NME's Best Alums of 2025... So Far

Introduced to the world as a bubbly TikTok influencer, the singer/dancer/actor spent 2024 pulling off what looked like a total reinvention—screaming over the remix of mentor Charli xcx’s “Von dutch” remix, then releasing the steamy “Diet Pepsi,” a single charming enough to seduce even the doubters. In fact, Addison Rae was just reintroducing herself. “I always knew that I wanted to make music, I knew I wanted to perform,” Rae tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “That was something that was really obvious to me since I was a little girl.” And TikTok was the best way for a teenager from Lafayette, Louisiana, to catapult herself into the seemingly inaccessible world of showbiz. Pursuing her pop-star dreams in LA studio sessions to write the songs that would become her first EP (2023’s polarizing *AR*), Rae found herself deferring to the professionals. “When I moved here and started doing sessions, I was like, ‘I need as much guidance as possible,’” she says. “Then, over time, I really started to lean on myself. I really started to lean on my abilities.” In February 2024, Rae met songwriter/producers Elvira Anderfjärd and Luka Kloser (both part of the publishing camp of Swedish pop powerhouse Max Martin) and wrote the effervescent hook of “Diet Pepsi” that same day. “\[‘Diet Pepsi’\] was such a natural beginning to all of this,” says Rae. “I think it was a perfect introduction in so many ways.” Cue a string of curveball singles, each one presenting an unexpected new facet, from the moody, minor-key “High Fashion” to the Björk-inspired “Headphones On.” It feels apt, then, that her debut album drops the “Rae” and simply goes by *Addison*—a collection of dreamy, intense pop songs that sound like self-discovery, tied together less by genre than by mood. Tracks like “Fame Is a Gun” and “Money Is Everything” expertly straddle camp and sincerity: “You’ve got a front-row seat, and I/I got a taste of the glamorous life!” she winks on the former, a dizzy synth-pop number on the perils of hitting the big time. The songs on *Addison* are not exactly club bangers, though they’re informed by Rae’s childhood as a dancer; nor are any of them obvious hits. But Rae relished the opportunity to let her creative instincts run wild. “Once you start playing it safe, feeling like, ‘Okay, I’m going to respond with what people want,’ you lose all your freedom,” she says. “You lose all desire for the whole purpose of starting it, and feeling like it’s a form of expression and a reflection. It’s more scary to let that go and give people exactly what they think they want.” As for what Rae learned in the process of writing the album? “Let yourself play. Let yourself have fun, let yourself mess up,” she says. “I’m not saying, ‘All right, this is the real me now.’ No—it’s always been the real me, and those experiences have completely guided and shaped me to where I am now. It is about arrival—arrival to who I feel like I’ve become, and who has experienced all these ups and downs, to now land here, in this person that I am now.”

Scores of Puerto Rican artists have used their music to express love and pride in their island, but few do so with the same purposeful vigor as Bad Bunny. The superstar from Vega Baja is responsible for numerous songs that center his homeland, from unofficial national anthems like “Estamos Bien” and “El Apagón” to powerful posse cuts like “ACHO PR” with veteran reggaetón luminaries Arcángel, De La Ghetto, and Ñengo Flow. More recently, he’s been decidedly direct about his passions and concerns, expressed in vivid detail on 2024’s standalone single “Una Velita.” Positioned as his sixth proper studio album, *DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS* centers Puerto Rico in his work more so than before, celebrating various musical styles within its legacy. While 2023’s *nadie sabe lo que va a pasar mañana* validated his trapero past with a more modern take on the sound he emerged with in the 2010s, this follow-up largely diverges from hip-hop, demonstrating his apparent aversion to repeating himself from album to album. Instead, house music morphs into plena on “EL CLúB,” the latter genre resurfacing later in splendorous fashion on “CAFé CON RON” with Los Pleneros de la Cresta. Befitting its title, “VOY A LLeVARTE PA PR” is set to a sleek reggaetón rhythm for prime-time perreo vibes, as is also the case for “KETU TeCRÉ” and the relatively more rugged “EoO.” A bold salsa statement, “BAILE INoLVIDABLE” pays apparent homage to some seminal Fania releases by Willie Colón and Héctor Lavoe, with traces of the instrumental interplay of “Juanito Alimaña” and an irresistible coda reminiscent to that of “Periódico de Ayer.” Regardless of style, the political and the personal thematically blur throughout the album, a new year’s gloom hanging over “PIToRRO DE COCO” and a metaphorical wound left open after the poignant “TURISTA.” As before, Bad Bunny remains an excellent and inventive collaborator, linking here primarily with other Puerto Ricans as more than a mere symbolic gesture. Sociopolitically minded indie group Chuwi join for the eclectic and vibrant “WELTiTA,” its members providing melodic vocals that both complement and magnify those of their host. Carolina natives Dei V and Omar Courtz form a formidable trio for the thumping dancehall retrofuturism of “VeLDÁ,” while RaiNao proves an exceedingly worthy duet partner on “PERFuMITO NUEVO.”

After the reception to her 2023 self-titled debut as Blondshell, it’s no surprise that Sabrina Teitelbaum’s follow-up, *If You Asked for a Picture*, came together while she was quite literally on the move. “I was touring a lot, so I was in a lot of new places and just writing about what was going on,” she tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “I didn’t have the intention of making an album, but when I got home, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to start demoing these songs.’” The resulting 12 tracks may have come together casually, but *If You Asked for a Picture* is a fuller and richer evocation of the Blondshell sound, pairing spiky ’90s alternative rock sounds with acerbic couplets. Along with longtime studio collaborator Yves Rothman (Kim Gordon, Yves Tumor), Teitelbaum adds subtle sonic flourishes to her winning sound—peep the Ronettes-recalling backbeat of “23’s a Baby” and the dream pop of closer “Model Rockets”—but her cutting and personal songwriting style remains the project’s hallmark. Who else could write an introspective exploration of living with OCD, as Teitelbaum does on the explosive “Toy,” and sneak in a withering line like, “I’ve been running this ship like the Navy/But it’s more like a Wendy’s”? As Teitelbaum’s songwriting continues to mature, Blondshell’s balance of the devastating and the deeply funny continues on as one of indie rock’s most thrilling high-wire acts.

One summer night in 2022, during a break from shooting *The Crow* reboot in Prague, FKA twigs found her way outside the city to a warehouse rave, where hundreds of strangers were dancing to loud, immersive techno. The experience snapped the English polymath (singer, dancer, songwriter, actor, force of nature) out of the intense brain fog she’d been stuck inside for years—so much so that she was moved to invent a word to describe the transcendent clarity, a portmanteau of “sex” and “euphoria” (which also sounds a bit like the Greek word used to celebrate a discovery: eureka!). *EUSEXUA*, twigs’ third studio album (and her first full-length release since her adventurous 2022 mixtape, *Caprisongs*), is not explicitly a dance record—more a love letter to dance music’s emancipating powers, channeled through the auteur’s heady, haunting signature style. The throbbing percussion from that fateful warehouse rave pulses through the record, warping according to the mood: slinky, subterranean trip-hop on the hedonistic “Girl Feels Good,” or big-room melodrama on the strobing “Room of Fools.” On the cyborgian “Drums of Death” (produced by Koreless, who worked closely alongside twigs and appears on every track), twigs evokes a short-circuiting sexbot at an after-hours rave in the Matrix, channeling sensations of hot flesh against cold metal as she implores you to “Crash the system...Serve cunt/Serve violence.” Intriguing strangers emerge from *EUSEXUA*’s sea of fog, all of them seeking the same thing twigs is—sticky, sweaty, ego-killing, rapturous catharsis.

The indie-pop band fronted by Michelle Zauner released their third album, 2021’s *Jubilee*, to massive critical acclaim and their first Grammy nomination. After spending five years writing *Crying in H Mart*, her best-selling memoir about grief, Zauner devoted the record to joy and catharsis, all triumphant horns and swooning synths. But for its follow-up, the ambitious polymath found herself drawn to darker, knottier themes—loneliness, desire, contemporary masculinity. She also gravitated to the indie-rock sounds of her past, recruiting producer and guitarist Blake Mills, known for his work with artists like Fiona Apple, Feist, and Weyes Blood. “\[For *Jubilee*\] we wanted to have bombastic, big instrumentation with lots of strings and horns; I wanted this to come back to a more guitar-oriented record,” Zauner tells Apple Music. “I think I’m going back to my roots a little bit more.” When she began to write the band’s fourth record in 2022, Zauner found inspiration in an unlikely literary juxtaposition: Greek mythology, gothic romance classics, and works that she wryly deemed as part of the “incel canon” à la Bret Easton Ellis’ *American Psycho*. From such seemingly disparate sources emerged the gorgeously bleak songs of *For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)*, whose title is presented with an implied wink, acknowledging the many women songwriters whose work is reduced to “sad girl music.” Indeed, the atmosphere on *For Melancholy Brunettes* is less straightforwardly sad, and more…well, it’s complicated. On “Leda,” the story of a strained relationship unfolds by way of Greek myths in which Zeus takes the form of a swan to seduce a Spartan queen. “Little Girl,” a deceptively sweet-sounding ballad about a father estranged from his daughter, opens with a spectacularly abject image: “Pissing in the corner of a hotel suite.” And on the fascinatingly eerie “Mega Circuit,” on which legendary drummer Jim Keltner lays down a mean shuffle, Zauner paints a twisted tableau of modern manhood—muddy ATVs, back-alley blowjobs, “incel eunuchs”—somehow managing to make it all sound achingly poetic with lines like, “Deep in the soft hearts of young boys so pissed off and jaded/Carrying dull prayers of old men cutting holier truths.” The universe Zauner conveys on *For Melancholy Brunettes* is sordid and strange, though not without beauty in the form of sublime guitar sounds or striking turns of phrase. (“I never knew I’d find my way into the arms/Of men in bars,” she sings on the wistful “Men in Bars,” which includes the album’s only feature from…Jeff Bridges?!) As for the title’s bone-dry humor—sardonically zesty castanet and tambourine add extra irony to “Winter in LA,” on which Zauner imagines herself as a happier woman, writing sweet love songs instead of…these.

Jennie Kim debuted as a K-pop performer in BLACKPINK in 2016 and released her first solo song, the finger-snapping “Solo,” two years later. But it wasn’t until her debut solo album, 2025’s *Ruby*, that she got a more profound chance to self-reflect through her music. “The greatest part of this solo project for me was that I had time with myself,” JENNIE tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “I really got to dig deep inside of who I am and what I am.” The 15-track, primarily English-language album was JENNIE’s first music release since leaving YG Entertainment as a soloist to launch her own label, Odd Atelier, and it’s a declaration of her musical identity as a solo singer and rapper. The album’s name, *Ruby*, is a reference to the alter ego (Jennie Ruby Jane) that the musician created for herself when she moved to New Zealand by herself as a child to learn English. “When I was like 11,” she says, “I knew that I wanted to create this identity for myself, like ‘Jennie’ wasn\'t doing justice for me, and I was like, ‘I want a longer name.’” The persona has carried over into adulthood and her creative expression on *Ruby*. From the hip-hop-driven swagger of tracks like “like JENNIE,” “ExtraL,” and “Damn Right” to confessional-style songs like “F.T.S.,” “twin,” and “start a war,” JENNIE opens up about fame, protecting the ones she loves, and staying true to herself. She taps an eclectic cadre of established and rising Western musicians for help, including Childish Gambino and Kali Uchis (“Damn Right”), Doechii (“ExtraL”), Dominic Fike (“Love Hangover”), FKJ (“JANE”), and Dua Lipa (“Handlebars”). “Now, I\'m not afraid to challenge myself,” JENNIE says of what she learned in the album-creation process. “Understanding my value was the biggest lesson.”

“That is who Lady Gaga is to me,” Lady Gaga tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe of creating *MAYHEM*. “Maybe to someone else, it might be the Meat Dress or something that I did that they remember as me. But for me, I always want to be remembered for being a real artist and someone that cares so much.” In that vein, Gaga set out to make her latest album—which she calls her “favorite record in a long time”—its own thing. “*ARTPOP* was a vibe. *Joanne* was a sound. *Chromatica* had a sound. All different. *The Fame Monster* was more chaotic. *The Fame* was theatrical pop. *Born This Way*, to me, had more of a metal/electro New York vibe to it,” she says. “I actually made the effort making *MAYHEM* to not do that and not try to give my music an outfit, but instead to allow myself to be influenced by everything.” Indeed, *MAYHEM* traverses—and oftentimes melds—the various flavors of Mother Monster’s career, from the disco scene of her earliest work to her singer-songwriter era and back again. The opening tracks, singles “Disease” and “Abracadabra,” revisit dance-floor Gaga to thrilling fanfare. The spirited “Garden of Eden” follows the trend of what she calls “2000 throwbacks.” With its sparkly synths, “LoveDrug” might be seen as the brighter and shinier elder sibling of her early cut “LoveGame.” She even specifically admits the “electro-grunge influence” seeps its way in—especially apparent in “Perfect Celebrity,” “Vanish into You,” and “The Beast.” The latter even shows shades of *Joanne*, but “Blade of Grass” and her Bruno Mars duet “Die with a Smile” really put her former folk-pop-rock persona on display. It’s also all incredibly personal to her. “The album is a series of gothic dreams,” she says. “I say it’s like images of the past that haunt me, and they somehow find their way into who I am today.” Below, Gaga takes us through several tracks, in her own words. **“Abracadabra”** “I think I didn’t want to make this kind of music for a long time, even though I had it in me. And I think ‘Abracadabra’ is very much my sound—something that I honed in \[on\] after many years, and I wanted to do it again. I felt like being stagnant was just death in my artistry. And I just really wanted to constantly be a student. Not just reinvent myself, but learn something new with every record. And that wasn’t always what people wanted from me, but that’s what I wanted from me. And it’s the thing that I’m the most probably proud of, if I look back on my career, is I know how much I grew from record to record and how authentic it all was. The thing that was most important to me was being a student of music, above everything else.” **“Perfect Celebrity”** “It’s super angry: ‘I’ve become a notorious being/Find my clone, she’s asleep on the ceiling.’ It’s almost comical, this idea that any time I’m in the room with anyone, there’s me—Stefani—and Lady Gaga asleep on the ceiling, and I have to figure out which body to be in. It’s kind of intense, but that song, that was an important song on this album because it didn’t feel honest to me on *MAYHEM* to exclude something that had that kind of anger in it because then it felt like I was trying to be a good girl or whatever and be something that I’m not actually. Part of my personal mayhem is that I have joy and celebration, but I’m also sometimes angry or super sad or really celebratory or completely insecure and have no confidence.” **“Shadow of a Man”** “That song is so much a response to my career and what it always felt like to be the only girl in the room a lot of the time. And to always be standing in the shadow of a man because there were so many around me that I learned how to dance in that shadow.” **“The Beast”** “In that record, it is me or someone singing to their lover who’s a werewolf, but what I believe about this is, this record is also about \[my fiancé\] Michael \[Polansky\] and I, and that this song is also about me and being Lady Gaga. What the beast is, who I become when I’m onstage, and who I am when I make my art and the prechorus of that song is, ‘You can’t hide who you are. 11:59, your heart’s racing, you’re growling, and we both know why.’ It’s like somebody that is saying to the beast, ‘I know you’re a monster, but I can handle you, and I love you.’” **“Blade of Grass”** “Michael asked me how I would want him to propose to me one day. We were in our backyard, and I said, ‘Just take a blade of grass and wrap it around my finger,’ and then I wrote ‘Blade of Grass’ because I remembered the way his face looked, and I remembered the grass in the backyard, and I remember thinking he should use that really long grass that’s in the center of the backyard. Those moments, to me, at a certain point I was into the idea of fame and artifice and being the conductor of your own life when it came to your own inner sense of fame. I had to fight a lot harder to make music and dance a little bit later into my career because my life became so different that I didn’t have as much life around me to inspire me.”

In the two and a half years since 2022’s *NO THANK YOU*, Little Simz attempted to write its follow-up four times, to no avail. From the outside, the London native was at the top of her game. Since 2021’s game-changing fourth album, *Sometimes I Might Be Introvert*, she’d won a Mercury Prize, owned the Glastonbury stage, and earned a spot among the power players of UK rap. But privately, her personal life was imploding. In 2025, word spread of the lawsuit Simz had filed against Inflo, the childhood friend and longtime collaborator who’d produced her last three albums. The split left the rapper at a loss, as she recounts on “Lonely”: “Sitting in the studio with my head in my hands/Thinking what am I to do with this music I can’t write?” From this turmoil, the 31-year-old musician arrived at a breakthrough that manifests on her sixth album, *Lotus*—named for the flower that thrives in muddy waters. Here Simz pulls no punches on the topic of her former friend, snarling her way through the bluesy opener “Thief” (“This person I’ve known my whole life, coming like the devil in disguise”) and the eerie “Flood,” produced by Miles Clinton James with cameos from Nigerian British pop star Obongjayar and South Africa’s Moonchild Sanelly. But the mood lifts on tracks like “Young,” a bit of post-punk method rapping on being dumb, broke, and alive (“A bottle of Rio and some chicken and chips/In my fuck-me-up pumps and my Winehouse quiff”), and on “Free,” a jazzy boom-bap meditation on love versus fear, on which Simz reaches a cathartic conclusion: “Love is every time I put pen to the page.”

The thing about desire is it relies on the not-having of the thing you want; then sometimes you get it, and the whole game changes. In the case of Lucy Dacus—the dreamy singer-songwriter and guitarist, best known these days as one-third of indie-rock supergroup boygenius—the conundrum could apply to any number of current-life situations, among them her unexpected success as a Grammy-winning rock god. “I think that through boygenius, it felt like, ‘Well, what else? I don’t want more than this,’” Dacus tells Apple Music. “I feel like I’ve been very career-oriented because I’ve just wanted to play music, satisfy my own drive, and make things that I can be proud of. Getting Grammys and stuff, I’m like, ‘Well, I guess that’s the end of the line. What is my life about?’” On her fourth solo album, *Forever Is a Feeling*, Dacus takes a heartfelt stab at answering that question, and in doing so, opens another desire-related can of worms. While the record explores the intoxicating, confusing, fleeting qualities of romance, it simultaneously functions as a fan-fic-worthy relationship reveal. (She went public with her relationship with boygenius bandmate Julien Baker weeks before the album’s release.) On *Forever*, Dacus dives headfirst into the implied complications, recruiting co-producer Blake Mills for subversive, swooning folk-pop numbers that revel in the mysteries of love, and what precedes it. Dacus’ songwriting has always been vulnerable, though perhaps never this much, nor in this way. “What if we don’t touch?” she begins the super-sexy “Ankles” by proposing—instead, she imagines hypothetical bitten shoulders, pulled hair, crossword puzzles finished together the morning after. (“It’s about not being able to get what you want,” Dacus says of the song. “You want to get them in bed, but you also want to wake up with them in the morning and have sweet, intimate moments, and you can’t. So, you just have to use your imagination about what that might be like.”) She explores the in-between stages of a relationship on the wispy “For Keeps,” takes a quiet road trip through the mountains with her partner on “Talk,” and on “Big Deal,” she wonders to a star-crossed lover if things could ever go back to how it was before, though the climactic final chorus suggests otherwise. Writing *Forever* brought Dacus closer to an answer to the question she posed to herself earlier, and she doesn’t care how cheesy it may sound. “I want my life to be about love,” she explained to Apple Music. “It feels corny to say. But that’s part of what this project is—the idea that talking about love is corny. I don’t think love is all you need, but I do think you need it amongst everything else.”

Momma’s follow-up to their 2022 breakthrough album, *Household Name*, opens with the pair skewering a freshly abandoned ex with the line “I love you to death/But I’m outside the door.” No emotion is off-limits for Brooklyn-based songwriting duo Etta Friedman and Allegra Weingarten (now expanded to a quartet including guitarist, composer, and producer Aron Kobayashi Ritch and drummer Preston Fulks), who’ve created a breakup album full of spiky lyrics and sing-along hooks. “It’s written from the perspective of two people we hurt, so it’s kinda looking at ourselves in a critical lens, which was a really interesting exercise,” Friedman tells Apple Music. “I think it captures the turmoil of us moving on, and these people feeling left behind. The inner struggle of, ‘These people are important to us. I love them, but our lives are growing apart, and I’m changing, so I have to move on.’” *Welcome to My Blue Sky* gave Momma a new spark and a deeper songwriting chemistry that naturally evolved from being such close friends. “I definitely think we wanted to not make a *Household Name* round two, so we were trying to push ourselves to find new things that would excite us,” says Friedman. “With Allegra and I writing these songs with just the two of us on acoustic, it actually allowed more room to play.” Weingarten agrees that their close friendship takes away any hint of self-consciousness that could hamper their creativity. “We’re so connected as songwriters and also friends, there’s a lot less time wasted trying to figure something out on the spot,” she says. “It all came together super fast because when it’s just Etta and I, we can try anything. We learned to trust our intuition and followed that.” From the ’90s slacker sing-along of “I Want You (Fever)” to a nostalgic trip to the grungy dance floor on “Last Kiss,” it’s the sound of a band maturing and moving on up.

Since blowing up on TikTok in 2021, the English singer-producer has balanced polished pop ambitions with DIY experimentation. On one hand, dreamy wisps of drum and bass and garage that clocked in at under two minutes; on the other, runaway megahits like “Boy’s a liar” and its subsequent Ice Spice remix. It’s a line PinkPantheress has trod deftly between her debut mixtape, 2021’s *to hell with it*, and her first studio album, 2023’s *Heaven knows*. “Half of me really wants to be a very recognized and one day iconic musician,” she tells Apple Music. “And then part of me is also like, being an unsung hero seems cool, too.” She maintains the balance on her sophomore mixtape, *Fancy That*—at once slick and eccentric, nostalgic and new, crisp but not too clean. Here she channels the euphoria of ’90s big-beat heavy-hitters like Fatboy Slim or Basement Jaxx, the latter of whom she samples frequently throughout (most pointedly on “Romeo,” a nod to the UK duo’s 2001 hit of the same name). Basement Jaxx’s first album, *Remedy*, was a major source of inspiration. “It blew me away, and I felt things that I hadn’t felt before,” she says. She’s honed her knack for reinterpretation since. “Stars” features her second sample of Just Jack’s “Starz in Their Eyes” (she previously used it on 2021’s “Attracted to You”), and on “Tonight,” she flips a 2008 Panic! At the Disco cut into a swooning house number. Tying it together are her ethereal vocals, cooing sweet nothings across the pond over a bassline from The Dare on “Stateside”: “Never met a British girl, you say?” As for where she stands on the superstar/unsung hero spectrum, she’s willing to tilt in favor of the latter at the moment. “I’m very happy to have an album that is way more pensive and less appealing to virality,” she says. “The first project was underdeveloped, but hype and hard and cool. Second project was well done, cohesive. I’ve proved I can do both. Now I can go and do exactly what I want.”

It was during a time-out after the whirlwind success of his 2019 debut *Hypersonic Missiles* and its 2021 follow-up *Seventeen Going Under* that Sam Fender realized what his third album needed to be. Those two records had made the singer-songwriter from Northeast England one of the breakthrough artists of the past decade, a homegrown superstar who’d gone from playing local venues to stadiums and now had a pair of BRIT Awards sitting on his mantelpiece. But Fender had felt a little rushed making *Seventeen Going Under* and he was determined that it wouldn’t happen again, no matter how long it took. Allied to that, he also wanted to hold to a simple and concise aim. “When writing the past two albums I started with a clear goal and concept, but towards the end of recording it always morphed into something else—at least for me it did,” Fender told Apple Music when announcing *People Watching* in November 2024. “I wanted to go in there and write good songs; not think about some grandiose overblown message, just 10/11 good songs about ordinary people.” His patience paid off. *People Watching* is Fender’s most perfectly realized release to date. Its title neatly sums up the emotional connection at the heart of the 30-year-old’s music and his supernatural gift for wrapping everyday tales in an exhilarating, euphoric release. It’s still his beloved hometown that remains the primary focus but in Fender’s dexterous hands, the place has become a prism through which he sings about grief, family, mental health, poverty, homelessness, the government, and more. Sonically, *People Watching* is the most sumptuous work of his career, one that builds on the bounding, Springsteen-style expanse and emerges with a technicolor indie-rock masterpiece stacked with another raft of killer choruses for the masses to sing along to. Fender nodded to his love of The War on Drugs on *Seventeen Going Under* and here he goes one step further, enlisting the band’s mercurial leader Adam Granduciel as co-producer alongside Markus Dravs (Coldplay, Arcade Fire, Florence + the Machine). Nothing here is overloaded. Even at its most epic, there’s an intricacy and airiness about these songs, Granduciel’s synth flourishes adding a dynamic counterpoint to Fender’s rousing hooks. It’s a record of many shapes and textures, taking in the urgent classic rock of the title track, yearning anthems (“Little Bit Closer”), contemplative Americana with a bit of a swagger about it (“Wild Long Lie”), and wistful ’80s pop (“Crumbling Empire”). At its best, it pairs his love of US heartland rock with an Oasis-style jubilance. In its minor chord acoustic strums, “Chin Up” even has echoes of “Wonderwall” about it. But it’s hard to imagine Noel and Liam attempting a song like “Remember My Name,” the stirring, stark closer made up of nothing but Fender’s vocals and the moving horns of the Easington Colliery Band, an emotive salute to his northeast roots and a song that places Sam Fender out there on his own. *People Watching* may well be the sound of an artist entering his imperial phase.

Samia’s third album, *Bloodless*, sounds as if someone’s opened a nearby window, allowing for a gush of fresh air to carry Samia Finnerty’s voice into the skies. The 28-year-old Minneapolis-based singer-songwriter’s follow-up to 2023’s *Honey* feels lithe and buoyant even at its most emotionally weighty. At times—the slinky “Lizard,” the echo-laden swell of “Sacred,” the thicket of woodwinds and vocals that run through closing track “Pants”—Samia recalls the ethereal New Wave of British pop-rock phenom The Japanese House, or the timeless bounce of Fleetwood Mac. At the center of such gestures is Samia’s close-to-the-bone lyricism, which continues to convey her pitch-perfect sly humor; atop the stormy strums and electronic frissons of “North Poles,” she wraps her bell-clear voice around evocations of “spyware lipstick” and fistfuls of natural wine before lobbing a grenade of reflection at the listener’s feet: “When you see yourself in someone/How can you look at them?”

“Will you listen?” Sleep Token vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Vessel asks on “Look to Windward,” the opening track from the band’s fourth album. Once again, the masked British phenoms seamlessly blend genres as the song goes from *Kid A*-era Radiohead to modern R&B to cinematic strings to an explosive metal riff. By now, fans have come to expect these kinds of dramatic shifts from the anonymous group, but *Even in Arcadia* isn’t just more of the same. It’s an expansion, the widening of an already impressive palette. “Emergence” offers the gospel refrain “Go ahead and wrap your arms around me” before Vessel raps over a loop of a trilling guitar and then weaves in and out of a beefy nu metal riff. “Dangerous” is probably the closest Sleep Token has come to pure Deftones, a band they’ve referenced, sonically and melodically, on previous albums. “Past Self” takes a more straight-ahead R&B approach, but with a vocal melody that echoes back on itself to create a disorienting stereo effect. Melancholy single “Damocles” references classic Greek mythology and seems to address Vessel’s personal struggles with fame and staying anonymous: “Nobody told me I’d get tired of myself/When it all looks like heaven, but it feels like hell.” “Caramel” might have a similar theme (“Wear me out like Prada, devil in my detail,” Vessel sings), but does it with a syncopated xylophone rhythm that drops into another Chino Moreno-like vocal melody over a tsunami of distorted guitars and a purgative nu metal beatdown. “Provider” channels neo-soul master D’Angelo as Vessel manages to rhyme “ICU” with “I see you” before the full-metal bridge kicks in. Closer “Infinite Baths” unfurls like an extended meditation in the eye of the storm until the inevitable screaming metal barrage—the longest and most ferocious on the album—takes over. And then it fades into the shadows again, just like the band itself.

For their second album, Canadian metalcore phenoms Spiritbox found inspiration at home. In fact, vocalist Courtney LaPlante and guitarist Mike Stringer’s home island of Victoria, British Columbia, *was* the inspiration. “When we were trying to get this band off the ground, we were feeling really stuck and hopeless,” LaPlante tells Apple Music. “I was thinking back to that time, and it brought back this subconscious dread, because we’re near all the scary tectonic plates on the West Coast. Since we were little kids, everyone’s been telling us about how ‘the big one’ is coming.” Of course, a massive earthquake at sea would cause a massive tsunami. “A tsunami is a horrible natural disaster that can’t be helped, but imagine if the entire ocean was a tsunami, not just one small part of it,” LaPlante offers. “It felt like such an over-the-top, perfect example of the drama you feel when you’re depressed. And that was my mental state at the time. But even saying I was depressed is embarrassing to me because I’ve achieved the life I’ve always wanted to achieve, so it feels like a moral failing to be depressed. In that way, the album became a score for my life.” Below, she comments on each song. **“Fata Morgana”** “When Michael and \[producer\] Dan \[Braunstein\] were making this at our house, I was frantically cleaning the bathroom while our puppy was taking a nap, because I knew I only had about 30 minutes before he’d wake up. But I could hear everything they were doing, and Michael just started playing this hypnotizing riff. Right away, I knew it was the intro track and the mission statement for the whole record. I started writing in my head right there in the bathroom. I thought, ‘My god, I cannot wait to walk out onstage to this song.’ The other fun fact about this one is that the vocal pattern was inspired by Busta Rhymes.” **“Black Rainbow”** “One of the reasons I wanted to call this song ‘Black Rainbow’ is because the director \[Panos Cosmatos\] that made *Beyond the Black Rainbow* is from our island. He moved here as a teenager, like I did, and I’ve just always felt a bit of camaraderie with anyone that’s left the island—people like Pamela Anderson and Nelly Furtado. But that movie was very disturbing to me, and it’s basically about someone dropped into something where they become completely disoriented. Which is how I feel sometimes.” **“Perfect Soul”** “This song feels very pop to me, though I never intended it to be that way. It’s very sincere and dramatic. It’s a song about someone who’s kind of saying, ‘You’ve taken everything from me. There’s nothing more to take, so just leave me here.’ It’s a relationship that’s so far gone that there’s nothing we can do to repair it. Instead of having a traditional breakdown like we’d normally do, this one is cool because Michael uses an EBow on his guitar and takes a full minute to bend a note. It’s a bit of an homage to one of his favorite artists, Cloudkicker, and it’s one of my favorite parts of the album.” **“Keep Sweet”** “I moved to the island from Alabama when I was 15. In Alabama, I was around people that were very conservative and extremely traditional. More so than the friends I made in Canada, I think I was exposed to how religion is used to subjugate women. I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of ‘keeping sweet,’ which is something that exists throughout different types of Christianity and other religions. It basically just means that women need to maintain their femininity, which in our society is softness, kindness, and empathy—but also humbleness and meekness. It’s kind of a mantra that’s repeated to us. We’re socialized to be complacent, which is what the song is about.” **“Soft Spine”** “I don’t really know the people that are part of my peer group. I don’t go to parties and meet people and hang out and stuff. But there’s so many nasty people in the music industry, and they probably know who I am, but they probably don’t know that I think they’re bad people and I don’t want to know them. This song is saying ‘fuck you’ to them. It’s my fantasy of having the leverage and power to negatively impact their wallets. I can’t beat anybody up or kick anyone’s ass, but the narrator in the song can, and they’re not scared to do it.” **“Tsunami Sea”** “I love this song so much. Before there were lyrics, I knew this one would be the title song. But I wanted to think of a more intimate reason for the album to be called *Tsunami Sea* that I could use for this song—rather than just the big, bold, theatrical idea of a natural disaster destroying everything. Here, it’s a metaphor to explain panic attacks or when you’re so sad and depressed and low, and you can’t stop crying. I thought about how many teardrops it would take to fill up a whole ocean of tsunamis. I’m using that to destroy everything and drown myself rather than deal with my problems.” **“A Haven with Two Faces”** “Conceptually, the haven with two faces is our town. It makes you unique and creative and different because you have to overcome a lot to get off the island and be an artist, but at the same time, it really hinders you because you just feel misunderstood. It’s extra weird living here because of the physical isolation combined with the normal isolation that you might feel. It’s got that small-town feeling, but then you can’t drive out of it. At the same time, it’s a beautiful place to grow up.” **“No Loss, No Love”** “On this song, I’m imagining a person in the middle of the ocean on a life raft. It’s after the tsunami has destroyed everything. They have no food, no drink. Everything they love is gone. But it’s the eye of the storm, so everything seems calm and safe. It’s like a person who feels secure in their mental health even though they stopped taking their medication. It’s that false clarity you feel when you’ve been deep, deep down and now all your endorphins and serotonin are shooting back up. The person on the raft thinks they see an abundant island, a safe place to get off, but it’s actually dangerous.” **“Crystal Roses”** “This is a gentler version of the scariness of ‘No Loss, No Love.’ You’re floating across the ocean, thinking, ‘Whatever will be will be.’ All these mystical elements of the supernatural world are beckoning the raft this way or that way. Michael wrote this because he wanted to make something completely out of left field, and the drum loop just put me in a trance. One of the things I’ve been wanting to do for a couple years now is to use a live formant to pitch my voice up and down in real time. I like it because it takes any gender out of my voice. Is it a guy? A girl? Is it me? You can’t tell.” **“Ride the Wave”** “When I heard Michael and Dan working on the chorus, I knew I had to get my Jimmy Eat World on. I love that band, but our bass player, Josh \[Gilbert\], is the ultra-mega Jimmy Eat World stan. When he joined the band, that’s one of the ways we really bonded. He knows all the lore, so I’ve learned more about Jimmy Eat World in the last two years than I had ever known in my life. One of the things I love about that band is that the harmony vocal is just as important as the melody. So, the chorus of this is my voice and Josh’s voice together, and the harmony isn’t just supportive.” **“Deep End”** “This song was originally called ‘Deep Dish.’ We wrote the first half years ago, when we were working on our *Rotoscope* EP. Afterwards, we went out and celebrated with deep-dish pizza at a spot down the road from the studio. Towards the end of the meal, we were like, ‘What are we going to name the song?’ We looked at our food and agreed: ‘Deep Dish.’ And this song is the final goodbye for the album. It’s about a person making all these excuses for their own shortcomings, tying themselves down with it and admitting defeat. It’s a very sad song, but it’s uplifting musically. It’s got my favorite riff that Michael has ever made.”

Turnstile is hardly the first band raised in a tight-knit DIY hardcore punk scene to graduate to big-tent popularity and grapple with what that success should look like. For the Baltimore-based five-piece, a stint opening for blink-182’s 2023 reunion tour served as a hands-on apprenticeship. “That summer was definitely a master class of existing in that space,” Turnstile bassist Franz Lyons tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “Riding with blink, they’re great people, but also their supporting cast—everything they do behind the scenes is very sharp, and it was cool to be in a situation where you have to learn how to mend your creative way to a different lens.” These lessons all came in handy in the making of their fourth album, *NEVER ENOUGH*, which doubles down on the genre-expanding—and, subsequently, audience-expanding—twists of 2021’s breakthrough *GLOW ON* and throws in an ambitious visual-album component that ties all 14 songs together. Among those songs are not just the tuneful, heavy midtempo anthems like the title track and “DULL” and hopped-up hardcore like “BIRDS” and “SUNSHOWER” that made *GLOW ON* stand out, but even bolder stylistic gambits like “I CARE” and “SEEIN’ STARS,” which channel The Smiths and The Police, respectively. The nearly seven-minute centerpiece “LOOK OUT FOR ME” somehow seems to incorporate bits of all of these at once. For singer Brendan Yates, who also produced the album, this is all part of a more thoughtful, confident, and collaborative approach to songwriting that was certainly helped by the luxury of having more time—and more resources—to let ideas evolve. “If there is a song that’s just very simple and you’re like, ‘This doesn’t sound like anything we’ve ever done, and maybe people are going to hate this, but the intangible is really there for me right now,’” he says. “So it’s like embracing that.” And sometimes trying new and more daring things also means throwing all those away in the end. Yates cites the album-closing “MAGIC MAN” as a song that began as a demo with just himself and a synth, expanded and contracted through many more iterations, and ultimately wound up as…just himself and a synth. Turnstile credits their versatility and trust in one another to having spent half their lives in Baltimore’s punk scene learning instruments on the fly, playing in multiple bands at once, and innately understanding the importance of community. These lessons, too, come in handy as the band begins to find themselves headlining the kinds of venues—possibly with pit-unfriendly seats—where they very recently were guests. What looks from the outside like complex ambition really is, from the band’s vantage point, little more than close friends with shared history indulging one another’s biggest swings. “When trust is your really big element that makes things function easily, that involves people’s happiness, too,” says Yates. “And being able to just be happy to do what you’re doing and be happy looking forward to what you’re about to do, it requires a certain amount of willingness to throw yourself into the deep end.”

“What is your definition of home?” Wretch 32 asks Apple Music. “Is it where you come from, where you belong, or something deeper than that?” When it came to creating his seventh album, *HOME?*, celebrated London rapper Wretch 32 decided to turn inwards and tackle those deep questions. Inspired by his family’s history of migration from Jamaica to the UK as part of the Windrush generation and equally enraged by the British Government’s treatment of that generation during the Windrush scandal, Wretch took to the studio to express the musical milestones that make up his myriad understandings of home. The result is 15 expansive tracks that traverse everything from the laid-back Afrobeats of “Like Home” to reggae on “Bridge Is Burning,” the soulful backing of “Windrush,” and R&B romance of “Little Things.” Features, meanwhile, come from grime contemporaries like Kano and Ghetts, as well as international stars Skip Marley, Teni, and Protoje. “I wanted to make sure that everything sounded and felt like the same textures of music I had growing up in my house,” Wretch says. “That’s all the music that got me to where I am today—it’s the sound of home.” Read on for his in-depth thoughts on the album, track by track. **“Transitional Chapter”** “Drum ’n’ bass is an integral part of my upbringing and heritage in the UK, so it was an honor to get Goldie’s blessing to resing this iconic sample from ‘Inner City Life’ as a way to start the record. I like an intro on an album that feels like a first scene in a film—it’s a space where I can speak about what the album is going to be and where I’m at.” **“Seven Seater” (feat. Ghetts & Mercston)** “When I made this instrumental with my live band we called it ‘Beast Mode’ because it was so venomous it reminded me of the pirate radio days where people would freestyle over a similar energy. It made me reach out to my brethren Mercston and Ghetts, and Mercs created this amazing intro and outro while, with Ghetts, we went in and out line for line, which feels nostalgic but it’s over a sound you’re not used to us being on.” **“Like Home” (feat. Teni)** “When I used to be at home as a kid listening to music, it always felt so good, and that’s the feeling I could capture most closely with the Afrobeats instrumental on this track. Whenever I listen to Afrobeats, it brings me back to a vibe of R&B, reggae, or rap songs with singers on the chorus—it evokes so many fusions. Everyone who listens to this one says it makes them feel good too!” **“Nesta Marley” (feat. Skip Marley)** “At this point in the album, it felt important to segue to the Caribbean and, when we did, I knew I had to include extracts from the legend himself, Robert Nesta Marley, as well as featuring his grandson Skip. It feels like the most colorful tune on the album, something listeners might not be used to hearing me on.” **“Bridge Is Burning” (feat. Protoje)** “By track five we’ve already transitioned through so many cultures. For this one, I was thinking about being in the hills in Jamaica when a rasta passes away and they play the Nyabinghi drums at the funeral. It feels spiritual and I wanted to evoke that same sensation, so I knew we needed someone from that background to feature. I’m a massive fan of Protoje, and he slotted in perfectly.” **“Me & Mine” (feat. WSTRN)** “The record gets quite deep so before we go there, this is a track to keep the mood bright, bringing the worlds of Afro and rap together. Growing up, my dad would play his music in the front room, my mum in her room, my sisters in theirs, and me in mine, with every space being like another room in a nightclub. Each song on the album similarly takes you into those different places.” **“Home Sweet Home” (feat. Kano)** “Now we get deeper. The idea for this song came about when I was talking to my exec producer about how, when I lived in a run-down estate in Tottenham, we knew all our neighbors and shared things even though it could be dangerous there—whereas, when I moved to a plush estate in Barnet, you’d be lucky if someone held the door for you. I wanted to explore this idea of community and I knew Kano would be perfect for it. I reached out, and he executed incredibly.” **“Home Is Where the Heart Is Interlude”** “I love an interlude on an album as it gives me the chance to sound different and use skits or play with my voice. This is an interlude where we piece together everything that’s happened before we transition into something different.” **“Black and British” (feat. Little Simz & Benjamin A.D)** “‘Black and British’ is what it says on the tin—it’s a track speaking about my life and upbringing, the trials and tribulations of how I got to where I am. I knew I needed a female perspective on being Black and British also, since everything needs a woman’s touch, and there was no one else I’d trust more than Simz. It’s a track that ultimately set the tone for the whole album.” **“Windrush” (feat. Cashh & tendai)** “The Windrush scandal and the injustice of how the British Government treated the Windrush generation was the initial inspiration for the whole album. I wanted to imagine what the journey to the UK might have been like from different perspectives and Cashh was integral to this because he’s a young person who’s been deported from the UK to Jamaica and has then managed to come back. He has experience and depth and he gave so much in his verse.” **“Little Things” (feat. Angel)** “I have one of these types of song on every project, like ‘6 Words’ \[from 2016’s *Growing Over Life*\] or ‘Don’t Go’ \[on 2011’s *Black and White*\], since I’m always trying to make that song you could play as your first dance at your wedding. It has a touch of reggae and dub to it and is a track built off sentiment. Angel nailed the chorus feature on this, and it’s one I know my parents will love too!” **“Peace & Love” (feat. Skrapz)** “Peace and love is the ultimate goal—if you have that, you’re free. When I was writing this, I was thinking about what peace and love might sound like on an instrumental. Once we had this backing, I wanted to get Skrapz involved, partly because you’d never normally hear him on something like this. I love doing that with a feature and getting people to step out of their comfort zone.” **“God’s Work” (feat. AV Allure)** “When I first heard this instrumental, it felt so alarming and so urgent and intriguing. I love when I can list off words like that right after listening to an instrumental. The track is ultimately about how I live off faith and I’m still yearning to be better after all that I’ve been through.” **“Close to Home / Nino SLG Interlude”** “I’ve had my eye on Nino SLG for a while, as he partly reminds me of a younger version of myself. Like with Skrapz, I wanted to get him out of his comfort zone and get him sounding different on this track. It also features a clip of a video recording of my christening, which ended up in a documentary about the 1985 riots on the Tottenham Broadwater Farm estate. My father and uncle were activists, and I’m trying to tap into that energy on the album also.” **“Feels” (feat. Tiggs Da Author)** “This is one of those tunes where you can’t help but get in your feelings, and so it felt like a great way to end because the last verse is where I’m just saying everything I feel, summarizing the whole story of the project—this huge journey through cultures and lives we’ve just been on.”