Noisey's 100 Best Albums of 2019

Part of the fun of listening to Lana Del Rey’s ethereal lullabies is the sly sense of humor that brings them back down to earth. Tucked inside her dreamscapes about Hollywood and the Hamptons are reminders—and celebrations—of just how empty these places can be. Here, on her sixth album, she fixes her gaze on another place primed for exploration: the art world. Winking and vivid, *Norman F\*\*\*\*\*g Rockwell!* is a conceptual riff on the rules that govern integrity and authenticity from an artist who has made a career out of breaking them. In a 2018 interview with Apple Music\'s Zane Lowe, Del Rey said working with songwriter Jack Antonoff (who produced the album along with Rick Nowels and Andrew Watt) put her in a lighter mood: “He was so *funny*,” she said. Their partnership—as seen on the title track, a study of inflated egos—allowed her to take her subjects less seriously. \"It\'s about this guy who is such a genius artist, but he thinks he’s the shit and he knows it,” she said. \"So often I end up with these creative types. They just go on and on about themselves and I\'m like, \'Yeah, yeah.\' But there’s merit to it also—they are so good.” This paradox becomes a theme on *Rockwell*, a canvas upon which she paints with sincerity and satire and challenges you to spot the difference. (On “The Next Best American Record,” she sings, “We were so obsessed with writing the next best American record/’Cause we were just that good/It was just that good.”) Whether she’s wistfully nostalgic or jaded and detached is up for interpretation—really, everything is. The album’s finale, “hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have - but I have it,” is packaged like a confessional—first-person, reflective, sung over simple piano chords—but it’s also flamboyantly cinematic, interweaving references to Sylvia Plath and Slim Aarons with anecdotes from Del Rey\'s own life to make us question, again, what\'s real. When she repeats the phrase “a woman like me,” it feels like a taunt; she’s spent the last decade mixing personas—outcast and pop idol, debutante and witch, pinup girl and poet, sinner and saint—ostensibly in an effort to render them all moot. Here, she suggests something even bolder: that the only thing more dangerous than a complicated woman is one who refuses to give up.

In a lot of ways, you can map Alex Giannascoli’s story onto a broader story of music and art in the 2010s. Born outside Philadelphia in 1993, he started self-releasing albums online while still in high school, building a small but devoted cult that scrutinized his collage-like indie folk like it was scripture. His music got denser, more expressive, and more accomplished, he signed to venerated indie label Domino, and he worked with Frank Ocean, all—more or less—without leaving his bedroom. In other words, Giannascoli didn’t have to leave his dream-hive to find an audience; he brought his audience in, and on his terms, too. “Something I can never stress enough is I try and explain this stuff, but it never accurately reflects the process,” Giannascoli tells Apple Music, “because I’m not actually thinking that much when I’m doing it.” Recorded in the same building-block fashion as his previous albums (and with the same home studio setup), *House of Sugar* represents a new peak for Giannascoli—not just as a songwriter, but as a producer who can spin peculiar moods out of combinations that don’t make any immediate sense. It can be blissful (“Walk Away”), it can be ominous (“Sugar”), it can be grounded one minute (“Cow,” “Hope,” “Southern Sky”) and abstract the next (“Near,” “Project 2”)—a range that gives the overall experience the disjointed, saturated feeling of a half-remembered dream. Often, the prettier the music is, the bleaker the lives of the characters in the lyrics get, whether it’s the drug casualty of “Hope” or the gamblers of “SugarHouse,” who keep coming back to the tables no matter how often they lose—a contrast, Giannascoli says, that was inspired in part by the 2018 sci-fi film *Annihilation*. “From afar, everything looks bright and beautiful,” he says, “but the closer you get, the more violent it becomes.” Despite his rising profile, Giannascoli tries to remain intuitive, following inspiration whenever it shows up, keeping what he calls “that lens” on whenever possible. “I never say to myself, ‘This isn’t where I thought \[the music\] was going to go,’” he says. “Because usually I don’t have that thought in mind to begin with. And I never really end up getting surprised, because the music is unfolding before me as I make it.”

House of Sugar— Alex G’s ninth overall album and his third for Domino — emerges as his most meticulous, cohesive album yet: a statement of artistic purpose, showing off his ear for both persistent earworms and sonic adventurism.

“A real-ass n\*gga from the 305/I was raised off of Trina, Trick, Rick, and Plies,” Denzel Curry says on “CAROLMART.” Since his days as a member of Raider Klan, the Miami MC has made it a point to forge a path distinct from the influences he shouts out here. But with *ZUU*, Curry’s fourth studio album, he returns to the well from which he sprang. The album is conspicuously street-life-oriented; Curry paints a picture of a Miami he certainly grew up in, but also one rap fans may not have associated him with previously. Within *ZUU*, there are references to the city’s storied history as a drug haven (“BIRDZ”), odes to Curry’s family (“RICKY”), and retellings of his personal come-up (“AUTOMATIC”), along with a unique exhibition of Miami slang on “YOO.” Across it all, Curry is the verbose, motormouthed MC he made his name as, a profile that is especially recognizable on the album closer “P.A.T.,” where he dips in and out of a bevy of flows over the kind of scuzzy, lo-fi production that set the table for another generation of South Florida rap stars.

Ari Lennox is Dreamville’s resident singer-songwriter, rounding out the label\'s hip-hop-heavy lineup with rich, midtempo soul birthed from basslines, melody, wind instruments, and supreme heartbreak. “I never thought I\'d make money off of soul music,” the Washington, DC-based singer told Beats 1’s Ebro. “I always thought I\'d have to be this pop artist or make this super hit, but no.” Lennox was discovered after putting her music up online, signing with Dreamville in 2015. She\'s contributed “Shea Butter Baby” to the *Creed II* soundtrack and released the 2016 EP *Pho*. The positive response to tracks like “Backseat” showed that her retro R&B fits well in contemporary times. “There\'s so many opportunities that come to me,” she said. “And I\'m just like, ‘You guys like soul and R&B that much? That\'s awesome.’ I didn\'t know it could ever happen again, because I knew it was really booming in the ’90s and the early 2000s, and then it felt like people stopped caring.” On her debut full-length, her voice is strengthened and emboldened by both breakup and “u up?” texts. She celebrates independence (“New Apartment”) and processes pain (“Speak to Me,” “I Been,” “Pop”) with equal parts frankness and freedom. Cameos by JID (“Broke”) and J. Cole (“Shea Butter Baby”) and a classy Galt MacDermot “Space” sample on “BMO” give the album its pronounced bump. “It’s soul,” she told Ebro. “There’s no gimmicks. It’s feeling.”

From the outset of his fame—or, in his earliest years as an artist, infamy—Tyler, The Creator made no secret of his idolization of Pharrell, citing the work the singer-rapper-producer did as a member of N.E.R.D as one of his biggest musical influences. The impression Skateboard P left on Tyler was palpable from the very beginning, but nowhere is it more prevalent than on his fifth official solo album, *IGOR*. Within it, Tyler is almost completely untethered from the rabble-rousing (and preternaturally gifted) MC he broke out as, instead pushing his singing voice further than ever to sound off on love as a life-altering experience over some synth-heavy backdrops. The revelations here are mostly literal. “I think I’m falling in love/This time I think it\'s for real,” goes the chorus of the pop-funk ditty “I THINK,” while Tyler can be found trying to \"make you love me” on the R&B-tinged “RUNNING OUT OF TIME.” The sludgy “NEW MAGIC WAND” has him begging, “Please don’t leave me now,” and the album’s final song asks, “ARE WE STILL FRIENDS?” but it’s hardly a completely mopey affair. “IGOR\'S THEME,” the aforementioned “I THINK,” and “WHAT\'S GOOD” are some of Tyler’s most danceable songs to date, featuring elements of jazz, funk, and even gospel. *IGOR*\'s guests include Playboi Carti, Charlie Wilson, and Kanye West, whose voices are all distorted ever so slightly to help them fit into Tyler\'s ever-experimental, N.E.R.D-honoring vision of love.

When David Berman disbanded Silver Jews in 2009, the world stood to lose one of the best writers in indie rock, a guy who catalogued the magic and misery of everyday life with wit, heart, and the ragged glory of the occupationally down-and-out. After a 10-year break professedly spent reading books and arguing with people on Reddit, Berman enlisted members of the Brooklyn band Woods to back him on *Purple Mountains*. Berman’s pain had never been laid quite so bare, nor had it ever sounded quite so urgent. “I spent a decade playing chicken with oblivion,” he sings on the swaggering “That’s Just the Way I Feel.” “Day to day, I’m neck and neck with giving in.” And “Margaritas at the Mall” turns an ordinary happy hour into a jeremiad about the cold comforts of capitalism in a godless world. That the music—country-tinged indie rock—was as polished and competent as it was only highlighted Berman’s intensity: less a rock singer than a street preacher, someone who needed to avail himself of his visions stat. But even at his most desperate, he remained achingly funny, turning statements of existential loneliness into the kind of bumper sticker Zen that made him seem like an ordinary guy no matter how highfalutin he could get. “Well, if no one’s fond of fuckin’ me, maybe no one’s fuckin’ fond of me,” he sings on the album-closing “Maybe I’m the Only One for Me,” sounding not all that far off from the George Strait one-twos he reportedly loved. Above all, though, his writing is beautiful, attuned to detail in ways that make ordinary scenarios shimmer with quiet magic. Just listen to “Snow Is Falling in Manhattan,” which turns a quiet night in a big city into an allegory of finding solace in the weather of what comes to us. Shortly after the release of *Purple Mountains*, Berman died, at the age of 52, a tragic end to what felt like a triumphant return. “The dead know what they\'re doing when they leave this world behind,” he sings on “Nights That Won’t Happen.” “When the here and the hereafter momentarily align.”

David Berman comes in from the cold after ten long years. His new musical expression is a meltdown unparalleled in modern memory. He warns us that his findings might be candid, but as long as his punishment comes in such bite-sized delights of all-American jukebox fare, we'll hike the Purple Mountains with pleasure forever.

Hiding Places is a collaborative album from Brooklyn-based rapper billy woods and Los Angeles beat scene veteran Kenny Segal, set for release by Backwoodz Studioz on March 29, 2019. On its face, it seems an unlikely pairing; woods—who moonlights as ½ of dissonant rap duo Armand Hammer—is a chaotic force, the warped relic of an NY indie-rap wave that never happened. Meanwhile, Segal has been in L.A. for twenty years; from paying dues with Project Blowed to pushing the culture forward with Busdriver and Milo. All the while, his soulful, dreamlike production precariously tethered to earth by the right drums or rumbling bass. But look closer and it makes more sense. After all, Segal lent his production to a couple of songs on Paraffin, Armand Hammer’s critically-acclaimed opus, and the two veterans have more than a few shared collaborators: Open Mike Eagle, ELUCID, and Hemlock Ernst amongst them. Hiding Places finds both artists deep in the labyrinth. Segal’s lush soundscapes have a new edge, woods’ writing is, paradoxically, at its most direct. Hiding Places is a child’s game: funny and cruel, as brutal as a fairy tale. The album features contributions from both artists’ well of collaborators with ELUCID, Self-Jupiter, and MOTHERMARY making appearances.

British music is fortunate to have Charlotte Aitchison. A restless collaborator and denier of pop borders with an unteachable ear for a hook, she’s one of the UK’s proudest exports. Her third studio LP serves as a blueprint for how a modern pop album should sound. Audacious but introspective, it’s straining with potential hits and subtler moments fans will hold close. And then there’s the cast list. If she tires of this pop star business, a sterling career in A&R probably awaits. She talked through some of the album’s standout moments on her Beats 1 show The Candy Shop. **“Next Level Charli”** “I wrote this track for the Angels—my fans. This is the Angel anthem. Everything in this song is about things that I imagine my fans doing: driving to a party, getting ready for a party, playing their music in their Prius, whatever it is. This song is for you guys. Thank you for loving me. Thank you for supporting me.” **“Gone” (with Christine and the Queens)** “This is the bop. The song of the summer, if I don’t say so myself. Me, Christine, dancing on a car, rain: What more do you want? We literally gave you everything.” **“Cross You Out” (feat. Sky Ferreira)** “I’m so happy that we got to make this song together. This was one of the first songs that kind of came to reality for this album. I sent this over to Sky, she felt it and came into this studio in LA with \[co-writer\] Linus Wiklund. She sounds so amazing and I’m so happy because Sky and I have known each other for quite a few years now. We kind of came up together in many ways, and we’ve shared a lot of the same producers. We’ve been on the same magazine covers together, and you know, I feel like we were on Myspace at the same time! I think her voice is really important and what she does is brilliant.” **“2099” (feat. Troye Sivan)** “My favorite dreamboat, my dream boy: Troye Sivan. I’m just in love with him. I just think he’s so brilliant. After we made \[the 2018 single\] ‘1999’, I kind of knew he wanted to get a little bit weirder than we got, as I’d heard him mention that he was into \[Charli’s 2017 mixtape\] *Pop 2*. So after ‘1999’ came out, I hit him up again and said, ‘Should we just go there? Should we just go out of space? Like, let’s do a weird moment.’ And he was like, ‘Yes, let’s do it.’” **“Click” (feat. Kim Petras & Tommy Cash)** “I’m not going to lie—and no shade to any of the other artists on the album— but I kind of think Kim’s verse might be my favorite on the whole album. I remember when I originally sent Kim this song, I did a verse and it was so bad. She sent me her demo back and her verse *killed*, and I was like, ‘Oh my god, I cannot put this song out with the verse I currently have.’ So I had to rerecord my thing, as Tommy had also sent me his and killed it, too. I was the weakest! It was bad! I love this song. It goes so hard. And Kim is still shining so bright on this song.” **“Warm” (feat. HAIM)** “This song is produced by A.G. Cook. He actually wrote a few of the melodies on this song, too. When we were making this song, we were working at \[Australian producer and DJ\] Flume’s studio in LA, and this was at the point where we thought we were still going to do a third mixtape. But then we had this song and a couple of ideas and were like, ‘Let’s just do the album. Now’s the time for the *Charli* album.’ When HAIM came to the studio house that I had rented in LA at the beginning of 2019, I had just had a lot of dental work done, so my whole mouth was super numb. I was dribbling; I couldn’t really speak. They were like, ‘What happened to you!’ It was a funny session, but the three of them came through. I’m so happy with the song.” **“White Mercedes”** “This is one of my favorite songs from the album. I guess it’s my version of a ballad.”

The third album from the LA-based master of timeless acoustic folk is an exercise in restraint. Yet despite its minimalism, there\'s emotional heft: While her 2015 album *On Your Own Love Again* followed the passing of her mother, the end of a relationship, and her upheaval from San Francisco to LA, these songs deal with her putting off a return to San Francisco after falling in love with musician Matthew McDermott (who plays piano on the opener here). The nine songs are compact and rooted in Pratt\'s voice, evoking 1960s French yé-yé singers or Nico, as the chamber pop of short numbers like “Fare Thee Well” and “As The World Turns” lulls with gentle flutes and soft strings. It\'s an intimacy that\'s distinct from any of her singer-songwriter peers, veiled behind a sense of old-fashioned mystique.

For her third album Quiet Signs, Jessica Pratt offers up nine spare, beautiful & mysterious songs that feel like the culmination of her work to date. "Fare Thee Well" and "Poly Blue" retain glimmers of On Your Own Love Again's hazy day spells, but delicate arrangements for piano, flute, organ and strings instill a lush, chamber pop vim. The record's B-side, meanwhile, glows with an arresting late-night clarity; the first single, "This Time Around," pairs the Los Angeles artist's intimate vulnerability with a newfound resolve. Ultimately, this confidence is what sets Quiet Signs apart from Pratt's previous work, the journey of an artist stepping out of the darkened wings to take her place as one of this generation's preeminent songwriters.

Since the 2015 release of Drab Majesty’s debut “Careless”, and the release of the acclaimed sophomore album “The Demonstration” the following year, artist Deb Demure and collaborator Mona D. have firmly established themselves amongst the pantheon of dark synth-pop greats, establishing a devoted fan base worldwide with their singular hypnotic sound and mysterious, constantly-evolving presence. Following intense and extensive touring in support of the first two albums, Drab Majesty escaped to the inspirational landscapes of Athens, Greece to channel the songs for their most ambitious album creation yet: Modern Mirror. Blowing the dust off the antiquarian myth of Ovid’s “Narcissus”, Drab Majesty uses its premise as groundwork for a modern reinterpretation. Each song tells a piece of the story, in which the listener’s own self-identity has become warped and dissociated through rapidly expanding technology, losing touch with the origins of their own personalities. Setting the stage as a romantic saga of antiquity, “A Dialogue” asks the listener if they are truly in love amid a building wash of guitars and reverb. Elements of classic tragedy weigh heavily in the reflection of Modern Mirror in songs like “The Other Side”, possessing a fundamental sound that is energetic, luminous and hopeful. Fusing the sonic aesthetics of predecessors like New Order and The Cure within the cautious instruction of Greek mythology and modern science fiction, Drab Majesty has birthed a hybrid of dreamy malaise, captured for a future moment. The first single, “Ellipsis”, romantically plays up the distorted concept of courting through modern technology in a world that has yet to adapt, while on “Long Division”, Deb’s resounding guitar cascades around the chorus shared with No Joy frontwoman Jasamine White-Gluz, wistfully warning us against our vanity and self-obsession. Even when hope for everlasting love peeks through in “Oxytocin”, a sparkling and stoic track sung by Mona D., we are firmly reminded our fleeting existence. Modern Mirror is a journey of self-reflection, nostalgia, love, beauty, and heartbreak told across eight addictive and emotional synth pop anthems – a seemingly classic tale delivered unblinkingly through the frame of the modern world. Produced by Josh Eustis (Telefon Tel Aviv) and mastered by Dave Cooley, with appearances by Jasamine White-Gluz (No Joy) and Justin Meldal-Johnson (NIN, Beck, M83, Air). Packaging and design by Juan Mendez of Jealous God/Silent Servant.

In 2016’s *Private Energy*, Roberto Carlos Lange, a.k.a. Helado Negro, celebrated his identity while highlighting themes like racially targeted enforcement and gender fluidity. The Brooklyn-based singer-producer’s follow-up, *This Is How You Smile*, allows him to wind down and find his center. *Smile* is by turns more self-reflective, a vivid reverie of personal memories bedded in delicate acoustic strums and atmospheric dreamscapes. Lange\'s articulate, compassionate voice softens the album\'s dense arrangements (which are interspersed with field recordings and ambient interludes). On “País Nublado,” a balmy bossa nova groove ambles against Lange’s pithy haikus. Serene piano strokes lead the way over his soulful, whispered baritone on both “Running” and “Please Won’t Please.” “Seen My Aura” is more effervescent by comparison, but just as chill—a lysergic funk jam where Lange’s naturalistobservations take flight.

Helado Negro returns with This Is How You Smile, an album that freely flickers between clarity and obscurity, past and present geographies, bright and unhurried seasons. Miami-born, New York-based artist Roberto Carlos Lange embraces a personal and universal exploration of aura – seen, felt, emitted – on his sixth album and second for RVNG Intl.

Summer Walker doesn’t look the way she sounds. The Atlanta singer’s face tattoos are more in line with the aesthetic of her hometown’s many hip-hop superstars than that of ’90s golden-era R&B acts like Mary J. Blige, Xscape, and SWV, but the makeover feels right for the moment. On Walker’s heavily anticipated *Over It*, which follows her 2018 breakout mixtape *Last Day of Summer*—as well as the *CLEAR* EP—the singer recontextualizes some familiar-sounding frustrations and reckonings about hard-earned romantic truths by way of throwback sounds and contemporary real talk (all of which sounds even richer thanks to Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos). “Did I ever ask you to take me to go shopping in Paris?/Or go sailing overseas and just drape me in Gucci?” she asks on the Bryson Tiller duet “Playing Games.” “No, I never had an issue, go to the club with your boys, baby/I never wanted you to stay too long, just wanted you to show me off.” Later in the song she borrows a few bars from “Say My Name,” Destiny’s Child’s eternally catchy ballad of the underappreciated lover. *Over It* is indeed peppered with references to the R&B of Walker’s childhood: Producer London On Da Track utilizes a vintage 702 sample for “Body” and builds the beat for “Come Thru,” which features Usher, on the keyboard line of the ATL icon’s 1997 “You Make Me Wanna...” The album also boasts guest spots from Drake, 6LACK, A Boogie wit da Hoodie, and long-dormant moody-R&B hero PARTYNEXTDOOR. The vantage point of *Over It*, though, is wholly the singer’s own. The exchanges in Walker’s verses sound like they could have been grafted directly from text messages or pulled from a FaceTime conversation. “Am I really that much to handle?” she opines on the title track. “You wanna be a good friend to me/Why don’t you pour up that Hennessy/Light up a few blunts so we can get high,” she sings on “Tonight.” “Too much Patrón will have you calling his phone/Have you wanting some more,” she advises on “Drunk Dialing…LODT.” Walker’s words are so relatable they seem destined to become social media captions. *Over It*, then, is a project whose title betrays its maker’s constitution, one certain only to leave fans wanting more.

Over the decade-plus since he arrived seemingly fully formed as the platonic ideal of indie DIY made good, Justin Vernon has pushed back against the notion that he and Bon Iver are synonymous. He is quick to deflect credit to core longtime collaborators like Chris Messina and Brad Cook, while April Base, the studio and headquarters he built just outside his native Eau Claire, Wisconsin, has become a cultural hub playing host to a variety of experimental projects. The fourth Bon Iver full-length album shines a brighter light on Bon Iver as a unit with many moving parts: Renovations to April Base sent operations to Sonic Ranch in Tornillo, Texas, for much of the production, but the spirit of improvisation and tinkering and revolving-door personnel that marked 2016’s out-there *22, A Million* remained intact. “This record in particular felt like a very outward record; Justin felt outward to me,” says Cook, who grew up with Vernon and has played with him through much of his career. “He felt like he was in a new place, and he was reaching out for new input in a different way. We\'re just more in the foreground inevitably because the process became just a little bit more transparent.” Vernon, Cook, and Messina talk through that process on each of *i,i*\'s 13 tracks. **“Yi”** Justin Vernon: “That was a phone recording of me and my friend Trevor screwing around in a barn, turning a radio on and off. We chopped it up for about five years, just a hundred times. There’s something in that ‘Are you recording? Are you recording?’ that felt like the spirit that flows into the next song.” **“iMi”** Brad Cook: “It was like an old friend that you didn\'t know what to do with for a long time. When we got to Texas, a lot of different people took a crack at trying to make something out of that song. And then Andrew Sarlo, who works with Big Thief and is just a badass young producer, he took the whack that broke through the wall. Once the band got their hands on it, Justin added some of the acoustic stuff to it, and it just totally blew it wide open.” **“We”** Vernon: “I was working on this idea one morning with this engineer, Josh Berg, who happened to be out with us. And this guy Bobby Raps from Minneapolis was also at my studio just kind of hanging around, and he brought this dude named Wheezy who does some Young Thug beats, some Future beats. So I had this little baritone-guitar bass loop thing, and Wheezy put his beat on there. All these songs had a life, or had a birth, before Texas, but Texas was like graduation for every single one. That\'s why we went for so long and allowed for so much perspective to sink into all the tunes. It\'s a fucking banger; I love that one.” **“Holyfields,”** Vernon: “The whole song is an improvised moment with barely any editing, and we just improv\'d moves. I sang some scratch vocals that day when we made it up, and they were weirdly close to what ended up being on the album. We didn\'t really chop away at that one—it kind of just was born with all its hair and everything.” **“Hey, Ma”** Vernon: “It just felt like a good strong song; we knew people would get it in their head. A couple of these tunes, and some of the tunes from the last album, I sort of peck around the studio with BJ Burton from time to time, and 90 percent of the stuff we make is death techno or something. So, there\'s another one that sort of just hung around with a stake in the ground, so to speak. And then our team—the three of us and the rest of everyone—just kept etching away at it, and it ended up becoming the song that felt emblematic of the record.” **\"U (Man Like)\"** Cook: “We had Bruce \[Hornsby\] come out to Justin\'s studio for a session for his *Absolute Zero* record. Bruce was playing a bunch of musical ideas that he had just sort of done at his house, and that piano figure in that song—I feel like we were tracking 15 seconds later. It was like, \'Wait, can we listen to this again?\'” Vernon: “I\'m not so good at coming up with full songs on the spot, but I can kind of map them out with my voice, or inflection. Then it takes a long time to chip away at them. Messina might have an idea for what that line should be, or Brad, or me. The melody that I sang that first day probably sounds remarkably like the melody that\'s on the album.” **“Naeem”** Vernon: “We did a collaboration with a dance group called TU Dance, and that was one of the songs. So we\'ve been performing \'Naeem\' as a part of this thing for a while. It\'s in a different state, but it\'s the finale of this big collaboration. And it just seemed very anthemic, and a very important part of whatever this record was going to be. It feels really nice to have a little bit more straightforward—not always bombastic, not always sonically trying to flip your lid or something.” **“Jelmore”** Vernon: “Basically an improvisation with me and this guy Buddy Ross. Again I probably didn\'t sing any final lyrics, but it\'s based on an improvisation, much like the song \'\_\_\_\_45\_\_\_\_\_\' from \[*22, A Million*\]. And when we were down outside El Paso, me and Chris were over on one part of this studio and Brad was with the band in a big studio across the property, and they sort of took \'Jelmore\' upon themselves and filled it in with all the lovely live-ness that\'s there. As the record goes on, it feels like there\'s a lot of these things that are sort of bare but have a lot of live energy to them.” **“Faith”** Vernon: “A basement improv that sat around for many years; maybe could have been on the last album, was for a while. I don\'t know, man—it\'s a song about having faith.” **“Marion”** Chris Messina: “I think that\'s one that Justin\'s been noodling around with for a while; for a few years, he would pick up that guitar and you would just kind of hear that riff. And we didn\'t really know what was going to happen to it. It\'s another one that exists in the TU Dance show. But what\'s cool about the version that\'s on the record is we did that as a live take with a six-piece ensemble that Rob Moose wrote for and conducted, and it was saxophone, trombone, trumpet, French horn, harmonica, and I think that\'s it that we did live. And then Justin was singing live and playing guitar live.” **“Salem”** Vernon: “OP-1 loop, weird Indigo Girls/Rickie Lee Jones vibes. I got really into acid and the Grateful Dead this year, so there\'s definitely some early psych vibes in there. The record really is supposed to be thought of as the fall record for this band, if you think of the other ones as seasons. Salem and burning leaves—these longings and these deaths, it\'s very much in there in that song, so it\'s a really autumn-y song.” **“Sh’Diah”** Vernon: “It stands for Shittiest Day in American History—the day after Trump got elected. It\'s another that sort of hung around as an improvised idea, and we finally got to figure out where we\'re going to land Mike Lewis, our favorite instrumentalist alive today in music. He gets to play over it, and the band got to do all this crazy layering over it. It\'s just one of my favorite moods on the album.” **“RABi”** Messina: “Justin\'s singing a cool thing on it, the guitar vibe is comforting and persistent, but we just weren\'t really sure where it needed to go. And then Brad and the rest of the dudes got their hands on it and it came back as just a dream sequence; it was so sick. We all kind of heard it and it was like, whoa, how can this not close out the record? This is definitely \'see you later.\'” Vernon: “Just some ‘life feels good now, don\'t it?\' There\'s a lot to be sad about, there\'s a lot to be confused about, there\'s a lot to be thankful for. And leaning on gratitude and appreciation of the people around you that make you who you are, make you feel safe, and provide that shelter so you can be who you want to be, there\'s still that impetus in life. We need that. It\'s a nice way to close the record, we all thought.”

With the DIY video for her 2017 track “Pretty Girl,” Clairo became the premier case study for how the internet can instantly blow up homespun artists. But with her full-length debut album, the Massachusetts indie-pop phenom betrays a bold artistic vision that can no longer be contained by her bedroom walls. Co-produced by the artist with ex-Vampire Weekender Rostam Batmanglij, *Immunity* achieves just the right balance of focus and fuzz, expanding Clairo’s sonic vocabulary with neo-soul vibes, jazzy piano lines, and boom-bapped drum breaks while framing her most brutally honest tracks—like the breakup lament “Bags” and same-sex-love anthem “Sofia”—with gritty intensity and blown-out distortion. Throughout the album, Clairo tries to reconcile her desire for independence with her need for intimacy, an emotional tug-of-war that reaches its zenith on the momentous closer “I Wouldn’t Ask You,” a stark, defiant piano ballad that cedes to the warm embrace of its ecstatic chillwave outro.

In the three years since her seminal album *A Seat at the Table*, Solange has broadened her artistic reach, expanding her work to museum installations, unconventional live performances, and striking videos. With her fourth album, *When I Get Home*, the singer continues to push her vision forward with an exploration of roots and their lifelong influence. In Solange\'s case, that’s the culturally rich Houston of her childhood. Some will know these references — candy paint, the late legend DJ Screw — via the city’s mid-aughts hip-hop explosion, but through Solange’s lens, these same touchstones are elevated to high art. A diverse group of musicians was tapped to contribute to *When I Get Home*, including Tyler, the Creator, Chassol, Playboi Carti, Standing on the Corner, Panda Bear, Devin the Dude, The-Dream, and more. There are samples from the works of under-heralded H-town legends: choreographer Debbie Allen, actress Phylicia Rashad, poet Pat Parker, even the rapper Scarface. The result is a picture of a particular Houston experience as only Solange could have painted it — the familiar reframed as fantastic.

Singer-songwriter Natalie Mering’s fourth album as Weyes Blood conjures the feeling of a beautiful object on a shelf just out of reach: You want to touch it, but you can’t, and so you do the next best thing—you dream about it, ache for it, and then you ache some more. Grand, melodramatic, but keenly self-aware, the music here pushes Mering’s \'70s-style chamber pop to its cinematic brink, suffusing stories of everything from fumbled romance (the McCartney-esque “Everyday”) to environmental apocalypse (“Wild Time”) with a dreamy, foggy almost-thereness both gorgeous and profoundly unsettling. A self-described “nostalgic futurist,” Mering doesn’t recreate the past so much as demonstrate how the past is more or less a fiction to begin with, a story we love hearing no matter how sad its unreachability makes us. Hence the album’s centerpiece, “Movies,” which wonders—gorgeously, almost religiously—why life feels so messy by comparison. As to the thematic undercurrent of apocalypse, well, if extinction is as close as science says it is, we might as well have something pretty to play us out.

The phantom zone, the parallax, the upside down—there is a rich cultural history of exploring in-between places. Through her latest, Titanic Rising, Weyes Blood (a.k.a. Natalie Mering) has, too, designed her own universe to soulfully navigate life’s mysteries. Maneuvering through a space-time continuum, she intriguingly plays the role of melodic, sometimes melancholic, anthropologist. Tellingly, Mering classifies Titanic Rising as the Kinks meet WWII or Bob Seger meets Enya. The latter captures the album’s willful expansiveness (“You can tell there’s not a guy pulling the strings in Enya’s studio,” she notes, admiringly). The former relays her imperative to connect with listeners. “The clarity of Bob Seger is unmistakable. I’m a big fan of conversational songwriting,” she adds. “I just try to do that in a way that uses abstract imagery as well.” “An album is like a Rubik’s Cube,” she says. “Sometimes you get all the dimensions—the lyrics, the melody, the production—to line up. I try to be futuristic and ancient at once, which is a difficult alchemy. It’s taken a lot of different tries to get it right.” As concept-album as it may sound, it’s also a devoted exercise in realism, albeit occasionally magical. Here, the throwback-cinema grandeur of “A Lot’s Gonna Change” gracefully coexists with the otherworldly title track, an ominous instrumental. Titanic Rising, written and recorded during the first half of 2018, is the culmination of three albums and years of touring: stronger chops and ballsier decisions. It’s an achievement in transcendent vocals and levitating arrangements—one she could reach only by flying under the radar for so many years. “I used to want to belong,” says the L.A. based musician. “I realized I had to forge my own path. Nobody was going to do that for me. That was liberating. I became a Joan of Arc solo musician.” The Weyes Blood frontwoman grew up singing in gospel and madrigal choirs. “Classical and Renaissance music really influenced me,” says Mering, who first picked up a guitar at age 8. (Listen closely to Titanic Rising, and you’ll also hear the jazz of Hoagy Carmichael mingle with the artful mysticism of Alejandro Jodorowsky and the monomyth of scholar Joseph Campbell.) “Something to Believe,” a confessional that makes judicious use of the slide guitar, touches on that cosmological upbringing. “Belief is something all humans need. Shared myths are part of our psychology and survival,” she says. “Now we have a weird mishmash of capitalism and movies and science. There have been moments where I felt very existential and lost.” As a kid, she filled that void with Titanic. (Yes, the movie.) “It was engineered for little girls and had its own mythology,” she explains. Mering also noticed that the blockbuster romance actually offered a story about loss born of man’s hubris. “It’s so symbolic that The Titanic would crash into an iceberg, and now that iceberg is melting, sinking civilization.” Today, this hubris also extends to the relentless adoption of technology, at the expense of both happiness and attention spans. The track “Movies” marks another Titanic-related epiphany, “that movies had been brainwashing people and their ideas about romantic love.” To that end, Mering has become an expert at deconstructing intimacy. Sweeping and string-laden, “Andromeda” seems engineered to fibrillate hearts. “It’s about losing your interest in trying to be in love,” she says. “Everybody is their own galaxy, their own separate entity. There is a feeling of needing to be saved, and that’s a lot to ask of people.” Its companion track, “Everyday,” “is about the chaos of modern dating,” she says, “the idea of sailing off onto your ships to nowhere to deal with all your baggage.” But Weyes Blood isn’t one to stew. Her observations play out in an ethereal saunter: far more meditative than cynical. “I experience reality on a slower, more hypnotic level,” she says. “I’m a more contemplative kind of writer.” To Mering, listening and thinking are concurrent experiences. “There are complicated influences mixed in with more relatable nostalgic melodies,” she says. “In my mind my music feels so big, a true production. I’m not a huge, popular artist, but I feel like one when I’m in the studio. But it’s never taking away from the music. I’m just making a bigger space for myself.”

The most punk moment of 2019 is Rico Nasty screaming “Kennyyyyyy!” in a voice like a revved-up chainsaw. The DMV rapper reestablished her signature sound with producer Kenny Beats in 2018 through an alter ego called Trap Lavigne, recalibrating the “sugar trap” style of her early hits into devil-horns missives shouted over heavy metal beats. *Anger Management* is Rico and Kenny’s first full-length collaboration, and it begins in sheer chaos: “Cold” and “Cheat Code” sound like primal screams from the soul. But the mood mellows out over the course of nine bite-sized tracks—a conceptual journey of catharsis from two of the most inventive names in rap right now. It’s like a therapy session, if your therapist was prone to hollering, “I got bitches on my dick and I ain’t even got a dick!” over JAY-Z samples.

On their eighth studio album, Sunn O))) wanted to take their signature drone metal back to its most minimalist form. During the past decade, the Stephen O’Malley- and Greg Anderson-led unit ventured into a series of collaborations—with artists ranging from Norwegian experimental collective Ulver to the late singer/composer/producer Scott Walker—before releasing 2015’s *Kannon*, which incorporated death-metal growls into their guitar assaults. For *Life Metal*, the band hired studio veteran Steve Albini—whose recordings distill a band\'s bare essence—to capture their expansive, amplified noise live to tape. “Troubled Air” is mired in their typically impenetrable feedback, though a gleaming pipe organ (arranged by Australian composer Anthony Pateras) faintly clears the darkness toward the song’s end. The lumbering “Between Sleipnir’s Breaths”—inspired by the creature from Norse mythology—plays like an orchestral piece, contrasting trenchant dissonance with Icelandic composer Hildur Guðnadóttir’s ghostly vocals. Simplicity is at the core of these four lengthy tracks, but those unexpected elements—and O’Malley and Anderson\'s broader palette of sounds in general—add a newfound depth to the band\'s arsenal.

96k/24bit AAD master

Hip-hop owes so much to Houston—its legacy of chopped/screwed aesthetics and narcotized themes continues to inspire new generations of rappers beyond the city limits, and within its sometimes factional wards, fresh talent still thrives. Beloved as an independent artist, lyrical dynamo Maxo Kream makes his major-label debut with *Brandon Banks*, an instantly engrossing album that addresses the relatable reality of the struggles preceding his come-up as well as those that persist today. As hinted at by the cover art, his relationship with his oft-incarcerated father looms over the project, unspooled honestly on “Bissonnet” (“Locked up my pops and took my brother/So my daddy was my mother”) and juxtaposed with his own complicated criminal history on “Pray 2 the Dope.” Eyes wide open, he speaks brutal truths about trap money on “8 Figures” (“You ain’t really got cash ’til you got eight figures/I been gettin’ street money ever since I was little”) while exposing the snakes in his own midst on “Change.” For the less grave fare of “She Live” and “The Relays,” Maxo taps prominent locals Megan Thee Stallion and Travis Scott for a party vibe.

The cover of Polo G’s *Die a Legend* features pictures of dearly departed friends and relatives looking on from heaven, their legacies front and center as he embarks upon the next, largest step of his career. The album is a timestamp for the MC, who recently relocated from Chicago to Los Angeles to escape the tragic cycle of street violence he often sings about. He’s come a long way, refining the drill music sonics of his earliest work into the more melodic and playlist-friendly delivery of songs like “Finer Things,” released nearly a year before *Die a Legend*. The tow of his former life is ever-present, though, and celebrations of success are often inseparable from pain. “Couldn\'t leave my brother in them trenches, told him come and stay with me/We gon\' live like kings for all them nights ain\'t have no place to sleep/N\*ggas watched us starve and never offered us a plate to eat/Took off, now they mad, but I know that they won’t wait for me,” he raps on “Through da Storm.” His bars can come across as catharsis, but there are constant warnings that Polo is still very much of the environment he left. On “Lost Files” he talks about being anointed for success by God, and then, in the same verse, details a remorseless revenge killing. Songs like “A King’s Nightmare” serve as warnings to the generation behind him, while “Dyin Breed,” “Pop Out,” and “Last Strike” all paint him as someone not to be toyed with. On the whole, *Die a Legend* is a portrait of an artist trapped between the plight that informs a great deal of his work and what lies beyond the determination to escape that trauma. Fortunately for Polo G, he’s singing about the experiences he’s already had as opposed to the ones yet to come.

Look past its futurist textures and careful obfuscations, and there’s something deeply human about FKA twigs’ 21st-century R&B. On her second full-length, the 31-year-old British singer-songwriter connects our current climate to that of Mary Magdalene, a healer whose close personal relationship with Christ brought her scorn from those who would ultimately write her story: men. “I\'m of a generation that was brought up without options in love,” she tells Apple Music. “I was told that as a woman, I should be looked after. It\'s not whether I choose somebody, but whether somebody chooses me.” Written and produced by twigs, with major contributions from Nicolas Jaar, *MAGDALENE* is a feminist meditation on the ways in which we relate to one another and ourselves—emotionally, sexually, universally—set to sounds that are at once modern and ancient. “Now it’s like, ‘Can you stand up in my holy terrain?’” she says, referencing the titular lyric from her mid-album collaboration with Future. “‘How are we going to be equals in this? Spiritually, am I growing? Do you make me want to be a better person?’ I’m definitely still figuring it out.” Here, she walks us through the album track by track. **thousand eyes** “All the songs I write are autobiographical. Anyone that\'s been in a relationship for a long time, you\'re meshed together. But unmeshing is painful, because you have the same friends or your families know each other. No matter who you are, the idea of leaving is not only a heart trauma, but it\'s also a social trauma, because all of a sudden, you don\'t all go to that pub that you went to together. The line \[\'If I walk out the door/A thousand eyes\'\] is a reference to that. At the time, I was listening to a lot of Gregorian music. I’d started really getting into medieval chords before that, and I\'d found some musicians that play medieval music and done a couple sessions with them. Even on \[2014\'s\] *LP1*, I had ‘Closer,’ which is essentially a hymn. I spent a lot of time in choir as a child and I went to Sunday school, so it’s part of who I am at this stage.” **home with you** “I find things like that interesting in the studio, just to play around and bring together two completely different genres—like Elton John chords and a hip-hop riff. That’s what ‘home with you’ was for me: It’s a ballad and it\'s sad, but then it\'s a bop as well, even though it doesn\'t quite ever give you what you need. It’s about feeling pulled in all directions: as a daughter, or as a friend, or as a girlfriend, or as a lover. Everyone wanting a piece of you, but not expressing it properly, so you feel like you\'re not meeting the mark.” **sad day** “It’s like, ‘Will you take another chance with me? Can we escape the mundane? Can we escape the cyclical motion of life and be in love together and try something that\'s dangerous and exhilarating? Yeah, I know I’ve made you sad before, but will you give me another chance?\' I wrote this song with benny blanco and Koreless. I love to set myself challenges, and it was really exciting to me, the challenge of retaining my sound while working with a really broad group of people. I was lucky working with Benny, in the fact that he creates an environment where, as an artist, you feel really comfortable to be yourself. To me, that\'s almost the old-school definition of a producer: They don\'t have to be all up in your grill, telling you what to do. They just need to lay a really beautiful, fertile soil, so that you can grow to be the best you in the moment.” **holy terrain** “I’m saying that I want to find a man that can stand up next to me, in all of my brilliance, and not feel intimidated. To me, Future’s saying, ‘Hey, I fucked up. I filled you with poison. I’ve done things to make you jealous. Can you heal me? Can you tell me how to be a better man? I need the guidance, of a woman, to show me how to do that.’ I don\'t think that there are many rappers that can go there, and just put their cards on the table like that. I didn\'t know 100%, once I met Future, that it would be right. But we spoke on the phone and I played him the album and I told him what it was about: ‘It’s a very female-positive, femme-positive record.’ And he was just like, ‘Yeah. Say no more. I\'ve got this.’ And he did. He crushed it. To have somebody who\'s got patriarchal energy come through and say that, wanting to stand up and be there for a woman, wanting to have a woman that\'s an equal—that\'s real.” **mary magdalene** “Let’s just imagine for one second: Say Jesus and Mary Magdalene are really close, they\'re together all the time. She\'s his right-hand woman, she’s his confidante, she\'s healing people with him and a mystic in her own right. So, at that point, any man and woman that are spending that much time together, they\'re likely to be what? Lovers. Okay, cool. So, if Mary had Jesus\' children, that basically debunks the whole of history. Now, I\'m not saying that happened. What I\'m saying is that the idea of people thinking that might happen is potentially really dangerous. It’s easier to call her a whore, because as soon as you call a woman a whore, it devalues her. I see her as Jesus Christ\'s equal. She’s a male projection and, I think, the beginning of the patriarchy taking control of the narrative of women. Any woman that\'s done anything can be subject to that; I’ve been subject to that. It felt like an apt time to be talking about it.” **fallen alien** “When you\'re with someone, and they\'re sleeping, and you look at them, and you just think, \'No.\' For me, it’s that line, \[\'When the lights are on, I know you/When you fall asleep, I’ll kick you down/By the way you fell, I know you/Now you’re on your knees\'\]. You\'re just so sick of somebody\'s bullshit, you\'re just taking it all day, and then you\'re in bed next to them, and you\'re just like, ‘I can\'t take this anymore.’” **mirrored heart** “People always say, ‘Whoever you\'re with, they should be a reflection of yourself.’ So, if you\'re looking at someone and you think, ‘You\'re a shitbag,’ then you have to think about why it was that person, at that time, and what\'s connecting you both. What is the reflection? For others that have found a love that is a true reflection of themselves, they just remind me that I don\'t have that, a mirrored heart.” **daybed** “Have you ever forgotten how to spell a really simple word? To me, depression\'s a bit like that: Everything\'s quite abstract, and even slightly dizzy, but not in a happy way. It\'s like a very slow circus. Suddenly the fruit flies seem friendly, everything in the room just starts having a different meaning and you even have a different relationship with the way the sofa cushions smell. \[Masturbation\] is something to raise your endorphins, isn\'t it? It’s either that or try and go to the gym, or try and eat something good. You almost can\'t put it into words, but we\'ve all been there. I sing, \'Active are my fingers/Faux, my cunnilingus\': You\'re imagining someone going down on you, but they\'re actually not. You open your eyes, and you\'re just there, still on your sofa, still watching daytime TV.” **cellophane** “It\'s just raw, isn\'t it? It didn\'t need a thing. The vocal take that\'s on the record is the demo take. I had a Lyft arrive outside the studio and I’d just started playing the piano chords. I was like, ‘Hey, can you just give me like 20, 25 minutes?’ And I recorded it as is. I remember feeling like I wanted to cry, but I just didn\'t feel like it was that suitable to cry at a studio session. I often want everything to be really intricate and gilded, and I want to chip away at everything, and sculpt it, and mold it, and add layers. The thing I\'ve learned on *MAGDALENE* is that you don\'t need to do that all the time, and just because you can do something, it doesn\'t mean you should. That\'s been a real growing experience for me—as a musician, as a producer, as a singer, even as a dancer. Something in its most simple form is beautiful.”

Sam Shepherd aka Floating Points has announced his new album Crush will be released on 18 October on Ninja Tune. Along with the announcement he has shared new track 'Last Bloom' along with accompanying video by Hamill Industries and announced details of a new live show with dates including London's Printworks, his biggest headline live show to date. The best musical mavericks never sit still for long. They mutate and morph into new shapes, refusing to be boxed in. Floating Points has so many guises that it’s not easy to pin him down. There’s the composer whose 2015 debut album Elaenia was met with rave reviews – including being named Pitchfork’s ‘Best New Music’ and Resident Advisor’s ‘Album of the Year’ – and took him from dancefloors to festival stages worldwide. The curator whose record labels have brought soulful new sounds into the club, and, on his esteemed imprint Melodies International, reinstated old ones. The classicist, the disco guy that makes machine music, the digger always searching for untapped gems to re-release. And then there’s the DJ whose liberal approach to genre saw him once drop a 20-minute instrumental by spiritual saxophonist Pharoah Sanders in Berghain. Fresh from the release earlier this year of his compilation of lambent, analogous ambient and atmospheric music for the esteemed Late Night Tales compilation series, Floating Points’ first album in four years, Crush, twists whatever you think you know about him on its head again. A tempestuous blast of electronic experimentalism whose title alludes to the pressure-cooker of the current environment we find ourselves in. As a result, Shepherd has made some of his heaviest, most propulsive tracks yet, nodding to the UK bass scene he emerged from in the late 2000s, such as the dystopian low-end bounce of previously shared striking lead single ‘LesAlpx’ (Pitchfork’s ‘Best New Track’), but there are also some of his most expressive songs on Crush: his signature melancholia is there in the album’s sublime mellower moments or in the Buchla synthesizer, whose eerie modulation haunts the album. Whereas Elaenia was a five-year process, Crush was made during an intense five-week period, inspired by the invigorating improvisation of his shows supporting The xx in 2017. He had just finished touring with his own live ensemble, culminating in a Coachella appearance, when he suddenly became a one-man band, just him and his trusty Buchla opening up for half an hour every night. He thought what he’d come out with would "be really melodic and slow- building" to suit the mood of the headliners, but what he ended up playing was "some of the most obtuse and aggressive music I've ever made, in front of 20,000 people every night," he says. "It was liberating." His new album feels similarly instantaneous – and vital. It’s the sound of the many sides of Floating Points finally fusing together. It draws from the "explosive" moments during his sets, the moments that usually occur when he throws together unexpected genres, for the very simple reason that he gets excited about wanting to "hear this record, really loud, now!" and then puts the needle on. It’s "just like what happens when you’re at home playing music with your friends and it's going all over the place," he says. Today's newly announced live solo shows capture that energy too, so that the audience can see that what they’re watching isn’t just someone pressing play. Once again Shepherd has teamed up with Hamill Industries, the duo who brought their ground-breaking reactive laser technologies to his previous tours. Their vision is to create a constant dialogue between the music and the visuals. This time their visuals will zoom in on the natural world, where landscapes are responsive to the music and flowers or rainbow swirls of bubbles might move and morph to the kick of the bass drum. What you see on the screen behind Shepherd might "look like a cosmos of colour going on," says Shepherd, "but it’s actually a tiny bubble with a macro lens on it being moved by frequencies by my Buchla," which was also the process by which the LP artwork was made." It means, he adds, "putting a lot of Fairy Liquid on our tour rider".

To put it mildly, San Diego-based artist Kristin Hayter’s second album under the Lingua Ignota name is not for the faint of heart. (Her first, it’s maybe worth noting, is called *All Bitches Die*.) A dark communion of neoclassical strings, industrial atmospherics, and Hayter’s classically trained vibrato, *Caligula* is an arresting meditation on abuse, recovery, and revenge. The opening “Faithful Servant Friend of Christ” sets the album’s tone early, showcasing both Hayter’s stirring vocal range and the complex religious themes that underpin most songs. On the funereal “Do You Doubt Me Traitor,” she sharpens her lyrics into weapons, even enlisting the Devil himself as an ally in her personal war against her abuser and herself (“I don’t eat/I don’t sleep/I let it consume me/How do I break you/Before you break me?”). This is not an uplifting journey through trauma to peace, however—the strangled wails and purgative screams of “Butcher of the World” and “Day of Tears and Mourning” speak to a catharsis without resolution or relief, only riddance. It’s an exhilarating, intense, apocalyptic jeremiad told with disarming honesty and starkness.

“CALIGULA”, the new album from LINGUA IGNOTA set for release on July 19th on CD/2xLP/Digital through Profound Lore Records, takes the vision of Kristin Hayter’s vessel to a new level of grandeur, her purging and vengeful audial vision going beyond anything preceding it and reaching a new unparalleled sonic plane within her oeuvre. Succeeding her self-released 2017 “All Bitches Die” opus (re-released by Profound Lore Records in 2018), “CALIGULA” sees Hayter design her most ambitious work to date, displaying the full force of her talent as a vocalist, composer, and storyteller. Vast in scope and multivalent in its influences, with delivery nothing short of demonic, “CALIGULA” is an outsider’s opera; magnificent, hideous, and raw. Eschewing and disavowing genre altogether, Hayter builds her own world. Here she fully embodies the moniker Lingua Ignota, from the German mystic Hildegard of Bingen, meaning “unknown language” — this music has no home, any precedent or comparison could only be uneasily given, and there is nothing else like it in our contemporary realm. LINGUA IGNOTA has always taken a radical, unflinching approach to themes of violence and vengeance, and “CALIGULA” builds on the transformation of the survivor at the core of this narrative. “CALIGULA” embraces the darkness that closes in, sharpens itself with the cruelty it has been subjected to, betrays as it has been betrayed. It is wrath unleashed, scathing, a caustic blood-letting: “Let them hate me so long as they fear me,” Hayter snarls in a voice that ricochets from chilling raw power to agonizing vulnerability. Whilst “CALIGULA” is unapologetically personal and critically self-aware, there are broader themes explored; the decadence, corruption, depravity and senseless violence of emperor Caligula is well documented and yet still permeates today. Brimming with references and sly jabs, Hayter’s sardonic commentary on abuse of power and invalidation is deftly woven. Working closely with Seth Manchester at Machines With Magnets studio in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, Hayter strips away much of the industrial and electronic elements of her previous work, approaching instead the corporeal intensity and intimate menace of her notorious live performances, achieved with unconventional recording techniques and sound sources, as well as a full arsenal of live instrumentation and collaborators including harsh noise master Sam McKinlay (THE RITA), visceral drummer Lee Buford (The Body) and frenetic percussionist Ted Byrnes (Cackle Car, Wood & Metal), with guest vocals from Dylan Walker (Full of Hell), Mike Berdan (Uniform), and Noraa Kaplan (Visibilities). “CALIGULA” is a massive work, a multi-layered epic that gives voice and space to that which has been silenced and cut out.

Steve Lacy snapped on this one. The guitarist/bassist of The Internet (and acclaimed producer for Solange and J. Cole, as well as featured collaborator on Vampire Weekend\'s *Father of the Bride*) presents a kaleidoscopic tour of funk and R&B styles on his debut solo album *Apollo XXI*. The sound and drive heard on the album are deeply indebted to the freaky early days of Prince Rogers Nelson, from the way Lacy stylizes song titles (“Love 2 Fast,” “N Side,” “4ever”) to his voice, which ranges from growly lows to pleading, teasing falsetto. “Guide” has *Dirty Mind* on its mind, while “Playground” jumps on the one with funk guitar and slap bass. The nine-minute shape-shifter “Like Me” sparkles with psychedelic touches, as if he’s hitched a ride on the P-Funk mothership. On “Lay Me Down,” Lacy masters the art of patient seduction, taking his time to do it right, while “Basement Jack” and “Hate CD” feel like something Frank Ocean would ride to. Sprinkled among these gems are spontaneous bursts of creativity like “Amandla’s Interlude” and “Outro Freestyle/4ever,” which show Lacy exploring the outer limits of expression and spirituality.

Big Thief had only just finished work on their 3rd album, U.F.O.F. – “the celestial twin” – days before in a cabin studio in the woods of Washington State. Now it was time to birth U.F.O.F.’s sister album – “the earth twin” – Two Hands. 30 miles west of El Paso, surrounded by 3,000 acres of pecan orchards and only a stone’s throw from the Mexican border, Big Thief (a.k.a. Adrianne Lenker, Buck Meek, Max Oleartchik, and James Krivchenia) set up their instruments as close together as possible to capture their most important collection of songs yet. Where U.F.O.F.layered mysterious sounds and effects for levitation, Two Hands grounds itself on dried-out, cracked desert dirt. In sharp contrast to the wet environment of the U.F.O.F. session, the southwestern Sonic Ranch studio was chosen for its vast desert location. The 105-degree weather boiled away any clinging memories of the green trees and wet air of the previous session. Two Hands had to be completely different — an album about the Earth and the bones beneath it. The songs were recorded live with almost no overdubs. All but two songs feature entirely live vocal takes, leaving Adrianne’s voice suspended above the mix in dry air, raw and vulnerable as ever. “Two Hands has the songs that I’m the most proud of; I can imagine myself singing them when I’m old,” says Adrianne. “Musically and lyrically, you can’t break it down much further than this. It’s already bare-bones.” Lyrically this can be felt in the poetic blur of the internal and external. These are political songs without political language. They explore the collective wounds of our Earth. Abstractions of the personal hint at war, environmental destruction, and the traumas that fuel it. Across the album, there are genuine attempts to point the listener towards the very real dangers that face our planet. When Adrianne sings “Please wake up,” she’s talking directly to the audience. Engineer Dom Monks and producer Andrew Sarlo, who were both behind U.F.O.F., capture the live energy as instinctually and honestly as possible. Sarlo teamed up with James Krivchenia to mix the album, where they sought to emphasize raw power and direct energy inherent in the takes. The journey of a song from the stage to the record is often a difficult one. Big Thief’s advantage is their bond and loving centre as a chosen family. They spend almost 100% of their lives together working towards a sound that they all agree upon. A band with this level of togetherness is increasingly uncommon. If you ask drummer James Krivchenia, bassist Max Oleartchik or guitarist Buck Meek how they write their parts, they will describe — passionately — the experience of hearing Adrianne present a new song, listening intently for hints of parts that already exist in the ether and the undertones to draw out with their respective instruments. With raw power and intimacy, Two Hands folds itself gracefully into Big Thief’s impressive discography. This body of work grows deeper and more inspiring with each new album.

If trip-hop had been created in sunny Inglewood, California, instead of downcast Bristol, it might sound a lot like *Chasing Summer*. It’s mood-intensive and takes unexpected stylistic shifts, yet stays true to the block. SiR, an R&B prodigy and TDE signee, doesn’t bunker down behind muted, eclectic sound banks. His supple reading is front and center, reveling in tales of love and torment. Stars like labelmate Kendrick Lamar (“Hair Down”), Lil Wayne (“Lucy’s Love”), Jill Scott (“Still Blue”), and Sabrina Claudio (“That’s Why I Love You”) are drawn to his magnetic personality, respectfully vibing with SiR on his level. *Chasing Summer* passes the bump test, no matter what the season. Stay for the album’s closer “LA,” his potent love letter to the City of Angels.

It takes a village to raise a child; Holly Herndon’s third proper studio LP, *PROTO*, holds that the same is true for an artificial intelligence, or AI. The Berlin-based electronic musician’s 2015 album *Platform* explored the intersection of community and technological utopia, and so does its follow-up—only this time, one of her collaborators is a programmed entity, a virtual being named Spawn. Arguing that technology should be embraced, not feared, Herndon and her human collaborators, including a choral ensemble and hundreds of volunteer vocal coaches, set about “teaching” their AI via call-and-response singing sessions inspired by Herndon’s religious upbringing in East Tennessee. The results harness *Platform*’s richly synthetic palette and jagged percussive force and join them with choral music of almost overwhelming beauty. The massed voices of “Frontier” suggest a combination of Appalachian revival meetings and Bulgarian folk that’s been cut up over Hollywood-blockbuster drums; in “Godmother,” a collaboration with the experimental footwork producer Jlin, Spawn “sings” a dense, hyperkinetic fugue based on Jlin’s polyrhythmic signature. The crux of the whole album might be “Extreme Love,” in which a narrator recounts the story of a future post-human generation: “We are not a collection of individuals but a macro-organism living as an ecosystem. We are completely outside ourselves and the world is completely inside us.” A loosely synchronized choir chirps in the background as she asks, in a voice full of childlike wonder, “Is this how it feels to become the mother of the next species—to love them more than we love ourselves?” It’s a moving encapsulation of the album’s radical optimism.

Holly Herndon operates at the nexus of technological evolution and musical euphoria. Holly’s third full-length album 'PROTO' isn’t about A.I., but much of it was created in collaboration with her own A.I. ‘baby’, Spawn. For the album, she assembled a contemporary ensemble of vocalists, developers, guest contributors (Jenna Sutela, Jlin, Lily Anna Haynes, Martine Syms) and an inhuman intelligence housed in a DIY souped-up gaming PC to create a record that encompasses live vocal processing and timeless folk singing, and places an emphasis on alien song craft and new forms of communion. 'PROTO' makes reference to what Holly refers to as the protocol era, where rapidly surfacing ideological battles over the future of A.I. protocols, centralised and decentralised internet protocols, and personal and political protocols compel us to ask ourselves who are we, what are we, what do we stand for, and what are we heading towards? You can hear traces of Spawn throughout the album, developed in partnership with long time collaborator Mathew Dryhurst and ensemble developer Jules LaPlace, and even eavesdrop on the live training ceremonies conducted in Berlin, in which hundreds of people were gathered to teach Spawn how to identify and reinterpret unfamiliar sounds in group call-and-response singing sessions; a contemporary update on the religious gathering Holly was raised amongst in her upbringing in East Tennessee. “There’s a pervasive narrative of technology as dehumanizing,” says Holly. “We stand in contrast to that. It’s not like we want to run away; we’re very much running towards it, but on our terms. Choosing to work with an ensemble of humans is part of our protocol. I don’t want to live in a world in which humans are automated off stage. I want an A.I. to be raised to appreciate and interact with that beauty.” Since her arrival in 2012, Holly has successfully mined the edges of electronic and Avant Garde pop and emerged with a dynamic and disruptive canon of her own, all while studying for her soon-to-be-completed PhD at Stanford University, researching machine learning and music. Just as Holly’s previous album 'Platform' forewarned of the manipulative personal and political impacts of prying social media platforms long before popular acceptance, 'PROTO' is a euphoric and principled statement setting the shape of things to come.

“It feels quite sinister,” Kano tells Apple Music about the title of his exceptional sixth album, *Hoodies All Summer*. “But a hoodie’s also like a defense mechanism—a coat of armor, protection from the rain. It’s like we always get rained on but don’t worry, we’re resilient, we wear hoodies all summer. We’re prepared for whatever.” That description is fitting for 10 songs that tear down stereotypes and assumptions to reveal the humanity and bigger picture of life in London’s toughest quarters. On “Trouble” that means reflecting with nuance and empathy on the lives being lost to postcode wars and knife and gun crime. “People become so used to the fact that these situations happen that they are almost numb to it,” he says. “Young kids dying on the street—it gets to a point where it’s like you lose count, and you just move on really quickly and forget a person’s name two minutes after hearing about it.” Like 2016’s *Made in the Manor*, this is an album rooted in his experiences of living in East London. This time, though, the focus is less introspective, with Kano, as he says, “reversing the lens” toward the communities he grew up in. “I just wanted to speak about it in a way where it\'s like, ‘I understand, I get it.’ I\'ll get into the psyche of why people do what they do. It’s about remembering that these unfortunate situations come about because of circumstances that are out of the hands of people involved. Not everyone’s this gang-sign, picture-taking, hoodie-wearing gang member. That’s the way they put us across in the media. Yes, some people are involved in crime, and some people are *not*—they just live in these areas, and it’s a fucked-up situation.” Kano’s at his poetic and potent best here. Lines such as “All our mothers worry when we touch the road/\'Cause they know it’s touch-and-go whether we’re coming home” (“Trouble”) impact fast and deep, but he also spotlights hope amid hard times. “I feel like we’re resilient people and there’s always room for a smile and to celebrate the small wins, and the big wins,” he says. “That’s when you hear \[tracks\] like \'Pan-Fried\' and \'Can\'t Hold We Down\'—you can\'t hold us down, no matter what you do to us, you can\'t stop us. We’re a force, you can\'t stop us creatively. I want more for you: I’ve made it through, I want you to see what I’ve seen. It’s about everyone having the opportunity to see more, so they’ll want more, to feel like they are more.” If the wisdom of Kano’s bars positions him as an elder statesman of UK rap, the album as a whole confirms that he’s an undisputed great of the genre. Musically, it sets new standards in vision and ambition, complementing visceral electronic beats with strings and choirs as it moves through exhilarating left turns and dizzying switches of pace and intensity. “I wanted it to be an exciting listen,” he says. “Like the beat that comes in from nowhere in ‘Teardrops’—it’s like a slap in the face. This ain’t the album that you just put on in the background. I didn\'t want it to be that. You need to dedicate time out of your day to listen to this.”

After Maren Morris released her blockbuster debut album *Hero* in 2016, she embarked on a series of unorthodox cross-genre collaborations that, at a different time in country music, could have easily ended her career. Instead, she scored near-simultaneous hits in dance, country, and pop, and established a new breed of Nashville superstar. “It’s a testament to how much the city has changed,” she tells Apple Music. “It’s become an exciting melting pot.” She is being modest: Much of that change is thanks to Morris. Her free-spirited sophomore effort continues to push the limits of contemporary country-pop, infusing it with energy and texture from hip-hop, R&B, and psychedelic rock. \"I wanted to be braver with production and get really weird with it,” she says. \"The lyrics were becoming really assertive and independent and sensual, all these empowering elements. I wanted the music to amplify that.” As the title suggests, womanhood is a theme, but the album steers clear of rallying cries and hear-me-roar tropes; these songs are more about learning to embrace all sides of yourself. By singing about her conflicting emotions and life experiences, she frames her complexity as a kind of power: She can be both romantic and in charge (**“The Bones\"**), pissed off and poised (**“Flavor”**), successful and uncertain (**\"To Hell & Back”**). The latter was the first song she wrote on *GIRL* after wrestling with the explosive success of *Hero*. “It was the bitter and the sweet going on in my head,” she says. “I opened up to this other person and felt like they accepted all my broken pieces. They didn’t try to fix me.” At some point, Morris’ independence and progressive point of view caught the attention of Brandi Carlile, a fellow disrupter in Americana and folk. “She wrote me a note about how she’s got two daughters and she’s proud to know they look up to me,” Morris says. The exchange led to their duet, **“Common”**—a pleading, impassioned ballad about setting aside our differences—and eventually, a supergroup with singer-songwriter Amanda Shires called the Highwomen. (Morris has gently tackled politics before, most notably on “Dear Hate”, her response to the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting.) The album’s other collaboration, **“All My Favorite People”** featuring the Brothers Osbourne, is Morris off duty. “It’s a slapping, trashy party song but has all these descriptive, intricate lyrics,” she says. “It’s my favorite kind of song to write: airtight and very country.” She co-wrote the song with her husband, musician Ryan Hurd, who gets a playful tribute on **“Make Out with Me,”** written to mimic a drunken voicemail. “That\'s one of my favorites,” she says, \"because it’s *so me*.\" Just when you think you’ve got Morris figured out, she serves up R&B curveballs (**“RSVP”**), pop-ified love songs (**“Gold Love”**), and lighters-in-the-air sing-alongs that hat-tip her influences, which include Bruce Springsteen and Katy Perry (**“A Song for Everything”**). No song packs as much zing as **“Flavor,”** a growling send-up Morris has dubbed \"an F U to your haters.” In her case, they’re mostly online. “This is my middle finger to the trolls, the body-shamers, the slut-shamers, the women-haters, the people who rain on my parade,” she says, pointing out that despite her fame, she still manages her own social media accounts. \"I wanted to tell them: You know what, I\'m cooking up my own flavor, and you don\'t have to like it, but I promise you\'ve never tasted anything like it.\"

“Members of the LGBT+ community that wouldn’t necessarily be at a country show. Mega-fans in Orville Peck masks. Couples in their 80s who are huge country fans. Drag queens. Five-year-olds!” Orville Peck is describing his average audience for Apple Music. “Maybe there are a million reasons for these people to be a room together,” he says. “But it’s lovely that I’m one of the reasons for them to be together.” It’s unsurprising that the fringe-masked, pseudonymous Toronto-based cowboy crooner’s debut album has attracted a broad church. *Pony* offers a very modern subversive spin on expertly informed country, tender torch songs of homoerotic desire and raw rock ’n’ roll decorated with his rich, sonorous voice. Peck may not want to show you his face, but here he’s happy to take you through his extraordinary debut, track by track. **Dead of Night** “This is a song about unrequited love. It\'s about being with somebody you know ultimately cannot give you what you want, and is only going to break your heart. But even just that is better than being without them, so you torture yourself with the inevitable demise. It was the first song I wrote for the album, and I wanted it to sound like something familiar, but something completely new as well. I wanted to provoke the kind of sensation of torturous nostalgia. I think we all go through somewhere where you remember a moment and you think that thinking about it is going to torture you, but you do it anyway, because we have this weird human nature of putting ourselves through emotional pain. That\'s kind of why I wanted the lonely guitar sound, and I wanted to go from very low to very high. I just wanted to give that same feeling sonically that the emotion is about in the song.” **Winds Change** “‘Winds Change’ is a song about traveling around not letting too much moss on your stone. I\'ve lived in many, many different countries, and I\'ve just felt like a drifter my entire life. The song is also about the things that you give up when you live that lifestyle. The benefits are adventure and freedom, but there are things—important things—that you have to leave behind.” **Turn to Hate** “I wrote the lyrics for this song about seven years ago when I was in a really low place. It\'s one of my favorite songs on the album. It\'s about the struggle I\'ve had feeling like an outsider and an outlaw my whole life and not letting that turn into resentment. Like I say in the song, ‘Don\'t let my sorrow turn to hate.’ Anyone who\'s ever felt like a weirdo should remember that is your power, and that\'s what makes you powerful and unique. This song is a mantra to remind myself not to let it go dark.” **Buffalo Run** “I’m not a very skilled technical musician, because I just teach myself everything I play. So I write all my music from a visual or emotive place. Here, I wanted to have my version of a driving train beat: I wanted it to feel like a stampede, essentially, so it needed to start peaceful and calm and slowly build and finally you get that release. I wanted it to feel cinematic. There’s a place in Alberta, Canada, I was thinking about called Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, which is this huge canyon where they would do buffalo runs. Canada’s indigenous people would essentially herd the buffalo off cliffs and then gather them. Every time we play it, I genuinely am picturing buffalo stampeding.” **Queen of the Rodeo** “This is about a Canadian drag queen friend of mine called Thanks Jem. It’s funny, because when we first met, we did not get along. But interestingly, she really taught me a lot about myself. She’s from a small town in Canada and moved to Vancouver to pursue her drag artistry. I wouldn’t want to speak on her behalf about her stories, but the general theme of the song is around pursuing something you love, and even if it’s maybe not as fruitful as you’d hoped, it’s the act of chasing what you love in the face of adversity that’s important.” **Kansas (Remembers Me Now)** “This is a tricky song to talk about, as it’s the only song on the record that isn’t connected to my own life. I don’t want to give it away because I’m always proud when someone figures it out and tells me their version. But I’ll give a couple hints: It’s a song about something pretty dastardly. It’s my murder ballad. They have a very long history in country music. It’s about a real-life murder story which also involves a very interesting kind of homoerotic romance. This is my ode to that.” **Old River** “I wrote this very shortly after the death of a family member. It’s a cathartic song for me that I wrote literally driving through the mountains in winter on the way to the studio. I wanted sonically for it to be what is known in Appalachian country as a field holler, which is a mix of the old haunting Appalachian mountain music with a gospel influence. The Carter Family would do it really well. I also wanted it to be just short enough to annoy people. It’s an uncomfortable song for me, and I wanted everyone listening to it to feel uncomfortable too.” **Big Sky** “I grew up a very chatty, outgoing person and I was always performing. I’ve never felt insecure, socially. But the older I’ve gotten, I’ve realized I’m a very closed person with regards to sharing things about myself—real things about myself. I never knew how closed I was for a long time. The song is about three relationships I’ve had, and the funny thing is people tend to think it’s about those people. It is, sort of, but all of the lyrics are actually me exposing my own shortcomings, exposing myself and my role in those relationships, rather than holding anyone else at fault. The second verse deals with a pretty tumultuous relationship that I was pretty fearful of and had never even talked to anybody about before. It’s a really liberating song, as somebody who internalizes a lot.” **Roses Are Falling** “A song about loving somebody so much that they drive you crazy. You know that being with them is not good for you, but at the same time maybe that’s what we all need every now and again. I wanted to give a nod to the era of Santo & Johnny—that pedal-steel Hawaiian influence which moved into country—with a cheeky twist.” **Take You Back (The Iron Hoof Cattle Call)** “There is a classic trope in country music that used to be known as hokum. It\'s funny, because I think it\'s—for people that don\'t really know country today—almost what gave country a stigma for being shallow. But there’s a long tradition in country to incorporate humor, wit, and Southern charm into the music. Dolly Parton is very famous for that, of course, and I love the very famous George Strait song called ‘All My Ex’s Live in Texas.’ So this is my hokum song with gunshots, whip cracks, and yeehaws. It’s a rootin’-tootin’ song about leaving somebody and that great feeling of telling them you’ll never take that back.” **Hope to Die** “Although I sing a lot about relationships, this is the only song on the album that’s about true heartbreak. It took a long time to record and I kept making revisions lyrically and to the production because I really wanted to capture a feeling within it. It was that feeling when you’re so at a loss that something fell apart. For me, it was that I was so heartbroken and spent months walking in slow motion. So I wanted to capture that sensation of feeling numb and watching the world pass you but all you can do is think about whatever it may be. It’s strange, because it’s almost a divine, serene feeling, but it’s so negative. It’s very still and peaceful, but it’s so very lonely. That serene unhappiness is something that I imagine people could probably get stuck in.” **Nothing Fades Like the Light** “This song is about the feeling of knowing something is coming to an end, and how that feeling can be more painful than when it does actually end. Embarrassingly, I still really choke up and cry in this song when I perform it. Which sounds conceited, but it’s not because I’m so moved by my performance. It’s very funny, as like I said earlier, I didn’t realize how closed I was emotionally for a very long time. A friend of mine passed away when I was quite young, and I remember being at the funeral and being incapable of crying. It dawned on me, ‘You know, I don’t cry very often. What makes me cry? Should I be crying? Do I feel things? Am I crazy?’ It’s nuts, because after that moment something clicked in my brain and I didn’t cry for about five or six years, at all. I think it became a compulsion where I just could not seem to cry. I eventually did, and it was actually a moment of bliss. Now I cry all the time.”

Combining the lulling ambiance of shoegaze with the iconic melodies and vocal prowess of classic American country music, outlaw cowboy, Orville Peck croons about love and loss from the badlands of North America. The resulting sound is entirely his own. He takes the listener down desert highways, through a world where worn out gamblers, road-dogs, and lovesick hustlers drift in and out of his masked gaze. Orville’s debut album, Pony, delivers a diverse collection of stories that sing of heartbreak, revenge and the unrelenting tug of the cowboy ethos. Warm lap steel guitars and echoing drums move through dreamy ballads and sometimes near frantic buzzsaw tunes - all the while paying homage to his country music roots. Pony’s lead single “Dead of Night” is a torch song about two hustlers traveling through Nevada desert. Their whirlwind romance takes us on a dusty trail of memories - racing down canyon highways, hitchhiking through casino towns and ultimately, ending in tragedy. Orville recalls the adventures of his young love, as he watches the boys silently pass him on the strip, haunted by the happy memories of his past. On the campfire lullaby, “Big Sky,” Orville sings about his past lovers - an aloof biker, an abusive boxer and an overly protective jailor in the Florida Keys - and the inevitable demise of each one, as he leaves them for the wide open, big sky. Meanwhile “Turn To Hate” finds Orville struggling to keep his resentment from building into hatred. A continuous battle between embracing the strength and freedom of being an outsider, and the inevitable struggle of wanting normalcy and familiarity. It encapsulates Orville's dilemma as a cowboy. He sings about having to constantly repair situations in his wake, and fighting with himself over his decision making. To stay or go; to cry or not; whether to leave without saying goodbye in order to soften the blow; All the while wishing someone would tell him that they "can't stay," and to make the decision for him. And “Buffalo Run” acts as a warning, a song built around the imagery of stampeding buffalo in the badlands of the Northern Plains. It’s one that begins peacefully enough but soon transcends into a kinetic charge that crescendos as the buffalo are headed off the cliffside. Pony was produced by Orville Peck, recorded and mixed by Jordan Koop at The Noise Floor on Gabriola Island, British Columbia and mastered by Harris Newman at Grey Market Mastering in Montreal, Quebec.

In recent years, the Sacramento rapper’s been shouted out by Kendrick Lamar on the Grammys stage and featured on the *Black Panther* soundtrack—and somehow he’s still underrated. On *Internal Affairs*, Mozzy leans further in to the cold-blooded, thoughtful gangster tales on which he built his buzz, with songs that feel like therapy sessions but could still go off in the club. He’s also recruited a solid selection of guests, including Sada Baby, whose scene-stealing verse on “Just My Luck” highlights the similarities between Detroit and Northern California street rap.

All music written and produced by Christopher Taylor Percussion on "Nairobi Flex" and "Shopping" written and performed by Mathew Anderegg Album art design and photograph by Richard Smith

“Walker Texas Ranger,” the standout single from DaBaby’s 2018 *Blank Blank* album, is also present on *Baby on Baby*. It\'s a stellar example of the Charlotte native’s appeal—the rapper’s husky delivery weaves in and out of paced bell chimes while rapping about his affinity for guns, his disdain for women with little to offer him besides their bodies, and a newfound potential for stardom. “It ain’t like Atlanta, I came out of Charlotte, that s\*\*t took me some time,” he raps. DaBaby once went by Baby Jesus, and the fact that he doesn’t take himself all that seriously is evident. Throughout a healthy stream of threats and braggadocio on “Suge,” you can hear the smirk on his face when he raps, “You disrespect me and I’ll beat your ass up all in front of your partners and children.” His choice of guests and their varying levels of fame (Offset, Rich Homie Quan, Stunna 4 Vegas) likewise says a great deal about what he values in a collaborator: MCs with energy that matches his own, and who can rap well, of course, but who also make it a point to laugh at their haters.

Houston\'s status as a fertile and influential rap mecca is still thriving as the rest of the world continues to catch up with the city\'s historically insular greatness. So consider Megan Thee Stallion an ambassador of what’s happening there now. From the blaxploitation vibes of its cover art to its loaded contents, her proper debut album builds upon the filthy flows that made her preceding *Tina Snow* project and its breakout single “Big Ole Freak” such an essential listen. Over live-wire beats informed less by purple drank and slab cars than by Cash Money and Hypnotize Minds, she doles out sex positivity and hustles wisdom about female empowerment in anthems like \"Dance\" and \"Money Good.\" Boasting a rare and deadly approach both lyrical and diabolical, she clowns hopeless imitators on “Realer” and provides ample ratchet motivation on the bassbin ruiner “Shake That.” Academy Award winner Juicy J, who produced three of *Fever*\'s cuts, doles out his legendary cosign with Southern pride, dropping a few raw bars himself on “Simon Says” alongside Megan’s characteristically raw ones.

Though she’d been writing songs in her head since she was six, and on the guitar since she was 12, it took a long time for Nilüfer Yanya to work up the courage to show anyone her music. “I knew I wanted to sing, but the idea of actually having to do it was really horrifying,” says the 23-year-old. When she was finally persuaded to do so, by a music teacher in West London where she grew up, she says “it was horrible. I loved it”. At 18, Nilüfer – who is of Turkish-Irish-Bajan heritage – uploaded a few demos to SoundCloud. Though she’s preternaturally shy, her music – which uniquely blends elements of soul and jazz into intimate pop songs with electronic flourishes and a newly expressed grungy guitar sound – isn’t. And it didn’t take long for it to catch people’s attention. She signed with independent New York label ATO, following three EPs on esteemed london indie label Blue Flowers, and earned a place on the BBC Sound of 2018 longlist. She also supported the likes of The xx, Interpol, Broken Social Scene and Mitski on tour. Now, Nilüfer is ready to release her debut album, Miss Universe. Though she recorded much of it in the same remote Cornwall studio she used to jam in as a much younger person, it is bigger and more ambitious than anything she has done before. ‘Angels’, with its muted, harmonic riffs, channels ideas “of paranoid thoughts and anxiety” – a theme that runs through the album, not least in its conceptual spoken word interludes which emanate from a fictional health management company WWAY HEALTH TM. “You sign up, and you pay a fee,” explains Nilüfer of the automated messages, which are littered through the album and are narrated by the titular Miss Universe. “They sort out all of your dietary requirements, and then they move onto medication, and then maybe you can get a better organ or something… and then suddenly it starts to get a bit weird. You're giving them more of you and to what end?”