Noisey's 100 Best Albums of 2020

Coming at the tail end of a steady wave of solid 2020 Griselda Records projects, the Buffalo, New York-based imprint may very well have saved the best for last. While his core labelmates Westside Gunn and Conway the Machine may have had more prolific release years, Benny the Butcher’s first project since the 2019 trio effort *WWCD* for Eminem’s Shady Records presents him in a singular context. Part of what makes *Burden of Proof* such a standout stems from the beat selection, all of which comes via Hit-Boy. Fresh off of a career highlight with Nas’ *King’s Disease*, the producer meshes exceptionally well with Benny’s street-informed verses on cuts like “Famous” and the animated boom-bap “Trade It All.” And as if his vibrant and boisterous bars weren’t enough, esteemed guests like Freddie Gibbs and Rick Ross sound energized by the upstate lyricist’s dynamic flows here.

One year after the release of “The Telluric Ashes of the Ö Vrth Immemorial Gods”, France's ESOCTRILIHUM return with a new and majestic work, “Eternity Of Shaog”, where the band's unique black/death metal style reaches new peaks of dark visionariness and overwhelming intensity. Sole member Asthâghul has injected new lifeblood in his creature by emphasizing the symphonic and mystical aura of the compositions, once again dense, complex and meticulously crafted. Infectious violins, piano and synths are skilfully blended with scorching guitars and mesmerizing melodies of cosmic proportions, often overflowing into raging melancholy or a delirium of omnipotence. The concept behind “Eternity Of Shaog” is one of psychic transmutation and demonic possession, and further explores the ill worlds of the immemorial gods to form a diptych with the previous album. Through a series of songs/gateways, the listeners are conducted in front of Shaog Og Magthoth, the most unfathomable among the Sovereigns of Nothingness, introduced by ESOCTRILIHUM on the "Pandemorthium" album and reminiscent of Lovecraft's Ancient Ones. In the context of this fantastic, elusive lore imagined by Asthâghul, Shaog is an omnipotent god living an endless and solitary existence outside of time and space; a hungry wild beast from a nightmarish dimension watching us with gnashing teeth, like the space vampire on Alan Brown's mind-blowing cover painting. Shaog resides at the centre of an empty, dead universe, imprisoned in a cage of monotonous desperation from which he tries to escape by possessing the unsuspecting voyager who ventures into his world of ruins through dreams... On closer inspection, Shaog is nothing but our evil self from the other side of the mirror, a metaphor for both the insanity hiding in man and the solitude of the artist. And of Asthâghul in particular: like an involuntary medium, he “receives” the blackened death metal music of ESOCTRILIHUM from unspeakable forces lurking in the dark corners of his mind, negative energies that leak out from its cracks and drip onto our reality.

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

“My life has changed for the better,” Natanael Cano tells Apple Music. Over a roughly seven-month period, the regional urbano singer rose from relative obscurity to become the hybrid sound’s most visible vocalist. His popular projects for the Rancho Humilde imprint, like *Mi Nuevo Yo* and Corazón Tumbado, have come in rapid succession, his ascent bolstered by hit singles including “Amor Tumbado” and the Bad Bunny-assisted “Soy el Diablo (Remix).” While so many young artists in his coveted position would hoard the attention for themselves, Cano instead has been using the moment to build up an inclusive regional Mexican movement around him. The strength-in-numbers approach of 2019’s *Corridos Tumbados*, a compilation of inventive duets and newly recorded stand-alone cuts, spotlighted not only him but also some of his like-minded peers and labelmates. Some of those artists and several more appear on this expansive, scene-defining sequel, upping the ante while exposing the breadth of talent present in this still burgeoning sound. “It happened very naturally,” he says. “Basically we did it the same way—duets with la clika and the same concept overall.” A standout from the first installment after the “Ella” team-up, rising star Junior H makes multiple appearances here. “We connect so well and make good music,” Cano says. Reunited, their “Diez Segundos” captures the same energy as that prior charting single, while their contributions to “Para Andar Agusto” add on to Juanillo Diaz’s original—with Diaz himself present. Cano also pairs up with Houston’s Esteban Gabriel for a remix of the latter’s street-savvy signature “Tirando la H.” One to watch in the regional urbano ranks, Ivonne Galaz continues to prove herself a compelling singer in the often male-dominated sound, delivering a memorable performance on “El Mágico” and the soaring Natalie López partnership “La Rueda.”

The first time that Mac Miller and Jon Brion formally met, Miller was already hard at work on what would become 2018’s *Swimming*, an album that Brion would sign on to produce. “He comes in and he plays five or six things,” Brion tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “There was more hip-hop-leaning stuff, and it was great and funny and personal—the tracks were already pointing someplace interesting. After a couple of those, he goes, ‘I’ve got these other things I\'m not sure what to do with.’” Those “other things” were the beginning of *Circles*, a now posthumous LP that Miller had envisioned as a counterpart to *Swimming*—one that finds him exploring levels of musicality, melody, and vulnerability he’d only hinted at before. It feels more akin to Harry Nilsson than hip-hop, and the breadth of Brion’s CV (Kanye West, Fiona Apple, Janelle Monáe) made him the perfect collaborator. With the support of Miller’s family, Brion completed *Circles* based on conversations the two had shared before Miller’s death in September 2018, adding elements of live percussion, strings, and various overdubs. Here, Brion takes us inside the making of some of *Circles*’ key songs and offers insights on what it was like to work so closely with Miller on something so personal. **Circles** “That\'s what he played me. I added a brush on a cymbal, and a vibraphone. Throughout all of his lyrics, his self-reflection is much more interesting than some other people’s. ‘Circles’ and a few other songs on this record: You hear him acknowledging aspects of himself, either that he doesn\'t feel capable of changing or things he thinks are questionable. Things you\'ll hear in the lyrics directly—‘I’m this way, and I think other people might not understand how I think, but actually I\'m okay with that.’ It\'s so pointed. I was just a hundred percent in from the get-go.” **Complicated** “I think that vocal was done, if I recall correctly. He\'d play me things in various states, and the whole batch, meaning both albums’ worth of songs. He\'d play things, and I might just go, ‘That\'s great. All it needs is for the low end to be a little better.’ Almost every time I\'d make a suggestion like that, he\'d go, \'Oh, I\'m so glad you said that. I just didn\'t know how to do it with this type of thing.\' Other times, I might listen to something and go, ‘I love it. I love what you\'re saying. I like that vocal. I like the rhythm. In this case, about halfway through, my mind wanders, and I don\'t want the listener\'s mind to do that, because what you\'re saying is great.’” **Good News** “It was him singing over a very minimal track. The lyrics were incredible. It didn\'t have the chorus. He said, ‘I just think you should play a bunch of stuff on it.’ I gingerly asked, ‘Do you like the chords that are there?’ He\'s like, ‘No.’ I\'m like, ‘Okay. Well, I\'m going to play, and every time you hear something you like, let me know.’ I did with him what I\'ve done with a bunch of directors, which is watch the body language, when somebody\'s happy or not. He came into the control room, and he was really excited. He started singing over it in the control room, and he sang the chorus. I’m in the middle of the keyboard over top and I look up and go, ‘That\'s great. Go run onto the mic.’ After he first did it, he came in and he was still a little unsure, like, ‘Yeah, I don\'t know, maybe that\'s a different song.’ And thank god he lived with it and saw the sense in it. Again, that\'s not something I created—that\'s something he was doing. I think I did say to him when he was walking around in front of the speakers and he was singing that, like, \'Look, there\'s a reason that came to you right now.\'” **I Can See** “It’s not fair to give words to the heaviness of it, but I can tell you that the week I had to listen through stuff was a torture and a delight. Torture because of the loss. And then ‘I Can See’ would come up and I\'d be beyond delighted because I\'m like, ‘This is good by anybody\'s standards, in any genre, this human being expressing themselves well.’ It would turn back to a torture because you\'re like, ‘Oh my god, you were capable of that. I didn\'t even get to hear that one yet.’ I could sit there and wonder, would I have? Was it something he was nervous about, or because it was already so complete, did he not feel a need? No idea. You can ascribe all sorts of things to his sense of knowing. But people are going to have that experience because he was already self-aware and was unafraid of expressing it. But beyond that lyrical wonder of honesty, the melody just made me cry.” **That’s on Me** “He had come back from Hawaii. I was sideswiped by the song and the feeling of it. He usually said, ‘Oh, you should just play everything.’ I\'m like, ‘No, you\'re already great, I\'ll play along with that.’ Inevitably, he\'d finish a take and say, ‘Was that all right?’ And all I could do is honestly go, ‘Yeah, it was great. I\'m having a blast.’\" **Hands** “He wanted it big and expansive and cinematic, had no idea how he had one keyboard pad implying that. I said, ‘Oh, I\'ve got this notion of Dr. Dre-influenced eighth notes like he would have on a piano sample. Instead of it being piano or a piano sample, let\'s take the influence of that era, but I want to do it on orchestral percussion but a lot of different ones. So it\'s sort of subtly changing across the thing.’ And he was like, ‘Just put everything you want on it.’ So that\'s one where I went to town. He was really excited but had no idea how one would even go about that.” **Once a Day** “He came over, played two or three things—that was one of them, and it had a little mini piano or something. I couldn\'t believe the songwriting. I looked forward to his visits so much because every time, there was this new discovery of, ‘You\'re hiding this?’ Honestly. I don\'t know what else he\'s got undercover, but this thing is fully fleshed out. It\'s personal. It\'s heartbreaking. I went through the rigmarole to get him to play it and I did what I thought was the right production decision. I left the room, but I didn\'t close the door. I didn\'t leave, not even slightly. I stood in the door, basically a room and a half away from the control room with the door open. And he started playing and the vocal was coming out and I wasn\'t having to be in the room and he did a pass and I could hear there was something on the keyboard needing adjustment. It needed to be brighter or darker, and I just sort of came running in like, ‘Oh, sorry, just one thing.’ And I went back out and I stood in the hallway and I listened to a couple of takes. And this is how I can tell you I\'m not looking at it with the loss goggles: I bawled my eyes out. Heard it twice in a row. I kind of poked my head around the door and said, ‘Oh, I heard a little bit of that. That sounds good. Just do a double of that keyboard just right now while the sound’s up. Okay, cool.’ Boom. Ran out into the hallway and cried again and dried my eyes out and went back in and sat through the usual ‘Was that good? Are you sure you shouldn\'t just play it?’ Maybe it\'s something the rest of the world wouldn\'t see and I will be blinded by personal experience, but I don\'t fucking care. It\'s what happened. It\'s what I saw, and I just think it\'s great and doesn\'t need any qualifiers, personally. So there.”

“Everything was stripped away from me,” Unknown T tells Apple Music. “I’ve been waiting to set the record straight for a while now about everything and I’ve had to wait. I’ve had to hear slander and lies on my name and my character.” To accurately measure the loss described by the London MC (real name Daniel Lena), you’d have to first trip back to 2018, where he landed one of the surprise hits of the year with ‘Homerton B’ and helped usher in drill’s status as the sound of the UK streets. Pairing wildly imaginative bars with a gruff, deep-voiced delivery, the east Londoner unearthed a style that suggested he held all the keys to a glittering future. However, eight months after his arrival, he was arrested and charged with murder and violent disorder. Consistently maintaining his innocence while remanded in custody, Lena was cleared of all charges in February 2020. *Rise Above Hate* is a deep-coloured and courageous exploration of his journey piecing together the threads of what happened to him. “The music is the best way I know how to get things off my chest whenever I’m going through it,” he says. “If it wasn’t for that I’m not sure where I’d be or how I would have coped. I know who I am so that was the message to myself the whole time. To just keep my head above all the bullshit and eventually rise above and beyond it all.” Here, Unknown T guides you through his debut release, track by track. **Steppy**
“I wanted to start the tape off with ‘Steppy’ because it takes me right back to the start of this. I didn’t know for sure it would be used as the intro but I see it as the start of me dealing with this situation through music, so it made sense. It was in the cell on the night I was arrested. That night, no lie, that’s when I started writing ‘Steppy’. All of the anger, the hurt and the confusion that was inside of me at the time, I was putting it all into the bars. When I was released on bail conditions, I called my manager and said, ‘Yo, I need to get all of this energy out of me now!’ I got to the studio and laid this.” **Deh Deh**
“This song’s a reflection of my area. Homerton is one of those areas where, even though it’s small, there’s also that sense of community. Also, in another sense, it’s still different and fragmented wherever you go. I drew up the concept of the video, so if you pay attention, you can see I tried to portray some of that there. The easiest way to explain ‘Deh Deh’? It’s a yard ting. It’s like a point of direction.” **Addicts (feat. M Huncho)**
“I recorded this in Paris with M Huncho and we recorded non-stop out there. All day, all night. Just baking off and working and I really got to know the real Huncho, away from the music. It was easy from then. I enjoy making music, now it just comes naturally to us. I wanted to do something a little different because I feel like the project couldn’t have just been drill, drill, drill the whole way, and this song is part of what I really love to do with my raps. I love to add that imagery and it was all tied into the concepts here.” **Tug Boy** 
“I wrote this just before I went to prison and I remember how the flow came to me. It’s always been within me, this style, even when I went away, and I was working on it and adapting it. I had the session with the producer, 169. I was going through his beats and I caught a vibe to this one and immediately started building the song. The session’s memorable to me because Dave ended up coming by and we all got to sit down and have some grown conversation that day.” **Prison**
“A day before I had to go to court, I went to the studio and made this. I said to myself: ‘Look, you might have to go away for a bit so let’s get in and get these emotions out.’ It was almost like they wanted to hold me back because they could see my potential and they could see how close I was and that’s the picture I tried to paint. I love to put little details in my lyrics and really get to that deep imagery. When I listen to this, obviously, it brings back memories of my time there and it’s not a nice place, prison. It’s a cold place and that’s why it hurts to see what happens when you’re still trapped in the system and you can still be recalled for anything. It hurts when I see what’s happening to Digga D and so many others. I’ll use my voice and my story to really shed light on all of that.” **Fresh Home**
“I was aware of the stories about me reaching the papers the whole time I was inside and my legal team would update me on the internet and press talk. I just kept my faith up and waited for my day I was free. This tune is the celebration of that. I’ve had situations in my life prior that have made me realise the presence of God but my trial was like the confirmation. There is a God out there, because miracles don’t happen twice. Every single person, even if you don’t know their life, I can tell you they’ve experienced God in some way that they can’t properly explain or quantify.” **Main Squeeze (feat. Young T & Bugsey)** 
“I really rate Young T & Bugsey for how they worked with me on this track. We were going back and forth on it and they were just real with me. I was trying to do the vocal thing at first but they made me understand it’s not about trying a Young T & Bugsey ting on an Unknown T track. So I changed up my verse. It was simple advice but it worked for the track. Those guys are very underrated, and I feel like if they were from south London, they’d get twice as much recognition as they do. So I’m happy to see their success and really get their shine on Billboard this year.” **Jail Call**
“Maybe once or twice a day when you’re inside, you’ve got a 10-minute call—depending on the prison—and, obviously, it has to be a collect call. So this is a recording of a convo with my girl. She really held me down the whole time and I’m just preparing her here for the worst-case scenario.” **SS Interlude** 
“This carries it on from the skit and it’s like a goodbye to my girl. When I was writing this in prison, obviously, at that time coming home wasn’t 100 per cent. It’s tough when you know you’re in a strong, stable relationship but it’s the system that’s gonna end up breaking you apart. We already know what happens to innocent people in this system. So this was to say if worst comes to worst: go and live your life. Be happy even if I’m not around. Subliminally, I’d say it was also a message for my own mental health too. I didn’t even really want fans or anyone writing to me because I knew how hard it would get for me.” **LV (feat. Young Adz)**
“When we made this Adz was already at the studio with the producer, Remedee, and he didn’t know I was about to pull up, so Rem really helped to make that connection. He already had the tune set too, so big him up for helping to pattern that and play the middle man. I definitely wanted to have something on here about the fly fashion and style and it’s obviously something I’m into. I’ve shot a few campaigns with brands like Trapstar and Places + Faces. It’s definitely something I would want to get into more but I’m fully on music right now.” **Mortal Kombat**
“This is a tune that people have been wanting for a while. From back in the day, before I was established and I was just grinding. When I made this, that night I was flexing with Not3s and Nana Rogues in the studio. They told me to just anticipate the buzz, put a bit out and give it to the fans. I dropped the snippet and everything went mad. From then I knew this is something the fans want so I just needed to find the right time to give it to them. Now it’s time. What I’ve learnt so far in this game, is that the right time to drop music really truly is when the Olympic torch is with you. You get me? How it goes around and around but there’s only one. Naturally, in the scene, the heat shifts. So when the eyes are on you, you’ve got to keep releasing and coming hard and that’s how you’ve got to keep it. When I was fresh home that’s what I was on. I just kept on dropping. ‘Squeeze & Buss’, ‘Dumpa’, a remix here, a tune here, GRM Daily Duppy... you know? I’m back and I’m in everyone’s faces. That’s the way you got to keep it with your artistry. If you slip, there’s always a few who want to take your spot.” **Leave dat Trap (feat. AJ Tracey)**
“When this tune dropped last year, it was building up nicely after my first single and the numbers were looking similar until I was arrested. People forget that. As an artist, that was painful to have that taken away from me. But big up AJ Tracey, man! AJ was showing me love from early. He was rating my music and supporting me and it meant a lot because he’s established. From the jump, he showed organic love and continued to when I went jail.” **Squeeze & Buss**
“I made this when I came out. If you look at the tracklist from ‘Fresh Home’ onwards, it’s my life from the time I was released. It’s expressed through the music and the styles that I’m using. I’m keeping it as trill as it is. I gave the audience what they want. The energy and the pain behind this song actually reflects that. The way I’ve been stigmatised, this is me saying, ‘Fuck it’, now. This is how they labelled me, so you know what? *This* is what I’ll give to you. It was trending on Twitter two nights in a row when it played on No Signal Radio. I’ve trended more times than I have fingers now! Big up the fans.” **One Time**
“DJ Swish produced this one. He’s from America but we linked up out in France at an artist camp. It was a camp for artists from different countries to connect and write together. I had a session with Swish and also M Huncho and Headie One. Overall the camp was really useful for me and it helped my writing. That was the first time being around guys like Headie, and Huncho. I’m in the younger age group but I saw it as an opportunity for me to work hard and see how the older guys do it. When I’m in those situations, the best way for me is just being myself. I don’t have an ego when I’m in the studio. When man’s in the studio, I’m in my own bubble, and if it’s lit, then it’s lit.” **AVEN9ERS (feat. KO & V9)**
“Recently I’ve been locking in a lot more with the crew and we’ve been recording. We know it’s what the fans really want and it’s what they’ve been waiting on but we don’t wanna give out too much honestly. They’re waiting on that tape from us as a trio, but we’re not stressing—we’re taking our time. Between us the chemistry has always been great, and it’s organic. If I think up an idea, we’ll just go with that, but then the next day, it could come from V, or it could be K. It\'s like a relay baton.” **Ambition**
“I made this before I went to jail and I wanted this to be the final track to send a message out. Over the years, as my life has changed, so have my ambitions so I wanted to tell the younger generation around me to stay focused on their dreams and ambitions in life. It’s a little something different from me but I think it’s good to end on a positive and motivational note. I didn’t grow up wanting to be rapper, it was just what I was doing at that time. But when ‘Homerton B’ blew up it changed my life and it’s opened my eyes to bigger things and new experiences. Now I’m reaching for the skies because there’s no limits to this. I’ve been to the edge and back.”

When the largely anonymous UK collective Sault released *Untitled (Black Is)* in June 2020, it arrived on the heels of global unrest spawned, this time, by the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. That album spoke to the profound grief and rage that so many Black people (and their allies) felt, offering a lifeline and a balm at the perfect moment. *Untitled (Rise)* comes three months later, celebratory in its spirit and poetic in its motion—the fresh air inhaled after a summer of drowning. Soulful disco and buoyant funk inform the album from the outset. “Strong,” complete with regal marching band flourishes, beckons to listeners to get up and move: “We\'re moving forward tonight,” a vocalist commands in the early seconds of the opener. “We won\'t back down tonight.” What follows is a monument to resilience and Black people\'s ability to conjure joy under any circumstances, and the songs keep the freedom of the dance floor (or the square) in their center. “I Just Want to Dance” is an intoxicating collage of percussion, while the loose groove of “Fearless” and the kineticism of “Street Fighter” keep up the energy. Elsewhere, “Son Shine,” with its affecting gospel choral arrangements, connects spiritual history with the present, a reminder that so much of this magic has long been intertwined with the sacred: “Let the son shine through my pain, so we will rise.” Towards the back, the tempo slows into the meditative, strings replace the much of the percussion, and the spaces between lyrics become more prominent leading into “The Black & Gold,” a solemn instrumental that evokes peace or rest. The final track offers one last thematic tie: the pain but also the divinity, a guilty world and the preservation of innocence. At its core, *Untitled (Rise)* is about duality and holding multiple truths in a single heart; it asks and extends levity while ensuring, also, that we do not forget.

“My language for producing music is way more diverse now and allows me to create different-sounding music,” Yaeji tells Apple Music. With her mesmerizing voice and chill vibe, the New York (by way of South Korea) DJ, producer, and multimedia artist Kathy Yaeji Lee is a unique presence in dance music. Her songs are celebratory yet meditative—influenced by house, R&B, and hip-hop. They’re reflective of her dual heritage and intercontinental mindset, ranging from stunt anthems (“raingurl,” “drink i’m sippin on”) to her lowercased cover of Drake’s “Passionfruit.” Recorded before inking a deal with XL (the home to Tyler, The Creator and other sonic misfits), *WHAT WE DREW 우리가 그려왔던* is a personal and intimate mixtape she likens to a musical diary. Sung-spoken in whispery tones in English and Korean, Yaeji’s observations are sharp, whether yearning for stillness (“IN PLACE 그 자리 그대로”), indulging in simple pleasures (“WAKING UP DOWN,” “MONEY CAN’T BUY”), or getting in her feelings (“WHAT WE DREW 우리가 그려왔던,” “IN THE MIRROR 거울”). It also represents a time when she soaked up new production techniques and was inspired by 2000s bossanova-influenced electronica, ’80s-’90s Korean music (curated by her parents, who live outside of Seoul), R&B, and soul. Below Yaeji walks through each song on her mixtape. “Every track is a bit different,” she says “I really hope it brings a little bit of positivity.” **MY IMAGINATION 상상** “I wrote it with the intention of warming people up to what I do. I repeat a lot in this song in Korean: ‘If you follow me in this moment I chose, right in this moment.’ And I repeat ‘my imagination’ over and over in Korean. I wanted it to feel really smooth and continuous, almost cyclical, but in a way that felt relaxing. It’s a way to ease you into the next song, which is quite emotional for me.” **WHAT WE DREW 우리가 그려왔던** “It’s one of the older songs on the mixtape. It was written at a very emotional time, when I was going through a lot of transitions and growing pains. In the midst of all that darkness, I was able to stay positive because of family around me. I think that notion of family and unconditional love is so Korean to me. Thinking of Korea gets me very emotional. My dad messaged \[himself scatting\] to me on KakaoTalk \[a Korean messaging app\] a year and a half ago. He said, ‘I have a song idea for you. Use it if it helps you in any way.’ When I finished up the mixtape, I realized it would be so perfect and meaningful for the track, so I added it in.” **IN PLACE 그 자리 그대로** “It was written around the time me and my friends were watching a video of Stevie Wonder performing live with a talk box \[a cover of The Carpenters’ ‘Close to You’ on *The David Frost Show* in 1972\]. We were listening to that a lot and it was stuck in my head. I loved how the talk box sounded; it’s so warm and fuzzy, his performance is so playful. It also has such a robotic quality. I wanted to create this feeling but using a completely different technique. I layered nine different vocal tracks to create that harmony you hear in the intro. It affected each layer differently and holds a similar feeling that I received when I heard Stevie Wonder. Emotionally, it was written when I didn’t want things to change. Just for a moment, I wanted things to stay still. It’s about yearning for stillness.” **WHEN I GROW UP** “It’s an idea I’ve been settling and meditating on for a long time. It’s the concept of a younger me, or a younger person, imagining what it’s like to become an adult. There’s another perspective in the song where it’s me, the adult version of myself, telling my younger self: ‘Unfortunately, when you grow older, you’re fearful for a lot of things. You don’t want to get hurt. You suppress your emotions and pretend like everything is OK.’ All these things I had no idea would happen when I was younger; it’s my reality, our reality, as adults. It’s a kind of back and forth about that.” **MONEY CAN’T BUY (feat. Nappy Nina)** “It’s the really playful one. It’s purely about friendship and being goofy and positive. The thing I repeat in Korean: ‘What I want to do is eat rice and soup.’ It’s pretty common for me. I’ll put the rice in the soup and mix it up, so it becomes like a porridge. I’m repeating that and it’s followed by ‘What I want, money can’t buy.’ Friendship isn’t something that’s quantifiable or measurable with materialism. It’s completely magical and far more special than what can be described. It’s like an appreciation song for friendship. It’s kind of perfect that Nappy Nina was featured on it. I had met her last minute. She’s a friend of my mixing engineer. She came in and recorded immediately; we realized we had mutual friends, so now we keep in touch. That lends itself well to the message of the song.” **FREE INTERLUDE (feat. Lil Fayo, Trenchcoat & Sweet Pea)** “It felt really liberating to include this in the mixtape. It was a completely natural, goofy hang with my friends. We were having fun making music together, kind of first takes of freestyles. The spirit of our hang and our friendship is really in that track. It’s a very meaningful one for me.” **SPELL 주문 (feat. YonYon & G.L.A.M.)** “It was a joy to put together. It started as a bare-bones demo that I had lyrics to. When I was writing it, I was thinking of the experience of performing onstage to a sea of people that you’ve never met before and sharing your most intimate thoughts and experiences. It’s casting a spell; you’re sharing something that only you know, and then they’re applying it in whatever way it means for themselves. I thought of YonYon because we went to the same middle school in Japan when I was living there for one year. We’ve stayed in touch since, and she’s doing great with music in Japan, so she’s always on my mind to collaborate, and this felt perfect. G.L.A.M. is a close friend of a friend. I had also played shows with her a long time ago when I moved to New York, so I thought she was also another perfect collaborator.” **WAKING UP DOWN** “Purely a feel-good song. There’s a moment of questioning and hesitation. The Korean verses embody that side of it. The parts in English are about the feeling I had when I had all of these basic life routines down and felt healthy, mentally and physically. It’s a song to groove to and hopefully feel inspired by. And also, not to get too wrapped up in the literal things: cooking, waking up, hydrating. Yes, it’s important, but the Korean lyrics remind you: Don’t forget, there are these bigger themes in life you have to think about.” **IN THE MIRROR 거울** “It’s the dramatic one. I really wanted to try singing in a way that feels like I’m unleashing pent-up energy. It was written after a difficult tour that mentally and physically stretched me quite thin. It came from a thought I had while I was looking in the mirror in the airplane bathroom. I think being up in the air makes you more emotional. I don’t know how true that is, but I definitely feel that way. I was really in my feelings and really upset.” **THE TH1NG (feat. Victoria Sin & Shy One)** “I want to credit Vic and Shy because I knew I wanted to work with them. I sent them a pretty bare-bones demo, just synth and samples. They’re partners and based in London. Vic is an incredible performing artist and Shy is an incredible DJ. Vic came up with all of the lyrics and vocals. They wrote it on their birthday, stayed at home alone in their bedroom, surrounded themselves with plants, meditated, and had an introspective stream of consciousness of what is this ‘TH1NG.’ It sounds really abstract, but they explore the concept. Shy did a lot of the production on it and built on the little things I sent them.” **THESE DAYS 요즘** “Do you know the \[anime\] genre Slice of Life? It feels like a Slice of Life song, which is, the way I understand it, it’s mundane day-to-day lifestyle about meditating on time. I would visually describe it as feeling like sitting on a stoop with your friends on a nice fall afternoon sharing stories with each other about how you’re doing. That kind of feeling. It’s not overly dramatic or purposeful; it’s a mood.” **NEVER SETTLING DOWN** “It’s a song about making a determined promise to myself to never settle. I should always stay open-minded, to continue unlearning and learning things, to shed things that felt toxic to me in the past. I say things like ‘I’m never shooting the shit,’ which is a balance of not taking myself too seriously but also that I’m not playing, I’m working every day. It’s a confident track, and I hope it brings confidence to other people that hear it. At the end, the breaks come in, and it feels like a big release, like a moment where you’re taking flight or dancing like crazy, alone in your room. That’s how I wanted to end the mixtape.”

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

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

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

“Nobody has riffs anymore,” says founding member/vocalist/guitarist Jacob Duarte when asked about his approach on 12th House Rock, Narrow Head’s highly anticipated LP for Run for Cover due on August 28. “That’s the kind of band we are and to me, that’s just how you write songs. Drums, bass, guitar, vocals. Nothing else. There are no other instruments on the record.”   The Houston-based band’s latest entry is the distillation of the greatest moments in 90’s alternative and hard rock with a fresh set of ears, thirteen tracks of their signature brand of bludgeoning lullabies bursting at the seams with creative ideas, new directions and yes, massive, monolithic riffs. In between the sparkle and smash, open-hearted and emotionally naked songwriting showcases a core piece of the band’s identity– showcasing 12th House Rock as one of the best releases of 2020. “It’s the definitive work of Narrow Head,” proudly explains bassist Ryan Chavez. “Recorded in a studio over a month’s span, the way they used to do it. Not just for the sake of making it that way, but because it was the right way for us.”   Delving into deep-seated themes of self loathing, desolation, self-medication, the loss of loved ones and hopeful redemption,12th House Rock is, as the title suggests, a rock-focused LP themed on transition– exploring the vast abyss of darkness just before the sun cracks upon the horizon. “A lot of the record was made in the late hours and early morning,” recalls Duarte. ”Those quiet moments alone when utter silence and my self-medication made it impossible to escape from my own thoughts. It was also from a specific time when I didn’t take care of myself and made bad decisions in all aspects of my life. These songs were a way out, temporarily anyway.”   Duarte references specific songs on the record as touchstones within that dark period. “’Emmadazey’ and ‘Hard to Swallow’ were inspired by pharmaceuticals and when the people around you know that you’re making bad decisions but are afraid to tell you,” he reveals. “’Crankcase. is about staying up for days at a time, not eating and chain smoking.” Guitarist William Menjivar is also quick to add that “’Ponderosa’ is about big life choices and the empty feelings of ‘What if?’ thinking about whether or not your decision was the right one. In the end it doesn’t matter because you can never take it back.” Yet while all the songs follow explore the darkness, Menjivar adds emphatically that 12th House Rock “does have moments of optimism and sentimentality, so it’s not a completely dark record. Nostalgia is also something we want people to feel when they listen to this.”   Rising from the Texas underground scene, Narrow Head formed in 2013 but became fully realized as a band in Houston with the release of their 2016 debut LP Satisfaction and the lineup of Duarte, Menjivar and drummer Carson Wilcox. Playing in the Texas scene instilled a can-do attitude, an ability to explore several different ideas along with a strong set of DIY ethics, qualities that still form the basis of the band to this day. “Book your own shows, book your own tours,” details Duarte about the foundation of his musical viewpoint. ”I think that having other musical projects provided a scene for us to play too. Nobody else was looking at us, so we had to make our own scene.”   The band’s second and highly-anticipated LP 12th House Rock was self-produced and born of close to a hundred takes with no click track, vocal correction, drum samples or quantizing, resulting in thirteen testaments to pulverizing pop clocking in above 50 minutes. Initially only Duarte, Menjivar and Wilcox in 2018, the trio of old friends entered the studio with a batch of songs intending to write bass parts on the fly. “I have known Jacob and Carson since childhood and they are the most talented musicians– total prodigies,” states Menjivar. The three looked to build an LP that reflected current tastes as well as “music [they] looked up to as kids,” according to Menjivar, adding their own twist on the entirety of it.   Though the primary trio was present throughout the entire cycle, fate would intervene on bass as the undeniable chemistry between the band and then strictly producer Ryan Chavez led to his inclusion in Narrow Head. “Once we got in the studio and started recording demos for the album, I got along with them well and felt full of ideas on how to play bass for certain tracks,” explains Chavez. The newly minted four piece would handle the bulk of the remainder of the LP, bringing in Erica Miller of Big Bite/Casual Hex, vocalist/lyricist on “Delano Door,” and mastering guru Sarah Register to put the final touches on the record. Guitarist Kora Puckett (Bugg, ex-Sheer Mag), who previously logged hours as a live member in the tours preceding the LP, would join Narrow Head as a full-fledged member following the LP’s completion.   Using distorted guitars as their primary vehicle, Narrow Head’s wall of riffs add stark contrast to their best quality– deceptively sweet pop melodies that channel the lessons of My Bloody Valentine, Cocteau Twins, Helmet, Deftones and Guided by Voices all at once. “Distortion provides a harmonic sound that feels like static texture,” details Duarte. “It feels smooth while being loud and noisy at the same time. But some of our favorite bands don’t use distortion– all music inspires us. Loud rock is only the first part of our formula– this record is our take on music we like from the last 20 years.”   Yet despite whatever comparisons that can be made to guitar tone, mood, songwriting, timbre or virtually anything else, Narrow Head are quick to credit their native Houston, TX as the primary source for it all. “Houston is the greatest city on earth,” says Duarte emphatically. “People who know, know. In Houston, you have to give people a reason to pay attention to you.” With 12th House Rock, not only will Narrow Head have Houston’s attention, but the entire rock world as well.

One of the original Brooklynites to cultivate this New York strain of drill, 22Gz rightfully gets credit for giving the genre its first viral sensations back in 2016 with “Blicky” and the signature “Suburban.” Following up 2019’s *The Blixky Tape*, the similarly criminal-minded *Growth & Development* offers a stark glimpse from the Flatbush fixture’s vantage point. The rolling bass warble of “308” accents his ruthless gun talk, while “No Questions” turns chain-snatching into an unlikely hook. Much like the epic original, “Suburban, Pt. 2” trudges through the war zone with a death wish, its hi-hats hitting like the strays inherent in his brutal bars. Looking beyond his own neighborhood, on “Blixky Gang Freestyle” he shouts out incarcerated rappers Kodak Black and Ralo.

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

When Deeper began work on their second LP, the Chicago post-punk outfit had a clear idea of what they wanted to make—a kind of tapestry of guitar-driven textures, loops, and noise. But in the middle of the process, with just over half the album written and recorded, guitarist Mike Clawson abruptly left the band. “We had to figure out where we wanted to go with the rest of it,” bassist Drew McBride tells Apple Music. “We had to figure out what we were actually trying to say. I feel like that really helped us reformulate what these songs meant to all of us and what they were driving us towards.” What followed was a set of new songs—“The Knife” and “Willing” among them—colored by everything the remaining trio was feeling in the wake of Clawson’s departure. “It all hit hard,” drummer Shiraz Bhatti says, “and we all had pent-up anger, things that we wanted to say to him. Throughout the last six months of him being in the band, we saw him slowly change and fade. He was doing things that he normally wouldn\'t be doing.” Months passed, *Auto-Pain* was finished, and no one had heard from Clawson since he’d left the band. “We were like, ‘Oh, Mike\'s going to come around, and we\'re all going to be friends again. It\'s just a matter of when, not if,’” McBride says. “And then he passed away.” While on tour in Europe, the band received word that Clawson, struggling with depression, had died by suicide. “What I learned,” guitarist and vocalist Nic Gohl says, “is to never *not* talk to your friends. That\'s definitely the first thing that I learned when I found out Mike passed away, because as much as I was mad at him and I knew he was mad at me, I love him like a fucking brother—I’ve known him since I was 15. If somebody commits suicide, it\'s not easy to ever really get over it. So many of these songs were experiences that we had together.” It’s forever changed the way they hear and think about an album that represents a leap forward for them creatively. “Nic was saying this the other day, but it\'s the last stuff \[Mike\] ever played on, and a lot of people haven\'t heard this,” Bhatti says. “We definitely want to make sure he lives on through this record.” Here, the trio walks us through every song. **Esoteric** Nic Gohl: “The driving force of that is Mike\'s riff—that ditty in the beginning is just so fucking catchy. The song’s a little angsty, and the vocals are like, ‘Where the fuck are you right now?’ which I think is a good way of interpreting the record—it\'s a pretty direct song for a record that I think is pretty direct. It deals with a lot of depression and anxiety and mental health stuff, the inner monologue within your head. Like, ‘Why do I feel so fucking old? Why is everything so gray to me?’ It\'s the start to feeling nihilist, basically. You\'re just like, ‘Fuck everything.’” **Run** NG: “It\'s like escapism. It\'s about trying to run away from the things that you have to do, or just blocking the things you have to do to help yourself. I’ve had a knee injury for about three months, from a fight I got into, and I still haven\'t gone to the doctor. That\'s just who I am. I don\'t know about you, but anything that\'s good for me, I don\'t do it. ‘Run’ is exactly what that is. You know what you\'re supposed to do to be better, and nobody ever does it.” **This Heat** NG: “It is definitely a little bit of a tribute to \[UK post-punk band\] This Heat. We also wrote it when it was the dead of winter. We\'re fucking cold as shit all the time. Literally, last week or this Monday was the first time we had seen the sun in, what, two weeks? 21 days. That\'s the typical winter Chicago. It really connects with us Chicagoans, us Midwesterners.” Drew McBride: “We took the idea of talking about This Heat and it morphed into longing for warmth. Just being like, ‘Man, we wish there was something to warm us up and make us feel good.’ It\'s a burner.” **Willing** NG: “The lyric ‘willingness to ignore’ was actually something that I wrote in a...I had a little bit of a notebook of lyrics that I was writing at the time. That was also around the time that Mike had left the band, so it was definitely a little pointed. We were mad at him, and he was mad at us. I mean, Mike was one of my best friends growing up. I\'ve known Mike for years, and when I wrote that line, I don\'t think it was meant for him. I think it was more meant for myself, or maybe meant for something else that I was thinking of, but when I revisited that notebook and I saw that line, we had just gotten off tour and we were planning on recording the rest of our new record—and then he quit. I lost my best friend and I was mad at him. I didn\'t want to be friends with him anymore. And, you know, it just fit the whole thing. It was easy to kind of just say over and over again.” **Lake Song** NG: “That’s definitely a pretty pointed lyric \[‘What\'s the point in living this life?’\] at a certain person. It\'s just about not knowing, you know? When you know you\'ve done something and you\'re not happy with yourself. You’re out of line, or not even out of line, just not being the best person you could possibly be or just the best partner, like anything like that. And the line ‘because you\'re sheltered’: It\'s because you somehow lie to yourself, or there\'s somebody around you that\'s telling you it\'s okay, even though it\'s not. It\'s not about suicide or anything like that. It’s, what\'s the point of being alive right now if you\'re not actually going to be the truest person. It’s not a hateful lyric. It\'s more like, ‘Come on. Let\'s fucking do this. Stop being the barrier between you and being happy.’” **Spray Paint** NG: “Do you see a lot of the people that spray-paint themselves to look like robots? Or gold to look like an Academy Award? That\'s what that whole thing is about. It\'s about a kid that lives on the street and they fucking spray-paint themselves to look like a robot. What does it take to get to that point? Is it mental health? Is it just being financially stable? The fact that you spray-paint yourself makes everybody around you not want to be close to you because they\'re scared of you. What does it take for that person to just cover themselves in that color and just be completely taken away and that kind of idea?” DM: “Oh, wow. I always thought it was, you\'re putting on a front to who you are. Like you spray-painted yourself gold to try and puff out your chest.” NG: “That\'s a way better idea.” **4U** NG: “I don\'t remember if it was me or Mike that started playing those triplets, but it was definitely because Mike had been learning a lot of Metallica riffs at the time. I remember we used to do this shtick where when somebody was tuning, or if we needed a break within the set, I would be like, ‘Hey, do you guys want to hear Mike play a riff?’ And it would either be a Metallica riff or we would do a rendition of Creed’s ‘With Arms Wide Open.’ Mike would start playing as I would start singing—it was brilliant. But I do remember he was playing a triplet and then I did that harmony over it, and then Shiraz started playing the bass. It all just kind of fell together.” **V.M.C.** NG: “It stands for Venetian Monument Company. It\'s a local Chicago thing I used to drive by all the time at work. It\'s about the idea of talking to your grandpa about war. Like, every time you talk to somebody that went to war, and you idolize them, you\'re also glorifying the fact that they completely have totally destroyed lives trying to save yours.” **Helena’s Flowers** NG: “That name actually comes from a flower shop in Chicago, on Grand Avenue. It\'s another place I used to drive by. And I just always thought the sign was really cool. We all just wanted all of the lyrics off the cuff, and same with that \'auto-pain\' line. I don\'t know if maybe you feel like this sometimes too, but sometimes, no matter where I am or what situation I\'m in, I just have this negative feeling going forward. Just this depressive cloud over me. That\'s what I think \'auto-pain\' is. It\'s like, don\'t trust yourself on auto-pain. Don\'t trust yourself when you\'re being depressed, because maybe it\'s not the best interpretation of what is actually going on.” **The Knife** DM: “We had been working on the bassline before Mike left the band, jamming. Me playing this really circular bassline; Shiraz came up with a pretty cool beat to it. Then Mike left the band and the song changed. We were like, ‘Okay, we need to find a way.’ Part of ‘The Knife’ is you keep making the same mistakes and you can\'t break out of this cycle. And really dropping into the coda was this breakthrough, where you realize that to move on from the mistakes that you\'ve made, you have to acknowledge them in a way that a lot of people don\'t, so you can really grow from it. I think that kind of breakthrough is what, to me, really defines the record.” **Warm** Shiraz Bhatti: “‘Warm’ was one that started as what we called an interlude, which really came from the idea of having textures. But then we just really liked how it sounded, and Nic laid vocals on separately a day after recording it to see what it\'d feel like, and we just kept it as a song.” DM: “I think having it after that big breakthrough, that big moment on ‘The Knife,’ teases out the idea of the next phase of where the band could go. I always felt like putting it last teases these new opportunities. Or for the story that goes through, struggling with mental illness and wanting to be better, and you keep making the same mistakes, and then finally you get somewhere that\'s new, and who knows if you\'ll stay with that, but you can hope that you can pursue something different.”

A portion of the proceeds from Auto-Pain will be donated to Hope For The Day an organization that actively works to break the silence surrounding mental health. What do you do when pain blots out joy? How do you learn to take care of yourself? What happens when the things you think are helping end up doing the most harm? 'Auto-Pain' is the Sophomore album from Deeper, a record that finds the band embracing open space, using synths to create shadows where bricks of guitars once would’ve blocked out the sun. The group — singer and guitarist Nic Gohl, bassist Drew McBride, and drummer Shiraz Bhatti — were all graduates of Chicago’s rich DIY scene who came together around their love of Wire, Devo, Gang of Four, and Television. While the new record is still within the Great Lakes post-punk tradition of their debut, the album isn’t as insular as its predecessor; it’s less interested in pile-driving and more willing to dwell in liminal spaces. Guitars enter the picture precisely, locked bass grooves propel things forward. Drummer Shiraz Bhatti, who is half-Pakistani and half-Native American, embraced the drumming patterns he’d heard growing up at pow-wows, channeling the anxieties of his heritage into his playing and keeping the group grounded when they switch into all-out percussive attack. The result is an album both more nuanced and catchy. Auto-Pain represents the constant wave of depression felt by many in everyday life. Stemmed from Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’, Auto-Pain is a concept meant to be an inverse to soma, a pill in the book which makes everything numb. The idea of auto-pain is to epitomize the desire to return to a connection with thoughts and clarity, which comes at the expense of feeling everything simultaneously. The album artwork features the now-demolished Prentice Women’s Hospital in Chicago capturing the band’s rounded-off brutalism, and the album title appears in Urdu, a nod to drummer Shiraz Bhatti’s Pakistani heritage. The record was recorded and mixed by Chicago scene luminary Dave Vetraino (Lala Lala, Dehd) and mastered at Chicago Mastering by Greg Obis (Ne-Hi, Melkbelly).

Amnesia Scanner’s Ville Haimala and Martti Kalliala call *Tearless* their “breakup album with the planet.” As the Anthropocene era wreaks increasing havoc on the only home humans have, that’s an audacious concept, and the music fits the bill. On the Finnish experimental musicians’ third full-length as a duo, they move past “deconstructed club” sounds and into the realm of flat-out destruction. They heap distortion on drums, synths, and vocals alike, until the results sound like the charred wreckage of a wildfire, and they crash together styles—reggaetón with doom metal, techno with shoegaze—like kids hell-bent on smashing up toy cars. Yet for all that aggression, there’s an underlying sweetness to their lilting melodies and Auto-Tuned vocals, and on a song like the pensive “AS Acá,” the tone is as melancholy as it is mischievous. Consider it the flipside of hyperpop, balancing dizzily between sugar high and flat-out exhaustion.

Berlin-based duo Amnesia Scanner have announced the impending release of their sophomore LP, Tearless, a sonic reflection of how it feels to experience Earth at a time when collapse is emerging as the prevailing narrative. As Amnesia Scanner founders, Ville Haimala and Martti Kalliala watch their icy home country of Finland thaw- the staggering scale of political recalibration and the worldwide climate crisis blows open old norms. “There’s a looming sense of radical change,” they noted pre-COVID, connecting the period of making the album to a fin de siecle horror and curiosity regarding what new world is being ushered in. Tearless has been referred to as “a breakup album with the planet”, to which Amnesia Scanner responds, on the LP’s closing track: “You will be fine, if we can help you lose your mind.” Amnesia Scanner are previewing the album in the form of a video for their accidental quarantine anthem “AS Going,” a clip featuring a cascade of images of spiraling humans. Tearless marks a turning point in the duo’s trajectory, one begun in 2014 with the AS Live [][][][][] mixtape, followed by audio play Angels Rig Hook, two EP’s for Young Turks, and their 2018 debut album, Another Life (PAN). For Amnesia Scanner in 2020, the walls of the nightclubs, galleries, and institutions fall away and are replaced by full-scale theatrical productions complete with jumbotron stages, animatronics, and a surrealist costumed cast (literally so in the XL version of the album’s live show, Anesthesia Scammer). Likewise, the musical scope of the album is expansive, with guest vocalists — the Peruvian artist Lalita and the Brazillian DJ/producer LYZZA — descending into a vast uncanny valley of sound. With the crossfader on Tearless sitting closer to pop than abstraction, so too does the audience for this record widen in scope. Opener “AS Enter” sets a sombre tone until the fucking riffs of the second track (the titular, Lalita-helmed “AS Tearless”) make clear there’s plenty of roaring to come. A feature from metalcore band Code Orange on “AS Flat” follows, along with “AS Trouble” (feat. Oracle, the third, machinic ghost-member of Amnesia Scanner) and together they hit as black-metal-gaze dirges. Closing Tearless is the sadboy grunge of “AS U Will Be Fine” with a clear statement of intent: doom, despair, insanity, absurdity, it’s all natural, all cathartic, and all OK. For the art direction of this release, Amnesia Scanner collaborators PWR scavenged the pop cultural unconscious, as if ventilating memory dissociated by trauma. The gatefold vinyl reveals a four-panel comic, full of iconic pre-millennial motifs, which arrive cut up and reassembled collage-style: fitting visuals for an album that channels Deftones as much as reggaeton, menace as much as the drop-outness of grunge. Refuse like the ‘90s and party like the ‘20s—if that seems senseless, you are doing it right.

On his fourth studio album, Wizkid invokes a strong continental impulse across 14 tracks. With melody at the heart of his sonics, he enlists Burna Boy, Ella Mai, H.E.R., Damian Marley and more to capture the rhythmic essence of Afrofusion. *Made In Lagos* is rooted in Africa—with instrumentation, lingo and vibes inspired by Wiz’s Nigerian origins—and offers worldwide appeal.

Before receiving a hefty signal boost on Drake’s “Chicago Freestyle,” the singer-songwriter Giveon was growing into a force in his own right. Early singles like 2018\'s “Garden Kisses” and “Fields” were but an appetizer for what would become the delicious main course of his debut *TAKE TIME*. The EP frames the California crooner as an old soul with new ears, a balladeer who makes slowing down, just for a moment, well worthwhile. Giveon\'s voice is singular—vintage, fragile, wrenching—and he astutely chooses production that showcases it with ease. The project\'s first half is a tapestry of grooves slinking towards the engulfing crawl of the back end. “HEARTBREAK ANNIVERSARY” is largely piano and percussion, and he soars over it, creating harmonies with himself that render a simple line like \"Don\'t want to let you out my head\" as gospel. The lead single “LIKE I WANT YOU” pulls off a similar trick to create the kind of love song that sounds like it could exist in any era; some voices can be time-travelers. The bittersweet ballad “VANISH” tiptoes along a minimal melodic line, allowing the force of his vocals to propel the song forward and draw the EP to a close. On its face, *TAKE TIME* is the sentimental musings of a man wandering the corridors of his own heart, but it\'s also a snapshot of a singer who, despite his formidable R&B inclinations, is nimble enough to steal the show in any space he chooses.

Pure X is the last band, has always been the last band. Not that there won’t be future acts, more that Pure X understands that all this pageantry, this civilization is wrapping up. It burned hot and bright like thermite used to bust a safe open, but now is the age of radiating waves, each one buckles the foundation more than the last. It would be understandable to express such forbidden fatalism in a brittle, harsh nihilism, the stark echo of a stone rattling down an endless well. But on this album, their fourth and first in six years, there is a pre-dawn kindness. It may be funereal, but it is a Viking pyre ablaze in the middle of a river, one of those moments when the water seems to pause and reflect the clouds blooming like smoke from an invisible glass pipe. Recorded live in the bucolic Texas Hill Country, this is their clearest, most focused work. The rhythm section is locked in--a night train through the desert. There is more singing, the weary wisdom of the lyrics ringing like Tibetan bowls. In 38 minutes, Pure X weave a culmination, all the delays and distortion, the grinding mortar of touring, the low-tide pulling them out from a cult band, to a legacy band, it’s here, understood and forgiven. This album is a guide, it will comfort you through this long bruised twilight. It’s time to leave the fantasy, to play the game.

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

“I like to describe *So Help Me God!* as a light during a dark time,” 2 Chainz tells Apple Music. “It\'s a time capsule of what we\'ve been experiencing during this pandemic, during this year. But it\'s the light side. It\'s the other side of the pillow.” Before COVID-19 changed the direction of 2020 for the world, 2 Chainz had already delivered *No Face No Case*, a project serving mostly to showcase his T.R.U. clique. The pandemic would void any plans of in-person promotion, so in addition to the extra time he’d get with family, Chainz did what he’s always done, retreating to the studio to accumulate music for what would eventually become *So Help Me God!* Feeling the weight of the era like everyone else, he focused his creative energy on delivering a proper distraction, a body of work that features a diversity of production (Mike WiLL Made-It, Cool & Dre, David Banner, Chief Keef), guest vocals (Kanye West, Mulatto, Kevin Gates, Brent Faiyaz), and novel concepts, all which speak to the MC’s impeccable taste and uncanny ability to wring humor from the street life he knows so well. (See “Vampire” for a hilariously pointed quip about how he distinguishes hustlers who’ve always had money from those who are new to it.) “When people hear this album, they can\'t tell me they knew I was coming like this,” 2 Chainz says. “Ain’t no way. I switch my pitch every time. So, that\'s what this is. We\'re switching up the pitch.” Read on as 2 Chainz breaks down *So Help Me God!* track by track and explains what makes it the next best installment in his catalog. **Lambo Wrist** “Most of the time I like to warm people up—I might give them their soup and their salad before I give them their meal. But this time was a little bit different: I was trying to go entrée first and just recognize what I do, who I am, and what I bring to the game. Sometimes confidence and cockiness can get misconstrued, but I do feel like I\'m one of the best to do this, so I didn\'t want to play with them this time.” **Grey Area** “I went to the ’yo and I was rocking with my man Dallas Martin and he had a young producer over there, Jay the Great. When producers play beats, they \[get\] three to five. I don\'t like to listen to beats all day. I don\'t want to hear your \'experimental folder.\' So I told them three to five beats, and this was the third beat and I just went straight in, and that’s what was on my mind, I guess.” **Save Me (feat. YoungBoy Never Broke Again)** “I be doing a little light production around here. People don’t be knowing, but \[the bounce\] element is what I added to the record because, one, it has my man on there, NBA YoungBoy, and he\'s from Baton Rouge and that\'s just an element that they have in some of their music. I didn\'t want it to be overbearing, but I’m like, we coming with this nostalgic R&B with this bounce, this is a wave, this is a vibe. I could see me doing three or four more joints like this.” **Money Maker (feat. Lil Wayne)** “\[Me and Wayne\] are actually working on *ColleGrove* 2, so while we were doing that, I sent him this from my album. I needed him on this. One reason is because I got the sample from Southern \[Louisiana’s Southern University\] but I just be trying to make everything make sense, sonically and conceptually. \[‘Money Maker’\] is an articulation of the Black experience, the HBCU experience, band culture, halftime, all of those things rolled into one. And then ‘Piece of My Love’ is top of the food chain.” **Can’t Go for That (feat. Ty Dolla $ign & Lil Duval)** “Using Ty Dolla $ign and Lil Duval, that idea came from when JAY-Z did ‘Girls, Girls, Girls,’ when there were different people doing different hooks, from Biz Markie to maybe Beanie Sigel? It was different voices. So for \[Lil Duval and Ty Dolla $ign\], I had originally called on them to do the hooks differently, but I put them all together and it leads up to the point at the end where you just hear Ty going crazy. It rises with each hook, but people don\'t really notice it, and then at the end it\'s a jam session.” **Feel a Way (feat. Kanye West and Brent Faiyaz)** “The thing with me is I’m able to do a lot of different things. I\'m also someone that may be a little too in-tune or be a little too smart when it comes to the process, because I\'m data-driven as well and I understand what the majority of the fans like to hear from 2 Chainz. But I got other bags. I have a whole folder full of this vibe if you need that.” **Quarantine Thick (feat. Mulatto)** “Mulatto is from the South side. She from Clayco: Clayton County is where I\'m from. I thought, who\'s new or fresh who I can support and it\'d be organic—she pulled up on me at the studio and we knocked that shit out. So I fuck with her for that.” **Ziploc (feat. Kevin Gates)** “Kevin Gates pulled up on me at my crib in LA, and we went in. In this time of pandemics and internet, a lot of features are done through email—you send them and send them back—but when he came through, we vibed, we chilled, we chopped it up for an hour or so. Then we pulled up some beats and we did that one on the spot. It was one of my most memorable recording sessions because of just how we were getting to it on that thing, for real. Steel sharpens steel.” **Free Lighter (feat. Lil Uzi Vert & Chief Keef)** “People don\'t know, man, I\'ve rocked with Sosa, I be hollering at Sosa, I like what he do, I like how he bring his individuality to the game. Chief Keef is one of them people that we have to give him his roses too and he hard on the beats, too. So I talked to him and I said, \'Send me some beats.\' Then I did it and I sent it back and he thought it was so hard, he jumped on it. I think then Uzi may have heard it, and it just came together super organically. It\'s one of them records that I\'ve been sitting on. I\'ve been ready to get that boy out of here.” **Toni** “Toni talks in third person a lot. So, it\'s conceptual. \'Toni\' derives from the neighborhood I’m from, Old National: Everybody who sold powder or anything like that, their name was Tony. You would get called Tony: Black Tony, White Tony, Big Tony, Lil Tony—all the different likenesses. I\'m just Big Toni at this particular point in my career. The biggest Toni.” **Southside Hov** “I got a lot of admiration for the big homie, he been around for a few decades. He\'s been relevant and successful, in our eyes. He’s a businessman, philanthropist, he be helping the hood; married with the kids. He\'s not a bad person to look at when you want some advice or trying to figure a couple of things out. So I just really talk about my business savvy on there, mixed with my hustling savvy, which is kind of where he came from, the same thing. From hustling to the Fortune 500 type of flow.” **Vampire** “So I got the track from Dallas \[Martin\] and I do the track and I loved the track. And then I sent it back to Cool & Dre and they give it back to me *all* different—with heavy 808s…like some Florida shit. Maybe the beat was unfinished when I got it, but they don\'t know I fell in love with it like that. So I had to take things back off or whatever, but I\'ve *been* fans of those boys. I\'ve been fucking with those boys forever. It was just time to do it, and it was time to do something different.” **YRB (feat. Rick Ross & Skooly)** “So we needed a little spoken word on here, and my boy MIKE DEAN had made this, like, four-bar pass, with just the vibes. Then my boy KY, who mixes all my stuff, he was like, ‘You gotta put Big Rube on here to give them folks some game.’ \[We placed it\] right before Ross come on and it just fit like a glove.” **Wait for You to Die** “I had a little partner pass away, he was only 17 years old. And he passed away from something unfortunate, but I saw somebody else say, ‘I never looked up to nobody younger than me before.’ So it was about how he didn\'t even know. No one knew that. As soon as you die, somebody want your girl, the label make money off of you—like all this stuff is going to happen as soon as you pass away. So, it\'s just like a reality check. David Banner did the beat, too.” **55 Times** “I’ve talked about this before, but I have a couple of friends whose sons have passed away. My homie Crazy called me one time and told me that Big’s son just got killed and I didn\'t believe it. So Big called me a lot of times before I answered the phone. I don’t know if it was 55 times, but it was a lot of times before I found out the horrible news. And then when Johnny passed, I was asleep, out of town, and my wife was calling. I don\'t know what happened, either, my phone was dead or—by the time I got to the phone, I had so many missed calls and it was bad news. So basically with this song I talk about how God keeps blessing me for some reason. I was in a storytelling format where I talk about some of the dark times, but how God continues to bless me throughout.”

“When you hear the music, I think the title explains itself,” Nines tells Apple Music of his third album *Crabs in a Bucket*. “I just felt like when I look back on recent situations I had, they all made me feel that way.” An artist who has always depicted the transition from life on the road (2015 mixtape *One Foot In*) to being a high-profile rapper and entrepreneur (2017’s *One Foot Out*), his absence from the forefront of the music scene since his acclaimed 2018 album *Crop Circle* has brought around a slew of online rumors, as well as heightened anticipation for his next release. On *Crabs in a Bucket*, Nines—born Courtney Freckleton—explains where he’s been, exploring the impact of his stabbing in the summer of 2019, during a time when he was also supporting his father through cancer. The incident left the North-West Londoner requiring surgery and a recovery period abroad—time away that allowed him to find solace, and regain a passion for music. All of which ignited his ambition to put together his most polished work yet. “I was in different countries—Spain, Paris, Dubai—when I was making this album. That’s why it took a bit of time. I would go sometimes three months without recording. But you know what they say: When you’re uninspired, the best thing is to do other things.” Over 52 minutes, and with guest spots from Nafe Smallz, NSG, and Headie One to name a few, Nines relights his fire by doubling down on witty rap references, big-time boasts, and smooth trap talk. Elsewhere, he hones his storytelling prowess—and allows himself the room to be more introspective than ever (see “Intro” and “NIC” especially). Walk with Nines as he breaks down *Crabs in a Bucket*, one track at a time. **Intro** “I didn’t intend for this to be the intro to the album, but everyone I’ve played the album to said this was the one. Normally you hear me get busy with the trap talk, the flavors, just popping that fly shit, but I went deeper and addressed a lot. It set the tone for the album; when the fans ask ‘Where has Nines been?’ you can listen to this and connect the dots. When I made this, I was bored on a plane. I’ve been flying a lot in the last year and I’ve been going through beats on YouTube. I heard this beat on there by an American producer, and once I played it, I had to track him down. At the end that’s me chatting to \[UK producer\] Quincy. I poured out my pain and just let it flow.” **Energy (feat. Skrapz)** “This was produced by Beatfreakz. I made it when I was driving around in my car—it just sounds like one of those tracks you can cruise to. I phoned up Skrapz and told him that I’ve got some fire that I need him on; that’s family so it was really that simple.” **Clout** “I consider ‘Airplane Mode’ to be the lead single, but it came out after ‘Clout.’ This wasn’t even meant to be a single. When I was playing tracks to the young guns, they said this was the one. My guy 1st Born produced this. You already know what I’m about when I make a song, you hear the wordplay—I can’t call really call it bragging, because I live it. The inspiration for the video was just some of the albums that have influenced me when I was growing up. When I get an idea, my guy \[director\] Charlie Di Placido helps me bring it to life. We directed the video together and I feel like we did it justice.” **Realist (feat. Nafe Smallz and Fundz)** “Come on, man, this one was inevitable! Nafe has been family for a minute, so it was only right that we linked up properly on a track. On *One Foot In*, he was only on a bonus track, but this time we just had to make it happen for real. On this song I kinda stepped into his world with the instrumental. We were at a coffee shop in Amsterdam and the guy who owns the shop has a studio in there, so Quincy hit me up and was like, ‘Yo, I’ve got something that was made for you,’ and we just took it from there. Quincy is family as well, I’ve been fucking with him for a while now. This was one of the most organic sessions I had for the album.” **Monster** “1st Born produced this also. He’s got a few joints on here. He laced me with this eerie-sounding beat so it was easy to get into that mindset when I was recording. ‘I swear these streets turned me to a monster, I swear these streets turned me to a—’ This track explains itself, you know what I come from already. I was in Dubai when I made this.” **Airplane Mode (feat. NSG)** “Shout out KZ and Rudimental. When I was making the album, I was thinking about the clubs for real, and I wanted a club song. Before COVID stopped everything, I would hit the clubs and DJs would play \[Nines’ 2017 track\] ‘Trapper of the Year.’ I know they wouldn’t play that if I wasn’t here. It’s homage, but it’s not a club song, you get me? So I feel like I needed an ‘Airplane Mode’ on the album. I fuck with NSG, I reached out to them, invited them to the studio, and the rest was history. We all played PlayStation, blew trees, it was a good time! We actually made three songs in that session, but ‘Airplane Mode’ was the one for me because I had my eye on the commercial side.” **NIC (feat. Tiggs Da Author)** “Tiggs has been on all of my studio albums, he’s a natural with it. Whenever I say I’m working on an album, he’ll always come around like, ‘I’ve got something for your album, bro.’ \[Producer\] Show N Prove is the same too. He’s actually produced all the songs that me and Tiggs have done together. When I heard the beat, I already knew I wanted to go into story mode. It has that vintage feel to it. Some of my inspiration comes from how 50 Cent, Hov, and those guys used to tell stories. I feel like you can hear it here, just the come-up story from my school days. That influence is why there\'s three verses. I felt like it was too long, but when I play it to people, they would beg me not to cut it to two.” **Don’t Change (feat. Northsidebenji)** “This is definitely one for the ladies, so I had to get \[Canadian rapper\] Benji on here. Carlos produced this one–he’s my go-to engineer, but he’s been getting in his bag lately with production. He’ll chop up samples for me that I’ll take to him. Here it was the ‘Don’t Change’ sample that I wanted someone to sing over. I hit up Benji and he laid his melodies and done his thing on it. I really enjoy helping to develop artists. Looking after other artists as the head of an imprint when you’re an artist as well is tricky; your natural instinct is to protect your own interests. With Benji, I co-manage him and I wanted to help him out.” **Lights (feat. Louis Rei)** “Again, that is me and Carlos in collab mode. I would say we both produced it, but it’s more him because he chopped the sample. Shout out to the boy Louis, man, people always try to take him out of the rapper conversation because he’s the vibes guy. But even when Akelle went away, he stepped up and held it down for WSTRN. People act like LB is not the guy, but it was good to get a joint with him where we’re both rapping nice.” **Money Ain’t a Thing (feat. Roy Woods)** “I think this one was worked on by three different producers: Quincy, Steel Banglez, and my guy Sean. Shout out to my OVO family Roy Woods, he’s good peoples. He wanted to be on the hook rather than drop a verse, and he came through with that. Since before I signed the deal, I could say money weren’t a thing. Could’ve been in *Top Boy* but I turned it down. Come on: *Crop Circle*, baby! It would have been a good look but off-brand given the fact I’m doing my own thing with *Crop Circle*.” **Ringaling (feat. Headie One and Odeal)** “Headie has been one of my favorites for a while now. Headie and K-Trap go in on drill. And M1llionz is trying to run away with it right now, too. He’s been on a good run, but those three are killing it. The Elements and Steel Banglez co-produced ‘Ringaling’—it doesn’t sound like any song I’ve done before. Again, this track was done with an eye on the club. You can’t be playing ‘Trapper of the Year’ in the clubs, we all know what that is. You thought that ‘Don’t Change’ was the girl song, but this is it for me. I talk about the love I have for bae, but I let her know that I gotta leave her when the money calls!” **Flavours** “You know I’ve been the tree guy from early, from the beginning, so I had to make a weed song. My favorite strains right now are Skittles, or Biscotti—that’s that good Cali right there. Billy Kimber as well—all the others don’t compare. We only keep exotic flavors around here, bro!” **Flex (feat. Northsidebenji and REID B2WN)** “This was produced by my guy, the young Nav Michael, who produced Drake’s ‘Back to Back.’ He’s the same as Show N Prove with me—when I’m trying to make an album he’ll always come through with something for me. Benji wrapped up his part effortlessly and I tried to match his energy with a smooth flow and flex a little.” **Stalker Interlude (feat. Cherrie)** “True stories: I really had stalkers following me at one point—ringing my phone, showing up at random shows. One time we were in Croatia for a festival and this girl showed up there and hit me up. Cherrie is a Swedish singer that I met through a mutual friend. She came through to the studio and I played her a few beats and she took to this one the most. When I was writing this one, I was influenced by my Fire in the Booth and also JAY-Z’s ‘Girls, Girls, Girls.’” **Movie Knights** “I had to hop on a hometown beat, so I hollered at my guy MK, a young producer from the ends. The reason for this is because when I go to my studio I see all the plaques I have, but the studio in ends doesn’t have a single plaque in there. So hopefully we get a plaque for this one. You know I’m about my films—throughout the song you hear me reference some of my favorites. Funnily enough, I was with Leon \[Palmer, the creative behind the Movie Knights brand\] in the studio when I made that and had some fun with it. Leon is a cool guy. I’ll never forget when he came to the ends on his ones just to meet me. I thought he was mad! But we’re alike—we see something we want and go for it.” **All Stars 2 (feat. Clavish, Frosty, Q2T and Chappo CSB)** “I had to show the young Gs some love on the album, let them get their shine on. Clavish picked the beat, and I don’t usually rap on beats at this tempo, but that’s what the youngers were doing. We done our thing, and I’m not dissing the song… I just wish Clavish picked a different beat.” **Outro** “Just like the intro, this one came from the heart. I rapped from the heart and poured my pain over the beat. By the time you get to the end of the album, what I want people—especially the youngers—to take from this is that you can be in the hood, and born into it, but do see other things in life. I’m not saying leave the hood, but there’s levels to life. I was turning down festivals and not doing shows so I can stand around in the hood—that doesn’t make any sense. Start thinking about the long game, you have to.”

You don’t listen to KA albums so much as you sink into them: the hushed, laser-focused flow, the dense imagery and virtually drum-free production, the sense of darkness lurking quietly around every corner. Loosely organized as a metaphorical play between Cain’s murder of his brother Abel and KA’s own violent memories of youth in east Brooklyn, *Descendants of Cain* is, yes, deadly serious and noir to the marrow. But between the whiplash-worthy observations—“All our Santas carried them hammers/Our guidance counselors was talented scramblers” (“Patron Saints”), “The meek heard ‘turn the other cheek’/I got different advice” (“Solitude of Enoch”)—is a sense of almost meditative calm, the sort of resolve that comes not from the heat of youth but from the steadiness of middle age. The pace is measured, the tone is cool, but the past still haunts him.

Looking for a respite from the gloomy cycle that has been 2020? Then Megan Thee Stallion\'s got you covered. “I feel like I had to name my album *Good News* because we\'ve been hearing so much bad news,” she tells Apple Music. “It\'s like, \'Okay, look, Megan Thee Stallion finally coming with the good news.\'” The Houston rapper\'s long-awaited (and, yes, aptly titled) debut album is a distillation of her best qualities punched up for maximum impact. It\'s skillful and clever, but not at the expense of style and levity. Hope you\'ve done your stretches. To start, she wastes no time addressing the controversy that had been trailing her, using the album\'s opening moments to put to rest any discussion about the shooting incident that left her wounded. It\'s brief, fiery, and filled with haymakers, as Megan takes aim at her perpetrator (who remains nameless on wax—“I know you want the clout so I ain\'t saying y\'all name,” she declares) and any naysayers. Never one to wallow, she spends the next 16 songs showcasing exactly why she\'s earned the respect and adoration of peers and fans alike. Songs like “Do It on the Tip” (featuring City Girls) and “Freaky Girls” (featuring SZA) are flirty, twerkable, and emblematic of the \'girls just wanna have fun\' mantra that seems to rule her world, while others like “Movie” and “What\'s New” are all attitude and take-no-prisoners displays of the lyrical dexterity that makes her freestyles so charming. Elsewhere, “Intercourse,” which features Jamaican artist Popcaan, and “Don\'t Rock Me to Sleep” find her outside of her comfort zone, the former a dancehall-inflected romp and the latter a singsongy pop record. And for Meg, that kind of ambition felt right for the current moment. “When I started recording the songs for this album, I knew it sounded like album songs,” she says. “And I\'m like, \'This is it. This is the time. Quarantine is happening, everybody\'s basically in the house. I have everybody\'s attention. Everybody wants new music and you can sit down and actually absorb it.\" By the time the album wraps up with a run of previously released singles (including, of course, her “Savage Remix” with Beyoncé), it feels like we’ve glimpsed past, present, and future. The fan-favorite styles of old are now well-developed and existing alongside the possibilities of what may come next. *Good News* lives up to its name with ease—a tenacious effort that makes room for pleasure, dance, and feeling good (and oneself) despite contrary circumstances. And, really, who among us couldn\'t use just a little more of that?

On his fourth LP, Fantastic Negrito wanted to draw attention to issues of mental illness from the perspective of both himself and the people he’s known all his life. “I noticed that most of the people that I thought were suffering from what I call mental challenges and hurdles, if you will, were just us regular people,” he tells Apple Music. “Not people walking down the street talking to themselves, but my friends, my family, my colleagues. We are facing the depression and the trauma of the gun violence that happens so much in America. And we take it in as if it\'s nothing.” After his politically charged 2018 LP *Please Don’t Be Dead*, the Oakland bluesman and two-time Grammy winner continues to explore societal concerns that are large in scale and scope. But this time, he focuses on the small details rather than looking at the big picture. “My records are always social commentary—but I wanted to go into that door and dig deep into that,” he says. “I wanted to take a therapeutic and accountable approach all in one and ask myself, \'What did we become that we just accept so many really tragic things that happen?\'” His interpretation of the blues in *Have You Lost Your Mind Yet?* is eclectic and all-encompassing, taking on an uncompromising mix of Delta blues, classic R&B, roots music, and funk, especially. “A lot of this album was about the power and the energy of the ’70s—powerful songs one right after another that just don\'t let up,” Negrito says, as he walks us through this track-by-track guide. **Chocolate Samurai** “When I was confronting a lot of the issues of mental health and illness, I was talking about my fans on that one. The whole world is watching us. My community, my people, my teachers, my soldiers, my doctors, my lawyers, my policemen. All of us. And what does that do to our psyche? And that\'s why, in the video, I got people from all over the world to send in their clips and make an amazing video out of that. I was talking about my community during that song. Like, \'We have to get free tonight.\' Get free from oppression. We have to get free from the construct of racism. We gotta get free from the idea that we\'re victims all the time, too. I was thinking very deep on that song. There was a lot about accountability. And celebration. All my songs are celebrations—even if they\'re all kind of anecdotal. There\'s a lot of Stevie Wonder in that song, too.” **I’m So Happy I Cry (feat. Tank and the Bangas & Tarriona “Tank” Ball)** “I wanted to make history and be the first two Tiny Desk winners \[NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest\] ever to collaborate on a song \[referring to his collaboration with Tank and the Bangas\]. The competition has been on for five years and no one has made a collaboration. But the song’s really about myself. You know, all the things that used to make me so high. And now it’s like, ‘Why don’t they get me high?’ Sometimes we have this hole in our life and we\'re just trying to fill it up with all this stuff, and a lot of it\'s from not wanting to confront who we are. I was reading about a lot of these young rappers, especially Juice WRLD and a lot of these young kids that are just dying from overdoses. I thought, you know what? Wow, it\'s not a real happiness. I have all this stuff, but it doesn\'t really fill me up and it doesn\'t fulfill me. I\'m depressed on my private jet with 70 kinds of marijuana on it, doing drugs. But again, it\'s hopeful. Today we wake up to another morning sun. I\'m happy this morning.” **How Long?** “This song was really about these policemen who are just arbitrarily executing citizens. You say to yourself, ‘Well, how long are we gonna keep living with that?’ It was very, very simple and very easy to write that song, because it was a question I thought a lot about. How long can we keep holding on to the same thing that we\'re repeating over and over again?” **Shigamabu Blues** “I like to create names. It was a name and a character that I used throughout the record. It\'s kind of a spirit; it\'s very African. It\'s all the kinds of things that can happen. We don\'t control the future. We don\'t control the next five minutes. It’s the monster of COVID-19, disease, and death. It\'s life and it\'s happiness, and it\'s Kobe Bryant being a millionaire and dying with his daughter. It\'s me getting into a coma for three weeks \[in 1999\]. A friend of mine, he has HIV. This record is very much that feeling, because the minute we realize that, then we have a much more peaceful existence.” **Searching for Captain Save a Hoe (feat. E-40)** “That song\'s a lot about me being the whore, you know? And about a lot of men. We\'re the whores and we can go around and do our thing as guys, but then if a woman does it, we call her a whore. I took the character of Captain Save a Hoe from the \'90s, where this guy is now saving the men who are actually the whores. He\'s learned, and now he\'s a guy that I\'m searching for to help save me and make me accountable to a lot of my really stupid and destructive ideas about family. And about E-40, what an innovative giant. I was so fortunate that my music got his attention. He was willing to go ahead and spit some bars on that, because he\'s just a giant. I was very pleased and honored to work with him.” **Your Sex Is Overrated (feat. Masa Kohama)** “That was more about the mental condition and using sex as a weapon. Sex as manipulation and sex for sale. Masa\'s a guy that I\'ve played with for 25 years, and we did that track a long time ago. We found it and redid the verses, like, chopped it up. Initially, I really wanted to sing that with Brittany Howard—but we couldn\'t really make it happen. That\'s why it starts off with \'Brittany, I\'m so scared of you \[laughing\].\' That was my initial idea, to get her to sing that with her on the second verse. But hey, another time. And Masa\'s solo on there is tremendous. Really, one of one of the best solos ever recorded. That\'s right. I said it.” **These Are My Friends** “I was just playing it this morning on the piano—it\'s one of my favorite songs on the record. I wrote it about two of my very close friends, best friends who are pretty damaged people that may be suffering from a lot of trauma and mental illness, but they are completely functional. I describe them in the song. Sometimes it\'s hard to get along, but you know what, these are my friends, for better or for worse. They got my back and I got their back, and that\'s what I was trying to write about. Exploring people\'s deficiencies, but celebrating the bond. I\'ve got my friends who are just as flawed as I am, but we support each other all the time. Your friends are your investors, basically; that\'s your investment portfolio.” **All Up in My Space** “It’s a very toxic thing—being a human being and being in relationships. People don’t want you sometimes because you don\'t want them, and I feel like that\'s extremely unhealthy. I think there\'s something wrong when that happens to people, and sometimes it can become extremely dangerous. Those type of interactions between people.” **Justice in America** “I didn\'t wanna write a song about it. I thought the idea itself was so powerful, because of the way that we use immigrants in this country and then we just wanna discard them and throw them away. I think that\'s why I wanted my friend Gina \[Madrid\]\'s voice, who\'s a vocal artist. Sometimes, immigrants, they come here and they\'ll realize, \'Hey, this place isn\'t all that it said.\' America is a place that\'s advertising for people to get free labor. And in the end, it\'s just that America was based on money. We don\'t say that on the Statue of Liberty, now, do we?” **King Frustration** “That was one of the most fun productions that I did, I think. It’s the two organ and guitar solos—and a kind of weird classical interlude thing that I did on it. I thought it was just fun, but it was inspired by one of my drug addict cousins. She\'d been hooked on drugs for 30-something years. I just saw her walking down the street and I wanted to tell some of her story in that song. It was based on the struggle of growing up in the inner city, without some of the opportunities and all the challenges and all the pitfalls. And she has, man, five, six, seven different kids and gave them away to relatives.” **Platypus Dipster** “That song was just about relieving pressure, this pressure of the media and the expectations that people have until it just breaks people. I wrote this about a particular person again, and how they\'re just broken by society\'s expectations. People have this image of what they want you to be. Or, you know, our news cycle is for sale. We\'re bombarded daily with this information that people are trying to sell us. I don\'t think it\'s very normal, and it breaks people.”

Growth with no reward. Finding strength in your less desirable traits. Coming up with the perfect comeback hours later in bed, glaring at the ceiling. Asking yourself: am I improving, or am I just changing into something unrecognizable? Chicago quartet Ganser probe the futility of striving for self-growth during the chaos of our times for dark comedy and jagged sounds on their potent new album Just Look at That Sky, out July 31st on Felte. Equal parts Space Odyssey and Ghost World, Ganser released their debut LP Odd Talk in 2018 to favorable coverage from The New York Times, Billboard, and Stereogum. Building on their dissociative disorder namesake, the album’s tone vacillated between frenzied and contemplative, probing on questions of communication, intimacy, and avoidance. On Just Look at That Sky, Ganser further explores the personal inner climate of uncertain times. Opening track “Lucky” announces an explosive energy that evokes the Midwest noise-rock legacy of bands like Jesus Lizard and Shellac, while embracing a more colorful palette of post-punk and art rock influences. Nadia Garofalo and Alicia Gaines, a self-described two-headed monster who share lead vocal duties, can bring both a recalcitrant cool worthy of Kim Gordon and a booming sneer that recalls Poly Styrene; the discordant interplay of Charlie Landsman’s guitar and Brian Cundiff’s drums on standouts “Self Service” and “Bad Form” build to blistering climaxes that wouldn’t feel out of place on Red Medicine-era Fugazi. And then there’s Ganser’s lyrics: manic explorations of worry and dread mark this record, the epic messiness of daily life in our damaged times attacked with sardonic specificity as often as generalized doom. Just Look at That Sky isn’t afraid to acknowledge that we’re all Extremely Online all the time, but rather explicitly owns it. These songs chart inner monologues of emphatic confusion, emotions already deeply felt further ratcheted up by the anxiety of always having too much information about other people, and always being just one tweet or status update away from knowing what everyone really thinks about us. This culminates in closing track “Bags for Life,” which imagines how online discourse might tackle a front-row seat for the end of the world. Nadia Garofalo (keyboards/vocals) and Alicia Gaines (bass/vocals) met in art school, bonding over their shared love of The Residents, outsider communities, and transgressive filmmakers like John Waters and David Lynch. The hands-on, DIY craftsmanship honed in those years has carried over into a group that shares writing duties, collaborates closely on music videos and album art, and crafts Brechtian visuals to accompany their maximalist live show. Having shared stages with the likes of Daughters, Oh Sees, Algiers, as well as Modern English, Ganser is a band that refuses to be pinned down, four individuals of diverse backgrounds functioning with the collective consciousness of four people in uncertain times. These are songs that never shy away from ugliness and confusion, that believe embracing the totality of the self sometimes means leaning into our dickish behavior. In the past, some listeners have had trouble reconciling non-male voices with the sorts of topics Ganser writes about, but that comes to an end with Just Look at That Sky. Co-produced with Electrelane's Mia Clarke and engineer Brian Fox, this is an assured, fully realized triumph of a record from an art-punk band that’s figured out how to focus on making great art, even if everything else around them falls apart.

7-disc, 49-track album A. G. Drums, A. G. Guitar, A. G. Supersaw, A. G. Piano, A. G. Nord, A. G. Spoken Word, A. G. Extreme Vocals Personal Computer Music 7g.click

Chicago drummer and composer Jeremy Cunningham wrote The Weather Up There in response to the loss of his brother Andrew, who died in a home invasion robbery in 2008. Co-produced by Jeff Parker and Paul Bryan, and engineered by Paul Bryan and John McEntire, this new work confronts the tragedy of violence and examines the acute ripple effect on several people's lives through the lens of memory, response, and collage. Further deepening the textural and emotive impact, Cunningham formed a “drum choir” for these recordings, comprised of close mentors and colleagues Mike Reed, Makaya McCraven, and Mikel Patrick Avery. Cunningham also taps regular collaborators Ben LaMar Gay, Jaimie Branch, Tomeka Reid, Dustin Laurenzi, Matt Ulery, and Josh Johnson. “Jeremy is a rare drummer who possesses both insane skills and immaculate taste. His tunes have that same sensibility— they are layered and sophisticated while remaining visceral and hummable.” -Yoni Wolf (Why?) “Jeremy Cunningham’s upcoming record is a testament to his commitment to sound, feel and creativity that sets him apart from other drummers. I am inspired by his vulnerable and honest approach to music both as a drummer and composer.” -Makaya McCraven "I've had the pleasure of watching Jeremy grow into one of the most visionary composer/bandleaders on the scene today. It was truly an honor for me to work with him on 'The Weather Up There'." –Jeff Parker

Code Orange vocalist, drummer, and bandleader Jami Morgan says his band’s fourth album is all about duality. “It’s about societal introspection and looking at where we’re at as a youth culture,” he tells Apple Music. “But it’s also about looking at yourself as a person—and what you present to the world in this digital age versus what’s inside.” On *Underneath*, the unclassifiable Pittsburgh band—equal parts hardcore crew and groove metal enthusiasts, punk rabble-rousers and industrial technicians—imbue their hyper-modern musical style with cold-eyed sociological observations and deep existential malaise. “There’s a journey down this rabbit hole of anxiety and fear and all these regrets and pain,” Morgan explains. “You’re looking at the world and looking at the bitterness and negative stuff you have and trying to work through it and see where it’s leading us in this very noisy world where it’s very hard to stand out but everyone’s constantly talking.” Below, Morgan and guitarist/vocalist Reba Meyers guide us through their new underworld. **(Deeperthanbefore)** Jami Morgan: “This intro is a trailer, in some ways—or the scene before the opening titles. It’s introducing a little bit of our narrative voice and setting up a feeling of dread. And it starts off with the theme from the end of our last record, which we continued on some of the EPs that came in between. It’s the theme song, in a lot of ways, for the last era of our career that phased out and this new voice phased in.” **Swallowing the Rabbit Whole** JM: “This is about taking that first step into the realization that you\'re going to have to go on an internal journey—going down the rabbit hole of success and hurt and envy and self-worth. And you can continue to live in shame, or decide to confront this monster that\'s been depicted in our last three albums, and that\'s on the cover of this album as well.” Reba Meyers: “It took us a really long time to put this song together. It was like we were trying to figure out what kind of album we wanted to write. But once we were able to put that song together, it was the centerpiece to everything. It made everything else fall into place. It was almost a testing ground for a lot of the glitchier guitars and layering and overdubs and bringing in the pianos and synths and everything that would really take the main stage on a lot of the verses and everything of the song. It gave us a place to work off of for the other songs.” **In Fear** JM: “In some ways it’s about this culture we have of throwing each other to the wolves, where the jury of public opinion is almost the most important thing. We have to live in fear now of what we do and say and how we behave. And that’s good in some ways. But in some ways you can be stripped of what makes you an individual. So this isn’t anti-callout-culture, because some of that is important. It’s about how important social currency is, and how it’s our most important currency in a lot of ways.” **You and You Alone** JM: “‘You and You Alone’ is the first real touch of bitterness and anger on the record. We find ourselves at odds with all this hate and resentment we have towards those around us. It\'s looking at this bitterness and saying, ‘Is it totally justified, or in my mind? Or even if it is justified, is this something that I need to hang on to?’ But on the other end, I’m saying this to myself: If I have to carry this burden, what’s my part in it?” RM: “Creating this was like bringing back the old-school chaos of the style of writing we did in our riffs. But we then took it to another dimension almost with bringing in all these digital clippings and glitches. The verses started out as a simple chaotic guitar riff, but we gave it to our keyboard player, Shade, and he looped them and added all these accents and spit it back out. Then we went back and relearned the riff that way. So it was a very cool, very modern back-and-forth process.” **Who I Am** JM: “This is an observation on obsession through the lens of stalkers, and how that was looked at in the past, versus how people present themselves through social media. It\'s this unrequited idealization. In the past—and still, obviously—it’s driven people mad and they\'ve done horrible things. But now it’s something that\'s just totally normal: constantly looking at people; stalking them. And using that new media to make excuses for our shortcomings.” **Cold.Metal.Place** JM: “‘Cold.Metal.Place’ is like the environment of the record. It\'s where I\'m envisioning the birthplace of our main character—or our main antagonist, if you\'re thinking of it that way. It\'s like this merciless, barren, glass world—a machine world. This world we\'re depicting inside the record layout and on the cover. It\'s this environmental embodiment of our own self-destructive thoughts and ideas. We’re abused by this echoing noise of criticism that is sometimes necessary and sometimes just pushes you deeper into your own head. And you go into the cold metal place.” RM: “We, as a unit, have all felt like we’re in that landscape and we’re able to relate in that way—which made it so much easier to connect on writing these songs. It\'s almost like being able to see it visualized has helped me, especially, be able to get through that trial of pointed fingers at all of us. And it\'s a very special thing to feel and have gone through that as a unit through our whole journey of all these albums and coming to this one.” **Sulfur Surrounding** JM: “This is about how we manipulate each other without even meaning to. And sometimes, people mean to. Are you corroding your group by making everyone so connected and having to go on? That’s something I’ve struggled with. Is this the wrong thing for these people who are my friends? I want to do the right thing, but these feelings take over. And I feel everyone can relate to that in a way.” **The Easy Way** JM: “This song is like the bridge between the two halves of the album. We had a song called ‘Only One Way’ that we put out a year or two ago, and this is the sequel. And there\'s a part at the end of ‘Only One Way,’ melodically, that actually is the chorus of this song. Reba sings ‘Only One Way’—it\'s awesome—and then at the end, I creep in with this vocal melody, and that\'s the chorus of this song.” RM: “I think all of us knew when we were writing ‘Only One Way’ that it was going to come back around, just because of how strong the melody was at the end. It didn’t feel like it got its full time in the spotlight. And we always like having things connect and weave together so it doesn\'t just feel like a bunch of songs slapped together on an album. We always try to make it more of a journey—not just through this album, but through our whole trajectory as a band. And I think a lot of people who like our band like us because of that. We\'re all very obsessive about music that has more of an overall vision to it. And obviously, you can see Jami has planned all of this out.” **Erasure Scan** JM: “‘Erasure Scan’ is probably the darkest song on the album. Lyrically, it\'s about the school shooting epidemic, and maybe the events and brain trauma that turn people to committing these horrible atrocities. It gets into some light, probably bullshit, very poorly researched psychology, but I was just looking into the Triune Brain theory—about how the three brains can become rigidly locked. That\'s been seen in a lot of school shooters under psychological evaluation. They become very fixated on the external goal and mission that they\'re unable to divert from. We also talk about this parasite that we get deeper into later on ‘Back Inside the Glass,’ but it’s this aquatic worm that exists in grasshoppers, fucks with their brain and controls them and influences their behavior. So I was relating that to these shootings and talking about the government swaying public opinion with pointless gun and freedom debates, but nothing is really done to help reduce it.” **Last Ones Left** JM: “Other than ‘You and You Alone,’ I would say ‘Last Ones Left’ is pretty much the most bitter-ass fucking song on the album. It\'s about pride and it\'s about social climbing. It\'s pretty much saying we\'re the last ones left on the surface of real bands that have worked and climbed that fucking ladder through hard work and not through bootlicking.” RM: “We\'ve always needed to have that song on every record that empowers us. And for me, and I know the other guys, when we play that song, it definitely has that feeling to it—even at shows when we feel like it\'s us against the world, and no one there even cares or wants to see us—we can use that as an empowering song, and we\'re almost screaming it and singing it to ourselves at times.” **Autumn and Carbine** JM: “On the surface, the song is about the quick lives and deaths of these flavor-of-the-year new artists that are being propped up by corporations. They\'re told to be bombastic and loud, and their demise is very similar. It\'s quick and it\'s loud and then it\'s gone.” **Back Inside the Glass** JM: “Sonically, this song is very sci-fi hardcore in a lot of ways. Our main character, the monster on the front cover that we call The Cutter, is trapped inside this glass shell of how the world sees him—and how maybe even you envision yourself, for better or worse. And it’s that monster trying to get out. It’s your own mania getting the best of you. So you want to kill this thing inside you, but it’s going to come out like that monster. So you want it to go back inside the glass.” **A Sliver** JM: “Thematically, ‘A Sliver’ is the culmination of years of overexposure and noise that almost leads us to become deaf to the cries of everyone around us. Because we all watch these tragedies like they\'re a TV show. But it seems in the past, everything matters only for a sliver of time, and then it’s on to the next thing. We’re lost in the rat race, and it’s all been engineered by corporations for this exact purpose. So we all keep posting; we keep promising. But it\'s really for nothing. We\'re not heard at all. You\'re just a dollar or another voice in a sea of voices. Even that only matters for a second, and then people move on.” **Underneath** JM: ‘‘Underneath’ is really about being in that final, most important moment, facing this monster—whether that be proverbial or inner self. It’s the most positive song on the record, I think, because a lot of it is about redemption. It doesn’t really give you a clear ending as to what happened, but there’s a truth and you’re going to find out what it is. So we have to shed who we are and remove that machine inside. We either stand up to it or just disappear and become it.”

“I feel that I’m representing a whole country, its urban music and its youth,” El Alfa tells Apple Music. On his new album *El Androide*, 11 new songs debut alongside 10 of the most explosive singles that the Dominican star has released over the last couple of years, creating a snapshot of the leading dembow practitioner in the contemporary canon. A vision of música urbana far removed from the pop mainstream, his latest is maybe the most diverse offering in a career that never fails to surprise. “Outside of dembow, which is my turf, there is a little bit of everything, from romantic trap to dancehall and some street things,” he tells Apple Music. To that end, the collaborations with artists like Diplo and Farruko are opportunities to paint his very personal world with different colors. “The most important thing is to let the music do the talking,” he insists. Nonetheless, Apple Music asked him to personally guide listeners through the 11 new songs, one by one. **Recógelo** “If people are expecting the same old, they’re in for a surprise right from the intro. I start rapping, then get an instrumental going, and everything is designed for a maximum impact from the get-go. I think this song will go a long way. It’s one of my best.” **Un Día Sí** “Farruko and Myke Towers make it special. I arrange my own songs. I don’t produce them, but I am the one that brings in the ideas and the vibes. ‘Un Día Sí’ is dancehall with some dembow flavor to it. I used Farruko because he has a bit of a Jamaican thing, and Myke Towers because he’s been doing lots of things with rappers now, just like me. I decided to get Farruko in the chorus, with Myke Towers and me rapping. It’s clean but still El Alfa. It sounds like international music with my essence.” **Singapur** “On my last album, *El Hombre*, I had a song called ‘Pa Jamaica’ that was like a trip and it was the most popular one. This time I wanted to travel to a different country. I went to Singapore and looked for a different color. I wanted to give it a bit of an ’80s touch. The sample is from the ’80s and had never been used before in any songs. This is another one of my favorites.” **Me Enamoré** “This is the first time I dedicated a song to my wife and the first time that she appears in one of my videos. I never post pictures of my family on the internet. My fans are always asking when I am going to show them this or the other, but I have always kept that separate. I have very few romantic songs, and I wanted to do something that was completely different, something organic and from the heart. I worked with different producers to get the best color. It’s soft trap, but it still has that El Alfa touch.” **A Correr los Lakers** “This is a whole other vibe, with the trumpet, a different kind of flow and banging trap. It reminds me of a song I did years ago with Bad Bunny, the one that went, ‘Que el padre me lo proteja y que el hijo lo bendiga’ (‘Demaga Ge Gi Go Gu’). It’s a really energetic track, a fast trap to change the pace right away. This is something I did for the sake of diversity, but my team likes it better than any other trap here. You can’t find this kind of style, this rapping anywhere else. I worked hard to get a really good bass.” **Bésalo** “This is my favorite song on the album. It has a completely different rhythm. It’s not trap, it’s not dembow; maybe it’s more like really slow dancehall. I wanted to work with Rauw Alejandro because of the flow that he has, which is romantic but also makes you wanna dance. It’s a unique style: the bass, the melody, the chorus, and the hook. I was trying to top ‘Suave’ but doing it a little slower. This is the song that I want everyone to hear.” **Guaremate de por Vida** “I did this one with Chael Produciendo, same as ‘Recógelo’ and ‘Singapur.’ I love it.” **Chapón** “In the Dominican Republic we call booties ‘chapas.’ I wanted to do something a little Mexican, with some vallenato and a Central American feel to it, and then mix it up with my dembow foundation. This is one to dance to. I don’t want to put out anything that’s not a banger. It’s been like that for two years now.” **El Dueño del Bizcocho** “This is gangsta trap. I’m catering to the audience that we refer to as ‘tigers,’ the street people. There’s a lot of street code in here. It’s about what’s going on today, what’s real for young people.” **Hablamos Nunca** “Here I rap with Kiko El Crazy and El Fother, two local rappers from the Dominican Republic who never went international. Here, they’ve been legends for 10, 12 years. It’s a banger. These artists don’t have a platform today. They are not working as the industry demands these days because they don’t have the resources, but in my scene they are legends. I tried to get them in one of the best dembows that I had, one of the hardest. When people listen to this, I want them to say, ‘This guy brought these two badasses back and it’s a killer!’” **El Lobo de Wall Street** “This is a song to please myself in the first place, and then the underground audience. I talk about how I operate in the music industry, about the things that you need to do if you want to make money. It’s me talking to the young from my vantage point.”

“I don’t know where it went, really,” Lianne La Havas tells Apple Music of the time between the release of her stunning second album *Blood*, in 2015, and her self-titled third record, delivered in 2020. “Lots was happening—and nothing.” In 2016 she toured with Coldplay (“Something I couldn’t not do”) and Leon Bridges (“extremely fun”), after which La Havas thought she’d settle down to write album number three. Two years later, she was still drawing a blank. “I was trying really hard, but I realized I couldn’t force it,” she says. “I just had to live my life a bit.” The inspiration came, at last, in 2019, in the form of a series of “big life changes—stuff in my personal life, family, relationships.” *Lianne La Havas* was finished before the year’s end. “Once I made those changes, it was the catalyst for the clarity of what I needed to write and how I needed to do it. Once I knew what to do, the process was quick.” The result is a record that harnesses the power of the bold, bass-imbued sounds of *Blood*—and then takes it up a level. The beats are heavier and the influences wider-ranging, from R&B (“my musical upbringing”) to Brazilian music (La Havas has been an avid fan for the last decade) and Radiohead, whose song “Weird Fishes” the singer gives her powerful take on midway through the album. “I feel like this is the first time my influences are more defined,” says La Havas. “But the album still sounds like me. It’s maybe the most me I’ve ever sounded, which is what I want.” *Lianne La Havas* is, too, a moving exploration of those seismic shifts that prompted the record’s inception and, in particular, the life cycle of a relationship. There’s the heady infatuation of those early days (“Read My Mind”), the devastating moment cracks begin to show (“Paper Thin”), and, finally, the slow, precarious process of putting yourself back together after a painful end (see “Sour Flower,” the album’s gorgeous, sprawling, jazz-imbibed outro). “This is my first album that is actually a full story where you can hear a beginning, middle, and an end,” says La Havas. She adds, as reassurance, “I’m all right now. Get to the last song on this album and you will know that I am totally fine!” More than that, this is the most self-assured the singer has ever sounded. “I’d lost a bit of confidence and got insecure about everything,” she says. “As I completed each piece of the story on this album, it made me a bit stronger. With each song, I realized that I could do it—that I could finish something I was proud of.” Let La Havas guide you through her triumphant album, track by track. **Bittersweet** “I started this song a long time ago and it was actually one of the contenders for my second album. This album is plotting a timeline, and lyrically this song is an overview of what’s to come. And the entire album is bittersweet—if it wasn’t self-titled, it would be called *Bittersweet*. Sonically, it’s also quite a statement. There’s nothing else really like it on the album, and it felt appropriate to start with this. As for the repetition of lyrics in this song: I really like poetry, and I was influenced by some of the poetry I was reading at the time and the idea of repeating a word to give it this whole different meaning.” **Read My Mind** “When I made this song, it made me feel slightly intoxicated. I wanted it to be reminiscent of that—like a night out where you meet someone and there\'s this hazy, wondrous, excited feeling that you can\'t quite describe. I worked with \[British songwriter and producer\] Bruno Major on this. He\'s just the most amazing guitarist, and when I heard the music, it just made me feel like I was on a date. So it had to be about what it\'s about. It’s got humor and lightness, but I wanted to be very literal in the right way about the overwhelming urge to give yourself away.” **Green Papaya** “A love letter, basically. You’ve got one another now and you want to make it a thing—to solidify the commitment in some way. It’s not really about physical love—it’s about making a home and doing all those things that come after the flirtatious infatuation. It\'s like, ‘Actually this could be a really great thing. And I want you to know that I believe it could be that.’ The whole track is very vulnerable—it’s hard to say those things for real at the best of times. That’s why sonically it felt best not to have any drums. I gave all the types of production that you can do a fair shot, but it just wasn’t the same.” **Can’t Fight** “There’s a little bit more humor here. It’s like when your conscience is talking to you. And because of the sound of the lilting guitar, it always felt like a cartoon conscience to me. It feels very animated, but with some quite serious themes at the center of it. I just wasn’t done being happy yet in this song. I was still very optimistic and everything is still pretty good. The music makes you bound a bit. I like how the ending came together—I don’t really do a lot of strings, and I’ve never been a string person. But with this one, because it’s so light-sounding with that quite serious content in the lyrics, I thought the strings brought that serious element to it. I think it ended up being the perfect balance.” **Paper Thin** “The very first song written for this album, but one of the last to be finished. I was falling asleep four years ago and I just heard that guitar part. It was like, ‘Should I get up? Should I record this? Should I just sleep on it?’ But I got up and thought about the lyric ‘paper thin.’ I heard all the chords for each section of the song, and I had the first line. It stayed that way for a long time. Anytime I would get a moment alone—say on a plane or something—the lyrics would start to make themselves apparent for the song. I think this one is maybe the most intimate and most vulnerable that I get, because the person is talking really candidly with the other person in the song. The pain is starting to show about how hard it can be when the person you\'re trying to love is maybe not in the same space as you, or maybe hasn\'t dealt with some things that they might need to deal with. I\'m not saying I\'m perfect. I\'m not saying the narrator is perfect. But it\'s recognizing the pain of somebody you really care about and wanting to help them, but not knowing how. Again, I thought sonically it would be appropriate to just have barely anything on it. And it\'s really all about the lyrics and the groove.” **Out of Your Mind (Interlude)** “This is the descent. When you go, ‘You know what? This isn’t for me.’ It doesn’t really have any words, it’s just sounds, but they’re murmurings of trying to work it out and then something sort of clicks. It’s the moment you flip. I wanted there to be a definite line under the first section of the album. When I first made an album, I had no idea how you would pick the order. How do you put your first album together? How do you know what to say first and last? And a piece of advice that I was given was, just think of it like it\'s a vinyl. Side A and side B. So every album now, I\'ve always just thought of side A and side B. And this one is the first one that is actually a full story that you can have a beginning, middle, and end. And for me, that is the middle, the absolute middle.” **Weird Fishes** “I sat and the looked at the lyrics to this song—which I love—and they felt really appropriate to what was happening in my life. Even the final lyric—‘I’ll hit the bottom and escape’—felt totally where I was at. The first time I played this song was at Glastonbury back in 2013 with my band. Somebody put it on YouTube, and I just loved this version. I was so happy with our arrangement. We’re not the same anymore, but we’re all still mates, so it was a lovely memento of that time we had together. I recorded this with a new band, and from that day I was like, ‘This is obviously how I’ve got to do the rest of the album: with my band, all in a room.’ We all get on, they\'re all sick musicians. So that\'s how it happened really. It just sort of all clicked in my head and everything felt right lyrically and with the personnel.” **Please Don’t Make Me Cry** “This is a loop and it\'s nice, because I got to explore that hip-hop way of writing, that R&B, which I just love. I grew up on all of that stuff. I love how it makes me sing too. I did it with a dear friend of mine, \[US musician\] Nick Hakim. He’s an incredible, humble guy with an incredible voice, and he’s maybe one of the best songwriters out there. I could spend days with him. I was getting frustrated with my lack of output and thought, ‘F\*\*k it. I’m going to New York and I’m going to see Nick.’ I was there for three weeks or so and did a bunch of songs. This one felt special and just said everything it needed to. He has amazing instruments available, amazing textures. And he\'s just such a brilliant producer. I just love every single choice of sound he had. I was just like, yeah, that\'s great. So this song has ended up quite thick in texture, but I love that, because it\'s quite contrasting with the rest of it and I really love that style. I was able to just chuck loads of stuff at it, and it never felt crowded.” **Seven Times** “My Blu Cantrell moment. Again, it’s that R&B which was a really big part of my musical upbringing. I was on a bit of a journey, I think, at this point, and I was finding my confidence and finding my own voice again. I was having an okay time. I was feeling very free and feeling like I’d come home to something or from somewhere and then just dancing in my house to all the music I listened to when I was 12. And then at the same time, again, I was listening to loads of Brazilian music. For me, this song is all my favorite R&B and all my favorite Brazilian music merged. And then I also got to give a piece of my mind in the lyrics. Once the demo was made, my band did their thing on it. I just love the groove, I love the chords, I love the melody. I love the lyrics. I love everything about it. I love the flute solo. I wanted to say that even though this thing has happened, it doesn’t mean that I’m completely out of the woods. It’s an ongoing process of self-care and getting yourself back on your feet after a bad thing.” **Courage** “Milton Nascimento, one of my favorite Brazilian artists, has an album called *Courage*. And during one of my darker times over the last few years, a friend of mine recommended that album to me. And then I wrote this song, and it wasn\'t going to be called that for a while. But then that word is just such a good word. I guess the song takes you to the most vulnerable point of just admitting that you\'re lonely and it\'s really hard and it feels like the pain is never going to end—even if it might\'ve been your decision. It was a particularly confusing type of pain. The music was written with a friend of mine, Joe Harrison, who played bass on ‘Paper Thin’ too. He\'s just an amazing guitarist and songwriter. During those five years where everything and nothing was happening, I was doing a writing camp—I think, basically, my label panicked and wanted to give me the tools to try and make music. I ended up in the studio with lots of incredible musicians, but not much of it was right. One day, I remember I was feeling particularly alone in this process and I called Joe. I was like, ‘Hey, are you in LA right now? Please will you come to the studio?’ And I made everyone get out of the room so that me and Joe could just be in the studio together. And we just wrote that thing in about 10 minutes. That was my piece of beautiful treasure from that weird time creatively that I was having.” **Sour Flower** “‘Sour flower’ is a phrase my great-grandmother used to say. Meaning ‘That\'s your sour flower, that\'s your problem, you deal with it.’ She was Jamaican and would say stuff like that, and I’d be like, ‘What does that mean?’ Later on, I was talking to Matt Hales, who I write a lot with, about her old phrases. We always wanted to get one of them onto a song. And that one just seemed appropriate. It\'s your journey, it\'s your issue, your cross to bear. For me, this song is all about the self-love and the self-care to restore yourself after whatever monumental derailment. I think it\'s ultimately a positive ending. But also, I wanted to have that long outro as well, to represent the ongoing work that the person is doing on themselves to improve things. The song is fully live—we all were playing together in the room, and it just feels like I should have done that earlier in my career. Of course there were some changes and then I was like, ‘No, we have to have that very first version, please.’ I\'m glad that it ended up as it was on the day that we did it.”

Autechre albums are like language immersion programs: At first they don’t make sense, but listen close and familiar shapes emerge. Not that *SIGN* is accessible per se: We’re still talking about something closer to computer programming than what most people would consider music. But for a group that can be almost mythically forbidding (2016’s four-hour-long—and 12-hours-dense—*elseq*), *SIGN* is almost pop. Thirty years in and the UK production duo’s roots still show: Hip-hop on “M4 Lema,” house on “psin AM,” far-out synth soundtracks on “F7” and “Metaz form8.” But it all remains deconstructed and once removed. Most music depends on memories of something you’ve heard before. With Autechre, you can feel your brain stretch as you listen. Normally they sound like they’re pushing forward or settling in. With *SIGN*, it’s both.

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

To listen to Mozzy is to inhabit a world of paranoia, turbulence, and perpetual grief. Yet there is pleasure to be taken from the way his narratives unfurl like epics, how he still manages to portray vulnerability through his armor and a spirit of triumph in spite of it all. As its name suggests, *Occupational Hazard* hinges on the downsides that come with certain lifestyles—tales of revenge, rugged persistence, and pyrrhic victories litter the mixtape as the Sacramento rapper paints a vividly nuanced picture of how systemic trauma manifests and becomes cyclical. Songs like “Death Is Callin” and “Livin Thru Me” feel haunted by the Reaper (“I press ignore and I ain\'t answer, I think death was callin\',” he declares on the former), but even surrounded by turmoil, he remains interested in survival and an existence that honors those who didn\'t live to see it. Across the project, which is a return to grittier form, contrasts are more defined than ever: light and dark, life and death, love and hate, pain and joy. On standout “Don\'t Play Fair,” he serves up a bittersweet pill: “Finally made it up out it, was giving back \'fore I got it/Remember vivid who died, it feel good we did it without ’em.” And though Mozzy has tasted the kind of success that could remove him from the strife, some mentalities follow you everywhere, and “respect over everything” is the rule no matter where you are. The handful of additional voices only add to the pendulum of moods—among them YFN Lucci\'s pinched melodies, Quando Rondo\'s slick drawl, Blxst\'s warm croons, and Trae tha Truth\'s sinister growl. Each one injects their own fierceness into the songs, but Mozzy remains central. There\'s no shortage of anecdotes that land as revelations, each one more illuminating than the last. “I\'m a gangsta first and then a rapper,” he claims on “Never Lackin,” but Mozzy is nothing if not a storyteller, consistent in his compelling ability to light up a full spectrum of humanity.