goddess of prophecy.” **“Vincent Kompany”** “This is about the fact that I tend to have a relationship with myself and my own mental illnesses, where time is a very important thing. I like to tell stories about terrible, scary, maybe worrying things that I did when I was very mentally ill, but only if they happened three years ago, so that I can be, ‘I was crazy back then, but I’d never do that now.’ As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that I’m always doing something insane, and it’s only time and foresight and whatever else that makes me realize that I was always the crazy person. There’s a line in it where I say, ‘Cut all my hair off trying to look like Vincent Kompany.’ I wrote this song with my friend Declan McKenna and we spent maybe two hours going through a list of bald celebrities that I could use in the simile. Eventually, he was like, ‘\[Burnley FC manager\] Vincent Kompany!’ I was like, ‘Oh, if he’s a dodgy bastard, I don’t really want to put him in a song,’ so I had to research him very thoroughly. Turns out, lovely man. Family guy.” **“Such a Miranda”** “When I first really started a relationship with this person, I was 18 and I’d moved to Denmark. I moved back to Ireland to be in a relationship with him and I also stopped watching *Sex and the City*; I stopped doing all of these things that were for me and that I was supposed to be doing for me. I look back on that time with a lot of regret. It’s not a very profound \[or\] logical song, or anything, it’s just literally me talking about how much I regret doing that.” **“Rent”** “This song is kind of the second part to ‘Such a Miranda’ in the sense that it fast-forwards into the middle of the relationship and is me telling the story of being in it. It’s probably the saddest song I’ve ever written. It’s about being in a relationship with someone and realizing you’ve dedicated your whole life to someone who doesn’t even know you, and you don’t even know them, and how isolating and awful that feeling is, and how chaotic it is as well; how your life looks a bit different every day because you don’t know who you’re getting.” **“Where Are Your Kids Tonight?” (feat. John Grant)** “This is a song about realizing that I’ve turned into my mother. For me, there are three scenes on the record. The first sequence of songs is a bit angry, the second sequence of songs \[where this one sits\] is very reflective and ‘Maybe I’ve done something wrong,’ and then the third sequence is trying to make peace and move on. ‘Where Are Your Kids Tonight?’ is a song about the passing of time and how quickly it’s gone, because I feel like people often get to their mid to late twenties and they’re like, ‘Fuck, I was 12 two weeks ago. What the fuck happened?!’” **“Can’t Make up My Mind”** “I wanted to really capture that fuzzy-headedness of indecisiveness and lack of commitment, because I’m definitely a commitment-phobe in life. I don’t know how people buy houses, I don’t know how people get married. That concept to me is very confusing. I don’t even know how people decide where they’re going to live for the rest of their life. I have specifically chosen a path where I move around all the time, and that suits me perfectly well, because I need to be constantly stimulated, like a toddler with an iPad. I need to be constantly scrolling or something. And I can’t make up my mind.” **“Whatever’s Inconvenient”** “This one is about being bad at romance and human relationships. I’m definitely a bit of a Madame Bovary about things. I always think something could be a bit better and a bit more romantic and a bit more crazy and a bit more wild, and that will fuck me up and put me into terrible, terrible positions. I’m definitely guilty of going for the craziest or the most rebellious, wild option, even into my adulthood, and it just runs a train through your life. You have to just not be a narcissist, and take people for what they are and enjoy them and commit to them and see the best in them—instead of always picking the worst option possible to live on the edge.” **“I…Hate Who I Am When I’m Horny”** “I wanted to put this feeling into a song because I had never heard anyone else ever talk about it in a poetic sense. I have so many friends that have been very hurt and confused by their own feelings towards someone they love. They’ll love this person and be so committed to this person, but after a while, the sexual attraction completely leaves them and they find anything new attractive. Quite a lot of my friends who are gay men suffered a lot in their early to mid twenties or thirties with this exact same feeling, where they’ve found someone and they love them, but they just want to have sex with anyone else. I think there’s a lot of shame associated with this feeling, and there’s a lot of shame associated with sex in general. But if I was to add a positive note, I would say there are other solutions to the problem rather than hating yourself. As a very famous drag queen, Trixie Mattel, once said, ‘If having sex with someone who isn’t my husband is illegal, then lock me up and throw away the key.’” **“Torn Apart”** “This is going back to the Cassandra prophecy thing, but it’s the other end of the prophecy here, where shit has hit the fan and everything has gone wrong, and you’re at the end of the relationship and there’s always a feeling of, ‘Well, I knew it was always going to happen, so why did I even bother?’ It’s about running through the past and looking for signs that it was always going to end. But if you look for that in anything, you’ll find it.” **“Stay for Something”** “‘Stay for Something’ is also about running back through the minutiae of a relationship that you’ve exited and looking to make sense out of it. I think this is also a very important song in the record for me because it really sums up that super-chaotic feeling of something terrible has happened, so I have to find reasoning for it, and I have to make sense out of it and it has to be a chapter that factors into the story of my life overall. I can’t have suffered for nothing, I can’t have stayed for nothing, I can’t have just stayed in this terrible relationship and not benefited from it in some way, but the truth is that I did and I think, in general, people do. There’s no reason for suffering, there’s no point to it, and these things don’t really make sense.” **“Have Fun!”** “I think the minute that it was written, I remember thinking it sounds like the last song on an album. It sounds like the exit song from a sitcom or something, it’s quite a jovial, jaunty number. I liked the idea of ending on something uplifting when I knew so much of the record was going to be so dramatic. Thematically, it makes sense as well because it’s the closest thing to a forgiveness song on the record. It’s not even really about forgiving and forgetting, but it’s more just about being like, ‘Well, that happened and now it’s not happening anymore, so I’m going to go have some fun,’ because that was what was missing for the last five years or whatever it was. I think it’s nice to end on a hopeful note.”

By her own admission, Olivia Dean is an “extreme perfectionist.” But, one day while making her debut album, the London singer-songwriter found herself mumbling the word “messy” over and over again while playing her guitar—and unlocked something lighter within herself. “I just loved the idea of flipping ‘messy’ from being a negative word into this beautiful thing,” she tells Apple Music. “I applied that to finishing the album and it was like, ‘We’re going to keep me laughing in there’ or, ‘The piano doesn’t have to exactly be in time on that part.’ I think in an age where everybody is pretending that their life is amazing, it’s really refreshing to be like, ‘My life’s a mess. And your life’s probably a mess too.’ But that’s fine: That’s the spice of life.” The aptly titled *Messy* is a sublime debut—that “messy approach” lending it a warm, immediate feeling that often makes listening feel like you’re right inside it. The album houses the soulful, jazz-inflected, old-soul songwriting and made-for-summer-days pop that Dean has built her name on: “In the studio I’d say, ‘Can you do this one a bit more like you just had the best day of your life, but suddenly the sun is setting?’” she says. There are sculptural, string-laden ballads (“No Man”), loose instrumental moments (such as on “Ladies Room” and “Getting There”), and intimate confessionals on her mental health (“Everybody’s Crazy”) or watching an ex thrive without her (“Dangerously Easy”). It’s all anchored by Dean’s effortless vocals, and the album presents as an irresistible series of vignettes set everywhere from the girls’ bathroom at a pub to her imaginary flower shop in South London (“I Could Be a Florist”) and home, on the exquisite “Carmen”—a jubilant tribute to her grandmother who came to the UK as part of the Windrush generation. Here, Dean takes us inside *Messy*, one track at a time. **“UFO”** “I thought it was the perfect opener because it’s like, ‘Hello, everyone. You’re about to go on a journey with this shy alien who is trying to find a place to land herself. Come along.’ This was one of the earliest songs we wrote for the record—it started out as a joke, as a lot of our songs tend to. \[Producer\] Matt \[Hales\] and I were having a cup of tea, and I said, ‘It’s a bit of a sexy problem.’ He thought it was hilarious. We went back to the studio, and I was talking about Nick Drake and how I liked the guitar style of his songs. The song was written really quickly and I listened to it 20 times that evening, like, ‘This is it.’” **“Dive”** “I love the drama, and my karaoke song is ‘I Will Survive’ by Gloria Gaynor so I knew I wanted to have \[an intro like that\] on my record. I wrote this on a really sunny day in London and was talking about how I was ready to fall in love again and feeling open to it. We were thinking about Aretha Franklin and Carole King and all the chords that they use to make your heart feel like you’re flying on a cloud. This one took the longest to finish—because I knew it was good, that it could be an important song, that it was special. It might sound carefree but a lot of work went into it. I was working on it for a year.” **“Ladies Room”** “I was in my local pub in the girls’ bathroom and this lady said something like, ‘Girls, never go out with a man 20 years your senior.’ Then he called her and she was like, ‘I don’t want to go home but I’ve got to leave.’ I thought that was a brilliant start to a song because I’ve had that before. When I was a little younger and not as independent as I am now, \[I\] was in, to put it frankly, more toxic relationships. I would have gone home if my boyfriend was like, ‘Stay in with me,’ so I needed to write a song that was like, ‘Do whatever you want to do.’ The rest of it was inspired by Marvin Gaye’s ‘Got to Give It Up’ and how that party sound goes throughout it.” **“No Man”** “Originally this had loads of instrumentation. It was dense, with crazy drums, and I realized I wasn’t doing justice to what I was singing about, which was quite sad and vulnerable. I wanted it to feel quite \[James\] Bond-y, but I was also listening to a lot of Mac Miller’s *Circles*. I don’t want to talk about the subject matter too intensely—I feel people can get the vibe of what it’s about.” **“Dangerously Easy”** “This one is about seeing somebody you loved doing really well without you and feeling like, ‘How are they making it look so easy? Why are you so fine without me?’ But it’s not an angry song—it’s very amicable. Some of my favorite lyrics on this record are in this song. It’s got this kind of ‘Redbone’-y bassline in the bridge and I love it. The one feels quite old school to me.” **“Getting There (Interlude)”** “This was always just on the end of ‘Dangerously Easy,’ but I thought, ‘She’s got legs. She can be her own song.’ When we were recording the last bits to the album, I said to the band \[Dean made the record with her live band\], ‘When we get to the end, just go for it.’ It was the first take of what we did.” **“Danger”** “At first I thought, ‘I can’t have two songs on the same album with “danger” in. That’s not allowed.’ And then I was like, ‘Anything’s allowed.’ I had been wanting to write something fun because I’d been writing a lot of sad music. I had this complex of, ‘If something’s fun and simple then it can’t be good.’ Actually, yes, it can. I think of some songs as Tangfastics—they’re just fun sweeties that you love. And other songs are like sad muesli. You’ve got to have it, it’s good for you, but it’s not the most exciting. I definitely wanted to play with lovers rock and bossa nova, because I grew up listening to a lot of that stuff. It’s also just a classic Olivia Dean song: I will fall in love with you, but not quite.” **“The Hardest Part”** “She’s an oldie but she had to be on the album because I think this song has been very defining for me. It was written at a time when I was very sad and was trying to process letting go of a relationship that I thought was it for me—as you do when you’re young and in love. I was so invested, but had this epiphany: ‘You are not a good person for me, and I’ve changed so much, and you are not able to love the person that I’ve changed into.’ Accepting that, that’s the hardest part. I’m so proud of the lyric: ‘I was only 18/You should’ve known that I was always gonna change.’ That concept of people telling you that you’ve changed like it’s a bad thing. It’s like, ‘Yes, I have and that’s fantastic.’” **“I Could Be a Florist”** “I went to the studio and was supposed to be finishing ‘Dive,’ but I was having a little bit of an existential moment—I felt I couldn’t turn off from music. I was fantasizing about how wonderful it would be to be a florist. You could make lovely bouquets for people and bring people joy and look at flowers all day and then put the closed sign on the shop door. It came super quickly—I left the demo how it was. Now, obviously when I listen to it, \[I realize\] it’s a love song and it’s about wanting to bring flowers to people as a metaphor for love.” **“Messy”** “The last track I wrote for the album. I had this guitar part that I kept playing over and I just kept saying the word ‘messy.’ I thought, ‘What is this song about? What am I trying to say?’ Maybe it was about a relationship being messy, but I had one of those epiphany moments, like, ‘No. It’s a song to myself. I’m writing a song to tell myself I’m allowed to be messy. Your album doesn’t have to be perfect. It has to be you.’” **“Everybody’s Crazy”** “I love this song, but it does also terrify me. It really puts me out there. As in, my heart on the line. But you have got to be brave. It’s all well and good for me to have songs like ‘Ladies Room’ where I’m like, ‘I’m an independent lady, you can’t tell me what to do,’ but obviously I go home and cry into my pillow sometimes. Let’s be real. For me, this song is a warm hug, a bowl of tomato soup, but then at the end it’s like you’re on mushrooms and suddenly the world’s opening up.” **“Carmen”** “Out of everything I’ve made, this felt like the thing I made most for me. It feels so specific to my life. I knew that I wanted to immortalize my grandmother forever, even when I’m gone and my great-grandkids are gone. That’s what music can do for someone. It was something that was very private at the beginning. It’s a song about her coming to the UK from Guyana as part of the Windrush generation. She got on a plane in 1963 and came over with her baby sister and completely changed her life. Then she had four kids, and they had kids and one of them is me. “I wanted this to feel like a celebration because, at the time and now, there is a lot of negativity around Windrush. I thought, ‘They need a celebration.’ The way that people from that generation loved the Queen—they needed the love back and the lyric ‘Never got a jubilee’ was me giving her that. When I was writing this song, I pictured my granny sitting on a throne, steel pans are playing and everybody’s just having a great time and eating mac and cheese at her diamond jubilee. I cried when we had the steel pan player come in and record because I just think it’s the most beautiful sound in the world—for me, it’s nostalgic for a place I’ve actually never even been to, but to have that on the record was so important. I’m so proud of this song. My granny knows it exists, but she hasn’t heard it yet. I guess I’m just nervous.”

“I spent a lot of moments in my life trying to represent that I was a *bichota*—a boss girl—but I wasn’t feeling that way completely,” KAROL G tells Apple Music. “It’s good and normal sometimes, feeling not that good and not in that mood—but that tomorrow is going to be beautiful.” That sentiment resonates from the first few moments of *MAÑANA SERÁ BONITO*, on the lively opener “MIENTRAS ME CURO DEL CORA.” After dramatically impacting the very landscape of global Latin music with 2021’s career-defining *KG0516*, the Colombian superstar is now focused on what the future holds. If KAROL G’s phenomenal 2022 run of hit singles, from “PROVENZA” to “GATÚBELA” to “CAIRO,” whet her fans’ appetites, the bold and confessional *MAÑANA SERÁ BONITO* provides them with a downright decadent musical feast. Boasting an eclectic series of collaborations with the likes of Carla Morrison, Sean Paul, and Sech, to name a few, her latest album intrepidly explores sounds both familiar and previously unexplored as she further refines and even redefines her artistry. From the FINNEAS-produced alt-pop of “TUS GAFITAS” to the música mexicana stylings of “GUCCI LOS PAÑOS,” *MAÑANA SERÁ BONITO* sets a high bar across genres. All the while, she delivers powerhouse vocal performances with deeply personal lyrics bound to resonate with listeners. “I was scared to just show that vulnerability,” she says. “But this is the way my album came out, and now I just feel proud.” Among its numerous highlights, the undeniable centerpiece of *MAÑANA SERÁ BONITO* is the momentous Shakira team-up “TQG,” an intergenerational and empowering single that unites these Colombian superstars at long last. “I was just seeing what was happening with Shakira in her personal life, and I was like, ‘You know what? Let me contact her,’” she says of the track, one that had been shelved prior to recording this historic feature. “It was worth it for me to launch it again, for girls to represent that moment of the life.” Read more about some of KAROL G’s favorite *MAÑANA SERÁ BONITO* songs below. **“X SI VOLVEMOS”** “I believe that this duet with Romeo was, in fact, destined. The story of choosing Romeo began when I had originally finished the song. For a long period, I found myself unsatisfied with the end result, as if it was a recipe missing its final ingredient. After replaying the song, the thought of duetting with Romeo felt like the perfect idea. I felt that his voice, charisma, and undeniable sensuality would give life to this passionate track. Days after, I decided to post the track on social media, and coincidentally \[in\] what felt like destiny, Romeo reached out to say he loved the song and that he wanted to join. He was the secret ingredient, and this song wouldn’t be complete without his ‘so nasty’ spice.” **“TQG”** “My collaboration with Shakira is a dream come true. She has always been a reference for me, besides being Colombian. She is the kind of artist that you follow throughout their career and dream about how, one day, you want to represent your country in the incredible way that she has done. Working with her has been an enriching experience, and I have learned a lot from her. My admiration is profound. After Shakira sang about her own breakup, I shared the lyrics of ‘TQG’ with her, a song about that stage when you are ready to rip the bandages off and get back on your feet. She loved the lyrics and felt they represented her; in the end, we finished the song together.” **“TUS GAFITAS”** “‘TUS GAFITAS’ represents something special for me; I got to work with FINNEAS on this track, which also happened to be the first love song I wrote for *MAÑANA SERÁ BONITO*. I was heading to Cairo to shoot a video clip when I wrote the lyrics, which I think was symbolic of where I was on my healing journey. It was a fulfilling experience at many levels, personally and creatively, as I was also involved in the production process.” **“OJOS FERRARI”** “I love blending different genres together, and introducing dembow as an eccentric, upbeat track was essential to deliver my idea of a diverse album. My favorite part about the creative process is being able to collaborate with talent that have fresh ideas. Angel Dior and \[Justin\] Quiles brought that energy to the song. It’s a reminder that art doesn’t always have to be sad or profound but can also be a source of joy and excitement.” **“DAÑAMOS LA AMISTAD”** “I always have a great time working with Sech; he is incredibly talented. In “DAÑAMOS LA AMISTAD,” our styles fuse together perfectly to create a unique sound with its own flow and energy. We are thrilled with the final product and hope our fans will be too.” **“MAÑANA SERÁ BONITO”** “The album’s name is a phrase I repeated to myself when I saw or felt that things were wrong. I felt like I was going through a grand moment in my career, but I was very disconnected from myself and my surroundings. Sometimes, despite so many blessings that life had given me, I didn’t feel happy. So, every day I would say to myself, ‘No matter what, tomorrow it will be nice, tomorrow it will be nice.’ And that’s the message I want to convey to you, that even though life sometimes puts us in situations that no matter how bad they hurt us or how cloudy it gets, the next day, the sun will come out, and everything will be beautiful.”

With a string of energising hits and impeccable dance routines, IVE took the fast track to fame—and they’ve never looked back. A little over a year after their first tracks dropped, their debut LP *I\'ve IVE* shows fans what the K-pop sensations are really all about. Discover “Five Facts You Didn’t Know About IVE” in an exclusive video they created for Apple Music to celebrate the release—then hit play on the sextet’s high-powered debut studio album. **Five Facts You Didn’t Know About IVE** **1. What would your superpower be if you had one?** JANGWONYOUNG: I want to teleport! LIZ: I want to see the future! REI: I wish I could get fully energised if I sleep for a second. ANYUJIN: Time travelling! LEESEO: I never really thought about this, but teleporting sounds like a good idea! GAEUL: The power to be invisible! **2. What song on *I’ve IVE*’s tracklist is your (secret) favourite?** JANGWONYOUNG: I would have to go with “Shine With Me”. LEESEO: “Cherish” is really good too! LIZ: “Lips” is great! 💋 REI: All of our songs are great. ANYUJIN: All songs from IVE. LIZ: Please check out all of our tracks! ☺️ JANGWONYOUNG: All eleven tracks! **3. What is your favourite scent or fragrance?** JANGWONYOUNG: I like sweet perfumes! GAEUL: I like something fruity and floral. ANYUJIN: Something woodsy, for me. LEESEO: I like citrus and bright scents! 🍋 REI: For me, it really depends. I go for something different everyday. For today, I felt like wearing something sweet like cotton candy. LIZ: I have a perfume that I wear daily but I don’t know what it is...! Someone said it smelled like sweet potato. I guess it has a bit of a heavy and nutty note. **4. What is the emoji you use most often?** JANGWONYOUNG: ☺️ Smiley ones, like this! GAEUL: 😝 This one with the tongue sticking out. Or, 😎 this one with the sunglasses! ANYUJIN: 🫶 LIZ: 🥹 REI: 🦭 LEESEO: 🫠 **5. Kimchi mandu vs meat-filled mandu (Korean dumplings)?** Everyone: One, two, three! ANYUJIN/REI/GAEUL: Kimchi mandu! JANGWONYOUNG/LEESEO/LIZ: Meat-filled mandu!

With over 50 hit singles and more than 100 million records sold, English synth-pop masters Depeche Mode could still play sold-out stadiums if they had stopped releasing music in the mid-’90s. “We could easily, if we wanted to, just go out and play the hits,” vocalist Dave Gahan tells Apple Music. “But that’s not what we’re about.” Depeche Mode’s 15th studio album is their first without co-founder and keyboardist Andy Fletcher, who passed away in 2022. This sad and hugely significant event in the band’s history is reflected in the album’s title. “*Memento Mori*—‘remember that you must die,’” Gahan says, translating the Latin phrase. “The music really will outlive all of us.” Main songwriter Martin Gore started working on the record early in the pandemic—well before Fletcher’s death—but recalls the moment when he played his demos for Gahan. “It’s always a tough moment when you have to present your songs for the first time to Dave,” he tells Apple Music. “I would’ve been presenting them to Andy as well, obviously. He passed away just days before I was about to send him the songs. And that’s one of the very sad parts about it, because he used to love getting the songs.” *Memento Mori* is notable for another big reason: It marks the first time Gore has worked with a songwriter outside of Depeche Mode. He teamed up with Psychedelic Furs vocalist Richard Butler on several tracks, including “Don’t Say You Love Me,” “Caroline’s Monkey,” and the pulsing lead single “Ghosts Again.” Surprisingly, the band tracked more than just the 12 songs that appear on the album. “We actually recorded 16 songs for this album, and it was very difficult to choose the 12 that made it,” Gore says. “That’s very unlike us, but we have four in the vault. It’s a very, very small vault. It’s like a thumb drive.” Despite the melancholy inherent in some of the songs, *Memento Mori* is ultimately life-affirming—and a testament to Depeche Mode’s commitment to the creative process. “It’s music, and it’s art, and it’s something that is incredibly informing,” Gahan says. “Without it, I don’t know where I would be.” Below, he and Gore comment on a few of the key tracks. **“My Cosmos Is Mine”** Dave Gahan: “It’s actually one of my favorites on the album. When Martin first sent me the demo, it didn\'t strike me. But quite often those are the ones that creep up on me later—that I most identify with for some reason—and that song was one of those. I remember going to Martin\'s house and singing it, and I knew we were capturing something. I feel like I found a meaning in the song that I identified with, and I don\'t often. When I found my place with that song, I knew it was going to be a great introduction to *Memento Mori*.” **“Ghosts Again”** Gahan: “When I first heard that song, I was like, ‘Okay. I\'m in.’ The demo made me feel instant joy. I remember dancing around my living room, and my daughter came in and she was looking at me weird, like, ‘What\'s going on?’ I was like, ‘Don\'t you love this?’ She kind of started bopping along with me and she was like, ‘I get it. It\'s a really good song.’” **“Don’t Say You Love Me”** Gahan: “It’s very Scott Walker. To me, it’s this beautiful torch, but I love those kinds of songs. I mean, it’s like a movie or something. Martin wrote that one with Richard Butler.” Martin Gore: “Which is something I’ve never done before, worked with somebody outside the band. He reached out to me around April 2020. The pandemic had hit, and he just texted and said, ‘We should write some songs together.’ And he actually said that once before, like 10 years ago or something, but nothing ever came of it. But because it was the pandemic, I thought, ‘If I’m going to do something different, now is a good time to experiment.’ So we did, and we ended up writing six songs that I really like.” **“Speak to Me”** Gahan: “Well, it\'s sort of metaphors. The loneliness, the emptiness, the void, the wanting to be with people and life—and at the same time, not wanting to be. The initial idea came to me, but the song was incredibly elevated by Martin and our producers, James \[Ford\] and Marta \[Salogni\], into a different place, another world. And that\'s exactly where I wanted the song to go as well. But it’s beyond what I could have put together myself. It’s a very simple song, but honest and real. For me, it was the key that opened the door for me to make another Depeche Mode record with Martin. It was an answer to that question for me.”

The first song on Lil Yachty’s *Let’s Start Here.* is nearly seven minutes long and features breathy singing from Yachty, a freewheeling guitar solo, and a mostly instrumental second half that calls to mind TV depictions of astral projecting. “the BLACK seminole.” is an extremely fulfilling listen, but is this the same guy who just a few months earlier delivered the beautifully off-kilter and instantly viral “Poland”? Better yet, is this the guy who not long before that embedded himself with Detroit hip-hop culture to the point of a soft rebrand as *Michigan Boy Boat*? Sure is. It’s just that, as he puts it on “the BLACK seminole.,” he’s got “No time to joke around/The kid is now a man/And the silence is filled with remarkable sounds.” We could call the silence he’s referring to the years since his last studio album, 2020’s *Lil Boat 3*, but he’s only been slightly less visible than we’re used to, having released the aforementioned *Michigan Boy Boat* mixtape while also lending his discerning production ear to Drake and 21 Savage’s ground-shaking album *Her Loss*. Collaboration, though, is the name of the game across *Let’s Start Here.*, an album deeply indebted to some as yet undisclosed psych-rock influences, with repeated production contributions from onetime blog-rock darlings Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson and Patrick Wimberly, as well as multiple appearances from Diana Gordon, a Queens, New York-hailing singer who made a noise during the earliest parts of her career as Wynter Gordon. Also present are R&B singer Fousheé and Beaumont, Texas, rap weirdo Teezo Touchdown, though rapping is infrequent. In fact, none of what Yachty presents here—which includes dalliances with Parliament-indebted acid funk (“running out of time”), ’80s synthwave (“sAy sOMETHINg,” “paint THE sky”), disco (“drive ME crazy!”), symphonic prog rock (“REACH THE SUNSHINE.”), and a heady monologue called “:(failure(:”—is in any way reflective of any of Yachty’s previous output. Which begs the question, where did all of this come from? You needn’t worry about that, says Yachty on the “the ride-,” singing sternly: “Don’t ask no questions on the ride.”